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In about half an hour we saw some sixty or seventy rafts, or flatboats, without riggers, filled with savages, and coming round the southern bight of the harbor. They appeared to have no arms except short clubs, and stones which lay in the bottom of the rafts. Immediately afterward another detachment, still larger, appeared in an opposite direction, and with similar weapons.
The glory of the river faded fast, and the final stroke was dealt it when some man of inventive mind discovered that a little, puffing tug, costing one-tenth as much as a fine steamboat, could push broad acres of flatboats, loaded with coal, lumber, or cotton, down the tortuous stream, and return alone at one-tenth the expense of a heavy steamer.
"'The Mischianza, as 't is styled; Tibbie, began at four o clock in the afternoon with a grand regatta, all the galleys and flatboats being covered with awnings and dressed out with colours and streamers, making a most elegant spectacle. The embarkation took place at the upper end of the city, mommy and I entering the 'Hussar' which bore Sir William Howe.
Hungry, and cold, and drenched with rain, they stood in the water waiting till they could be carried over the lake, through the cypress trees, in two small flatboats and on some extemporized rafts. It was noon of the 9th before the forlorn band were all over, and, without knapsacks or blankets, many without arms, began their weary march for Memphis.
So were some others not Indians; and the Spanish governors of Louisiana, scheming with them for the acquisition of Kentucky and the regions intervening, had allowed an interprovincial commerce to spring up. Flatboats and barges came floating down the Mississippi past the plantation home where little Suzanne and Françoise were growing up to womanhood.
This man said that the oil was being subjected to experiments for use in illumination. As an ointment it was magical, and in a few days my lameness disappeared. Both on the Ohio and the Mississippi we saw flatboats tied together heaped with coal, which had been loaded into them from the sides of the hills of the Alleghanies and elsewhere. They were being floated down to New Orleans.
The port of Boulogne contained about seventeen hundred vessels, such as flatboats, sloops, turkish boats, gunboats, prairies, mortar-boats, etc.; and the entrance to the port was defended by an enormous chain, and by four forts, two on the right, and two on the left.
Twenty or thirty thousand of these westerners on flatboats could come down the river and sweep everything before them.
Quite a number of rebels could be seen moving about through the rain and mud, there was great deal of chopping going on, several flatboats, canoes and rafts were lying at the bank, wagons were passing, and the boys thought they could make out a cannon or two. "I can't make out what in the world they're up to," said Si. "But I'm certain the Colonel ought to know it.
On the crowded river bank would be disembarked goods drawn from far-off New England, which had been dragged over the mountains and sent down the Ohio to the Mississippi; furs from northern Minnesota or Wisconsin; lumber in the rough, or shaped into planks, from the mills along the Ohio; whisky from Kentucky, pork and flour from Illinois, cattle, horses, hemp, fabrics, tobacco, everything that men at home or abroad, could need or crave, was gathered up by enterprising traders along three thousand miles of waterway, and brought hither by clumsy rafts and flatboats, and scarcely less clumsy steamboats, for distribution up and down other rivers, and shipment to foreign lands.
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