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It had been a place of some importance since Revolutionary days, for in seasons of low water the rapids in the Ohio at this point gave employment to scores of laborers who assisted the flatboatmen in hauling their cargoes around the obstruction which prevented the passage of the heavily loaded barges. The town, which was incorporated in 1780, soon showed signs of commercial activity.
Seasons pursuing each other, the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground, Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface, The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe, Flatboatmen make fast, towards dusk, near the cotton-wood or pekan-trees, Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red River, or through those drained by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas, Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw, Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them, In walls of adobe, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day's sport, The city sleeps and the country sleeps, The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time, The old husband sleeps by his wife, and the young husband sleeps by his wife; And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, And such as it is to be of these, more or less, I am."
There were brown flatboatmen, in weather-beaten felt hats, just returned by the long overland trip from New Orleans and discussing with tobacco merchants the open navigation of the Mississippi; and as they talked, up to them hurried the inventor Edward West, who said with excitement that if they would but step across the common to the town branch, he would demonstrate by his own model that some day navigation would be by steam: whereat they all laughed kindly at him for a dreamer, and went to laugh at the action of his mimic boat, moving hither and thither over the dammed water of the stream.
A Spanish commandant buried a box near the same spot with the colours of his sovereign as a token of possession. After 1783, the flatboatmen, who adventured down the river with loads of tobacco, flour, or planks, seeking a market at New Orleans or adjacent settlements, found at the Walnut Bluffs, about ten miles below the mouth of the Yazoo River, a post of Spanish customs guards.
And if not, could steamboat men be continually taking expensive engines down to New Orleans and abandoning them there, as the old-time river men did their rafts and scows? Clearly not. So Roosevelt's appearance on the river did not in any way disquiet the flatboatmen, though it portended their disappearance as a class. Roosevelt, however, was in no wise discouraged.
No mistake he meant you downright, plain, practical, and earnest. He'd tell his crowd of backwoodsmen, flatboatmen and deck hands the hardest customers that the gospel was ever preached to, 'That the war carried on by the Government was the most righteous of wars; they were doing God's service by fighting in it. On the part of the rebels it was the most unnatural and wicked of wars.
In addition to farming there was a big trade along the river. Land transportation was very difficult indeed, and the frontiersman's whole life was one long struggle with the forest and with poor roads. The waterways were consequently of very great importance, and the flatboatmen on the Mississippi and Ohio became a numerous and noteworthy class. The rivers were covered with their craft.
For just then the great possibilities of the river highway were becoming apparent. The valley was filling up with farmers, and their produce sought the shortest way to tide-water. The streets of the city were crowded with flatboatmen, from Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, and with sailors speaking strange tongues, and gathered from all the ports of the world.
If the Mississippi could perform such miracles upon its whole course without a show of effort, what could it not do with the little winding canal through its center called by pilots the "channel"? The flatboatmen had laboriously acquired the art of piloting the commerce of the West through this mazy, shifting channel, but as steamboats developed in size and power the man at the wheel had to become almost a superman.
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