The Flatboat Age
In the early twenties of the last century one of the popular songs of
the day was The Hunters of Kentucky. Written by Samuel Woodworth, the
author of The Old Oaken Bucket, it had originally been printed in the
New York Mirror but had come into the hands of an actor named Ludlow,
who was playing in the old French theater in New Orleans. The poem
chants the praises of the Kentucky riflemen who fought with Jackson at
New Orleans and indubitably proved
That every man was half a horse
And half an alligator.
Ludlow knew his audience and he saw his chance. Setting the words to
Risk's tune, Love Laughs at Locksmiths, donning the costume of a Western
riverman, and arming himself with a long "squirrel" rifle, he presented
himself before the house. The rivermen who filled the pit received him,
it is related, with "a prolonged whoop, or howl, such as Indians give
when they are especially pleased." And to these sturdy men the words of
his song made a strong appeal:
We are a hardy, freeborn race,
Each man to fear a stranger;
Whate'er the game, we join in chase,
Despising toil and danger;
And if a daring foe annoys,
No matter what his force is,
We'll show him that Kentucky boys
Are Alligator-horses.
The title "alligator-horse," of which Western rivermen were very proud,
carried with it a suggestion of amphibious strength that made it both
apt and figuratively accurate. On all the American rivers, east and
west, a lusty crew, collected from the waning Indian trade and the
disbanded pioneer armies, found work to its taste in poling the long
keel boats, "cordelling" the bulky barges--that is, towing them by
pulling on a line attached to the shore--or steering the "broadhorns" or
flatboats that transported the first heavy inland river cargoes. Like
longshoremen of all ages, the American riverman was as rough as the work
which calloused his hands and transformed his muscles into bands of
tempered steel. Like all men given to hard but intermittent labor, he
employed his intervals of leisure in coarse and brutal recreation. Their
roistering exploits, indeed, have made these rivermen almost better
known at play than at work. One of them, the notorious Mike Fink, known
as "the Snag" on the Mississippi and as the "Snapping Turtle" on the
Ohio, has left the record, not that he could load a keel boat in a
certain length of time, or lift a barrel of whiskey with one arm, or
that no tumultuous current had ever compelled him to back water, but
that he could "out-run, out-hop, out-jump, throw down, drag out, and
lick any man in the country," and that he was "a Salt River roarer."
Such men and the craft they handled were known on the Atlantic rivers,
but it was on the Mississippi and its branches, especially the Ohio,
that they played their most important part in the history of American
inland commerce. Before the beginning of the nineteenth century wagons
and Conestogas were bringing great loads of merchandise to such points
on the headwaters as Brownsville, Pittsburgh, and Wheeling. As early as
1782, we are told, Jacob Yoder, a Pennsylvania German, set sail from the
Monongahela country with the first flatboat to descend the Ohio and
Mississippi. As the years passed, the number of such craft grew
constantly larger. The custom of fixing the widespreading horns of
cattle on the prow gave these boats the alternative name of
"broadhorns," but no accurate classification can be made of the various
kinds of craft engaged in this vast traffic. Everything that would
float, from rough rafts to finished barges, was commandeered into
service, and what was found unsuitable for the strenuous purposes of
commercial transportation was palmed off whenever possible on
unsuspecting emigrants en route to the lands of promise beyond.
Flour, salt, iron, cider and peach brandy were staple products of the
Ohio country which the South desired. In return they shipped molasses,
sugar, coffee, lead, and hides upon the few keel boats which crept
upstream or the blundering barges which were propelled northward by
means of oar, sail, and cordelle. It was not, however, until the
nineteenth century that the young West was producing any considerable
quantity of manufactured goods. Though the town of Pittsburgh had been
laid out in 1764, by the end of the Revolution it was still little more
than a collection of huts about a fort. A notable amount of local trade
was carried on, but the expense of transportation was very high even
after wagons began crossing the Alleghanies. For example, the cost from
Philadelphia and Baltimore was given by Arthur Lee, a member of
Congress, in 1784 as forty-five shillings a hundredweight, and a few
months later it is quoted at sixpence a pound when Johann D. Schoph
crossed the mountains in a chaise--a feat "which till now had been
considered quite impossible." Opinions differed widely as to the future
of the little town of five hundred inhabitants. The important product of
the region at first was Monongahela flour which long held a high place
in the New Orleans market. Coal was being mined as early as 1796 and was
worth locally threepence halfpenny a bushel, though within seven years
it was being sold at Philadelphia at thirty-seven and a half cents a
bushel. The fur trade with the Illinois country grew less important as
the century came to its close, but Maynard and Morrison, cooperating
with Guy Bryan at Philadelphia, sent a barge laden with merchandise to
Illinois annually between 1790 and 1796, which returned each season with
a cargo of skins and furs. Pittsburgh was thus a distributing center of
some importance; but the fact that no drayman or warehouse was to be
found in the town at this time is a significant commentary on the
undeveloped state of its commerce and manufacture.
