I had rowed fifty-three miles that day, and did ample justice to the Christmas dinner on the flatboat. The father and brother joined us in the evening, and gave me much good advice in regard to river navigation. The rain fell heavily before midnight, and they insisted that I should share one of their beds in the boat; but as small streams of water were trickling through the roof of the shanty, and my little craft was water-tight, I declined the kindly offer, and bade them good-night.
The next day being Sunday, I again visited my new acquaintances upon the shanty-boat, and gathered from their varied experiences much of the river's lore. The rain continued, accompanied with lightning and thunder, during the entire day, so that Monday's sun was indeed welcome; and with kind farewells on all sides I broke camp and descended the current with the now almost continuous raft of drift- wood. For several hours a sewing-machine repair-shop and a photographic gallery floated with me.
The creeks were now so swollen from the heavy rains, and so full of drift-wood, that my usual retreat into some creek seemed cut off; so I ran under the sheltered side of "Three Mile Island," below Newburg, Indiana. The climate was daily improving, and I no longer feared an ice blockade; but a new difficulty arose. The heavy rafts of timber threatened to shut me in my camp. At dusk, all might be open water; but at break of day "a change came o'er the spirit of my dream," and heavy blockades of timber rafts made it no easy matter to escape. There were times when, shut in behind these barriers, I looked out upon the river with envious eyes at the steamboats steadily plodding up stream against the current, keeping free of the rafts by the skill of their pilots; and thoughts of the genius and perseverance of the inventors of these peculiar craft crowded my mind.
In these days of successful application of mechanical inventions, but few persons can realize the amount of distrust and opposition against which a Watts or a Fulton had to contend while forcing upon an illiberal and unappreciative public the valuable results of their busy brains and fertile genius. It is well for us who now enjoy these blessings,—the utilized ideas of a lifetime of unrequited labors,—to look back upon the epoch of history so full of gloom for the men to whom we owe so much.
At the beginning of the present century the navigation of the Ohio was limited to canoes, bateaux, scows, rafts, arks, and the rudest models of sailing-boats. The ever downward course of the strong current must be stemmed in ascending the river. Against this powerful resistance upon tortuous streams, wind, as a motor, was found to be only partially successful, and for sure and rapid transit between settlements along the banks of great waterways a most discouraging failure. Down-river journeys were easily made, but the up-river or return trip was a very slow and unsatisfactory affair, excepting to those who travelled in light canoes.
The influx of population to the fertile Ohio valley, and the settling up of the rich bottoms of the Mississippi, demanded a more expeditious system of communication. The necessities of the people called loudly for this improvement, but at the same time their prejudices and ignorance prevented them from aiding or encouraging any such plans. The hour came at length for the delivery of the people of the great West, and with it the man. Fulton, aided by Watts, offered to solve the problem by unravelling rather than by cutting the "Gordian knot." It was whispered through the wilderness that a fire-ship, called the "Clermont," built by a crazy speculator named Fulton, had started from New York, and, steaming up the Hudson, had forced itself against the current one hundred and fifty miles to Albany, in thirty-six hours. This was in September, 1807.
The fool and the fool's fire-ship became the butt of all sensible people in Europe as well as in America. Victor Hugo remarks that, "In the year 1807, when the first steamboat of Fulton, commanded by Livingston, furnished with one of Watts's engines sent from England, and manoeuvred, besides her ordinary crew, by two Frenchmen only, Andr Michaux and another, made her first voyage from New York to Albany, it happened that she set sail on the 17th of August. The ministers took up this important fact, and in numberless chapels preachers were heard calling down a malediction on the machine, and declaring that this number seventeen was no other than the total of the ten horns and seven heads of the beasts in the Apocalypse. In America they invoked against the steamboat the beast from the book of Revelation; in Europe, the reptile of the book of Genesis. The SAVANS had rejected steamboats as impossible; the PRIESTS had anathematized them as impious; SCIENCE had condemned, and RELIGION consigned them to perdition."
"In the archipelago of the British Channel islands," this learned author goes on to say, "the first steamboat which made its appearance received the name of the 'Devil Boat.' In the eyes of these worthy fishermen, once Catholics, now Calvinists, but always bigots, it seemed to be a portion of the infernal regions which had been somehow set afloat. A local preacher selected for his discourse the question of, 'Whether man has the right to make fire and water work together when God had divided them.' (Gen. ch. i. v.4.) No; this beast composed of iron and fire did not resemble leviathan! Was it not an attempt to bring chaos again into the universe?"
So much for young America, and so much for old mother England! Now listen, men and women of to-day, to the wisdom of France—scientific France. "A mad notion, a gross delusion, an absurdity!" Such was the verdict of the Academy of Sciences when consulted by Napoleon on the subject of steamboats early in the present century.
It seems scarcely credible now that all this transpired in the days of our fathers, not so very long ago. Time is a great leveller. Education of the head as well as of the heart has liberalized the pulpit, and the man of theoretical science to-day would not dare to stake his reputation by denying any apparently well-established theory, while the inventors of telephones, perpetual-motion motors, &c., are gladly hailed as leaders in the march of progress so dear to every American heart. The pulpit is now on the side of honest science, and the savant teaches great truths, while the public mind is being educated to receive and utilize the heretofore concealed or undeveloped mysteries of a wise and generous Creator, who has taught his children that they must labor in order to possess.