American Merchant Ships and Sailors by Willis J. Abbot

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Though the old salt may sneer at the freshwater sailor who scarcely need
know how to box the compass, to whom the art of navigation is in the main
the simple practise of steering from port to port guided by headlands and
lights, who is seldom long out of sight of land, and never far from aid,
yet the perils of the lakes are quite as real as those which confront the
ocean seaman, and the skill and courage necessary for withstanding them
quite as great as his. The sailor's greatest safeguard in time of tempest
is plenty of searoom. This the lake navigator never has. For him there is
always the dreaded lee shore only a few miles away. Anchorage on the sandy
bottom of the lakes is treacherous, and harbors are but few and most
difficult of access. Where the ocean sailor finds a great bay, perhaps
miles in extent, entered by a gateway thousands of yards across, offering
a harbor of refuge in time of storm, the lake navigator has to run into
the narrow mouth of a river, or round under the lee of a government
breakwater hidden from sight under the crested waves and offering but a
precarious shelter at best. Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee--most of the
lake ports have witnessed such scenes of shipwreck and death right at the
doorway of the harbor, as no ocean port could tell. At Chicago great
schooners have been cast far up upon the boulevard that skirts a waterside
park, or thrown bodily athwart the railroad tracks that on the south side
of the city border the lake. The writer has seen from a city street,
crowded with shoppers on a bright but windy day, vessels break to pieces
on the breakwater, half a mile away but in plain sight, and men go down
to their death in the raging seas. On all the lakes, but particularly on
the smaller ones, an ugly sea is tossed up by the wind in a time so short
as to seem miraculous to the practised navigator of the ocean. The shallow
water curls into breakers under the force of even a moderate wind, and the
vessels are put to such a strain, in their struggles, as perhaps only the
craft built especially for the English channel have to undergo. Some of
the most fatal disasters the lakes have known resulted from iron vessels,
thus racked and tossed, sawing off, as the phrase goes, the rivets that
bound their plates together, and foundering. Fire, too, has numbered its
scores of victims on lake steamers, though this danger, like indeed most
others, is greatly decreased by the increased use of steel as a structural
material and the great improvement in the model of the lake craft. Even
ten years ago the lake boats were ridiculous in their clumsiness, their
sluggishness, and their lack of any of the charm and comfort that attend
ocean-going vessels, but progress toward higher types has been rapid, and
there are ships on the lakes to-day that equal any of their size afloat.

For forty years it has been possible to say annually, "This is the
greatest year in the history of the lake marine." For essentially it is a
new and a growing factor in the industrial development of the United
States. So far, from having been killed by the prodigious development of
our railroad system, it has kept pace with that system, and the years that
have seen the greatest number of miles of railroad built, have witnessed
the launching of the biggest lake vessels. There is every reason to
believe that this growth will for a long time be persistent, that the
climax has not yet been reached. For it is incredible that the Government
will permit the barrier at Niagara to the commerce of these great inland
seas to remain long unbroken. Either by the Mohawk valley route, now
followed by the Erie canal, or by the route down the St. Lawrence, with a
deepening and widening of the present Canadian canals, and a new canal
down from the St. Lawrence to Lake Champlain, a waterway will yet be
provided. The richest coast in the world is that bordering on the lakes.
The cheapest ships in the world can there be built. Already the Government
has spent its tens and scores of millions in providing waterways from the
extreme northwest end to the southeastern extremity of this water system,
and it is unbelievable that it shall long remain violently stopped there.
New devices for digging canals; such as those employed in the Chicago
drainage channel, and the new pneumatic lock, the power and capacity of
which seem to be practically unlimited, have vastly decreased the cost of
canal building, and multiplied amazingly the value of artificial
waterways. As it is admitted that the greatness and the wealth of New York
State are much to be credited to the Erie canal, so the prosperity and
populousness of the whole lake region will be enhanced when lake sailors
and the lake ship-builders are given a free waterway to the ocean.

