Except when there was an Indian campaign, politics and the river
commerce formed the two chief interests for all Kentuckians, but
especially for the well-to-do.
Features of the River Travel.
In spite of all the efforts of the Spanish officials the volume of trade
on the Mississippi grew steadily. Six or eight years after the close of
the Revolution the vast stretches of brown water, swirling ceaselessly
between the melancholy forests, were already furrowed everywhere by the
keeled and keelless craft. The hollowed log in which the Indian paddled;
the same craft, the pirogue, only a little more carefully made, and on a
little larger model, in which the creole trader carried his load of
paints and whiskey and beads and bright cloths to trade for the peltries
of the savage; the rude little scow in which some backwoods farmer
drifted down stream with his cargo, the produce of his own toil; the
keel boats which, with square-sails and oars, plied up as well as down
the river; the flotilla of huge flat boats, the property of some rich
merchant, laden deep with tobacco and flour, and manned by crews who
were counted rough and lawless even in the rough and lawless
backwoods--all these, and others too, were familiar sights to every
traveller who descended the Mississippi from Pittsburgh to New Orleans,
[Footnote: John Pope's "Tour," in 1790.
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