The boat was handled by means of poles, and the crew generally consisted of two men. The draft of the boat, when placed in the water in the morning, was about four inches, but the boat hide becoming soaked during the day, and possibly some water leaking in, it would probably be as much as six or eight inches by night. Every evening when camp was made the boat was unloaded, brought up on the bank, and placed in an inclined position, bottom side up, to dry. In this position it served as a shelter for both cargo and crew. In the morning the seams were repitched, and any incipient rents or abrasions were carefully patched. The boat was then launched and reloaded and the voyage resumed. [Sidenote: FREAKS OF THE WIND.] Low water, even on the Platte, was generally preferred to high water for bullboat navigation, because in high water the current was too strong. Every little while the boat would glide into deep pockets, where the poles could not touch bottom, and it was then necessary to drift with the current until a shallower stretch would give the men control again. Sometimes in those wide and shallow expanses, which give the Platte such a pretentious appearance in high water, the wind would play vexatious pranks with the bullboat navigators. A strong prairie gale blowing steadily from one direction during the day would drift most of the water to the leeward side of the stream. The boat would naturally follow the same shore, and the night camp would be made there. If, as often happened, the wind changed before re-embarkation, the river would very likely be wafted to the other side of its broad bed, and the crew would find themselves with half a mile of sandbar between them and the water. [Sidenote: NOTED BULLBOAT VOYAGES.] Bullboat navigation, as here described, was most frequently resorted to in bringing the trade of the Pawnees on the Loup Fork of the Platte to the Missouri, but it was likewise extensively used on the Cheyenne and Niobrara and other tributaries. There were some very extensive bullboat voyages. A good many were made from Laramie River to the mouth of the Platte, but generally it was impossible to find enough water to make a continuous voyage. In 1825 General Ashley loaded one hundred and twenty-five packs of beaver into bullboats at the head of navigation on the Bighorn River, with the intention of conveying them in that way to St. Louis. But at the mouth of the Yellowstone he met General Atkinson, who offered him the use of his keelboats for the rest of the journey. In 1833 the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, Captain Bonneville and Nathaniel J. Wyeth, embarked all their furs, the product of a year’s hunt, in bullboats on the Bighorn River, and together went downstream to the mouth of the Yellowstone. Sometimes these boats were actually given names, and we have a record of the bullboat _Antoine_, in which a free trapper, Johnson Gardner, shipped his furs from the “Crossings of the Yellowstone” to Fort Union in 1832.