became, for the Ohio or Indiana lad, as much of
an ambition as to run away to sea was for the boy of New England. It will
be remembered that Abraham Lincoln for a time followed the calling of a
flatboatman, and made a voyage to New Orleans, on which he first saw
slaves, and later invented a device for lifting flatboats over sand-bars,
the model for which is still preserved at Washington, though the industry
it was designed to aid is dead. Pigs, flour, and bacon, planks and
shingles, ploughs, hoes, and spades, cider and whisky, were among the
simple articles dealt in by the owners of the barges. Their biggest market
was New Orleans, and thither most of their food staples were carried, but
for agricultural implements and whisky there was a ready sale all along
the route. Tying up to trade, or to avoid the danger of night navigation,
the boatmen became the heroes of the neighborhood. Often they invited all
hands down to their boat for a dance, and by flaring torches to the notes
of accordion and fiddle, the evening would pass in rude and harmless
jollity, unless too many tin cups or gourds of fiery liquor excited the
always ready pugnacity of the men. They were ready to brag of their valor,
and to put their boasts to the test. They were "half horse, half
alligator," according to their own favorite expression, equally prepared
with knife or pistol, fist, or the trained thumb that gouged out an
antagonist's eye, unless he speedily called for mercy. "I'm a Salt River
roarer!" bawled one in the presence of a foreign diarist. "I can outrun,
outjump, throw down, drag out and lick any man on the river! I love
wimmen, and I'm chock full of fight!" In every crew the "best" man was
entitled to wear a feather or other badge, and the word "best" had no
reference to moral worth, but merely expressed his demonstrated ability to
whip any of his shipmates. They had their songs, too, usually sentimental,
as the songs of rough men are, that they bawled out as they toiled at the
sweeps or the pushpoles. Some have been preserved in history:

"It's oh! As I was walking out,
One morning in July,
I met a maid who axed my trade.
'A flatboatman,' says I.

"And it's oh! She was so neat a maid
That her stockings and her shoes
She toted in her lily-white hands,
For to keep them from the dews."

[Illustration: "THE EVENING WOULD PASS IN RUDE AND HARMLESS JOLLITY."]

Just below the mouth of the Wabash