[Illustration:  FLATBOATS MANNED WITH RIFLEMEN]

The story of navigation on the Mississippi River, is not without its elements of romance, though it does not approach in world interest the story of the achievements of the New England mariners on all the oceans of the globe.  Little danger from tempest was encountered here.  The natural perils to navigation were but an ignoble and unromantic kind—­the shifting sand-bar and the treacherous snag.  Yet, in the early days, when the flatboats were built at Cincinnati or Pittsburg, with high parapets of logs or heavy timber about their sides, and manned not only with men to work the sweeps and hold the steering oar, but with riflemen, alert of eye, and unerring of aim, to watch for the lurking savage on the banks, there was peril in the voyage that might even affect the stout nerves of the hardy navigator from New Bedford or Nantucket.  For many long years in the early days of our country’s history, the savages of the Mississippi Valley were always hostile, continually enraged.  The French and the English, bent upon stirring up antagonism to the growing young nation, had their agents persistently at work awakening Indian hostility, and, indeed, it is probable that had this not been the case, the rough and lawless character of the American pioneers, and their entire indifference to the rights of the Indians, whom they were bent on displacing, would have furnished sufficient cause for conflict.

First of the craft to follow the Indian canoes and the bateaux of the French missionaries down the great rivers, was the flatboat—­a homely and ungraceful vessel, but yet one to which the people of the United States owe, perhaps, more of real service in the direction of building up a great nation than they do to Dewey’s “Olympia,” or Schley’s “Brooklyn.”  A typical flatboat of the early days of river navigation was about fifty-five feet long by sixteen broad.  It was without a keel, as its name would indicate, and drew about three feet of water.  Amidships was built a rough deck-house or cabin, from the roof of which extended on either side, two long oars, used for directing the course of the craft rather than for propulsion, since her way was ever downward with the current, and dependent upon it.  These great oars seemed to the fancy of the early flatboat men, to resemble horns, hence the name “broadhorns,” sometimes applied to the boats.  Such a boat the settler would fill with household goods and farm stock, and commit himself to the current at Pittsburg.  From the roof of the cabin that housed his family, cocks crew and hens cackled, while the stolid eyes of cattle peered over the high parapet of logs built about the edge for protection against the arrow or bullet of the wandering redskin.  Sometimes several families would combine to build one ark.  Drifting slowly down the river—­the voyage from Pittsburg to the falls of the Ohio, where Louisville now stands, requiring with the best luck, a week or ten days—­the