The t.i.tle "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 l.u.s.ty crew, collected from the waning Indian trade and the disbanded pioneer armies, found work to its taste in poling the long keel boats, "corralling" the bulky barges-that is, towing them by pulling on a line attached to the sh.o.r.e-or steering the "broadhorns" or flatboats that transported the first heavy inland river cargoes. Like longsh.o.r.emen 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 coa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.sed, 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 cla.s.sification 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 mola.s.ses, 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 quant.i.ty 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt of its owner, "sufficiently upheld by the hand of the Almighty" to supply in part the demand for iron and castings. Gla.s.s 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 entrepot of the Blue Gra.s.s 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 a.s.sisted the flatboatmen in hauling their cargoes around the obstruction which prevented the pa.s.sage 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 d.a.m.ning 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 sh.o.r.es. 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 pa.s.s 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 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 sh.o.r.e. A small gla.s.s 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 a.s.sist, 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 sh.o.r.es 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 c.u.mberland 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 Ma.s.sac, 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 pounds, 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 Ma.s.sac, 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 Ma.s.sac.
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-a.s.sertion. 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, pa.s.sed 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 "Sat.u.r.day 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 Ma.s.sac 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 a.s.sisted 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 c.o.c.k"s crow-to go to sh.o.r.e 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 ringtailed 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.
CHAPTER VI. The Pa.s.sing Show Of 1800
Foreign travelers who have come to the United States have always proved of great interest to Americans. From Brissot to Arnold Bennett while in the country they have been fed and clothed and transported wheresoever they would go-at the highest prevailing prices. And after they have left, the records of their sojourn that these travelers have published have made interesting reading for Americans all over the land. Some of these trans-Atlantic visitors have been jaundiced, disgruntled, and contemptuous; others have shown themselves of an open nature, discreet, conscientious, and fair-minded.
One of the most amiable and clear-headed of such foreign guests was Francis Baily, later in life president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Great Britain, but at the time of his American tour a young man of twenty-two. His journey in 1796-97 gave him a wide experience of stage, flatboat, and pack-horse travel, and his genial disposition, his observant eye, and his discriminating criticism, together with his comments on the commercial features of the towns and regions he visited, make his record particularly interesting and valuable to the historian. * Using Baily"s journal as a guide, therefore, one can today journey with him across the country and note the pa.s.sing show as he saw it in this transitional period.
* "Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 and 1797" by the late Francis Baily (London, 1856).
Landing at Norfolk, Virginia, Baily was immediately introduced to an American tavern. Like most travelers, he was surprised to find that American taverns were "boarding-places," frequented by crowds of "young, able-bodied men who seemed to be as perfectly at leisure as the loungers of ancient Europe." In those days of few newspapers, the tavern everywhere in America was the center of information; in fact, it was a common practice for travelers in the interior, after signing their names in the register, to add on the same page any news of local interest which they brought with them. The tavern habitues, Baily remarks, did not sit and drink after meals but "wasted" their time at billiards and cards. The pa.s.sion for billiards was notorious, and taverns in the most out-of-the-way places, though they lacked the most ordinary conveniences, were nevertheless provided with billiard tables. This custom seems to have been especially true in the South; and it is significant that the first taxes in Tennessee levied before the beginning of the nineteenth century were the poll tax and taxes on billiard tables and studhorses!
From Norfolk Baily pa.s.sed northward to Baltimore, paying a fare of ten dollars, and from there he went on to Philadelphia, paying six dollars more. On the way his stagecoach stuck fast in a bog and the pa.s.sengers were compelled to leave it until the next morning. This sixty-mile road out of Baltimore was evidently one of the worst in the East. Ten years prior to this date, Brissot, a keen French journalist, mentions the great ruts in its heavy clay soil, the overturned trees which blocked the way, and the unexampled skilfulness of the stage drivers. All travelers in America, though differing on almost every other subject, invariably praise the ability of these st.u.r.dy, weather-beaten American drivers, their kindness to their horses, and their attention to their pa.s.sengers. Harriet Martineau stated that, in her experience, American drivers as a cla.s.s were marked by the merciful temper which accompanies genius, and their perfection in their art, their fertility of resource, and the gentleness with which they treated female fears and fretfulness, were exemplary.