**Transcriber's note: Page 256: changed estopped to stopped.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MISSISSIPPI AND TRIBUTARY RIVERS--THE CHANGING PHASES OF THEIR
SHIPPING--RIVER NAVIGATION AS A NATION-BUILDING FORCE--THE VALUE OF SMALL
STREAMS--WORK OF THE OHIO COMPANY--AN EARLY PROPELLER--THE FRENCH FIRST ON
THE MISSISSIPPI--THE SPANIARDS AT NEW ORLEANS--EARLY METHODS OF
NAVIGATION--THE FLATBOAT, THE BROADHORN, AND THE KEELBOAT--LIFE OF THE
RIVERMEN--PIRATES AND BUCCANEERS--LAFITTE AND THE BARATARIANS--THE GENESIS
OF THE STEAMBOATS--CAPRICIOUS RIVER--FLUSH TIMES IN NEW ORLEANS--RAPID
MULTIPLICATION OF STEAMBOATS--RECENT FIGURES ON RIVER SHIPPING--COMMODORE
WHIPPLE'S EXPLOIT--THE MEN WHO STEERED THE STEAMBOATS--THEIR TECHNICAL
EDUCATION--THE SHIPS THEY STEERED--FIRES AND EXPLOSIONS--HEROISM OF THE
PILOTS--THE RACERS.

It is the ordinary opinion, and one expressed too often in publications
which might be expected to speak with some degree of accuracy, that river
transportation in the United States is a dying industry. We read every now
and then of the disappearance of the magnificent Mississippi River
steamers, and the magazines not infrequently treat their readers to
glowing stories of what is called the "flush" times on the Mississippi,
when the gorgeousness of the passenger accommodations, the lavishness of
the table, the prodigality of the gambling, and the mingled magnificence
and outlawry of life on the great packets made up a picturesque and
romantic phase of American life. It is true that much of the
picturesqueness and the romance has departed long since. The great river
no longer bears on its turbid bosom many of the towering castellated
boats built to run, as the saying was, on a heavy dew, but still carrying
their tiers upon tiers of ivory-white cabins high in air. The time is past
when the river was the great passenger thoroughfare from St. Louis to New
Orleans. Some few packets still ply upon its surface, but in the main the
passenger traffic has been diverted to the railroads which closely
parallel its channel on either side. The American travels much, but he
likes to travel fast, and for passenger traffic, except on a few routes
where special conditions obtain, the steamboat has long since been
outclassed by the railroads.

Yet despite the disappearance of its spectacular conditions the water
traffic on the rivers of the Mississippi Valley is greater now than at any
time in its history. Its methods only have changed. Instead of gorgeous
packets crowded with a gay and prodigal throng of travelers for pleasure,
we now find most often one dingy, puffing steamboat, probably with no
passenger accommodations at all, but which pushes before her from
Pittsburg to New Orleans more than a score of flatbottomed, square-nosed
scows, aggregating perhaps more than an acre of surface, and heavy laden
with coal. Such a tow--for "tow" it is in the river vernacular, although
it is pushed--will transport more in one trip than would suffice to load
six heavy freight trains. Not infrequently the barges or scows will number
more than thirty, carrying more than 1000 tons each, or a cargo exceeding
in value $100,000. During the season when navigation is open on the Ohio
and its tributaries, this traffic is pursued without interruption. Through
it and through the local business on the lower Mississippi, and the
streams which flow into it, there is built up a tonnage which shows the
freight movement, at least, on the great rivers, to exceed, even in these
days of railroads, anything recorded in their history.

No physical characteristic of the United States has contributed so greatly
to the nationalization of the country and its people, as the topography of
its rivers. From the very earliest days they have been the pathways along
which proceeded exploration and settlement. Our forefathers, when they
found the narrow strip of land along the Atlantic coast which they had at
first occupied, becoming crowded, according to their ideas at the time,
began working westward, following the river gaps. Up the Hudson and
westward by the Mohawk, up the Susquehanna and the Potomac, carrying
around the falls that impeded the course of those streams, trudging over
the mountains, and building flatboats at the headwaters of the Ohio, they
made their way west. Some of the most puny streams were utilized for
water-carriers, and the traveler of to-day on certain of the railroads
through western New York and Pennsylvania, will be amazed to see the
remnants of canals, painfully built in the beds of brawling streams, that
now would hardly float an Indian birch-bark canoe. In their time these
canals served useful purposes. The stream was dammed and locked every few
hundred yards, and so converted into a placid waterway with a flight of
mechanical steps, by which the boats were let down to, or raised up from
tidewater. To-day nothing remains of most of these works of engineering,
except masses of shattered masonry. For the railroads, using the river's
bank, and sometimes even part of the retaining walls of the canals for
their roadbeds, have shrewdly obtained and swiftly employed authority to
destroy all the fittings of these waterways which might, perhaps, at some
time, offer to their business a certain rivalry.