After Wayne's victory at the battle of the Fallen Timber in 1794 and the
signing of the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which ended the earlier
Indian wars of the Old Northwest and opened for settlement the country
beyond the Ohio, a great migration followed into Ohio, Indiana, and
Kentucky, and the commercial activity of Pittsburgh rapidly increased.
By 1800 a score of profitable industries had arisen, and by 1803 the
first bar-iron foundry was, to quote the advertisement of its owner,
"sufficiently upheld by the hand of the Almighty" to supply in part the
demand for iron and castings. Glass factories were established, and
ropewalks, sail lofts, boatyards, anchor smithies, and brickyards, were
soon ready to supply the rapidly increasing demands of the infant cities
and the countryside on the lower Ohio. When the new century arrived the
Pittsburgh district had a population of upwards of two thousand.
One by one the other important centers of trade in the great valley
beyond began to show evidences of life. Marietta, Ohio, founded in 1788
by Revolutionary officers from New England, became the metropolis of the
rich Muskingum River district, which was presently sending many
flatboats southward. Cincinnati was founded in the same year as
Marietta, with the building of Fort Washington and the formal
organization of Hamilton County. The soil of the Miami country was as
"mellow as an ash heap" and in the first four months of 1802 over four
thousand barrels of flour were shipped southward to challenge the
prestige of the Monongahela product. Potters, brickmakers, gunsmiths,
cotton and wool weavers, coopers, turners, wheelwrights, dyers,
printers, and ropemakers were at work here within the next decade. A
brewery turned out five thousand barrels of beer and porter in 1811, and
by the next year the pork-packing business was thoroughly established.
Louisville, the "Little Falls" of the West, was the entrepôt of the Blue
Grass region. It had been a place of some importance since Revolutionary
days, for in seasons of low water the rapids in the Ohio at this point
gave employment to scores of laborers who assisted the flatboatmen in
hauling their cargoes around the obstruction which prevented the passage
of the heavily loaded barges. The town, which was incorporated in 1780,
soon showed signs of commercial activity. It was the proud possessor of
a drygoods house in 1783. The growth of its tobacco industry was rapid
from the first. The warehouses were under government supervision and
inspection as early as 1795, and innumerable flatboats were already
bearing cargoes of bright leaf southward in the last decade of the
century. The first brick house in Louisville was erected in 1789 with
materials brought from Pittsburgh. Yankees soon established the "Hope
Distillery"; and the manufacture of whiskey, which had long been a
staple industry conducted by individuals, became an incorporated
business of great promise in spite of objections raised against the
"creation of gigantic reservoirs of this damning drink."
Thus, about the year 1800, the great industries of the young West were
all established in the regions dominated by the growing cities of
Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville. But, since the combined
population of these centers could not have been over three thousand in
the year 1800, it is evident that the adjacent rural population and the
people living in every neighboring creek and river valley were chiefly
responsible for the large trade that already existed between this corner
of the Mississippi basin and the South.