In the City of Brotherly Love Baily notes the geniality of the people, who by many travelers are called aristocratic, and comments on Quaker opposition to the theater and the inconsequence of the Peale Museum, which travelers a generation later highly praise. Proceeding to New York at a cost of six dollars, he is struck by the uncouthness of the public buildings, churches excepted, the widespread pa.s.sion for music, dancing, and the theater, the craze for sleighing, and the promise which the harbor gave of becoming the finest in America. Not a few travelers in this early period gave expression to their belief in the future greatness of New York City. These prophecies, taken in connection with the investment of eight millions of dollars which New Yorkers made in toll-roads in the first seven years of this new century, incline one to believe that the influence of the Erie Ca.n.a.l as a factor in the development of the city may have been unduly emphasized, great though it was.
From New York Baily returned to Baltimore and went on to Washington. The records of all travelers to the site of the new national capital give much the same picture of the countryside. It was a land worn out by tobacco culture and variously described as "dried up," "run down," and "hung out to dry." Even George Washington, at Mount Vernon, was giving up tobacco culture and was attempting new crops by a system of rotation. Cotton was being grown in Maryland, but little care was given to its culture and manufacture. Tobacco was graded in Virginia in accordance with the rigidity of its inspection at Hanover Court House, Pittsburgh, Richmond, and Cabin-Point: leaf worth sixteen shillings at Richmond was worth twenty-one at Hanover Court House; if it was refused at all places, it was smuggled to the West Indies or consumed in the country. Meadows were rapidly taking the place of tobacco-fields, for the planters preferred to clear new land rather than to enrich the old.
At Washington Baily found that lots to the value of $278,000 had been sold, although only one-half of the proposed city had been "cleared." It was to be forty years ere travelers could speak respectfully of what is now the beautiful city of Washington. In these earlier days, the streets were mudholes divided by vacant fields and "beautified by trees, swamps, and cows."
Departing for the West by way of Frederick, Baily, like all travelers, was intensely interested upon entering the rich limestone region which stretched from Pennsylvania far down into Virginia. It was occupied in part by the Pennsylvania Dutch and was so famous for its rich milk that it was called by many travelers the "Bonnyclabber Country." Most Englishmen were delighted with this region because they found here the good old English breed of horses, that is, the English hunter developed into a stout coach-horse. Of native breeds, Baily found animals of all degrees of strength and size down to hackneys of fourteen hands, as well as the "vile dog-horses," or packhorses, whose faithful service to the frontier could in no wise be appreciated by a foreigner.
This region of Pennsylvania was as noted for its wagons as for its horses. It was this wheat-bearing belt that made the common freight-wagon in its colors of red and blue a national inst.i.tution. It was in this region of rich, well-watered land that the maple tree gained its reputation. Men even prophesied that its delightful sap would prove a cure for slavery, for, if one family could make fifteen hundred pounds of maple sugar in a season, eighty thousand families could, at the same rate, equal the output of cane sugar each year from Santo Domingo!
The traveler at the beginning of the century noticed a change in the temper of the people as well as a change in the soil when the Bonnyclabber Country was reached. The time-serving att.i.tude of the good people of the East now gave place to a "consciousness of independence" due, Baily remarks, to the fact that each man was self-sufficient and pa.s.sed his life "without regard to the smiles and frowns of men in power." This spirit was handsomely ill.u.s.trated in the case of one burly Westerner who was "churched" for fighting. Showing a surly att.i.tude to the deacon-judges who sat on his case, he was threatened with civil prosecution and imprisonment. "I don"t want freedom," he is said to have replied, bitterly; "I don"t even want to live if I can"t knock down a man who calls me a liar."
