rman was the fundamental factor. Only by means of
his brawn and his genius for navigation could these innumerable tons of
flour, tobacco, and bacon have been kept from rotting on the shores. Yet
the man himself remains a legend grotesque and mysterious, one of the
shadowy figures of a time when history was being made too rapidly to be
written. If we ask how he loaded his flatboat or barge, we are told that
"one squint of his eye would blister a bull's heel." When we inquire how
he found the channel amid the shifting bars and floating islands of that
tortuous two-thousand-mile journey to New Orleans, we are informed that
he was "the very infant that turned from his mother's breast and called
out for a bottle of old rye." When we ask how he overcame the natural
difficulties of trade--lack of commission houses, varying standards of
money, want of systems of credit and low prices due to the glutting
of the market when hundreds of flatboats arrived in the South
simultaneously on the same freshet--we are informed that "Billy
Earthquake is the geniwine, double-acting engine, and can out-run,
out-swim, chaw more tobacco and spit less, drink more whiskey and keep
soberer than any other man in these localities."

The reason for this lack of information is that our descriptions of
flatboating and keel boating are written by travelers who, as is always
the case, are interested in what is unusual, not in what is typical and
commonplace. It is therefore only dimly, as through a mist, that we
can see the two lines of polemen pass from the prow to the stern on the
narrow running-board of a keel boat, lifting and setting their poles to
the cry of steersman or captain. The struggle in a swift "rife" or rapid
is momentous. If the craft swerves, all is lost. Shoulders bend with
savage strength; poles quiver under the tension; the captain's voice is
raucous, and every other word is an oath; a pole breaks, and the next
man, though half-dazed in the mortal crisis, does for a few moments
the work of two. At last they reach the head of the rapid, and the boat
floats out on the placid pool above, while the "alligator-horse" who
had the mishap remarks to the scenery at large that he'd be "fly-blowed
before sun-down to a certingty" if that were not the very pole with
which he "pushed the broadhorn up Salt River where the snags were
so thick that a fish couldn't swim without rubbing his scales off."
Audubon, the naturalist-merchant of the Mississipp