The great fleet of shanty-boats does not begin to reach New Orleans until the approach of spring.  Once there, they find a market for the skins of the animals trapped during the winter, and these being sold for cash, the trapper disposes of his boat for a nominal sum to some one in need of cheap firewood, and purchasing lower-deck tickets for Cairo, or Pittsburgh, at from four to six dollars per head, places his family upon an up-river steamer, and returns with the spring birds to the Ohio River, to rent a small piece of ground for the season, where he can “make a crop of corn,” and raise some cabbage and potatoes, upon which to subsist until it be time to repeat his southern migration.

In this descent of the river, many persons, who have clubbed together to meet the expenses of a shanty-boat life for the first time, and who are of a sentimental turn of mind, look upon the voyage as a romantic era in their lives.  Visions of basking in the sunlight, feasting, and sleeping, dance before their benighted eyes; for they are not all of the low, ignorant class I have described.  Professors, teachers, musicians, all drift at times down the river; and one is often startled at finding in the apparently rough crew men who seem worthy of a better fate.  To these the river experiences are generally new, and the ribald jokes and low river slang, with the ever-accompanying cheap corn-whiskey and the nightly riots over cutthroat euchre, must be at first a revelation.  Hundreds of these low fellows will swear to you that the world owes them a living, and that they mean to have it; that they are gentlemen, and therefore cannot work.  They pay a good price for their indolence, as the neglect of their craft and their loose ideas of navigation seldom fail to bring them to grief before they even reach the Mississippi at Cairo.  Their heavy, flat-bottomed boat gets impaled upon a snag or the sharp top of a sawyer; and as the luckless craft spins round with the current, a hole is punched through the bottom, the water rushes in and takes possession, driving the inexperienced crew to the little boat usually carried in tow for any emergency.

Into this boat the shanty-men hastily store their guns, whiskey, and such property as they can save from the wreck, and making for the shore, hold a council of war.

There, in the swift current, lies the centre of their hopes, quickly settling in the deep water, soon to be seen no more.  The fact now seems to dawn upon them for the first time that a little seamanship is needed even in descending a river, that with a little care their Noah’s Ark might have been kept afloat, and the treacherous “bob sawyer” avoided.  This trap for careless sailors is a tree, with its roots held in the river’s bottom, and its broken top bobbing up and down with the undulations of the current.  Boatmen give it the euphonious title of “bob sawyer” because of the bobbing and sawing motions imparted to it by the pulsations of the water.