Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/472

 then and is still called, teeming with energy and hardihood, with fruitfulness and prosperity. Before the day of railroads rivers furnished the only outlet to commerce. The Mississippi, gathering up with the waters of its tributaries the harvests of their valleys, bore down to New Orleans a continuous line of flatboats laden to the edge. The cargoes found ready sale and were soon the main food-supply of the city, and the sturdy flatboatmen returning to their farms were ever better and better satisfied with their market, and more and more discontented with the foreign ownership of it. In their parlance, the valley owned the river, and the river owned the mouth. Spanish obstinacy and American temper, concessions and evasions, threats and brawls, kept the city for a score of years filled to the brim with political excitement. Outside the wall and canal—the Canal Street of to-day—lay a new city, an American city, populated by flatboatmen and produce traders, against which the gates of the Spanish city were carefully closed and sentinels set at nightfall.

But it were as well to attempt to hold back the current of the river itself as the current of popular determination that flowed down with