"Flatboat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on nuts and roots by the way. Rivers were the chief highways for such produce as could not provide for its own locomotion. The Western waters floated all sorts of craft, from the lumber raft to the flatboat, laden with pork, cheese, butter, flour, corn, and whiskey. The greater part of these boats were makeshifts, and made no return voyage. It was not until 1809 that a barge was warped upstream from New Orleans to Nashville. The ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... Lincoln had learned how to build a flatboat, and had made at least one trip to New Orleans on a craft which he himself had put together. So, when he finally decided in the fall of 1816 to emigrate to Indiana, he at once began to build another boat, which he launched on the ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... of this light and shade gathered by the Father of Waters—the Mississippi—along its banks, that there comes silently one day in 1831, the lank, bony, awkward figure of Abraham Lincoln, then a young man of twenty-two, guiding a flatboat laden with prairie products down this same tortuous waterway, from the Sangamon to the sea. He was six feet four inches tall, homely, sad-faced, handy, and as little promising outwardly as any other pilot or boatman of those days. It is still remembered in prairie legends, however, ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... a few miles over to Tug River, and he readily engaged a wagon to carry him that far. On the wooded river bank he built a flatboat with his own hands, and covered one end of it with a poplar-wood cabin, purchased at a near-by sawmill. He floated out of the eddy in his shack-boat and began his journey down the rivers to the Mississippi, where he would perform the one task that remained ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... that time. From my peculiar circumstances, it is probable that for the last twelve months I have given as particular attention to the stage of the water in this river, as any other person in the country. In the month of March, 1831, in company with others, I commenced the building of a flatboat on the Sangamon, and finished and took her out in the course of the spring. Since that time, I have been concerned in the mill at New Salem. These circumstances are sufficient evidence, that I have not been very inattentive to ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... desire to move westward; and hearing glowing accounts of the new territory of Indiana, he resolved to go and see it for himself. His skill as a carpenter made this not only possible but reasonably cheap, and in the fall of 1816 he built himself a little flatboat, launched it half a mile from his cabin, at the mouth of Knob Creek on the waters of the Rolling Fork, and floated on it down that stream to Salt River, down Salt River to the Ohio, and down the Ohio to a landing called Thompson's Ferry ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay |
