emergency, the typical captain of the first half century of steamboating in the West was a man any one was glad to number among his friends and acquaintances.
But between the pilot house and the deck lay a gulf—not impassable, for it was very frequently spanned by the worthy—deep, and significant. Until the Civil War "deckoneering" was, largely, the pursuit of whites. A few plantation owners rented out slaves to steamboat owners, but negroes did not usurp the profession until they were freed. This was contemporaneous with the general introduction of steam railways.
A heterogeneous population—not touched in the foregoing generalizations—has made the waters of the Ohio Basin its home. They may be classed as vagrants, gamblers, and banditti. The first class would include both the indolent and the vicious population that has swarmed the Ohio and its tributaries from times immemorial. In all sorts of conceivable craft, resembling each other only in the sole particular of buoyancy, these vagrants have been floating our waters and mooring
