>From New Madrid Baily proceeded to Natchez, which then contained
about eighty-five houses
>From New Madrid Baily proceeded to Natchez, which then contained
about eighty-five houses. The town did not boast a tavern, but,
as was true of other places in the interior, this lack was made
up for by the hospitality of its inhabitants. Rice and tobacco
were being grown, Baily notes, and Georgian cotton was being
raised in the neighborhood. Several jennies were already at work,
and their owners received a royalty of one-eighth of the product.
The cotton was sent to New Orleans, where it usually sold for
twenty dollars a hundred weight. From Natchez to New Orleans the
charge for transportation by flatboat was a dollar and a half a
bag. The bags contained from one hundred and fifty to two hundred
and fifty pounds, and each flatboat carried about two hundred and
fifty bags. Baily adds two items to the story of the development
of the mechanical operation of watercraft. He tells us that in
the fall of 1796 a party of ‘Dutchmen,’ in the Pittsburgh region,
fashioned a boat with side paddle wheels which were turned by a
treadmill worked by eight horses under the deck. This strange
boat, which passed Baily when he was wrecked on the Ohio near
Grave Creek, appeared ‘to go with prodigious swiftness.’ Baily
does not state how much business the boat did on its downward
trip to New Orleans but contents, himself with remarking that the
owners expected the return trip to prove very profitable. When he
met the boat on its upward voyage at Natchez, it had covered
three hundred miles in six days. It was, however, not loaded, ’so
little occasion was there for a vessel of this kind.’ As this run
between New Orleans and Natchez came to be one of the most
profitable in the United States in the early days of
steamboating, less than fifteen years later, the experience of
these ‘Flying Dutchmen’ affords a very pretty proof that
something more than a means of transportation is needed to create
commerce. The owners abandoned their craft at Natchez in disgust
and returned home across country, wiser and poorer.