In this trade the riverman 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 "riffle" 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 Mississippi, has left us a clear
picture of the process by which these heavy tubs, loaded with forty or
fifty tons of freight, were forced upstream against a swift current:
Wherever a point projected so as to render the course or bend below it
of some magnitude, there was an eddy, the returning current of which was
sometimes as strong as that of the middle of the great stream. The
bargemen, therefore, rowed up pretty close under the bank and had merely
to keep watch in the bow lest the boat should run against a planter or
sawyer. But the boat has reached the point, and there the current is to
all appearance of double strength and right against it. The men, who
have rested a few minutes, are ordered to take their stations and lay
hold of their oars, for the river must be crossed, it being seldom
possible to double such a point and proceed along the same shore. The
boat is crossing, its head slanting to the current, which is, however,
too strong for the rowers, and when the other side of the river has been
reached, it has drifted perhaps a quarter of a mile. The men are by this
time exhausted and, as we shall suppose it to be 12 o'clock, fasten the
boat to a tree on the shore. A small glass of whiskey is given to each,
when they cook and eat their dinner and, after resting from their
fatigue for an hour, recommence their labors. The boat is again seen
slowly advancing against the stream. It has reached the lower end of a
sandbar, along the edge of which it is propelled by means of long poles,
if the bottom be hard. Two men, called bowsmen, remain at the prow to
assist, in concert with the steersman, in managing the boat and keeping
its head right against the current. The rest place themselves on the
land side of the footway of the vessel, put one end of their poles on
the ground and the other against their shoulders and push with all their
might. As each of the men reaches the stern, he crosses to the other
side, runs along it and comes again to the landward side of the bow,
when he recommences operations. The barge in the meantime is ascending
at a rate not exceeding one mile in the hour.
Trustworthy statistics as to the amount and character of the Western
river trade have never been gathered. They are to be found, if anywhere,
in the reports of the collectors of customs located at the various
Western ports of entry and departure. Nothing indicates more definitely
the hour when the West awoke to its first era of big business than the
demand for the creation of "districts" and their respective ports, for
by no other means could merchandise and produce be shipped legally to
Spanish territory beyond or down the Mississippi or to English territory
on the northern shores of the Great Lakes.
Louisville is as old a port of the United States as New York or
Philadelphia, having been so created when our government was established
in 1789, but oddly enough the first returns to the National Treasury
(1798) are credited to the port of Palmyra, Tennessee, far inland on the
Cumberland River. In 1799 the following Western towns were made ports of
entry: Erie, Sandusky, Detroit, Mackinaw Island, and Columbia
(Cincinnati). The first port on the Ohio to make returns was Fort
Massac, Illinois, and it is from the collector at this point that we get
our first hint as to the character and volume of Western river traffic.
In the spring months of March, April, and May, 1800, cargoes to the
value of £28,581, Pennsylvania currency, went down the Ohio. This
included 22,714 barrels of flour, 1017 barrels of whiskey, 12,500 pounds
of pork, 18,710 pounds of bacon, 75,814 pounds of cordage, 3650 yards of
country linen, 700 bottles, and 700 barrels of potatoes. In the three
autumn months of 1800, for instance, twenty-one boats ascended the Ohio
by Fort Massac, with cargoes amounting to 36 hundredweight of lead and a
few hides. Descending the river at the same time, flatboats and barges
carried 245 hundredweight of drygoods valued at $32,550. When we compare
these spring and fall records of commerce downstream we reach the
natural conclusion that the bulk of the drygoods which went down in the
fall of the year had been brought over the mountains during the summer.
The fact that the Alleghany pack-horses and Conestogas were transporting
freight to supply the Spanish towns on the Mississippi River in the
first year of the nineteenth century seems proved beyond a doubt by
these reports from Fort Massac.
The most interesting phase of this era is the connection between western
trade and the politics of the Mississippi Valley which led up to the
Louisiana Purchase. By the Treaty of San Lorenzo in 1795 Spain made New
Orleans an open port, and in the next seven years the young West made
the most of its opportunity. But before the new century was two years
old the difficulties encountered were found to be serious. The lack of
commission merchants, of methods of credit, of information as to the
state of the market, all combined to handicap trade and to cause loss.
Pittsburgh shippers figured their loss already at $60,000 a year. In
consequence men began to look elsewhere, and an advocate of big business
wrote in 1802: "The country has received a shock; let us immediately
extend our views and direct our efforts to every foreign market."
