class, ready to fight and to dance, equally enraptured with the rough scraping of a fiddle by one of their number, or the sound of the war-whoop, which promised the only less joyous diversion of a fight, they aroused all the inborn vagrant tendencies of the riverside boys, and to run away with a flatboat became, for the Ohio or Indiana lad, as much of an ambition as to run away to sea was for the boy of New England.  It will be remembered that Abraham Lincoln for a time followed the calling of a flatboatman, and made a voyage to New Orleans, on which he first saw slaves, and later invented a device for lifting flatboats over sand-bars, the model for which is still preserved at Washington, though the industry it was designed to aid is dead.  Pigs, flour, and bacon, planks and shingles, ploughs, hoes, and spades, cider and whisky, were among the simple articles dealt in by the owners of the barges.  Their biggest market was New Orleans, and thither most of their food staples were carried, but for agricultural implements and whisky there was a ready sale all along the route.  Tying up to trade, or to avoid the danger of night navigation, the boatmen became the heroes of the neighborhood.  Often they invited all hands down to their boat for a dance, and by flaring torches to the notes of accordion and fiddle, the evening would pass in rude and harmless jollity, unless too many tin cups or gourds of fiery liquor excited the always ready pugnacity of the men.  They were ready to brag of their valor, and to put their boasts to the test.  They were “half horse, half alligator,” according to their own favorite expression, equally prepared with knife or pistol, fist, or the trained thumb that gouged out an antagonist’s eye, unless he speedily called for mercy.  “I’m a Salt River roarer!” bawled one in the presence of a foreign diarist.  “I can outrun, outjump, throw down, drag out and lick any man on the river!  I love wimmen, and I’m chock full of fight!” In every crew the “best” man was entitled to wear a feather or other badge, and the word “best” had no reference to moral worth, but merely expressed his demonstrated ability to whip any of his shipmates.  They had their songs, too, usually sentimental, as the songs of rough men are, that they bawled out as they toiled at the sweeps or the pushpoles.  Some have been preserved in history: 

    “It’s oh!  As I was walking out,
       One morning in July,
    I met a maid who axed my trade. 
       ‘A flatboatman,’ says I.

    “And it’s oh!  She was so neat a maid
       That her stockings and her shoes
     She toted in her lily-white hands,
       For to keep them from the dews.”

[Illustration:  “THE EVENING WOULD PASS IN RUDE AND HARMLESS JOLLITY.”]

Just below the mouth of the Wabash on the Ohio was the site of Shawneetown, which marked the line of division between the Ohio and the Mississippi trade.  Here goods and passengers were debarked for Illinois, and here the Ohio boatmen stopped before beginning their return trip.  Because of the revels of the boatmen, who were paid off there, the place acquired a reputation akin to that which Port Said, at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal, now holds.  It held a high place in river song and story.