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The Neckar has always been used as a canal, and thus has given employment to a great many men and animals; but now that this steamboat is able, with a small crew and a bushel or so of coal, to take nine keel-boats farther up the river in one hour than thirty men and thirty mules can do it in two, it is believed that the old-fashioned towing industry is on its death-bed.
The upper part is occupied with flat-boats, arks, peeroges, rafts, keel-boats, canoes, and steam-boats; and below these are stationed schooners, cutters, brigs, ships, &c., in regular succession.
This sudden abandonment of a scheme already agreed to and acted on by his colleague was certainly improper, and, indeed, none of the earl's movements indicated very much military capacity. However, he descended the Ohio River with a flotilla of a hundred canoes, besides keel-boats and pirogues, to the mouth of the Hockhocking, where he built and garrisoned a small stockade.
This was that glorious gate to the west, through which floated the rafts and keel-boats of the American settlers who took possession of the great northwest.
Dave had a long pole to push with, like the boatmen on the keel-boats in the early times, and Jake had a board to steer with; Frank had another board to paddle with, on the other side of the raft from Dave; and so they set on their journey. The dam was a wide, smooth sheet of water, with trees growing round the edge, and some of them hanging so low over it that they almost touched it.
A farmer's family in the neighborhood of Prairie du Chien was massacred, and two keel-boats returning down stream from Fort Snelling were attacked, with some loss of life. The settlers hastily repaired the old fort and also dispatched messengers to give the alarm.
I had often watched her from the hotel, and wondered how she propelled herself, for apparently she had no propeller or paddles. She came churning along, now, making a deal of noise of one kind or another, and aggravating it every now and then by blowing a hoarse whistle. She had nine keel-boats hitched on behind and following after her in a long, slender rank.
The keel-boats, similar in construction to a canal-boat, were propelled by poles all that three hundred miles, in the following manner: Several men stood on each side of the boat on what was called a running-board, with their faces to the stern, and, placing their long poles on the river bottom, braced them against their shoulders and pushed hard, walking towards the stern.
Bruce Carrington had seen the day of barge and raft reach its zenith, had heard the first steam packet's shrieking whistle which sounded the death-knell of the ancient order, though the shifting of the trade was a slow matter and the glory of the old did not pass over to the new at once, but lingered still in mighty fleets of rafts and keel-boats and in the Homeric carousals of some ten thousand of the half-horse, half-alligator breed that nightly gathered in New Orleans.
Indian bull boats flocked at the river front beneath the stern adobe walls; moored mackinaws swayed in the current, waiting to be loaded with peltries and loosed for the long drift back to the States; and the keel-boats, looking very fat and lazy, unloaded supplies in the late fall that were loaded at St. Louis in the early spring.
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