g. It
is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable waters of
the Atlantic coast formed into one stream." Yet, when the first trader,
in 1786, drifted with his flatboat from Ohio down to New Orleans, thus
entering the confines of Spanish territory, he was seized and imprisoned,
his goods were taken from him, and at last he was turned loose, penniless,
to plod on foot the long way back to his home, telling the story of his
hardships as he went along. The name of that man was Thomas Amis, and
after his case became known in the great valley, it ceased to be a matter
of doubt that the Americans would control the Mississippi. He was in a
sense the forerunner of Jefferson and Jackson, for after his time no
intelligent statesman could doubt that New Orleans must be ours, nor any
soldier question the need for defending it desperately against any foreign
power. The story of the way in which Gen. James Wilkinson, by intrigue and
trickery, some years later secured a partial relaxation of Spanish
vigilance, can not be told here, though his plot had much to do with
opening the great river.

[Illustration: FLATBOATS MANNED WITH RIFLEMEN]

The story of navigation on the Mississippi River, is not without its
elements of romance, though it does not approach in world interest the
story of the achievements of the New England mariners on all the oceans of
the globe. Little danger from tempest was encountered here. The natural
perils to navigation were but an ignoble and unromantic kind--the shifting
sand-bar and the treacherous snag. Yet, in the early days, when the
flatboats were built at Cincinnati or Pittsburg, with high parapets of
logs or heavy timber about their sides, and manned not only with men to
work the sweeps and hold the steering oar, but with riflemen, alert of
eye, and unerring of aim, to watch for the lurking savage on the banks,
there was peril in the voyage that might even affect the stout nerves of
the hardy navigator from New Bedford or Nantucket. For many long years in
the early days of our country's history, the savages of the Mississippi
Valley were always hostile, continually enraged. The French and the
English, bent upon stirring up antagonism to the growing young nation, had
their agents persistently at work awakening Indian hostility, and, indeed,
it is probable that had this not been the case, the rough and lawless
character of the American pioneers, and their entire indifference to the
right