The cotton was sent to New Orleans, where it usually sold for twenty dollars a hundred weight.From Natchez to New Orleans the charge for transportation by flatboat was a dollar and a half a bag.The bags contained from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty pounds, and each flatboat carried about two hundred and fifty bags.Baily adds two items to the story of the development of the mechanical operation of watercraft.He tells us that in the fall of 1796 a party of "Dutchmen," in the Pittsburgh region, fashioned a boat with side paddle wheels which were turned by a treadmill worked by eight horses under the deck.This strange boat, which passed Baily when he was wrecked on the Ohio near Grave Creek, appeared "to go with prodigious swiftness." Baily does not state how much business the boat did on its downward trip to New Orleans but contents, himself with remarking that the owners expected the return trip to prove very profitable.When he met the boat on its upward voyage at Natchez, it had covered three hundred miles in six days.It was, however, not loaded, "so little occasion was there for a vessel of this kind." As this run between New Orleans and Natchez came to be one of the most profitable in the United States in the early days of steamboating, less than fifteen years later, the experience of these "Flying Dutchmen" affords a very pretty proof that something more than a means of transportation is needed to create commerce.The owners abandoned their craft at Natchez in disgust and returned home across country, wiser and poorer.
Baily also noted that a Dr.Waters of New Madrid built a schooner "some few years since" at the head of the Ohio and navigated it down the Ohio and Mississippi and around to Philadelphia, "where it is now employed in the commerce of the United States." It is thus apparent, solely from this traveler's record, that an ocean-going vessel and a side-paddle-wheel boat had been seen on the Western Waters of the United States at least four years before the nineteenth century arrived.
Baily finally reached New Orleans.The city then contained about a thousand houses and was not only the market for the produce of the river plantations but also the center of an extensive Indian trade.The goods for this trade were packed in little barrels which were carried into the interior on pack-horses, three barrels to a horse.The traders traveled for hundreds of miles through the woods, bartering with the Indians on the way and receiving, in exchange for their goods, bear and deer skins, beaver furs, and wild ponies which had been caught by lariat in the neighboring Apalousa country.
Baily had intended to return to New York by sea, but on his arrival at New Orleans he was unable to find a ship sailing to New York.He therefore decided to proceed northward by way of the long and dangerous Natchez Trace and the Tennessee Path.Though few Europeans had made this laborious journey before 1800, the Natchez Trace had been for many years the land route of thousands of returning rivermen who had descended the Mississippi in flatboat and barge.In practically all cases these men carried with them the proceeds of their investment, and, as on every thoroughfare in the world traveled by those returning from market, so here, too, highwaymen and desperadoes, red and white, built their lairs and lay in wait.Some of the most revolting crimes of the American frontier were committed on these northward pathways and their branches.
Joining a party bound for Natchez, a hundred and fifty miles distant overland, Baily proceeded to Lake Pontchartrain and thence "north by west through the woods," by way of the ford of the Tangipahoa, Cooper's Plantation, Tickfaw River, Amite River, and the "Hurricane" (the path of a tornado) to the beginning of the Apalousa country.This tangled region of stunted growth was reputed to be seven miles in width from "shore to shore" and three hundred miles in length.It took the party half a day to reach the opposite "shore," and they had to quench their thirst on the way with dew.
At Natchez, Baily organized a party which included the five "Dutchmen" whose horse boat had proved a failure.For their twenty-one days' journey to Nashville the party laid in the following provisions: 15 pounds of biscuit, 6 pounds of flour, 12pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of dried beef, 8 pounds of rice, 1 1/2pounds of coffee, 4 pounds of sugar, and a quantity of pounded corn, such as the Indians used on all their journeys.After celebrating the Fourth of July, 1797, with "all the inhabitants who were hostile to the Spanish Government," and bribing the baker at the Spanish fort to bake them a quarter of a hundredweight of bread, the party started on their northward journey.
They reached without incident the famous Grindstone Ford of Bayou Pierre, where crayfishes had destroyed a pioneer dam.Beyond, at the forks of the path where the Choctaw Trail bore off to the cast the party pursued the alternate Chickasaw Trail by Indian guidance, and soon noted the change in the character of the soil from black loam to sandy gravel, which indicated that they had reached the Piedmont region.Indian marauders stole one horse from the camp, and three of the party fell ill.The others, pressed for food, were compelled to leave the sick men in an improvised camp and to hasten on, promising to send to their aid the first Indian they should meet "who understood herbs." After appalling hardships, they crossed the Tennessee and entered the Nashville country, where the roads were good enough for coaches, for they met two on the way.Thence Baily proceeded to Knoxville, seeing, as he went, droves of cattle bound for the settlements of west Tennessee.With his arrival at Knoxville, his journal ends abruptly; but from other sources we learn that he sailed from New York on his return to England in January, 1798.His interesting record, however, remained unpublished until after his death in 1844.
Not only to Francis Baily but to scores of other travelers, even those of unfriendly eyes, do modern readers owe a debt of gratitude.These men have preserved a multitude of pictures and a wealth of data which would otherwise have been lost.The men of America in those days were writing the story of their deeds not on parchment or paper but on the virgin soil of the wilderness.
But though the stage driver, the tavern keeper, and the burly riverman left no description of the life of their highways and their commerce, these visitors from other lands have bequeathed to us their thousands of pages full of the enterprising life of these pioneer days in the history of American commerce.
