to Europe, sell his flatboat for the
lumber in it, and begin his painful way back again to the head of
navigation.

The flatboat never attempted to return against the stream. For this
purpose keel-boats or barges were used, great hulks about the size of a
small schooner, and requiring twenty-five men at the poles to push one
painfully up stream. Three methods of propulsion were employed. The
"shoulder pole," which rested on the bottom, and which the boatman pushed,
walking from bow to stern as he did so; tow-lines, called cordelles, and
finally the boat was drawn along by pulling on overhanging branches. The
last method was called "bushwhacking." These became in time the regular
packets of the rivers, since they were not broken up at the end of the
voyage and required trained crews for their navigation. The bargemen were
at once the envy and terror of the simple folk along the shores. A wild,
turbulent class, ready to fight and to dance, equally enraptured with the
rough scraping of a fiddle by one of their number, or the sound of the
war-whoop, which promised the only less joyous diversion of a fight, they
aroused all the inborn vagrant tendencies of the riverside boys, and to
run away with a flatboat became, for the Ohio or Indiana lad, as much of
an ambition as to run away to sea was for the boy of New England. It will
be remembered that Abraham Lincoln for a time followed the calling of a
flatboatman, and made a voyage to New Orleans, on which he first saw
slaves, and later invented a device for lifting flatboats over sand-bars,
the model for which is still preserved at Washington, though the industry
it was designed to aid is dead. Pigs, flour, and bacon, planks and
shingles, ploughs, hoes, and spades, cider and whisky, were among the
simple articles dealt in by the owners of the barges. Their biggest market
was New Orleans, and thither most of their food staples were carried, but
for agricultural implements and whisky there was a ready sale all along
the route. Tying up to trade, or to avoid the danger of night navigation,
the boatmen became the heroes of the neighborhood. Often they invited all
hands down to their boat for a dance, and by flaring torches to the notes
of accordion and fiddle, the evening would pass in rude and harmless
jollity, unless too many tin cups or gourds of fiery liquor excited the
always ready pugnacity of the men. They were ready to brag of their valor,
and to put their boasts to the test. They were "half horse, half
alligator," according to their own favorite expression, equally prepared
with knife or pistol, fist, or the trained thumb that gouged out an
antagonist's eye, unless he speedily called for mercy. "I'm a Salt River
roarer!" bawled one in the presence of a foreign diarist. "I can outrun,
outjump, throw down, drag out and lick any man on the river! I love
wimmen, and I'm chock full of fight!" In every crew the "best" man was
entitled to wear a feather or other badge, and the word "best" had no
reference to moral worth, but merely expressed his demonstrated ability to
whip any of his shipmates. They had their songs, too, usually sentimental,
as the songs of rough men are, that they bawled out as they toiled at the
sweeps or the pushpoles. Some have been preserved in history:

"It's oh! As I was walking out,
One morning in July,
I met a maid who axed my trade.
'A flatboatman,' says I.

"And it's oh! She was so neat a maid
That her stockings and her shoes
She toted in her lily-white hands,
For to keep them from the dews."

[Illustration: "THE EVENING WOULD PASS IN RUDE AND HARMLESS JOLLITY."]

Just below the mouth of the Wabash on the Ohio was the site of
Shawneetown, which marked the line of division between the Ohio and the
Mississippi trade. Here goods and passengers were debarked for Illinois,
and here the Ohio boatmen stopped before beginning their return trip.
Because of the revels of the boatmen, who were paid off there, the place
acquired a reputation akin to that which Port Said, at the northern
entrance to the Suez Canal, now holds. It held a high place in river song
and story.

"Some row up, but we row down,
All the way to Shawneetown.
Pull away, pull away,"

was a favorite chorus.

Natchez, Tennessee, held a like unsavory reputation among the Mississippi
River boatmen, for there was the great market in which were exchanged
northern products for the cotton, yams, and sugar of the rich lands of the
South.

For food on the long voyage, the boatmen relied mostly on their rifles,
but somewhat on the fish that might be brought up from the depths of the
turbid stream, and the poultry and mutton which they could secure from the
settlers by barter, or not infrequently, by theft. Wild geese were
occasionally shot from the decks, while a few hours' hunt on shore would
almost certainly bring reward in the shape of wild turkey or deer. A
somewhat archaic story among river boatmen tells of the way in which
"Mike Fink," a famous character among them, secured a supply of mutton.
Seeing a flock of sheep grazing near the shore, he ran his boat near them,
and rubbed the noses of several with Scotch snuff. When the poor brutes
began to caper and sneeze in dire discomfort, the owner arrived on the
scene, and asked anxiously what could ail them. The bargeman, as a
traveled person, was guide, philosopher, and friend to all along the
river, and so, when informed that his sheep were suffering from black
murrain, and that all would be infected unless those already afflicted
were killed, the farmer unquestioningly shot those that showed the strange
symptoms, and threw the bodies into the river, whence they were presently
collected by the astute "Mike," and turned into fair mutton for himself
and passengers. Such exploits as these added mightily to the repute of the
rivermen for shrewdness, and the farmer who suffered received scant
sympathy from his neighbors.

