But now, turning specifically to our classification, let us glance at the first generation of Ohio rivermen: those who knew these waters before and during Revolutionary days. At the outset it is clear that their tasks are as strange to us as the sights upon which their eyes feasted and the sounds which day and night were sounding in their ears. They were engaged in the only trade known in the valley then—the fur trade. At about midsummer, or a little earlier, the fur trade of the entire Ohio Basin focused at the mouth of the Monongahela for transportation to Philadelphia and Baltimore or on the lower Ohio for shipment by canoe down the Ohio and Mississippi. When the curtain of actual history arose on the Ohio River, the fur traders formed the motley background in the drama in which Céloron, Contrecœur, Villiers, Washington, and Gist stood out clearly in the dark foreground. Céloron found them here and there in 1750 and sent them back to Virginia with a sharp letter to Governor Dinwiddie. Indeed it was these first rivermen who floated on the Ohio in canoes laden with peltry who brought on apace the Old French War. Nominally, of course, it was that quota of one hundred families with which the Ohio Company promised to people its two hundred thousand acre grant between the Monongahela and Kanawha Rivers which alarmed the Quebec government; but in reality it was the Virginia and Pennsylvania fur traders in whose canoes thousands of dollars’ worth of beaver skins were being kept from the St. Lawrence. From village to village these traders passed, securing from the natives their plunder of river and forest. In their long canoes the packs were carefully deposited, and payment was made in goods, of which ammunition and fire-arms were of most worth. Though these were the first rivermen, they as frequently came by land as by water. But, when in their canoes, they were the first to ply the western rivers. They, first of white men, learned the old-time riffles—many of which became known to millions by the names these first voyageurs gave them. They knew islands which have long since passed from sight; they knew the old licks and the old trails. They practiced the lost arts of the woodsman; they had eyes and ears of which their successors in these valleys do not know. They did not become white Indians for, it would seem, they did not mingle as closely with the red-men as did the French; but they became exceedingly proficient in the Indian’s woodland wisdom. Browned by the sun and hardened by wind and rain and snow they were a strong race of men; they could paddle or walk the entire day with little fatigue. Yet their day’s work was not such usually that it made mere brute machines of them. Not as boisterous as the French on the Great Lakes and their tributaries, these first Americans in the West were yet a buoyant crew; there were songs to be sung as the canoe glided speedily along beneath the shadows of those tremendous forest trees; dangers intensified the joys, and, as everywhere else, added a flavor to living, a romantic tinge to what otherwise might have been commonplace. There was no caste, no clique, no faction; even Virginian and Pennsylvanian eyed one another more considerately on the Ohio than elsewhere; true, the quarrel at last grew bitter, even here, but it was confined to the possession of Pittsburg and did not concern the valley as a whole.
With the deepening of the struggle for the Ohio its first generation of voyageurs became of great importance. Their knowledge of the river and the land through which it flowed was of moment to marching armies, scouts and spies, peace commissioners, military superintendents, commanders of forts, cohorts of surveyors, land companies, investors, promoters, and pioneers. With the passing of the fur trade, a score of remunerative openings was at the command of the rivermen who had learned well his lesson. Thus with the opening of the new era of the barge and keel-boat the old-time voyageur could remain upon the scene, or, like Daniel Boone, paddle away to the West and in a new land live over again the days when the forests were fresh and green.
