The upper ranks of the steam-packet business have furnished the West with some of its strongest types of aggressive manhood. Keen-eyed, physically strong, acquainted with men and equal to any emergency, the typical captain of the first half century of steamboating in the West was a man any one was glad to number among his friends and acquaintances. But between the pilot house and the deck lay a gulf--not impassable, for it was very frequently spanned by the worthy--deep, and significant. Until the Civil War "deckoneering" was, largely, the pursuit of whites. A few plantation owners rented out slaves to steamboat owners, but negroes did not usurp the profession until they were freed. This was contemporaneous with the general introduction of steam railways. A heterogeneous population--not touched in the foregoing generalizations--has made the waters of the Ohio Basin its home. They may be classed as vagrants, gamblers, and banditti. The first class would include both the indolent and the vicious population that has swarmed the Ohio and its tributaries from times immemorial. In all sorts of conceivable craft, resembling each other only in the sole particular of buoyancy, these vagrants have been floating our waters and mooring their boats along our shores for a hundred years or more. In house-boats of all possible sizes, shapes, heights, depths, and stenches these idlers and triflers have lived and trained their sons and daughters to live. Their staple means of existence has been fishing and filching, and, while living, are seemingly the happiest of people and no questions asked. To dig a few hills of potatoes and snatch a few ears of corn or a melon, to conciliate and lead away a watch-dog, to "run" the trot-line, to barter stolen articles in a contiguous county, makes up the happy round of their useless lives. If it is true that every man is as lazy as he dare be the Ohio River can boast the most daring set of men in the world. It is interesting to note that at the beginning of the last century those who were engaged in legitimate business on western waters were not considered as holding a respectable social position. "This voyage performed," we read in _The Navigator_ for 1818, "which generally occupies three month ... the trader returns [from New Orleans] doubly invigorated, and enabled to enlarge his vessel and cargo, he sets out again; this is repeated, until perhaps getting tired of this mode of merchandizing, he sets himself down in some town or village as a wholesale merchant, druggist or apothecary, practicing physician, or lawyer, or something else, that renders him respectable in the eyes of his neighbors, where he lives amidst wealth and comforts the remainder of his days--nor is it by any known that his fortune was founded in the paddling of a canoe, or trafficking in apples, cider-royal, peach-brandy, whiskey, &c. &c. &c."