The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 125 



The women who had made the first stage of the journey 

 west in the canvas-topped wagons, and the second in peri- 

 lously loaded flatboats, following the ice down the river, 

 stood at their doors and looked over the waves of rustling green 

 leaves, crackling in the bright sunshine. "Leastways, we won't 

 starve." 



Starvation was the thought furthest from the minds of the 

 men who drove their plows across the rolling fields and felt 

 the deep wealth of that rockless soil. There was gold in those 

 furrows. Corn was wealth. Corn fattened cattle for the drovers 

 who were coming now out to this west country to buy beef, 

 as they had used to go down to the southern cow pens. Cities 

 like Philadelphia and New York had to have beef. Corn fat- 

 tened hogs. Corn made bacon, pork and lard. In the smoke- 

 houses, fires of hickory wood turned the fresh-killed meat to 

 sweet-smelling rosy hams. The cities in the East had to have . 

 these. So did the planters in the West Indies. All these were 

 salable in New Orleans. 



Shrewdly, those transplanted Yankees knew that if they 

 made a good product for which there was a steady market, the 

 buyers would come for it. They were only a generation in 

 advance of Emerson's philosophy concerning the better mouse- 

 trap. 



Those who did not come by road came by the river. Every 

 day the traders' boats went by; flat, broad arks, familiar sights 

 on the Susquehanna and the Delaware. Seventy-five to one 

 hundred feet long and from fifteen to twenty feet wide, these 

 were steered by sweeps which required the combined strength 

 of six men. They put in at the docks of the valley farms and 

 bartered for produce to carry to New Orleans. There were keel- 

 boats that drew two feet of water, and consequently made 

 fewer steps. There were store-boats that brought general mer- 

 chandise to sell to the farmers. 



At sound of the warning conch shell blown from the deck, 

 the women would leave their chores to run down to the land- 

 ing to see if the flag floating from the oncoming prow was red 



