Her embarkation is characteristic.  Whatever her attire, the bonnet is there, gay with flowers; a pack of cards is tightly grasped in her hand; while a worn, old trunk, tied with a cord and fondly called a “saratoga,” is hoisted on board; and so, for better or for worse, she goes forth to meet her fate, or, as she expresses it, “to find luck.”

More than one quarrel usually occurs during the descent of the Mississippi, and by the time New Orleans is reached the shanty-boatman sets his quondam housekeeper adrift, where, in the swift current of life, she is caught by kindred spirits, and being introduced to city society as the Northern Lily, or Pittsburgh Rose, is soon lost to sight, and never returns to the far distant up-river country.

Another shanty-boat is built by a party of young men suffering from impecuniosity.  They are “out of a job,” and to them the charms of an independent life on the river is irresistible.  Having pooled their few dollars to build their floating home, they descend to New Orleans as negro minstrels, trappers, or thieves, as necessity may demand.

Cobblers set afloat their establishments, calling attention to the fact by the creaking sign of a boot; and here on the rushing river a man can have his heel tapped as easily as on shore.

Tin-smiths, agents and repairers of sewing machines, grocers, saloon-keepers, barbers, and every trade indeed is here represented on these floating dens.  I saw one circus-boat with a ring twenty-five feet in diameter upon it, in which a troop of horsemen, acrobats, and flying trapze artists performed while their boat was tied to a landing.

The occupants of the shanty-boats float upon the stream with the current, rarely doing any rowing with their heavy sweeps.  They keep steadily on their course till a milder climate is reached, when they work their clumsy craft into some little creek or river, and securely fasten it to the bank.  The men set their well-baited steel traps along the wooded watercourse for mink, coons, and foxes.  They give their whole attention to these traps, and in the course of a winter secure many skins.  While in the Mississippi country, however, they find other game, and feast upon the hogs of the woods’ people.  To prevent detection, the skin, with the swine-herd’s peculiar mark upon it, is stripped off and buried.

When engaged in the precarious occupation of hog-stealing, the shanty-man is careful to keep a goodly number of the skins of wild animals stretched upon the outside walls of his cabin, so that visitors to his boat may be led to imagine that he is an industrious and legitimate trapper, of high-toned feelings, and one “who wouldn’t stick a man’s hog for no money.”  If there be a religious meeting in the vicinity of the shanty-boat, the whole family attend it with alacrity, and prove that their belief in honest doctrines is a very different thing from their daily practice of the same.  They join with vigor in the shoutings, and their “amens” drown all others, while their excitable natures, worked upon by the wild eloquence of the backwoods’ preacher, seem to give evidence of a firm desire to lead Christian lives, and the spectator is often deceived by their apparent earnestness and sincerity.  Such ideas are, however, quickly dispelled by a visit to a shanty-boat, and a glimpse of these people “at home.”