uce which
went by Fort Massac in the early months of 1800 would have been worth on
the Ohio River upwards of two hundred thousand dollars! In the preceding
summer Baily quoted flour at Norfolk as selling at sixty-three shillings
a barrel of 196 pounds, or double the price it was bringing on the
ice-gorged Ohio. It is by such comparisons that we get some inkling of
the value of western produce and of the rates in western trade.

After a short stay at Cincinnati, Baily set out for the South on an
"Orleans boat" loaded with four hundred barrels of flour. At the
mouth of Pigeon Creek he noted the famous path to "Post St. Vincent's"
(Vincennes), over which he saw emigrants driving cattle to that ancient
town on the Wabash. At Fort Massac he met Captain Zebulon M. Pike, whose
tact in dealing with intoxicated Indians he commended. At New Madrid
Baily made a stay of some days. This settlement, consisting of some two
hundred and fifty houses, was in the possession of Spain. It was within
the province of Louisiana, soon to be ceded to Napoleon. New Orleans
supplied this district with merchandise, but smuggling from the United
States was connived at by the Spanish officials.

From New Madrid Baily proceeded to Natchez, which then contained about
eighty-five houses. The town did not boast a tavern, but, as was true
of other places in the interior, this lack was made up for by the
hospitality of its inhabitants. Rice and tobacco were being grown, Baily
notes, and Georgian cotton was being raised in the neighborhood. Several
jennies were already at work, and their owners received a royalty of
one-eighth of the product. The cotton was sent to New Orleans, where it
usually sold for twenty dollars a hundred weight. From Natchez to New
Orleans the charge for transportation by flatboat was a dollar and a
half a bag. The bags contained from one hundred and fifty to two hundred
and fifty pounds, and each flatboat carried about two hundred and
fifty bags. Baily adds two items to the story of the development of the
mechanical operation of watercraft. He tells us that in the fall of 1796
a party of "Dutchmen," in the Pittsburgh region, fashioned a boat with
side paddle wheels which were turned by a treadmill worked by eight
horses under the deck. This strange boat, which passed Baily when he was
wrecked on the Ohio near Grave Creek, appeared "to go with prodigious
swiftness." Baily does not state how much business the boat did on its
downward