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Updated: May 12, 2025
The effect of new mechanical appliances on the movement of population was amazing. The day when emigrants settled along the banks of streams, pushed their boats up the rivers by means of poles, carried their goods on the backs of pack horses, and floated their produce in Kentucky broadhorns down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, was fast disappearing.
Truly, there were snails in those days. The river's earliest commerce was in great barges keelboats, broadhorns. They floated and sailed from the upper rivers to New Orleans, changed cargoes there, and were tediously warped and poled back by hand. A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months.
The cheaper material of Western boats has something to do with this difference, but a certain happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care spirit, which has characterized the Western riverman since the days of the broadhorns, is chiefly responsible.
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.
There were canoes, pirogues, skiffs, rafts, dugouts, scows, galleys, arks, keelboats, flatboats, barges, "broadhorns," "sneak-boxes," and eventually ocean-going brigs, schooners, and steamboats. The canoe served the early explorer and trader, and even the settler whose possessions had been carried over the Alleghanies on a single packhorse.
Truly, there were snails in those days. The river's earliest commerce was in great barges keelboats, broadhorns. They floated and sailed from the upper rivers to New Orleans, changed cargoes there, and were tediously warped and poled back by hand. A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months.
It was amid such scenes that the Indian boy grew to manhood. In that wild time, war was the only science, and butchery the only trade that an Indian could follow. One of the favorite Indian pursuits of the day was the capture of parties of emigrants and traders who came floating down the Ohio in canoes or "broadhorns."
As the years passed, the number of such craft grew constantly larger. The custom of fixing the widespreading horns of cattle on the prow gave these boats the alternative name of "broadhorns," but no accurate classification can be made of the various kinds of craft engaged in this vast traffic.
On all the American rivers, east and west, a lusty crew, collected from the waning Indian trade and the disbanded pioneer armies, found work to its taste in poling the long keel boats, "corralling" the bulky barges that is, towing them by pulling on a line attached to the shore or steering the "broadhorns" or flatboats that transported the first heavy inland river cargoes.
Together Reynolds and Mose rode out toward the slowly "milling" herd, a hungry, hot, and restless mob of broadhorns, which required careful treatment. As he approached, the dull roar of their movement, their snuffling and moaning, thrilled the boy. He saw the gleaming, clashing horns of the great animals uplift and mass and change, and it seemed to him there were acres and acres of them.
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