The Mississippi, Ohio, and their tributaries furnished highways for easy travel, of which the daring pioneers soon availed themselves.
Fig. 113.
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 Noah’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.
Bound for a Good Time.
Every island, had it a tongue, could tell of wrecks; every point or headland, of adventure.