Note 656 — Chapter XI · —The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers

For the western trader, the Mississippi and Ohio were preeminently downstream paths. Gravity did the work. Only small boats, laden with fine commodities of small bulk and large value, occasionally made the forty day upstream voyage from New Orleans to Louisville. Flat boats and barges that were constructed at Pittsburg for the river traffic were regularly broken up for lumber at downstream points like Louisville and New Orleans; for the traders returned overland by the old Chickasaw Trail to the Cumberland and Ohio River settlements, carrying their profits in the form of gold. The same thing happens today, as it also happened two thousand years ago, on the Tigris and Euphrates. The highlander of Armenia or northern Mesopotamia floats down the current in his skin boat or on his brushwood raft, to sell his goods and the wood forming the frame-work of his primitive craft in timberless Bagdad and Busra, as formerly in treeless Babylon. He dries out his skins, loads them on his shoulders or on a mule brought down for the purpose, and returns on foot to his highland village.656 The same preponderance of downstream traffic appears to-day in eastern Siberia. Pedlers on the Amur start in the spring from Stretensk, 2025 miles up the river, with their wares in barges, and drift down with the current, selling at the villages en route, to the river's mouth at Nikolaievsk. Here they dispose of their remaining stock and also of their barges, the lumber of which is utilized for sidewalks, and they themselves return upstream by steamer. The grain barges of western Siberia, like the coal barges of the Mississippi, even within recent decades, are similarly disposed of at the journey's end.657 The tonnage of downstream traffic on the Ohio and Mississippi to-day greatly exceeds that upstream,. The fleet of 56 coal boats, carrying about 70,000 tons, which the great towboat Sprague takes in a single trip from Louisville down to New Orleans, all return empty. Of the 15,226,805 net tons of freight shipped in 1906 on the Ohio system, 13,980,368 tons of coal, stone, sand and lumber were carried in unrigged craft, fitted chiefly for downstream traffic.658