Pushing on westward by way of historic Sideling Hill and Bedford to Statlers, Baily found here a prosperous millstone quarry, which sold its stones at from fifteen to thirty dollars a pair. Twelve years earlier Washington had prophesied that the Alleghanies would soon be furnishing millstones equal to the best English burr. As he crossed the mountains Baily found that taverns charged the following schedule: breakfast, eighteen pence; dinner and supper from two shillings to two shillings and sixpence each. Traversing Laurel Hill, he reached Pittsburgh just at the time when it was awakening to activity as the trading center of the West.
In order to descend the Ohio, Baily obtained a flatboat, thirty-six feet long and twelve feet broad, which drew eighteen inches of water and was of ten tons burden. On the way downstream, Charleston and Wheeling were the princ.i.p.al settlements which Baily first noted. Ebenezer Zane, the founder of Wheeling, had just opened across Ohio the famous landward route from the Monongahela country to Kentucky, which it entered at Limestone, the present Maysville. This famous road, pa.s.sing through Zanesville, Lancaster, and Chillicothe, though at that time safe only for men in parties, was a common route to and from Kentucky.
On such inland pathways as this, early travelers came to take for granted a hospitality not to be found on more frequented thoroughfares. In this hospitality, roughness and good will, cleanliness and filth, attempts to ape the style of Eastern towns and habits of the most primitive kind, were singularly blended. In one instance, the traveler might be cordially a.s.signed by the landlord to a good position in "the first rush for a chance at the head of the table"; at the next stopping place he might be coldly turned away because the proprietor "had the gout" and his wife the "delicate blue-devils"; farther on, where "soap was unknown, nothing clean but birds, nothing industrious but pigs, and nothing happy but squirrels," Daniel Boone"s daughter might be seen in high-heeled shoes, attended by white servants whose wages were a dollar a week, skirting muddy roads under a ten-dollar bonnet and a six-dollar parasol. Or, he might emerge from a lonely forest in Ohio or Indiana and come suddenly upon a party of neighbors at a dreary tavern, enjoying a corn shucking or a harvest home. Immediately dubbed "Doctor," "Squire," or "Colonel" by the hospitable merrymakers, the pa.s.ser-by would be informed that he "should drink and lack no good thing." After he had retired, as likely as not his quarters would be invaded at one or two o"clock in the morning by the uproarious company, and the best refreshment of the house would be forced upon him with a hilarity "created by omnipotent whiskey." Sometimes, however, the traveler would encounter pitiful instances of loneliness in the widespreading forests. One man in pa.s.sing a certain isolated cabin was implored by the woman who inhabited it to rest awhile and talk, since she was, she confessed, completely overwhelmed by "the lone!"
Every traveler has remarked upon the yellow pallor of the first inhabitants of the western forests and doubtless correctly attributed this sickly appearance to the effects of malaria and miasma. The psychic influences of the forest wilderness also weighed heavily upon the spirits of the settlers, although, as Baily notes, it was the newcomers who felt the depression to an exaggerated degree. As he says:
"It is a feeling of confinement, which begins to damp the spirits, from this complete exclusion of distant objects. To travel day after day, among trees of a hundred feet high, is oppressive to a degree which those cannot conceive who have not experienced it; and it must depress the spirits of the solitary settler to pa.s.s years in this state. His visible horizon extends no farther than the tops of the trees which bound his plantation-perhaps five hundred yards. Upwards he sees the sun, and sky, and stars, but around him an eternal forest, from which he can never hope to emerge:--not so in a thickly settled district; he cannot there enjoy any freedom of prospect, yet there is variety, and some scope for the imprisoned vision. In a hilly country a little more range of view may occasionally be obtained; and a river is a stream of light as well as of water, which feasts the eye with a delight inconceivable to the inhabitants of open countries."
In direct contradiction to this longing for society was the pa.s.sion which the first generation of pioneers had for the wilderness. When the population of one settlement became too thick, they were seized by an irresistible impulse to "follow the migration," as the expression went. The easy independence of the first hunter-agriculturalist was upset by the advance of immigration. His range was curtailed, his freedom limited. His very breath seems to have become difficult. So he sold out at a phenomenal profit, put out his fire, shouldered his gun, called his dog, and set off again in search of the solitude he craved.