The corporation known as the Ohio Company, with a great purchase of land
from Congress in 1787, by keen advertising, and the methods of the modern
real-estate boomer, started the tide of emigration and the fleet of boats
down the Ohio. The first craft sent out by this corporation was named,
appropriately enough, the "Mayflower." She drifted from Pittsburg to a
spot near the mouth of the Muskingum river. Soon the immigrants began to
follow by scores, and then by thousands. Mr. McMaster has collected some
contemporary evidence of their numbers. One man at Fort Pitt saw fifty
flatboats set forth between the first of March and the middle of April,
1787. Between October, 1786, and May, 1787--the frozen season when boats
were necessarily infrequent--the adjutant at Fort Harmer counted one
hundred and seventy-seven flat-boats, and estimated they carried
twenty-seven hundred settlers. A shabby and clumsy fleet it was, indeed,
with only enough seamanship involved to push off a sand-bar, but it was a
great factor in the upbuilding of the nation. And a curious fact is that
the voyagers on one of these river craft hit upon the principle of the
screw-propeller, and put it to effective use. The story is told in the
diary of Manasseh Cutler, a member of the Ohio Company, who writes:
"Assisted by a number of people, we went to work and constructed a machine
in the form of a screw, with short blades, and placed it in the stern of
the boat, which we turned with a crank. It succeeded to perfection, and I
think it a very useful discovery." But the discovery was forgotten for
nearly three-quarters of a century, until John Ericsson rediscovered and
utilized it.

Once across the divide, the early stream of immigration took its way down
the Ohio River to the Mississippi. There it met the outposts of French
power, for the French burst open that great river, following their
missionaries, Marquette and Joliet, down from its headwaters in
Wisconsin, or pressing up from their early settlements at New Orleans.
Doubtless, if it had not been that the Mississippi afforded the most
practicable, and the most useful highway from north to south, the young
American people would have had a French State to the westward of them
until they had gone much further on the path toward national manhood. But
the navigation of the Mississippi and its tributaries was so rich a prize,
that it stimulated alike considerations of individual self-interest and
national ambition. From the day when the first flatboat made its way from
the falls of the Ohio to New Orleans, it was the fixed determination of
all people living by the great river, or using it as a highway for
commerce, that from its headwaters to its mouth it should be a purely
American stream. It was in this way that the Mississippi and its
tributaries proved to be, as I have said, a great influence in developing
the spirit of coherent nationality among the people of the young nation.

Indeed, no national Government could be of much value to the farmers and
trappers of Kentucky and Tennessee that did not assure them the right to
navigate the Mississippi to its mouth, and find there a place to
trans-ship their goods into ocean-going vessels. From the Atlantic
seaboard they were shut off by a wall, that for all purpose of export
trade was impenetrable. The swift current of the rivers beat back their
vessels, the towering ranges of the Alleghanies mocked at their efforts at
road building. From their hills flowed the water that filled the Father of
Waters and his tributaries. Nature had clearly designed this for their
outlet. As James Madison wrote: "The Mississippi is to them everything. It
is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable waters of
the Atlantic coast formed into one stream." Yet, when the first trader,
in 1786, drifted with his flatboat from Ohio down to New Orleans, thus
entering the confines of Spanish territory, he was seized and imprisoned,
his goods were taken from him, and at last he was turned loose, penniless,
to plod on foot the long way back to his home, telling the story of his
hardships as he went along. The name of that man was Thomas Amis, and
after his case became known in the great valley, it ceased to be a matter
of doubt that the Americans would control the Mississippi. He was in a
sense the forerunner of Jefferson and Jackson, for after his time no
intelligent statesman could doubt that New Orleans must be ours, nor any
soldier question the need for defending it desperately against any foreign
power. The story of the way in which Gen. James Wilkinson, by intrigue and
trickery, some years later secured a partial relaxation of Spanish
vigilance, can not be told here, though his plot had much to do with
opening the great river.