With the filling of the Ohio Valley came the introduction of these heavy freight craft, the barge and flat-boat, and, almost immediately, the keel-boat, the first upstream craft. To row or steer a barge or flat or to pole a keel-boat was work no voyageur of earlier times had undertaken. It was rougher work than had ever been demanded of men in the West and it soon developed rougher men than the West had ever seen. Social conditions, growing spasmodically complex in a new country, made them worse. Once free of savage red-men, the Ohio Valley became a famous retreat for criminals of every class from every state; horse thieves, gamblers, and men guilty of far worse crimes were comparatively safe on the Ohio by 1800; and, in the descending barge or flat, could pass on into a new career under new names in Kentucky, Ohio, or beyond. Added to this scum of the older communities must be counted the hundreds who had served in the western armies which were now disbanded, many of whom bred in roughest surroundings now sank quickly to their social level in the fast-filling West they had freed. This type of hardy but vicious manhood found hard work awaiting them on the rivers where millions of tons of freight were waiting to be moved. They laid down a heavy musket and picked up a heavier oar; but the two forms of occupation were not dissimilar, for both offered a life of alternate labor and rest. On these first freight craft in the West the work was severe in the extreme, but it was not continuous; it was often a desperate pull today and leisure tomorrow. A writer of a generation ago caught the exact spirit of this life at this transitional state:
“The Ohio River being once reached, the main channel of emigration lay in the water-courses. Steamboats as yet were but beginning their invasion, amid the general dismay and cursing of the population of boatmen that had rapidly established itself along the shore of every river. The early water life of the Ohio and its kindred streams was the very romance of emigration; no monotonous agriculture, no toilsome wood-chopping could keep back the adventurous boys who found delight in the endless novelty, the alternate energy and repose of a floating existence on those delightful waters. The variety of river craft corresponded to the varied temperaments of the boatmen. There was the great barge with lofty deck requiring twenty-five men to work it up-stream; there was the long keel-boat, carrying from twenty-five to thirty tons; there was the Kentucky ‘broadhorn,’ compared by the emigrants of that day to a New England pig-sty set afloat, and sometimes built one hundred feet long, and carrying seventy tons; there was the ‘family-boat,’ of like structure, and bearing a whole household, with cattle, hogs, horses, and sheep. Other boats were floating tin shops, blacksmith’s shops, whiskey shops, dry-goods shops. A few were propelled by horsepower. Of smaller vessels there were ‘covered sleds,’ ‘ferry flats,’ and ‘Alleghany skiffs;’ ‘pirogues’ made from two tree trunks, or ‘dug-outs’ consisting of one.”
“The bargemen were a distinct class of people,” writes Mr. Cassedy, “whose fearlessness of character, recklessness of habits and laxity of morals rendered them a marked people. Their history will hereafter form the groundwork of many a heroic romance or epic poem. In the earlier stages of this sort of navigation, their trips were dangerous, not only on account of the Indians whose hunting-grounds bounded their track on either side, but also because the shores of both rivers were infested with organized banditti, who sought every occasion to rob and murder the owners of these boats. Beside all this the Spanish Government had forbidden the navigation of the lower Mississippi by the Americans, and thus, hedged in every way by danger, it became these boatmen to cultivate all the hardihood and wiliness of the Pioneer, while it led them also into the possession of that recklessness of independent freedom of manner, which even after the causes that produced it had ceased, still clung to and formed an integral part of the character of the Western Bargeman. It is a matter of no little surprise that something like an authentic history of these wonderful men has never been written. Certainly it is desirable to preserve such a history, and no book could have been undertaken which would be likely to produce more both of pleasure and profit to the writer and none which would meet with a larger circle of delighted readers. The traditions on the subject are, even at this recent period, so vague and contradictory that it would be difficult to procure anything like reliable or authentic data in regard to them. No story in which the bargemen figured is too improbable to be narrated, nor can one determine what particular person is the hero of an incident which is in turn laid at the door of each distinguished member of the whole fraternity.”[72]
“The crews were carefully chosen. A ‘Kentuck,’ or Kentuckian, was considered the best man at a pole, and a ‘Canuck,’ or French Canadian, at the oar or the ‘cordelles,’ the rope used to haul a boat upstream. Their talk was of the dangers of the river; of ‘planters and sawyers,’ meaning tree trunks imbedded more or less firmly in the river; of ‘riffles,’ meaning ripples; and of ‘shoots,’ or rapids (French chutes). It was as necessary to have violins on board as to have whiskey and all the traditions in song or picture of ‘the jolly boatman’ date back to that by-gone day. Between the two sides of the river there was already a jealousy. Ohio was called ‘the Yankee State’ and Flint tells us that it was a standing joke among the Ohio boatmen when asked their cargo to reply, ’Pitcoal indigo, wooden nutmegs, straw baskets, and Yankee notions.‘ The same authority describes this sort of questioning as being inexhaustible among the river people and asserts that from one descending boat came this series of answers all of which proved to be truthful:
“‘Where are you from?’
‘Redstone.’
‘What is your lading?’
‘Millstones.’