street to the accompaniment of the boast: "We are all Kings over here." English travelers in the middle West have probably left truer pictures of actual social conditions in the days of the keel-boat and barge than we have elsewhere. We think many of these accounts are, like Dickens's Notes, exaggerated. If any of them are true, all might as well be. And, at any rate, whatever the social average, we can be very certain that the rivermen had the hardest work and were the hardest type of all laborers in the new West.
A hint has been dropped some pages before about the feeling of the old-time rivermen concerning the introduction of steam navigation. In this series of monographs it has been in place now and then to refer to the anger and disgust of every class of men engaged in land transportation over the introduction of new methods. The old packhorse-men were intensely incensed at the introduction of wheeled vehicles on the great routes of trade and immigration, and even opposed the widening of Indian trails and the building of roads. The first wagons were assaulted
