surroundings now sank quickly to their social level in the fast-filling West they had freed. This type of hardy but vicious manhood found hard work awaiting them on the rivers where millions of tons of freight were waiting to be moved. They laid down a heavy musket and picked up a heavier oar; but the two forms of occupation were not dissimilar, for both offered a life of alternate labor and rest. On these first freight craft in the West the work was severe in the extreme, but it was not continuous; it was often a desperate pull today and leisure tomorrow. A writer of a generation ago caught the exact spirit of this life at this transitional state:
"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
