y coal, grain, lumber, iron, and steel. The
Mississippi carries about the same amount of freight, though on its turbid
tide, cotton and sugar, in no small degree, take the place of grain and
the products of the furnaces and mills.

But it was a long time before steam navigation approached anything like
these figures, and indeed, many years passed before the flatboat and the
barge saw their doom, and disappeared. In 1821, ten years after the first
steamboat arrived at New Orleans, there was still recorded in the annals
of the town, the arrival of four hundred and forty-one flatboats, and one
hundred and seventy-four barges. But two hundred and eighty-seven
steamboats also tied up to the levee that year, and the end of the
flatboat days was in sight. Ninety-five of the new type of vessels were in
service on the Mississippi and its tributaries, and five were at Mobile
making short voyages on the Mississippi Sound and out into the Gulf. They
were but poor types of vessels at best. At first the shortest voyage up
the river from New Orleans to Shippingport--then a famous landing, now
vanished from the map--was twenty-two days, and it took ten days to come
down. Within six years the models of the boats and the power of the
engines had been so greatly improved that the up trip was made in twelve
days, and the down in six. Even the towns on the smaller streams tributary
to the great river, had their own fleets. Sixteen vessels plied between
Nashville and New Orleans. The Red River, and even the Missouri, began to
echo to the puffing of the exhaust and the shriek of the steam-whistle.
Indeed, it was not very long before the Missouri River became as important
a pathway for the troops of emigrants making for the great western plains
and in time for the gold fields of California, as the Ohio had been in the
opening days of the century for the pioneers bent upon opening up the
Mississippi Valley. The story of the Missouri River voyage, the landing
place at Westport, now transformed into the great bustling city of Kansas
City, and all the attendant incidents which led up to the contest in
Kansas and Nebraska, forms one of the most interesting, and not the least
important chapters in the history of our national development.

The decade during which the steamboats and the flatboats still struggled
for the mastery, was the most picturesque period of Mississippi River
life. Then the river towns throve most, and waxed turbulent, noisy, and