One of the most remarkable plans for the capture of foreign trade to be
found in the annals of American commerce originated almost
simultaneously in the Muskingum and Monongahela regions. With a view to
making the American West independent of the Spanish middlemen, it was
proposed to build ocean-going vessels on the Ohio that should carry the
produce of the interior down the Mississippi and thence abroad through
the open port of New Orleans. The idea was typically Western in its
arrogant originality and confident self-assertion. Two vessels were
built: the brig St. Clair, of 110 tons, at Marietta, and the Monongahela
Farmer, of 250 tons, at Elizabeth on the Monongahela. The former reached
Cincinnati April 27, 1801; the latter, loaded with 750 barrels of flour,
passed Pittsburgh on the 13th of May. Eventually, the St. Clair reached
Havana and thus proved that Muskingum Valley black walnut, Ohio hemp,
and Marietta carpenters, anchor smiths, and skippers could defy the grip
of the Spaniard on the Mississippi. Other vessels followed these
adventurers, and shipbuilding immediately became an important industry
at Pittsburgh, Marietta, Cincinnati, and other points. The Duane of
Pittsburgh was said by the Liverpool Saturday Advertiser of July 9,
1803, to have been the "first vessel which ever came to Europe from the
western waters of the United States." Probably the Louisiana of Marietta
went as far afield as any of the one hundred odd ships built in these
years on the Ohio. The official papers of her voyage in 1805, dated at
New Orleans, Norfolk (Virginia), Liverpool, Messina, and Trieste at the
head of the Adriatic, are preserved today in the Marietta College
Library.
The growth of the shipbuilding industry necessitated a readjustment of
the districts for the collection of customs. Columbia (Cincinnati) at
first served the region of the upper Ohio; but in 1803 the district was
divided and Marietta was made the port for the Pittsburgh-Portsmouth
section of the river. In 1807 all the western districts were
amalgamated, and Pittsburgh, Charleston (Wellsburg), Marietta,
Cincinnati, Louisville, and Fort Massac were made ports of entry.
The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 gave a marked impulse to inland
shipbuilding; but the embargo of 1807, which prohibited foreign trade,
following so soon, killed the shipyards, which, for a few years, had
been so busy. The great new industry of the Ohio Valley was ruined.
By this time the successful voyage of Fulton's steamboat, the Clermont,
between New York and Albany, had demonstrated the possibilities of steam
navigation. Not a few men saw in the novel craft the beginning of a new
era in Western river traffic; but many doubted whether it was possible
to construct a vessel powerful enough to make its way upstream against
such sweeping currents as those of the Mississippi and the Ohio. Surely
no one for a moment dreamed that in hardly more than a generation the
Western rivers would carry a tonnage larger than that of the cities of
the Atlantic seaboard combined and larger than that of Great Britain!
As early as 1805, two years before the trip of the Clermont, Captain
Keever built a "steamboat" on the Ohio, and sent her down to New Orleans
where her engine was to be installed. But it was not until 1811 that the
Orleans, the first steamboat to ply the Western streams, was built at
Pittsburgh, from which point she sailed for New Orleans in October of
that year. The Comet and Vesuvius quickly followed, but all three
entered the New Orleans-Natchez trade on the lower river and were never
seen again at the headwaters. As yet the swift currents and flood tides
of the great river had not been mastered. It is true that in 1815 the
Enterprise had made two trips between New Orleans and Louisville, but
this was in time of high water, when counter currents and backwaters had
assisted her feeble engine. In 1816, however, Henry Shreve conceived the
idea of raising the engine out of the hold and constructing an
additional deck. The Washington, the first doubledecker, was the result.
The next year this steamboat made the round trip from Louisville to New
Orleans and back in forty-one days. The doubters were now convinced.
For a little while the quaint and original riverman held on in the new
age, only to disappear entirely when the colored roustabout became the
deckhand of post-bellum days. The riverman as a type was unknown except
on the larger rivers in the earlier years of water traffic. What an
experience it would be today to rouse one of those remarkable
individuals from his dreaming, as Davy Crockett did, with an oar, and
hear him howl "Halloe stranger, who axed you to crack my lice?"--to tell
him in his own lingo to "shut his mouth or he would get his teeth
sunburnt"--to see him crook his neck and neigh like a stallion--to
answer his challenge in kind with a flapping of arms and a cock's
crow--to go to shore and have a scrimmage such as was never known on a
gridiron--and then to resolve with Crockett, during a period of
recuperation, that you would never "wake up a ring-tailed roarer with an
oar again."
The riverman, his art, his language, his traffic, seem to belong to days
as distant as those of which Homer sang.