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 shore.
The boat is crossing, its head slanting to the current, which is,