pe of a new ship that would take sail and
answer her rudder beyond anything the maritime world until then had
known. Shreve, like Hawkins, flagrantly ignoring the conventional wisdom
of his day and craft, built the Washington to sail on the water instead
of in it, doing away altogether with a hold and supplying an upper deck
in its place.

To few inventors, indeed, does America owe a greater debt of thanks than
to this Ohio River shipbuilder. A dozen men were on the way to produce a
Clermont had Fulton failed; but Shreve had no rival in his plan to
build a flat-bottomed steamboat. The remarkable success of his design
is attested by the fact that in two decades the boats built on his model
outweighed in tonnage all the ships of the Atlantic seaboard and Great
Lakes combined. Immediately the Ohio became in effect the western
extension of the great national highway and opened an easy pathway
for immigration to the eastern as well as the western lands of the
Mississippi Basin. The story goes that an old phlegmatic negro watched
the approach of one of the first steamboats to the wharf of a Southern
city. Like many others, he had doubted the practicability of this
new-fangled Yankee notion. The boat, however, came and went with ease
and dispatch. The old negro was converted. "By golly," he shouted,
waving his cap, "the Mississippi's got her Massa now."

The Mississippi had indeed found her master, but only by slow degrees
and after intervals of protracted rebellion did she succumb to that
master. Luckily, however, there was at hand an army of unusual men--the
"alligator-horses" of the flatboat era--upon whom the steamboat
could call with supreme confidence that they would not fail. Theodore
Roosevelt has said of the Western pioneers that they "had to be good and
strong--especially, strong." If these men upon whom the success of the
steamboat depended were not always good, they were beyond any doubt
behemoths in strength.

The task before them, however, was a task worthy of Hercules. The great
river boldly fought its conquerors, asking and giving no quarter, biding
its time when opposed by the brave but crushing the fearful on sight. In
one respect alone could it be depended upon--it was never the same. It
is said to bring down annually four hundred million tons of mud, but
its eccentricity in deciding where to wash away and where to deposit its
load is still the despair of river pilots. The great river could destroy
island