ter's edge. Their favorite ruse was
to cause captive or renegade whites to run along the bank imploring to
be saved. When a boat had been decoyed to shore, and perhaps a landing
had been made, the savages would pour a murderous fire on the voyagers.
This practice became so common that pioneer boats "shunned the whites
who hailed them from the shores as they would have shunned the Indians,"
and as a consequence many whites escaping from the Indians in the
interior were refused succor and left to die.

When the flatboat reached its destination, it might find service as a
floating store, or even as a schoolhouse. But it was likely to be broken
up, so that the materials in it could be used for building purposes.
Before sawmills became common, lumber was a precious commodity, and
hundreds of pioneer cabins in the Ohio Valley were built partly or
wholly of the boards and timbers taken from the flatboats of their
owners. Even the "gunnels" were sometimes used in Cincinnati as
foundations for houses. In later days the flatboat, if in reasonably
good condition, was not unlikely to be sold to persons engaged in
trading down the Mississippi. Loaded with grain, flour, meats, and other
backwoods products, it would descend to Natchez or New Orleans, where
its cargo could be transferred to ocean-going craft. But in any case
its end was the same; for it would not have been profitable, even had
it been physically possible, to move the heavy, ungainly craft upstream
over long distances, in order to keep it continuously in service.

Chapter VII. Pioneer Days And Ways

Arrived on the lower Ohio, or one of its tributaries, the pioneer looked
out upon a land of remarkable riches. It was not a Mexico or a Peru,
with emblazoned palaces and glittering temples, nor yet a California,
with gold-flecked sands. It was merely an unending stretch of wooded
hills and grassy plains, bedecked with majestic forests and fructifying
rivers and lakes. It had no treasures save for the man of courage,
industry, and patience; but for such it held home, broad acres, liberty,
and the coveted opportunity for social equality and advancement.

The new country has been commonly thought of, and referred to by writers
on the history of the West, as a "wilderness"; and offhand, one might
suppose that the settlers were obliged literally to hew their way
through densely grown vegetation to the spots which they selected for
their homes. In point of fact, there were