Severe winter weather overtook Baily as he descended the Ohio River, until below Grave Creek floating ice wrecked his boat and drove him ash.o.r.e. Here in the primeval forest, far from "Merrie England," Baily spent the Christmas of 1796 in building a new flatboat. This task completed, he resumed his journey. Pa.s.sing Marietta, where the bad condition of the winter roads prevented a visit to a famous Indian mound, he reached Limestone. In due time he sighted Columbia, the metropolis of the Miami country. According to Baily, the sale of European goods in this part of the Ohio Valley netted the importers a hundred per cent. Prices varied with the ease of navigation. When ice blocked the Ohio the price of flour went up until it was eight dollars a barrel; whiskey was a dollar a gallon; potatoes, a dollar a bushel; and bacon, twelve cents a pound. At these prices, the total produce which went by Fort Ma.s.sac in the early months of 1800 would have been worth on the Ohio River upwards of two hundred thousand dollars! In the preceding summer Baily quoted flour at Norfolk as selling at sixty-three shillings a barrel of 196 pounds, or double the price it was bringing on the ice-gorged Ohio. It is by such comparisons that we get some inkling of the value of western produce and of the rates in western trade.
After a short stay at Cincinnati, Baily set out for the South on an "Orleans boat" loaded with four hundred barrels of flour. At the mouth of Pigeon Creek he noted the famous path to "Post St. Vincent"s" (Vincennes), over which he saw emigrants driving cattle to that ancient town on the Wabash. At Fort Ma.s.sac he met Captain Zebulon M. Pike, whose tact in dealing with intoxicated Indians he commended. At New Madrid Baily made a stay of some days. This settlement, consisting of some two hundred and fifty houses, was in the possession of Spain. It was within the province of Louisiana, soon to be ceded to Napoleon. New Orleans supplied this district with merchandise, but smuggling from the United States was connived at by the Spanish officials.
From New Madrid Baily proceeded to Natchez, which then contained about eighty-five houses. The town did not boast a tavern, but, as was true of other places in the interior, this lack was made up for by the hospitality of its inhabitants. Rice and tobacco were being grown, Baily notes, and Georgian cotton was being raised in the neighborhood. Several jennies were already at work, and their owners received a royalty of one-eighth of the product. The cotton was sent to New Orleans, where it usually sold for twenty dollars a hundred weight. From Natchez to New Orleans the charge for transportation by flatboat was a dollar and a half a bag. The bags contained from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty pounds, and each flatboat carried about two hundred and fifty bags. Baily adds two items to the story of the development of the mechanical operation of watercraft. He tells us that in the fall of 1796 a party of "Dutchmen," in the Pittsburgh region, fashioned a boat with side paddle wheels which were turned by a treadmill worked by eight horses under the deck. This strange boat, which pa.s.sed Baily when he was wrecked on the Ohio near Grave Creek, appeared "to go with prodigious swiftness." Baily does not state how much business the boat did on its downward trip to New Orleans but contents, himself with remarking that the owners expected the return trip to prove very profitable. When he met the boat on its upward voyage at Natchez, it had covered three hundred miles in six days. It was, however, not loaded, "so little occasion was there for a vessel of this kind." As this run between New Orleans and Natchez came to be one of the most profitable in the United States in the early days of steamboating, less than fifteen years later, the experience of these "Flying Dutchmen" affords a very pretty proof that something more than a means of transportation is needed to create commerce. The owners abandoned their craft at Natchez in disgust and returned home across country, wiser and poorer.
Baily also noted that a Dr. Waters of New Madrid built a schooner "some few years since" at the head of the Ohio and navigated it down the Ohio and Mississippi and around to Philadelphia, "where it is now employed in the commerce of the United States." It is thus apparent, solely from this traveler"s record, that an ocean-going vessel and a side-paddle-wheel boat had been seen on the Western Waters of the United States at least four years before the nineteenth century arrived.
