The hardest problem that the business man of those early times had to face was the question of transportation. Dry goods, groceries and manufactured articles had at first been brought from Savannah and Charleston by wagon or horseback. But the way was long, the roads wretched,--especially through the Creek territory,--and the Indians demanded exorbitant tolls at the bridges; so the method was anything but satisfactory, and other plans were soon tried. Barges and flatboats were laboriously poled up from Mobile. They bore the promising names, _Alabama Swan_, _Lady of the Lake_, _Cotton Patch_ and _Ready Money_, but consumed from fifty to seventy days on the trip. The local paper records the arrival of an “amphibious animal in the shape of a boat from East Tennessee.” It came down the Tennessee, was transported across thirty miles of land to the Coosa, and by that river reached its destination. After a journey of a thousand miles, it finally arrived with an amusing assortment of flour, whiskey, apple brandy, cider, dried fruit, feathers and a five-wheel carriage,--some of which must have been taken on board near the end of the trip. Under such circumstances, the arrival of the first steamboat, the _Harriet_, on October 22, 1821, marked an epoch. Nor did the town fail to appreciate its importance. The entire population turned out to bid it welcome. The next day it carried an excursion up the river at the lively rate of six miles an hour. Steam was too precious to be wasted in whistling, so a gun was fired to signal its approach. While the _Swans_ and the _Harriets_ were struggling for supremacy, a third rival destined to supplant them both made its modest appearance. The Montgomery Railroad, delayed by the panic of ’37, opened the first twelve miles of its line for business in 1840. It made no great display, and when the engine was out of fix horses were substituted without hesitation or serious loss of time. But it was the beginning of a system that soon put the city in close communication with the older Eastern States; and when President Davis came in 1861 over the same road, he traveled in a private car made in its own shops at Montgomery. Business was the dominant interest during the first two decades of the city’s existence, and may have seemed to visitors like Governor Gilmer to exclude all other thoughts; yet beneath the surface there smouldered the Southern devotion to politics. The town was scarcely two years old when the Missouri question gave rise to an ardent discussion of State rights, which found frequent occasion for renewal in subsequent years; and at the public dinner prepared in celebration of the Fourth of July, 1826, there were two toasts whose sentiment seems strangely significant in the light of after events. They were: “The Union of the States--The golden chain of our liberties; dissolved into its minute links, the fabric falls into ruin.”