difficult to procure anything like reliable or authentic data in regard to them. No story in which the bargemen figured is too improbable to be narrated, nor can one determine what particular person is the hero of an incident which is in turn laid at the door of each distinguished member of the whole fraternity."[72] "The crews were carefully chosen. A 'Kentuck,' or Kentuckian, was considered the best man at a pole, and a 'Canuck,' or French Canadian, at the oar or the 'cordelles,' the rope used to haul a boat upstream. Their talk was of the dangers of the river; of 'planters and sawyers,' meaning tree trunks imbedded more or less firmly in the river; of 'riffles,' meaning ripples; and of 'shoots,' or rapids (French _chutes_). It was as necessary to have violins on board as to have whiskey and all the traditions in song or picture of 'the jolly boatman' date back to that by-gone day. Between the two sides of the river there was already a jealousy. Ohio was called 'the Yankee State' and Flint tells us that it was a standing joke among the Ohio boatmen when asked their cargo to reply, 'Pitcoal indigo, wooden nutmegs, straw baskets, and Yankee notions.' The same authority describes this sort of questioning as being inexhaustible among the river people and asserts that from one descending boat came this series of answers all of which proved to be truthful: "'Where are you from?' 'Redstone.' 'What is your lading?' 'Millstones.' 'What's your captain's name?' 'Whetstone.' 'Where are you bound?' 'To Limestone.'" "It was the highway of emigration," a pioneer has written of the Ohio in its early years, "by the old and nearly forgotten flat-boat system.... I was familiar with the sight of these primitive navigators and their sluggish moving vessels when in the early spring days they came down.... I have seen several generations on a single flatboat, from the white haired grand-sire and his aged helpmate, seated in rude chairs of domestic manufacture, with split hickory bottoms, down to the infant babe nestled in its rough hewn cradle, made by the ax of the stalwart young man, father to a group of little 'towheads' who surrounded the parents, and their small assortment of household goods. A cow--that domesticated helpmate to the family of the emigrating poor--was generally tied near the center of the flatboat, and on the lumber or planks that were intended, when the voyage terminated, to be made into flooring, and combine with the broken up flat-boat to make a quickly constructed home at some point on the forest covered hills of Kentucky or Ohio, or on the low, flat lands that border the Mississippi.... They were going to settle in the wilderness, with a cow, a flitch of bacon, a small coop of chickens, and, generally, a large family of children."