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