Baily finally reached New Orleans. The city then contained about a thousand houses and was not only the market for the produce of the river plantations but also the center of an extensive Indian trade. The goods for this trade were packed in little barrels which were carried into the interior on pack-horses, three barrels to a horse. The traders traveled for hundreds of miles through the woods, bartering with the Indians on the way and receiving, in exchange for their goods, bear and deer skins, beaver furs, and wild ponies which had been caught by lariat in the neighboring Apalousa country.
Baily had intended to return to New York by sea, but on his arrival at New Orleans he was unable to find a ship sailing to New York. He therefore decided to proceed northward by way of the long and dangerous Natchez Trace and the Tennessee Path. Though few Europeans had made this laborious journey before 1800, the Natchez Trace had been for many years the land route of thousands of returning rivermen who had descended the Mississippi in flatboat and barge. In practically all cases these men carried with them the proceeds of their investment, and, as on every thoroughfare in the world traveled by those returning from market, so here, too, highwaymen and desperadoes, red and white, built their lairs and lay in wait. Some of the most revolting crimes of the American frontier were committed on these northward pathways and their branches.
Joining a party bound for Natchez, a hundred and fifty miles distant overland, Baily proceeded to Lake Pontchartrain and thence "north by west through the woods," by way of the ford of the Tangipahoa, Cooper"s Plantation, Tickfaw River, Amite River, and the "Hurricane" (the path of a tornado) to the beginning of the Apalousa country. This tangled region of stunted growth was reputed to be seven miles in width from "sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e" and three hundred miles in length. It took the party half a day to reach the opposite "sh.o.r.e," and they had to quench their thirst on the way with dew.
At Natchez, Baily organized a party which included the five "Dutchmen" whose horse boat had proved a failure. For their twenty-one days" journey to Nashville the party laid in the following provisions: 15 pounds of biscuit, 6 pounds of flour, 12 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of dried beef, 8 pounds of rice, 1 1/2 pounds of coffee, 4 pounds of sugar, and a quant.i.ty of pounded corn, such as the Indians used on all their journeys. After celebrating the Fourth of July, 1797, with "all the inhabitants who were hostile to the Spanish Government," and bribing the baker at the Spanish fort to bake them a quarter of a hundredweight of bread, the party started on their northward journey.
They reached without incident the famous Grindstone Ford of Bayou Pierre, where crayfishes had destroyed a pioneer dam. Beyond, at the forks of the path where the Choctaw Trail bore off to the cast the party pursued the alternate Chickasaw Trail by Indian guidance, and soon noted the change in the character of the soil from black loam to sandy gravel, which indicated that they had reached the Piedmont region. Indian marauders stole one horse from the camp, and three of the party fell ill. The others, pressed for food, were compelled to leave the sick men in an improvised camp and to hasten on, promising to send to their aid the first Indian they should meet "who understood herbs." After appalling hardships, they crossed the Tennessee and entered the Nashville country, where the roads were good enough for coaches, for they met two on the way. Thence Baily proceeded to Knoxville, seeing, as he went, droves of cattle bound for the settlements of west Tennessee. With his arrival at Knoxville, his journal ends abruptly; but from other sources we learn that he sailed from New York on his return to England in January, 1798. His interesting record, however, remained unpublished until after his death in 1844.
Not only to Francis Baily but to scores of other travelers, even those of unfriendly eyes, do modern readers owe a debt of grat.i.tude. These men have preserved a mult.i.tude of pictures and a wealth of data which would otherwise have been lost. The men of America in those days were writing the story of their deeds not on parchment or paper but on the virgin soil of the wilderness. But though the stage driver, the tavern keeper, and the burly riverman left no description of the life of their highways and their commerce, these visitors from other lands have bequeathed to us their thousands of pages full of the enterprising life of these pioneer days in the history of American commerce.