The next day being Sunday, I again visited my new acquaintances upon the shanty-boat, and gathered from their varied experiences much of the river’s lore.  The rain continued, accompanied with lightning and thunder, during the entire day, so that Monday’s sun was indeed welcome; and with kind farewells on all sides I broke camp and descended the current with the now almost continuous raft of drift-wood.  For several hours a sewing-machine repair-shop and a photographic gallery floated with me.

The creeks were now so swollen from the heavy rains, and so full of drift-wood, that my usual retreat into some creek seemed cut off; so I ran under the sheltered side of “Three Mile Island,” below Newburg, Indiana.  The climate was daily improving, and I no longer feared an ice blockade; but a new difficulty arose.  The heavy rafts of timber threatened to shut me in my camp.  At dusk, all might be open water; but at break of day “a change came o’er the spirit of my dream,” and heavy blockades of timber rafts made it no easy matter to escape.  There were times when, shut in behind these barriers, I looked out upon the river with envious eyes at the steamboats steadily plodding up stream against the current, keeping free of the rafts by the skill of their pilots; and thoughts of the genius and perseverance of the inventors of these peculiar craft crowded my mind.

In these days of successful application of mechanical inventions, but few persons can realize the amount of distrust and opposition against which a Watts or a Fulton had to contend while forcing upon an illiberal and unappreciative public the valuable results of their busy brains and fertile genius.  It is well for us who now enjoy these blessings,—­the utilized ideas of a lifetime of unrequited labors,—­to look back upon the epoch of history so full of gloom for the men to whom we owe so much.

At the beginning of the present century the navigation of the Ohio was limited to canoes, bateaux, scows, rafts, arks, and the rudest models of sailing-boats.  The ever downward course of the strong current must be stemmed in ascending the river.  Against this powerful resistance upon tortuous streams, wind, as a motor, was found to be only partially successful, and for sure and rapid transit between settlements along the banks of great waterways a most discouraging failure.  Down-river journeys were easily made, but the up-river or return trip was a very slow and unsatisfactory affair, excepting to those who travelled in light canoes.

The influx of population to the fertile Ohio valley, and the settling up of the rich bottoms of the Mississippi, demanded a more expeditious system of communication.  The necessities of the people called loudly for this improvement, but at the same time their prejudices and ignorance prevented them from aiding or encouraging any such plans.  The hour came at length for the delivery of the people of the great West, and with it the man.  Fulton, aided by Watts, offered to solve the problem by unravelling rather than by cutting the “Gordian knot.”  It was whispered through the wilderness that a fire-ship, called the “Clermont,” built by a crazy speculator named Fulton, had started from New York, and, steaming up the Hudson, had forced itself against the current one hundred and fifty miles to Albany, in thirty-six hours.  This was in September, 1807.