APPARENTLY the river was ready for business, now. But no,the distribution of a population along its banks was as calmand deliberate and time-devouring a process as the discoveryand exploration had been.

Seventy years elapsed, after the exploration, before theriver's borders had a white population worth considering;and nearly fifty more before the river had a commerce.

Between La Salle's opening of the river and the time when itmay be said to have become the vehicle of anything like a regularand active commerce, seven sovereigns had occupied the throneof England, America had become an independent nation, Louis XIV.

and Louis XV. had rotted and died, the French monarchy had gonedown in the red tempest of the revolution, and Napoleon was a namethat was beginning to be talked about. Truly, there were snailsin those days.

The river's earliest commerce was in great barges--keelboats, broadhorns.

They floated and sailed from the upper rivers to New Orleans,changed cargoes there, and were tediously warped and poled backby hand. A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months.

In time this commerce increased until it gave employment to hordesof rough and hardy men; rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrifichardships with sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickersin moral sties like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day,heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly,foul-witted, profane; prodigal of their money, bankrupt at the endof the trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts;yet, in the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty,and often picturesquely magnanimous.

By and by the steamboat intruded. Then for fifteen or twenty years,these men continued to run their keelboats down-stream, and the steamersdid all of the upstream business, the keelboatmen selling their boatsin New Orleans, and returning home as deck passengers in the steamers.

But after a while the steamboats so increased in number andin speed that they were able to absorb the entire commerce;and then keelboating died a permanent death. The keelboatmanbecame a deck hand, or a mate, or a pilot on the steamer;and when steamer-berths were not open to him, he took a berthon a Pittsburgh coal-flat, or on a pine-raft constructedin the forests up toward the sources of the Mississippi.

In the heyday of the steamboating prosperity, the river from endto end was flaked with coal-fleets and timber rafts, all managedby hand, and employing hosts of the rough characters whom Ihave been trying to describe. I remember the annual processionsof mighty rafts that used to glide by Hannibal when I was a boy,--an acre or so of white, sweet-smelling boards in each raft,a crew of two dozen men or more, three or four wigwams scatteredabout the raft's vast level space for storm-quarters,--and Iremember the rude ways and the tremendous talk of their big crews,the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning successors;for we used to swim out a quarter or third of a mile and get onthese rafts and have a ride.

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