A Unique Navy
There were keel-boats, built something like a modern canal-boat, only of much greater dimensions; there were broad-horns, looking like Noak's arks from some giant's toy-shop, and there were flat-boats and rafts, the latter with houses built on them, all recklessly drifting, or being propelled by long sweeps down the current into the great solemn, unknown wilderness.
Every island, had it a tongue, could tell of wrecks; every point or headland, of adventure.
The perils were great and the forest solemn, but the immigrants were merry, and the squeaking fiddle made the red man rise up from his hiding-place and look with wonder upon the "long knives" and their squaws dancing on the decks of their rude crafts, as they swept by into the unknown.
The advent of the steam-boat gradually drove the flat-boat, broad-horn, keel-boat, and all the primitive sweep-propelled craft from the rivers, but many of the old boatmen were loath to give up so pleasant a mode of existence, and they built themselves house-boats, and, still clinging to their nomadic habits, took their wives, and went to house-keeping on the bosom of the waters they loved so well.
Their descendants now form what might well be called a race of river-dwellers, and to this day their quaint little arks line the shores of the Mississippi and its tributaries.