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, broadhorn, 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.
Fig. 114.
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.
Some of These House-Boats
are as crudely made as the Italian huts we see built along the railroads, but others are neatly painted, and the interiors are like the proverbial New England homes, where everything is spick-and-span.
Like the drift-wood, these boats come down the stream with every freshet, and whenever it happens that the waters are particularly high they land at some promising spot and earn a livelihood on the adjacent water, by fishing and working aboard the other river-craft, or they land at some farming district, and as the waters recede they prop up and level their boats, on the bank, with stones or blocks of wood placed under the lower corners of their homes.
The muddy waters, as they retire, leave a long stretch of fertile land between the stranded house and the river, and this space is utilized as a farm, where ducks, chickens, goats and pigs are raised, and where garden-truck grows luxuriantly.
From a boat their home has been transformed to a farm-house; but sooner or later there will be another big freshet, and when the waters reach the late farm-house, lo! it is a boat again, and goes drifting in its happy-go-lucky way down the current. If it escapes the perils of snags and the monster battering-rams, which the rapid current makes of the drifting trees in the flood, it will land again, somewhere, down-stream.