Even the towns on the smaller streams tributary to the great river, had their own fleets.  Sixteen vessels plied between Nashville and New Orleans.  The Red River, and even the Missouri, began to echo to the puffing of the exhaust and the shriek of the steam-whistle.  Indeed, it was not very long before the Missouri River became as important a pathway for the troops of emigrants making for the great western plains and in time for the gold fields of California, as the Ohio had been in the opening days of the century for the pioneers bent upon opening up the Mississippi Valley.  The story of the Missouri River voyage, the landing place at Westport, now transformed into the great bustling city of Kansas City, and all the attendant incidents which led up to the contest in Kansas and Nebraska, forms one of the most interesting, and not the least important chapters in the history of our national development.

The decade during which the steamboats and the flatboats still struggled for the mastery, was the most picturesque period of Mississippi River life.  Then the river towns throve most, and waxed turbulent, noisy, and big, according to the standards of the times.  Places which now are mere names on the map, or have even disappeared from the map altogether, were great trans-shipping points for goods on the way to the sea.  New Madrid, for example, which nowadays we remember chiefly as being one of the stubborn obstacles in the way of the Union opening of the river in the dark days of the Civil War, was in 1826 like a seaport.  Flatboats in groups and fleets came drifting to its levees heavy laden with the products of the west and south, the output of the northern farms and mills, and the southern plantations.  On the crowded river bank would be disembarked goods drawn from far-off New England, which had been dragged over the mountains and sent down the Ohio to the Mississippi; furs from northern Minnesota or Wisconsin; lumber in the rough, or shaped into planks, from the mills along the Ohio; whisky from Kentucky, pork and flour from Illinois, cattle, horses, hemp, fabrics, tobacco, everything that men at home or abroad, could need or crave, was gathered up by enterprising traders along three thousand miles of waterway, and brought hither by clumsy rafts and flatboats, and scarcely less clumsy steamboats, for distribution up and down other rivers, and shipment to foreign lands.

At New Orleans there was a like deposit of all the products of that rich valley, an empire in itself.  There grain, cotton, lumber, live stock, furs, the output of the farms and the spoils of the chase, were transferred to ocean-going ships and sent to foreign markets.  Speculative spirits planned for the day, when this rehandling of cargoes at the Crescent City would be no longer necessary, but ships would clear from Louisville or St. Louis to Liverpool or Hamburg direct.  A fine type of the American sailor, Commodore Whipple, who had won his title by good sea-fighting