FRESCOES FROM THE PAST.

21

By and by the steamboat intruded. Then for fifteen or twenty
years, these men continued to run their keelboats down-stream, and
the steamers did all of the up-stream business, the keelboatmen selling
their boats in New Orleans, and returning home as deck passengers
in the steamers.
But after a while the steamboats so increased in number and in
speed that they were able to absorb the entire commerce; and then
keelboating died a permanent death. The keelboatman became a
-deck hand, 02." a mate, or a pilot on the steamer; and when steamer-
berths were not open to him, he took a berth on a Pittsburgh coal-

flat, or on a pine-raft construc-
ted in the forests up toward
the sources of the Mississippi.
In the heyday of the steamboating prosperity, the river from end
to end was flaked with coal-fleets and timber rafts, all managed by
hand, and employing hosts of the rough characters whom I have been
trying to describe. I remember the annual processions of mighty
rafts that used to glide by Hannibal when I was a boy,—an acre or
so of white, sweet-smelling boards in each raft, a crew of two dozen
men or more, three or four wigwams scattered about the raft's vast
level space for storm-quarters,—and I remember the rude ways
and the tremendous talk of their big crews, the sx-keelboatmen and