"The Ohio River being once reached, the main channel of emigration lay in the water-courses. Steamboats as yet were but beginning their invasion, amid the general dismay and cursing of the population of boatmen that had rapidly established itself along the shore of every river. The early water life of the Ohio and its kindred streams was the very romance of emigration; no monotonous agriculture, no toilsome wood-chopping could keep back the adventurous boys who found delight in the endless novelty, the alternate energy and repose of a floating existence on those delightful waters. The variety of river craft corresponded to the varied temperaments of the boatmen. There was the great barge with lofty deck requiring twenty-five men to work it up-stream; there was the long keel-boat, carrying from twenty-five to thirty tons; there was the Kentucky 'broadhorn,' compared by the emigrants of that day to a New England pig-sty set afloat, and sometimes built one hundred feet long, and carrying seventy tons; there was the 'family-boat,' of like structure, and bearing a whole household, with cattle, hogs, horses, and sheep. Other boats were floating tin shops, blacksmith's shops, whiskey shops, dry-goods shops. A few were propelled by horsepower. Of smaller vessels there were 'covered sleds,' 'ferry flats,' and 'Alleghany skiffs;' 'pirogues' made from two tree trunks, or 'dug-outs' consisting of one." "The bargemen were a distinct class of people," writes Mr. Cassedy, "whose fearlessness of character, recklessness of habits and laxity of morals rendered them a marked people. Their history will hereafter form the groundwork of many a heroic romance or epic poem. In the earlier stages of this sort of navigation, their trips were dangerous, not only on account of the Indians whose hunting-grounds bounded their track on either side, but also because the shores of both rivers were infested with organized banditti, who sought every occasion to rob and murder the owners of these boats. Beside all this the Spanish Government had forbidden the navigation of the lower Mississippi by the Americans, and thus, hedged in every way by danger, it became these boatmen to cultivate all the hardihood and wiliness of the Pioneer, while it led them also into the possession of that recklessness of independent freedom of manner, which even after the causes that produced it had ceased, still clung to and formed an integral part of the character of the Western Bargeman. It is a matter of no little surprise that something like an authentic history of these wonderful men has never been written. Certainly it is desirable to preserve such a history, and no book could have been undertaken which would be likely to produce more both of pleasure and profit to the writer and none which would meet with a larger circle of delighted readers. The traditions on the subject are, even at this recent period, so vague and contradictory that it would be