drive out the other craft, it revolutionized the commerce of the
river. Whereas it had taken the keel-boats thirty to forty days to
descend from Louisville to New Orleans, and about ninety days to
ascend the fifteen hundred miles of navigation by poling and warping
up-stream, the steamboat had shortened the time, by 1822, to seven
days down and sixteen days up. [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 17 Gong.,
2 Sess., 407; McMaster, United States, V., 166; National Gazette,
September 26, 1823 (list of steamboats, rates of passage, estimate
of products); Blane, Excursion through the U. S., 119; Niles'
Register, XXV., 95.] As the steamboats ascended the various
tributaries of the Mississippi to gather the products of the growing
west, the pioneers came more and more to realize the importance of
the invention. They resented the idea of the monopoly which Pulton
and Livingston wished to enforce prior to the decision of Chief-
Justice Marshall, in the case of Gibbons vs. Ogden--a decision of
vital interest to the whole interior. [Footnote: Thomas, Travels
through the Western Country, 62; Alexandria Herald, June 23, 1817.]

They saw in the steamboat a symbol of their own development. A
writer in the Western Monthly Review, [Footnote: Timothy Flint's
Western Monthly Review (May, 1827), I., 25; William Bullock, Sketch
of a Journey, 132.] unconsciously expressed the very spirit of the
self-contented, hustling, materialistic west in these words: "An
Atlantic cit, who talks of us under the name of backwoodsmen, would
not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental gorgeousness and
splendor, as the Washington, the Florida, the Walk in the Water, the
Lady of the Lake, etc. etc., had ever existed in the imaginative
brain of a romancer, much less, that they were actually in
existence, rushing down the Mississippi, as on the wings of the
wind, or plowing up between the forests, and walking against the