Boatmen and Gambling

A singular class of pioneers populated the river frontier and established gambling as an essential aspect of life in the new territory.

From the agricultural and forest hinterlands of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, adventuresome boatmen floated downstream in an assortment of river craft.

These deck hands and pilots, who numbered between two and three thousand by 1815, manned the rafts, barges, keel boats, and flatboats that protected the role of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers as arteries of commerce in the early nineteenth-century West.

They guided their craft to Natchez and New Orleans, where cargoes of farm and lumber products were sold or transferred to ocean-going vessels.

The boatmen then began the arduous upstream journey. With extensive labor, some keel boats were poled and pulled upriver.

Other boatmen dismantled their craft in order to sell them as lumber in New Orleans, and then returned northward by land.

The introduction of regular steamboat traffic on the western rivers made the return trip much easier by 1820, though the new vessels did not soon displace the cheaper flatboats and keel boats as downstream carriers of cargo.

Large numbers of boatmen continued to work, and gamble, on the Mississippi until the Civil War.

American folklore was quick to inflate the boatmen into figures larger than life. Legends depicting these 'Kentuckians' as 'gigantic' or 'rough and hardy' men soon obscured the actual nature of life along the river.

Underlying the topsoil of legend lay the reality of homeless and womenless men, the bedrock of tall tales about such other heroic drifters as mountain men, cowboy, and hobos.

In 1826, Timothy Flint colorfully depicted the hard migratory life, punctuated every so often by bouts of abandon, that boatmen led.

From all points of the trans-Appalachian frontier and with all kinds of cargo, he noted these sailors floated downriver through the western wilderness.

Their long, friendless journey was interrupted on occasion when the boats converged in 'fleets' at such landings as Natchez or New Madrid, Missouri.

For one evening the transient men socialized and caroused, but by dawn each boat had resumed its solitary southward trip not to encounter another crowd until the next big landing.

And so the boatmen traveled downstream, enduring long 'indolent' stretches interspersed with bursts of dangerous work and playful excitement.

Toward the middle of the century, artists George Caleb Bingham and Jacob A. Dallas portrayed the boatmen's card playing while aboard their craft, and captured the small scale of these private games.

Deck hands never gambled too extensively while floating downriver, because the voyage was often rough, and boatmen liked to save their money for sprees at the ports of Natchez and New Orleans or, after 1820, for betting while heading upstream aboard steamers.