[Illustration: FLATBOATS MANNED WITH RIFLEMEN]

The story of navigation on the Mississippi River, is not without its
elements of romance, though it does not approach in world interest the
story of the achievements of the New England mariners on all the oceans of
the globe. Little danger from tempest was encountered here. The natural
perils to navigation were but an ignoble and unromantic kind--the shifting
sand-bar and the treacherous snag. Yet, in the early days, when the
flatboats were built at Cincinnati or Pittsburg, with high parapets of
logs or heavy timber about their sides, and manned not only with men to
work the sweeps and hold the steering oar, but with riflemen, alert of
eye, and unerring of aim, to watch for the lurking savage on the banks,
there was peril in the voyage that might even affect the stout nerves of
the hardy navigator from New Bedford or Nantucket. For many long years in
the early days of our country's history, the savages of the Mississippi
Valley were always hostile, continually enraged. The French and the
English, bent upon stirring up antagonism to the growing young nation, had
their agents persistently at work awakening Indian hostility, and, indeed,
it is probable that had this not been the case, the rough and lawless
character of the American pioneers, and their entire indifference to the
rights of the Indians, whom they were bent on displacing, would have
furnished sufficient cause for conflict.

First of the craft to follow the Indian canoes and the bateaux of the
French missionaries down the great rivers, was the flatboat--a homely and
ungraceful vessel, but yet one to which the people of the United States
owe, perhaps, more of real service in the direction of building up a great
nation than they do to Dewey's "Olympia," or Schley's "Brooklyn." A
typical flatboat of the early days of river navigation was about
fifty-five feet long by sixteen broad. It was without a keel, as its name
would indicate, and drew about three feet of water. Amidships was built a
rough deck-house or cabin, from the roof of which extended on either side,
two long oars, used for directing the course of the craft rather than for
propulsion, since her way was ever downward with the current, and
dependent upon it. These great oars seemed to the fancy of the early
flatboat men, to resemble horns, hence the name "broadhorns," sometimes
applied to the boats. Such a boat the settler would fill with household
goods and farm stock, and commit himself to the current at Pittsburg. From
the roof of the cabin that housed his family, cocks crew and hens cackled,
while the stolid eyes of cattle peered over the high parapet of logs built
about the edge for protection against the arrow or bullet of the wandering
redskin. Sometimes several families would combine to build one ark.
Drifting slowly down the river--the voyage from Pittsburg to the falls of
the Ohio, where Louisville now stands, requiring with the best luck, a
week or ten days--the shore on either hand would be closely scanned for
signs of unusual fertility, or for the opening of some small stream
suggesting a good place to "settle." When a spot was picked out the boat
would be run aground, the boards of the cabin erected skilfully into a
hut, and a new outpost of civilization would be established. As these
settlements multiplied, and the course of emigration to the west and
southwest increased, river life became full of variety and gaiety. In some
years more than a thousand boats were counted passing Marietta. Several
boats would lash together and make the voyage to New Orleans, which
sometimes occupied months, in company. There would be frolics and dances,
the notes of the violin--an almost universal instrument among the flatboat
men--sounded across the waters by night to the lonely cabins on the
shores, and the settlers not infrequently would put off in their skiffs to
meet the unknown voyagers, ask for the news from the east, and share in
their revels. Floating shops were established on the Ohio and its
tributaries--flatboats, with great cabins fitted with shelves and stocked
with cloth, ammunition, tools, agricultural implements, and the
ever-present whisky, which formed a principal staple of trade along the
rivers. Approaching a clump of houses on the bank, the amphibious
shopkeeper would blow lustily upon a horn, and thereupon all the
inhabitants would flock down to the banks to bargain for the goods that
attracted them. As the population increased the floating saloon and the
floating gambling house were added to the civilized advantages the river
bore on its bosom. Trade was long a mere matter of barter, for currency
was seldom seen in these outlying settlements. Skins and agricultural
products were all the purchasers had to give, and the merchant starting
from Pittsburg with a cargo of manufactured goods, would arrive at New
Orleans, perhaps three months later, with a cabin filled with furs and a
deck piled high with the products of the farm. Here he would dispose of
his cargo, perhaps for shipment to Europe, sell his flatboat for the
lumber in it, and begin his painful way back again to the head of
navigation.

