es of their services
and sought patronage with all the ingenuity of the modern railroad.
Taverns and roadhouses of which no trace remains today offered
entertainment at any figure, and of almost any character, that the
customer desired. Eastward flowed a steady stream of wagon-trains of
flour, tobacco, and pork, with great droves of cattle and hogs to be
fattened for the Philadelphia or Baltimore markets.

At almost precisely the same time that the first shovelful of earth
was turned for the Cumberland Road, people dwelling on the banks of
the upper Ohio were startled by the spectacle of a large boat moving
majestically down stream entirely devoid of sail, oar, pole, or any
other visible means of propulsion or control. This object of wonderment
was the New Orleans, the first steamboat to be launched on western
waters.

The conquest of the steamboat was speedy and complete. Already in 1819
there were sixty-three such craft on the Ohio, and in 1834--when the
total shipping tonnage, of the Atlantic seaboard was 76,064, and of the
British Empire 82,696--the tonnage afloat on the Ohio and Mississippi
was 126,278. Vessels regularly ascended the navigable tributaries of the
greater streams in quest of cargoes, and while craft of other sorts
did not disappear, the great and growing commerce of the river was
revolutionized.

In the upbuilding of steamboat navigation the thriving, bustling,
boastful spirit of the West found ample play. Steamboat owners vied with
one another in adorning their vessels with bowsprits, figureheads,
and all manner of tinseled decorations, and in providing elegant
accommodations for passengers; engineers and pilots gloried in speed
records and challenged one another to races which ended in some of the
most shocking steamboat disasters known to history. The unconscious
bombast of an anonymous Cincinnati writer in Timothy Flint's "Western
Monthly Review" in 1827 gives us the real flavor of the steamboat
business on the threshold of the Jacksonian era:

"An Atlantic cit, who talks of us under the name of backwoodsmen, would
not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental gorgeousness and
splendor as the Washington, the Florida, the Walk in the Water, The Lady
of the Lake, etc., etc., had ever existed in the imaginative brain of a
romancer, much less, that they were actually in existence, rushing down
the Mississippi, as on the wings of the wind, or plowing up between the
forests, and walking agai