Carrying Western Trade.

Before 1840 most of the produce grown in the old Northwest Territory was carried to market by flatboats on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Between 1815 and 1840 an average of 2,500 flatboats every year, laden with the surplus grain, flour, pork, whiskey, and lumber of the Ohio Valley, sailed down the smaller rivers of Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Ohio and on into the Mississippi, bound for the markets of the cotton South or for the bustling wharves of New Orleans for export back east or abroad. Even after 1830, when steamboats began to dominate the Mississippi, the clumsy wooden flatboat still carried farm produce to the steamboat landings or to the nearest canal port. In fact, 1846-1847 was the peak year for flatboat arrivals in New Orleans (their most common destination), when 2,792 of the vessels tied up at the levees of the Crescent City...