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Pittsburgh interested him, and he spent a week there: went to a theater and heard England hissed and Columbia exalted. Pittsburgh burned only wood for fuel, the wood being brought down on flatboats. At Youngstown, Ohio, were three hundred horses used on the many stagecoaches that centered there.
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.
The young men promptly offered to make the flatboat, since one was not to be bought; and they set to work, felling the trees for it on the banks of the stream. Abraham's father had been a carpenter, so the use of tools was no mystery to him; and during his trip to New Orleans with Allen Gentry he had learned enough about flatboats to give him confidence in this task of shipbuilding.
We find New Orleans to be one of the chief seaports of America. We see shipping of all sorts about the town barges and flatboats along the river bank, merchant vessels in the harbor, and farther down some war-ships.
One of these, made up mostly of women and children, went by water in flatboats, dugouts, and canoes, a route supposed to be easier though much the longer of the two. Whether it was easier, we shall see. The other party, including Robertson himself, went by land, hoping thus to reach the place of settlement in time to make ready for those coming by water.
The start was made on the 24th of June. Just as the little flotilla of clumsy flatboats was caught by the rapid current, the landscape was darkened by an eclipse of the sun. The superstitious said that this was surely an evil omen. But Clark was no believer in omens, and he ordered the bateaux to proceed.
Owing to the good treatment received by the Major, he proposed to treat the entire party, and, to facilitate the matter, buckets of whisky with tin cups were passed around, and after all had partaken they shook hands with the Major and commenced Crossing over in flatboats. At three o'clock in the afternoon we crossed over on the last boat, and took our departure for Galena.
Two hundred and fifty bushels of grain were secured at Lord Selkirk's expense, and brought back on flatboats to the colony. Never since that time has there been a serious lack of seed on the Red River. The year 1821 brings us to a milestone in the history of the Canadian West, and at this point our story terminates.
But it was a long time before steam navigation approached anything like these figures, and indeed, many years passed before the flatboat and the barge saw their doom, and disappeared. In 1821, ten years after the first steamboat arrived at New Orleans, there was still recorded in the annals of the town, the arrival of four hundred and forty-one flatboats, and one hundred and seventy-four barges.
In old times, most of the sidewalks of New Orleans not in the heart of town were only a rough, rank turf, lined on the side next the ditch with the gunwales of broken-up flatboats ugly, narrow, slippery objects.
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