Plans for a House-Boat that May Be a Camp or Built as Large as a Hotel
When the great West of the United States began to attract immigrants from the Eastern coast settlements, the Ohio River rolled between banks literally teeming with all sorts of wild game and wilder men: then it was that the American house-boat had its birth.
The Mississippi, Ohio, and their tributaries furnished highways for easy travel, of which the daring pioneers soon availed themselves.
Lumber was to be had for the labor of felling the trees. From the borders of the Eastern plantations to the prairies, and below the Ohio to the Mississippi, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, was one vast forest of trees; trees whose trunks were unscarred by the axe, and whose tall tops reached an altitude which would hardly be believed by those of this generation, who have only seen second, third, or fourth growth timber.
When the settlement of this new part of the country began it was not long before each stream poured out, with its own flood of water,
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.