The flatboat never attempted to return against the stream. For this
purpose keel-boats or barges were used, great hulks about the size of a
small schooner, and requiring twenty-five men at the poles to push one
painfully up stream. Three methods of propulsion were employed. The
"shoulder pole," which rested on the bottom, and which the boatman pushed,
walking from bow to stern as he did so; tow-lines, called cordelles, and
finally the boat was drawn along by pulling on overhanging branches. The
last method was called "bushwhacking." These became in time the regular
packets of the rivers, since they were not broken up at the end of the
voyage and required trained crews for their navigation. The bargemen were
at once the envy and terror of the simple folk along the shores. A wild,
turbulent class, ready to fight and to dance, equally enraptured with the
rough scraping of a fiddle by one of their number, or the sound of the
war-whoop, which promised the only less joyous diversion of a fight, they
aroused all the inborn vagrant tendencies of the riverside boys, and to
run away with a flatboat became, for the Ohio or Indiana lad, as much of
an ambition as to run away to sea was for the boy of New England. It will
be remembered that Abraham Lincoln for a time followed the calling of a
flatboatman, and made a voyage to New Orleans, on which he first saw
slaves, and later invented a device for lifting flatboats over sand-bars,
the model for which is still preserved at Washington, though the industry
it was designed to aid is dead. Pigs, flour, and bacon, planks and
shingles, ploughs, hoes, and spades, cider and whisky, were among the
simple articles dealt in by the owners of the barges. Their biggest market
was New Orleans, and thither most of their food staples were carried, but
for agricultural implements and whisky there was a ready sale all along
the route. Tying up to trade, or to avoid the danger of night navigation,
the boatmen became the heroes of the neighborhood. Often they invited all
hands down to their boat for a dance, and by flaring torches to the notes
of accordion and fiddle, the evening would pass in rude and harmless
jollity, unless too many tin cups or gourds of fiery liquor excited the
always ready pugnacity of the men. They were ready to brag of their valor,
and to put their boasts to the test. They were "half horse, half
alligator," according to their own favorite expression, equally prepared
with knife or pistol, fist, or the trained thumb that gouged out an
antagonist's eye, unless he speedily called for mercy. "I'm a Salt River
roarer!" bawled one in the presence of a foreign diarist. "I can outrun,
outjump, throw down, drag out and lick any man on the river! I love
wimmen, and I'm chock full of fight!" In every crew the "best" man was
entitled to wear a feather or other badge, and the word "best" had no
reference to moral worth, but merely expressed his demonstrated ability to
whip any of his shipmates. They had their songs, too, usually sentimental,
as the songs of rough men are, that they bawled out as they toiled at the
sweeps or the pushpoles. Some have been preserved in history:

"It's oh! As I was walking out,
One morning in July,
I met a maid who axed my trade.
'A flatboatman,' says I.

"And it's oh! She was so neat a maid
That her stockings and her shoes
She toted in her lily-white hands,
For to keep them from the dews."

[Illustration: "THE EVENING WOULD PASS IN RUDE AND HARMLESS JOLLITY."]

Just below the mouth of the Wabash on the Ohio was the site of
Shawneetown, which marked the line of division between the Ohio and the
Mississippi trade. Here goods and passengers were debarked for Illinois,
and here the Ohio boatmen stopped before beginning their return trip.
Because of the revels of the boatmen, who were paid off there, the place
acquired a reputation akin to that which Port Said, at the northern
entrance to the Suez Canal, now holds. It held a high place in river song
and story.

"Some row up, but we row down,
All the way to Shawneetown.
Pull away, pull away,"

was a favorite chorus.

Natchez, Tennessee, held a like unsavory reputation among the Mississippi
River boatmen, for there was the great market in which were exchanged
northern products for the cotton, yams, and sugar of the rich lands of the
South.

For food on the long voyage, the boatmen relied mostly on their rifles,
but somewhat on the fish that might be brought up from the depths of the
turbid stream, and the poultry and mutton which they could secure from the
settlers by barter, or not infrequently, by theft. Wild geese were
occasionally shot from the decks, while a few hours' hunt on shore would
almost certainly bring reward in the shape of wild turkey or deer. A
somewhat archaic story among river boatmen tells of the way in which
"Mike Fink," a famous character among them, secured a supply of mutton.
Seeing a flock of sheep grazing near the shore, he ran his boat near them,
and rubbed the noses of several with Scotch snuff. When the poor brutes
began to caper and sneeze in dire discomfort, the owner arrived on the
scene, and asked anxiously what could ail them. The bargeman, as a
traveled person, was guide, philosopher, and friend to all along the
river, and so, when informed that his sheep were suffering from black
murrain, and that all would be infected unless those already afflicted
were killed, the farmer unquestioningly shot those that showed the strange
symptoms, and threw the bodies into the river, whence they were presently
collected by the astute "Mike," and turned into fair mutton for himself
and passengers. Such exploits as these added mightily to the repute of the
rivermen for shrewdness, and the farmer who suffered received scant
sympathy from his neighbors.

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