big, according to the standards of the times. Places which now are mere
names on the map, or have even disappeared from the map altogether, were
great trans-shipping points for goods on the way to the sea. New Madrid,
for example, which nowadays we remember chiefly as being one of the
stubborn obstacles in the way of the Union opening of the river in the
dark days of the Civil War, was in 1826 like a seaport. Flatboats in
groups and fleets came drifting to its levees heavy laden with the
products of the west and south, the output of the northern farms and
mills, and the southern plantations. On the crowded river bank would be
disembarked goods drawn from far-off New England, which had been dragged
over the mountains and sent down the Ohio to the Mississippi; furs from
northern Minnesota or Wisconsin; lumber in the rough, or shaped into
planks, from the mills along the Ohio; whisky from Kentucky, pork and
flour from Illinois, cattle, horses, hemp, fabrics, tobacco, everything
that men at home or abroad, could need or crave, was gathered up by
enterprising traders along three thousand miles of waterway, and brought
hither by clumsy rafts and flatboats, and scarcely less clumsy steamboats,
for distribution up and down other rivers, and shipment to foreign lands.

At New Orleans there was a like deposit of all the products of that rich
valley, an empire in itself. There grain, cotton, lumber, live stock,
furs, the output of the farms and the spoils of the chase, were
transferred to ocean-going ships and sent to foreign markets. Speculative
spirits planned for the day, when this rehandling of cargoes at the
Crescent City would be no longer necessary, but ships would clear from
Louisville or St. Louis to Liverpool or Hamburg direct. A fine type of the
American sailor, Commodore Whipple, who had won his title by good
sea-fighting in the Revolutionary War, gave great encouragement to this
hope, in 1800, by taking the full-rigged ship "St. Clair," with a cargo of
pork and flour, from Marietta, Ohio, down the Ohio, over the falls at
Louisville, thence down the Mississippi, and round by sea to Havana, and
so on to Philadelphia. This really notable exploit--to the success of
which good luck contributed almost as much as good seamanship--aroused
the greatest enthusiasm. The Commodore returned home overland, from
Philadelphia. His progress, slow enough, at best, was checked by ovations,
complimentary addresses, and extemporized banque