ition. Captains and
clerks found it prudent to abate something of their dignity. Instead of
shippers pleading for deck-room on the boats, the boats' agents had to do
the pleading. Instead of levees crowded with freight awaiting carriage
there were broad, empty spaces by the river's bank, while the railroad
freight-houses up town held the bales of cotton, the bundles of staves,
the hogsheads of sugar, the shingles and lumber. On long hauls the
railroads quickly secured all the North and South business, though indeed,
the hauling of freight down the river for shipment to Europe was ended for
both railroads and steamboats, so far as the products raised north of the
Tennessee line was concerned. For a new water route to the sea had been
opened and wondrously developed. The Great Lakes were the shortest
waterway to the Atlantic, and New York dug its Erie Canal which afforded
an outlet--pinched and straitened, it is true, but still an outlet--for
the cargoes of the lake schooners and the early steamers of the unsalted
seas. Even the commonwealths forming the north bank of the Ohio River
turned their faces away from the stream that had started them on the
pathway to wealth and greatness, and dug canals to Lake Erie, that their
wheat, corn, and other products might reach tidewater by the shortest
route. The great cargoes from Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Louisville, began
to be legends of the past, and the larger boats were put on routes in
Louisiana, or on the Mississippi, from Natchez south, while others were
reduced to mere local voyages, gathering up freight from points tributary
to St. Louis. The glory of the river faded fast, and the final stroke was
dealt it when some man of inventive mind discovered that a little, puffing
tug, costing one-tenth as much as a fine steamboat, could push broad acres
of flatboats, loaded with coal, lumber, or cotton, down the tortuous
stream, and return alone at one-tenth the expense of a heavy steamer. That
was the final stroke to the picturesqueness and the romance of river life.
The volume of freight carried still grows apace, but the glory of
Mississippi steamboat life is gone forever.

**Transcriber's Note: Page 268: change infreqently to infrequently

CHAPTER IX

THE NEW ENGLAND FISHERIES--THEIR PART IN EFFECTING THE SETTLEMENT OF
AMERICA--THEIR RAPID DEVELOPMENT--WIDE EXTENT OF THE TRADE--EFFORT OF LORD
NORTH TO DESTROY IT--THE FISHERMEN IN THE REVOLUTION--EFFORTS TO ENCOURAGE
T