I don't know if this is wanted but here we go anyway. On the Mississippi River boats they came in two flavors, the stern wheeler and the side wheeler. The stern wheeler is as the name describes the paddles are on the rear and usually had several (2 or 3) rudders behind them directly in the water flow. The boilers were some where just ahead of mid ship and the engines were of course in the rear. The advantage of this design is that the boat can put it's nose against the bank to load and unload with out putting the fragile paddle wheels near the bank where debris would build up. Also this gave a long straight side to dock to for better unloading since most of the cargo was carried on the main deck. The Mississippi Side wheeler seemed to have most of there wheels about 2/3rds of the way back from the bow. I think that the reasons for the stern wheeler tying up to the bank apply to the side wheeler, the farther back you could keep the wheels the better it was. Towboat Joe could probably address this better than I but I think that the side wheelers only had one rudder with a narrow stern for the reasons mentioned above. With the Mississippi River boats most of the cargo went forward and most of the machinery went aft due I think to the way that they were loaded and unloaded so much of the time against a river bank and not at a dock or wharf.
The Hudson river steamers and the long haul ocean steamers tended to have the wheels amid ship probably for the same reasons that the English River steamers did, they mostly used docks of one kind or another.
Andre
Over yonder in Portland Oregon
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