disuse,and about the year 1830, few were to be seen.[360] In 1818, two thousand people were regularly employed as boatmen on the Ohio, and they were proverbially ferocious and abandoned in their habits, though possibly with many exceptions.[361] The shores of the Monongahela in 1819, were lined with barges, keels, and arks or flats, waiting for the rise of the Ohio.[362] During 1821-1823 flat bottoms, keels, and barges[363] found constant employment in the carrying trade to and from New Orleans.[364] As late as 1828 or 1830, flats, arks, and barges were to be seen at New Orleans.[365] The flats seem to have continued in the greatest numbers after the introduction of the steamboat. There were on the Ohio many other forms of craft which I shall briefly mention. The Allegheny or Mackinaw skiff was a covered boat carrying from six to ten tons.[366] "Dugouts," named from the manner of making them, and canoes hollowed from trees were to be seen in great numbers. These boats and skiffs were used to cross the rivers, and a select company of travelers often descended the river in them to New Orleans.[367] Flat boats, worked by a wheel, driven by the cattle that they were conveying to New Orleans, were to be seen; also horse boats of various construction, used for the most part as ferry boats, but sometimes as boats of ascent.[368] Boats moved rapidly up stream by wheels, after the steam construction, propelled by a man turning a crank.[369] Flint says, "in this land of freedom and invention, with a little aid perhaps, from the influence of the moon, there are monstrous anomalies, reducible to no specific class of boats, and only illustrating the whimsical archetypes of things that have previously existed in the brain of inventive men, who reject the slavery of being obliged to build in any received form. You can scarcely imagine an abstract form in which a boat can be built, that in some part of the Ohio or Mississippi, you will not see, actually in motion."[370] As the steamboat was perfected, and increased in numbers and importance, many of these strange craft were destined to disappear, and prior even to the year 1830, many of them began to be superseded by the larger and more swiftly moved steamboats. FOOTNOTES: [314] Hall, J., Notes, 142-143. [315] Howells, W. C., Recollections, 84-85. [316] Howells, W. C., Recollections, 84-85. [317] Hall, J., Letters, 87-88. [318] Hulme, T., Journal, Early W. Travels, X., 39. [319] Birkbeck, M., Letters, 119. [320] Faux, W., Memorable Days, Early W. Travels, XI., 171. [321] Birkbeck, M., Notes, 38. [322] Ogden, G. W., Letters, Early W. Travels, XIX., 41. [323] Hulme, T., Journal, Early W. Travels, X., 42. [324] Flint, J., Letters, Early W. Travels, IX., 86. [325] Tranchepain, Travels, 100-101. [326] Flint, T., Recollections, 13-14. [327] Flint, J., Letters, Early W. Travels, IX., 97. [328] Ibid., IX., 147. [329] Ibid., IX., 163.