Titus replied sheepishly, “Yep—and thankee for the victuals too.”
“Think nothing of it, Titus Bass,” the pilot said as he turned away and strode off. “I’ll give you your chance to work off those victuals and more—come the Falls of the Ohio.”
“Get back from there, you idjit!” Heman Ovatt bellowed.
Suddenly Titus was snagged and whirled backward, stumbling over a coil of thick oiled hemp lying underfoot.
“The boy didn’t know!” hollered Ebenezer Zane, piloting the flatboat at that fifty-five-foot-long stern rudder.
Ovatt grumbled, gesturing off along the gunnel, “Just go piss somewhere down the side.”
His face burning in embarrassment, Bass stuffed himself back into his britches and scooted past the angry oarsman.
“Anywhere there will do, Titus Bass,” Zane advised.
Feeling all four sets of eyes on his back, Titus turned toward the brown, frothy river and pulled his penis out again, hanging it over the Ohio flowing slowly beneath their flatboat.
“Ain’t your fault,” Hames Kingsbury explained from his thirty-five-foot-long starboard oar on the far side of the craft. “No one told you it’s bad luck to piss off the bow of a boat.”
“Only one thing worst’n pissin’ off the bow of a man’s boat,” Reuben Root growled, then spit some tobacco into the water. “That’s having a god-bleemed woman on a boat.”
“I’ll know now,” Titus replied, dog-faced with shame. “Won’t never do it again.”
“Make sure you don’t—you know what’s good for you,” Root snarled as he settled back in behind the larboard oar, one of that pair rivermen might also refer to as “sweeps,” used more for helping the pilot navigate the flatboat than for propelling it.
“Don’t pay him no mind,” Zane reminded. “Just sit back and enjoy the ride, boy. Think on all the fun we’re gonna have ourselves come we make Louisville.”
For another moment Titus watched Ebenezer plunge the wide, flat end of his huge rudder back into the water, angling it from side to side as the pole rested in a waist-high, Y-shaped wooden fork at the stern of the boat. Turning from the pilot, Titus found Kingsbury motioning him over to the right, or starboard, side of the flatboat. He heaved himself up atop the wooden crates containing nails, from there crawled over some huge oak casks filled with flour, then finally sank onto a few open feet of the deck just in front of the oarsman.
“It’s like anything, boy. First time for ever’thing. You’ll learn.”
“I never rode a riverboat afore.”
More than seven thousand board feet of straight yellow poplar had been felled, milled, planed, and drafted in the construction of Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat back up the Ohio in Pittsburgh. In that city, and downriver at Cincinnati and even Louisville during this golden era of river travel, hundreds of master carpenters and woodworking craftsmen were kept extremely busy right along the banks of the stately Ohio. Gunnels, cross ties and stringers—all were held together by hammering in more than three thousand wooden pins hand-carved from seasoned white oak. To this framework, built upside down at the water’s edge, were then fastened the long sections of poplar planks. That done, all seams were tightly caulked with more than fifty pounds of oakum, untwisted hemp rope pulled apart and soaked in oil or tar, then hammered into every joint across the bottom and up the entire six feet the flatboat’s sides rose above the waterline where the craft might take on some of the river in passing through whitewater rapids or the white-capped river swells during a storm.
To complete a flatboat having reached that stage of construction, the builder would pile rocks on one side of the craft until it tipped right side up. From there on the craftsmen would fashion one sort of raised cover or another, to provide protection for the crew and their sand-box fire pit as well as what cargo they would not chance leaving out in the rain and the river’s worst elements—that roof made either out of wood with shake shingles of oak or cedar, or, in the case of what Ebenezer Zane had come to prefer, a simple oak framework over which he stretched the versatile, and much cheaper by far, oiled Russian sheeting.
Averaging sixty feet or better in length, at least fifteen feet or so in width, the flatboat was normally called upon to carry a minimum of forty or fifty tons of cargo downriver. Such craft came to be known by many names: Kentuckyboat, from the land of its crew’s origin; New Orleans or Natchez, for that crew’s destination; broadhorn, after its huge steering oars, fastened at both stern and bow; in addition to being affectionately called ark, after the boatman’s biblical predecessor.
Ebenezer Zane outfitted every one of his craft with “check-posts”—what boatmen sometimes referred to as “snubbing posts”—those ends of a half dozen of the cross ties extending at least a foot or more above the gunnels every ten feet or so along both sides of the boat; with a muscle-powered capstan the crew could turn with capstan poles to slowly haul in the hawsers of oiled rope by which the rivermen would secure the boat to the shore or wharf at both bow and stern; in addition to a foot-powered leather boat pump, in the event the craft began to take on more water than the men could bail before they would tie up for the evening and replace any oakum guilty of leaking between the boat’s seams. Here in the early part of the nineteenth century, flatboats were constructed for the nominal cost of $1.25 per linear foot, about $75.00, American money. By the time Zane had his craft fully outfitted, he had invested less than a hundred dollars before dickering over the purchase price of his cargo.
There were some businessmen who operated their floating stores, blacksmith shops, tinners, and cooperages, as well as river-going taverns—those “dramshops” and whorehouses—from their gaudily painted flatboats along limited stretches of the Ohio. These were commonly referred to by locals as “chicken thieves” because of their propensity for thievery from settler farms nearest the riverbank. Yet most flatboat owners used their craft to transport cargo from the upper Ohio to the lower Mississippi. To those who preferred the aesthetic lines of a canoe or even a crude bateau or pirogue paddled by buckskin-clad frontiersmen, the flatboat was nothing more than a large, plain, rectangular box allowed to bob in the river’s current with some help from a pair of boatmen on their rudders as well as other crew who manned the oars along the sides. But while it would never win a beauty contest, the Kentucky-born flatboat got the job done: moving early-American commerce downriver.
“You any good with that rifle of your’n?” Kingsbury asked, giving his head a nod toward that part of the deck nearby that was covered by the awning. It was there that Ebenezer Zane had stowed the youngster’s few belongings.
“Thought I was,” Titus answered after a moment’s reflection. “Always had good luck when I went out hunting. Don’t have a idea one why I’ve been off the mark last few days.”
“Said you ain’t seen any sign?”
“Not a thing. And that’s strange too.”
“Only two things my pappy told me would run game out of the woods,” Kingsbury replied. “A storm coming, or Injuns.”
For a moment Titus studied the sky downriver to the southwest. “Must be a storm coming, like you said. Can’t believe it’d be Injuns.”
“Sure it could be,” Heman Ovatt commented as he clambered over to the side of the boat and unbuttoned his britches. “Injuns still thick as ever south side of the river. Every now and then you’ll hear what they do, jumping boatmen coming back home up the Trace.”
“The Trace?”
“Natchez Trace,” Kingsbury explained. “We float down with the goods to Natchez or Nawlins, sell the empty boat too—and then we hire us a wagon back north to Natchez on the Mississap. From there on a man has to buy himself a horse to ride, or he walks.”
“Walks all the way back where?”
Ovatt answered, “Clear up here to the Ohio country where he can put hisself out to work another trip that same year.”
“Man can make two trips a year if he hurries back north on the Trace,” Kingsbury added.
“Why don’t you just float on back north?”
Ovatt snorted, grinning as he fastened his buttons and turned around to look at Bass. “Look out there at that water you pissed in not long ago. Which way it taking us?”
“Downriver.”
“That’s right,” Ovatt replied. “Ain’t no getting a flatboat back upriver less’n it’s more work than it’s worth.”
