s on the
shores, and the settlers not infrequently would put off in their skiffs to
meet the unknown voyagers, ask for the news from the east, and share in
their revels. Floating shops were established on the Ohio and its
tributaries--flatboats, with great cabins fitted with shelves and stocked
with cloth, ammunition, tools, agricultural implements, and the
ever-present whisky, which formed a principal staple of trade along the
rivers. Approaching a clump of houses on the bank, the amphibious
shopkeeper would blow lustily upon a horn, and thereupon all the
inhabitants would flock down to the banks to bargain for the goods that
attracted them. As the population increased the floating saloon and the
floating gambling house were added to the civilized advantages the river
bore on its bosom. Trade was long a mere matter of barter, for currency
was seldom seen in these outlying settlements. Skins and agricultural
products were all the purchasers had to give, and the merchant starting
from Pittsburg with a cargo of manufactured goods, would arrive at New
Orleans, perhaps three months later, with a cabin filled with furs and a
deck piled high with the products of the farm. Here he would dispose of
his cargo, perhaps for shipment to Europe, sell his flatboat for the
lumber in it, and begin his painful way back again to the head of
navigation.

The flatboat never attempted to return against the stream. For this
purpose keel-boats or barges were used, great hulks about the size of a
small schooner, and requiring twenty-five men at the poles to push one
painfully up stream. Three methods of propulsion were employed. The
"shoulder pole," which rested on the bottom, and which the boatman pushed,
walking from bow to stern as he did so; tow-lines, called cordelles, and
finally the boat was drawn along by pulling on overhanging branches. The
last method was called "bushwhacking." These became in time the regular
packets of the rivers, since they were not broken up at the end of the
voyage and required trained crews for their navigation. The bargemen were
at once the envy and terror of the simple folk along the shores. A wild,
turbulent class, ready to fight and to dance, equally enraptured with the
rough scraping of a fiddle by one of their number, or the sound of the
war-whoop, which promised the only less joyous diversion of a fight, they
aroused all the inborn vagrant tendencies of the riverside boys, and to
run away with a flatboat