Transportation was long a difficult problem, although it became gradually less so. Travel by either water or land was slow and difficult. When a party of about one hundred men, conducted by Colonel R. M. Johnson, went, in six or eight boats, from St. Louis to the site of the present Galena, in 1819, to make an arrangement with the Indians which would permit the whites to mine lead, the upward voyage occupied some twenty days.(390) Doubtless the journey of Edward Coles from Albemarle county, Virginia, to Illinois, in 1819, was typical of that of the better class of immigrants. At the Virginia homestead, slaves, horses and wagons were prepared for the long journey. A trusty slave was put in charge of the caravan of emigrant wagons and started out on the long journey over the Alleghanies to Brownsville, Pennsylvania. Mr. Coles started a few days later, overtook the party one day’s journey from Brownsville, and upon arriving at that place bought two flat-bottomed boats, upon which negroes, horses and wagons, with their owner, were embarked. The drunken pilot was discharged at Pittsburg, and Coles acted as captain and pilot on the voyage of some six hundred miles down the Ohio to a point below Louisville, whence, the boats being sold, the journey was continued by land to Edwardsville, Illinois.(391) April 5, 1823, a party of forty-three started from Cincinnati in a keel-boat, arriving at Galena, June 1, 1823. Twenty-two days were required to stem the flooded Mississippi from the mouth of the Ohio to St. Louis, and twenty of these were rainy days.(392) In 1822 the English settlement in Edwards county sent several flat-boats loaded with corn, flour, beef, pork, sausage, etc., to New Orleans.(393) Improvement of the Wabash was entrusted to an incorporated company in 1825, and several years earlier a canal across the peninsula at the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi was contemplated.(394)