Frederick Way Jr.

He supervised the flat-bottom, stern paddlewheeler, the Delta Queen, from San Francisco, down the Pacific coast, through the Panama Canal, across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to Pittsburgh in 1946.

Prior to Way’s purchase of the Betsy Ann, she had held the packet ship speed record on the Mississippi River since the 1900s, winning and retaining a set of gold-tipped elk horns.

[1][3][4][5] In 1933 Way wrote a book of his experiences as a river packet ship captain called The Log of the Betsy Ann.

He wrote about the adventure of piloting the paddle wheeler down the west coast, through the Panama Canal, across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi River to Pittsburgh in The Saga of the Delta Queen.

Way continued to be an active writer, collector of steamboat and packet ship photographs, and preserver of the history of boats on inland waterways.