But the boatmen themselves had dangers to meet, and robbers to evade or to
outwit. At any time the lurking Indian on the banks might send a
death-dealing arrow or bullet from some thicket, for pure love of
slaughter. For a time it was a favorite ruse of hostiles, who had secured
a white captive, to send him alone to the river's edge, under threat of
torture, there to plead with outstretched hands for aid from the passing
raft. But woe to the mariner who was moved by the appeal, for back of the
unfortunate, hidden in the bushes, lay ambushed savages, ready to leap
upon any who came ashore on the errand of mercy, and in the end neither
victim nor decoy escaped the fullest infliction of redskin barbarity.
There were white outlaws along the rivers, too; land pirates ready to rob
and murder when opportunity offered, and as the Spanish territory about
New Orleans was entered, the dangers multiplied. The advertisement of a
line of packets sets forth:

"No danger need be apprehended from the enemy, as every person whatever
will be under cover, made proof against rifle or musket balls, and
convenient portholes for firing out of. Each of the boats are armed with
six pieces, carrying a pound ball, also a number of muskets, and amply
supplied with ammunition, strongly manned with choice hands, and masters
of approved knowledge."

The English of the advertisement is not of the most luminous character,
yet it suffices to tell clearly enough to any one of imagination, the
story of some of the dangers that beset those who drifted from Ohio to New
Orleans.

The lower reaches of the Mississippi River bore among rivermen, during the
early days of the century, very much such a reputation as the Spanish Main
bore among the peaceful mariners of the Atlantic trade. They were the
haunts of pirates and buccaneers, mostly ordinary cheap freebooters,
operating from the shore with a few skiffs, or a lugger, perhaps, who
would dash out upon a passing vessel, loot it, and turn it adrift. But one
gang of these river pirates so grew in power and audacity, and its leaders
so ramified their associations and their business relations, as for a time
to become a really influential factor in the government of New Orleans,
while for a term of years they even put the authority of the United States
at nought. The story of the brothers Lafitte and their nest of criminals
at Barataria, is one of the most picturesque in American annals. On a
group of those small islands crowned with live-oaks and with fronded
palms, in that strange waterlogged country to the southwest of the
Crescent City, where the sea, the bayou, and the marsh fade one into the
other until the line of demarkation can scarcely be traced, the Lafittes
established their colony. There they built cabins and storehouses, threw
up-earthworks, and armed them with stolen cannon. In time the plunder of
scores of vessels filled the warehouses with the goods of all nations, and
as the wealth of the colony grew its numbers increased. To it were
attracted the adventurous spirits of the creole city. Men of Spanish and
of French descent, negroes, and quadroons, West Indians from all the
islands scattered between North and South America, birds of prey, and
fugitives from justice of all sorts and kinds, made that a place of
refuge. They brought their women and children, and their slaves, and the
place became a small principality, knowing no law save Lafitte's will.
With a fleet of small schooners the pirates would sally out into the Gulf
and plunder vessels of whatever sort they might encounter. The road to
their hiding-place was difficult to follow, either in boats or afoot, for
the tortuous bayous that led to it were intertwined in an almost
inextricable maze, through which, indeed, the trained pilots of the colony
picked their way with ease, but along which no untrained helmsman could
follow them. If attack were made by land, the marching force was
confronted by impassable rivers and swamps; if by boats, the invaders
pressing up a channel which seemed to promise success, would find
themselves suddenly in a blind alley, with nothing to do save to retrace
their course. Meanwhile, for the greater convenience of the pirates, a
system of lagoons, well known to them, and easily navigated in luggers,
led to the very back door of New Orleans, the market for their plunder. Of
the brothers Lafitte, one held state in the city as a successful merchant,
a man not without influence with the city government, of high standing in
the business community, and in thoroughly good repute. Yet he was, in
fact, the agent for the pirate colony, and the goods he dealt in were
those which the picturesque ruffians of Barataria had stolen from the
vessels about the mouth of the Mississippi River. The situation persisted
for nearly half a score of years. If there were merchants, importers and
shipowners in New Orleans who suffered by it, there were others who
profited by it, and it has usually been the case that a crime or an
injustice by which any considerable number of people profit, becomes a
sort of vested right, hard to disturb. And, indeed, the Baratarians were
not without a certain rude sense of patriotism and loyalty to the United
States, whose laws they persistently violated. For when the second war
with Great Britain was declared and Packenham was dispatched to take New
Orleans, the commander of the British fleet made overtures to Lafitte and
his men, promising them a liberal subsidy and full pardon for all past
offenses, if they would but act as his allies and guide the British
invaders to the most vulnerable point in the defenses of the Crescent
City. The offer was refused, and instead, the chief men of the pirate
colony went straightway to New Orleans to put Jackson on his guard, and
when the opposing forces met on the plains of Chalmette, the very center
of the American line was held by Dominique Yon, with a band of his swarthy
Baratarians, with howitzers which they themselves had dragged from their
pirate stronghold to train upon the British. Many of us, however
law-abiding, will feel a certain sense that the romance of history would
have been better served, if after this act of patriotism, the pirates had
been at least peacefully dispersed. But they were wedded to their
predatory life, returned with renewed zeal to their piracies, and were
finally destroyed by the State forces and a United States naval
expedition, which burned their settlement, freed their slaves, razed their
fortifications, confiscated their cannon, killed many of their people,
and dispersed the rest among the swamps and forests of southern Louisiana.

In 1809 a New York man, by name Nicholas J. Roosevelt, set out from
Pittsburg in a flatboat of the usual type, to make the voyage to New
Orleans. He carried no cargo of goods for sale, nor