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Updated: September 22, 2025
How serious an obstruction this may be does not clearly appear. It can hardly be a perpendicular fall, since, according to Governor Simpson, canoes and flat-boats pass over it in safety. From the head of navigation it is only about two hundred miles across the Rocky Mountains, of which the elevation here is much less than in Oregon and California, to the Thompson and Fraser Rivers.
Between St Petersburg and the Pacific lay six thousand miles of mountain and tundra. Caravans, flat-boats, and dog-trains must be provided to transport supplies; and the vessels to be used at the end of the land journey must be built on the Pacific. The explorers were commissioned to levy tribute for food and fur on Tartar tribes as their caravans worked slowly eastward.
Those who chose the latter way embarked in roughly built little flat-boats at Fort Pitt, if they came from Pennsylvania, or else at the old Redstone Fort on the Monongahela, if from Maryland or Virginia, and drifted down with the current.
Our vast amount of surplus baggage made a heavy job in the loading, inasmuch as we had no wharf, and everything had to be put on board by means of flat-boats. It was completed by twenty-four hours of steady work; and after some of the usual uncomfortable delays which wait on military expeditions, we were at last afloat.
There proceeded from South Carolina, about the time mentioned above, a colony of persons which located near Natchez. They came down the Holston, Tennessee, and Mississippi Rivers, on flat-boats; and after many escapes from the perils incident to the streams they navigated, and the hostility of the savages who dwelt along their shores, they reached this Canaan of their hopes.
But the population consisted mainly of Americans from the old colonies, who had come thither by sea in small sailing-vessels, or had descended the Ohio and the Tennessee in flat-boats, or, perchance, had crossed the Creek country with pack ponies, following the narrow trails of the Indian traders.
He gazed with unceasing wonder upon the Father of Waters, on whose mighty bosom he was borne towards the loved scenes of home. He was edified and amused with the ever-varying succession of objects which presented themselves, as the Chalmetta progressed. Flat-boats and steamers, plantations and cotton-wood groves, islands and cut-offs, were all objects of interest.
His portrait, scrutinized now from the distance and at the disadvantage of a hundred years, hands him down to posterity as a bald-headed man with a seedy growth of hair sprouting laterally from his temples, so that his ears look like little flat-boats half hidden in little canebrakes; with mutton-chop whiskers growing far up on the overhanging ledges of his cheek-bones and suggesting rather a daring variety of lichen; with a long arched nose, running on its own hook in a southwesterly direction; one eye a little higher than the other; a protruding upper lip, as though he had behind it a set of the false teeth of the time, which were fixed into the jaws by springs and hinges, all but compelling a man to keep his mouth shut by main force; and a very short neck with an overflowing jowl which weighed too heavily on his high shirt collar.
He bought goods himself and received goods from other merchants on commission; and a year after his first venture he sent a flotilla of heavy-laden flat-boats down the Mississippi, and disposed of their contents at a high profit in New Orleans. The River Trade and the Separatist Spirit.
"And we shall pass ever so many towns and cities, and the river will be full of steamers and flat-boats," I continued, as the raft glided round the bend into the great river. "Now we are in the Wisconsin, Flora; and this is Riverport on the right of us." "We can't see much of it." "No; but you will find enough in the daytime to amuse you. I hope you will sleep all night after this."
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