• Notes from Kloss, William, et al. Art in the White House: A Nation's Pride. Washington, D.C.: The White House Historical Association, 2008:
  " . . . [I]nstead of painting 'the never-ending transit of steamers' that was the reality of the 1840s, [Bingham] has wrapped his picture in the dream of the past, embodied in his monumental group of idle boatmen raptly listening to stories. The scene is unhurried, . . locked in place by . . . geometry--a pyramid of strikingly foreshortened, interlocked figures carefully aligned with the picture plane. . . .

". . . The steamboat in the distance has run aground on the shoal . . . .

". . . [The] primary focus is on the self-sufficient boatmen . . . . Having removed cargo from the steamer ('lightened' it so it can float free from the shoal), they have turned from it to listen to their storyteller."

• Estill Curtis Pennington (2013). Romantic Expansions: Looking West From The White House. The White House Historical Association. Retrieved on 14. April 2020. "Bingham’s Lighter Relieving a Steamboat Aground recalls the age of “venturesome flatboats that drifted with the current, its picturesque rivermen, ‘half horse, half alligator,’ who towed their heavy crafts upstream, its rude miscellany of settlers who entrusted their families, and goods and cattle to great rafts and set forth hopefully on waters that were to bear them . . . to the Promised Land.”"