trip to New Orleans but contents, himself with remarking that
the owners expected the return trip to prove very profitable. When
he met the boat on its upward voyage at Natchez, it had covered three
hundred miles in six days. It was, however, not loaded, "so little
occasion was there for a vessel of this kind." As this run between New
Orleans and Natchez came to be one of the most profitable in the United
States in the early days of steamboating, less than fifteen years later,
the experience of these "Flying Dutchmen" affords a very pretty proof
that something more than a means of transportation is needed to create
commerce. The owners abandoned their craft at Natchez in disgust and
returned home across country, wiser and poorer.

Baily also noted that a Dr. Waters of New Madrid built a schooner "some
few years since" at the head of the Ohio and navigated it down the Ohio
and Mississippi and around to Philadelphia, "where it is now employed
in the commerce of the United States." It is thus apparent, solely
from this traveler's record, that an ocean-going vessel and a
side-paddle-wheel boat had been seen on the Western Waters of the United
States at least four years before the nineteenth century arrived.

Baily finally reached New Orleans. The city then contained about a
thousand houses and was not only the market for the produce of the river
plantations but also the center of an extensive Indian trade. The goods
for this trade were packed in little barrels which were carried into the
interior on pack-horses, three barrels to a horse. The traders traveled
for hundreds of miles through the woods, bartering with the Indians on
the way and receiving, in exchange for their goods, bear and deer skins,
beaver furs, and wild ponies which had been caught by lariat in the
neighboring Apalousa country.

Baily had intended to return to New York by sea, but on his arrival
at New Orleans he was unable to find a ship sailing to New York. He
therefore decided to proceed northward by way of the long and dangerous
Natchez Trace and the Tennessee Path. Though few Europeans had made this
laborious journey before 1800, the Natchez Trace had been for many years
the land route of thousands of returning rivermen who had descended the
Mississippi in flatboat and barge. In practically all cases these men
carried with them the proceeds of their investment, and, as on every
thoroughfare in the world traveled by those returning from market, so
h