Ogden--a decision of
vital interest to the whole interior. [Footnote: Thomas, Travels
through the Western Country, 62; Alexandria Herald, June 23, 1817.]
They saw in the steamboat a symbol of their own development. A
writer in the Western Monthly Review, [Footnote: Timothy Flint's
Western Monthly Review (May, 1827), I., 25; William Bullock, Sketch
of a Journey, 132.] unconsciously expressed the very spirit of the
self-contented, hustling, materialistic west in these words: "An
Atlantic cit, who talks of us under the name of backwoodsmen, would
not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental gorgeousness and
splendor, as the Washington, the Florida, the Walk in the Water, the
Lady of the Lake, etc. etc., had ever existed in the imaginative
brain of a romancer, much less, that they were actually in
existence, rushing down the Mississippi, as on the wings of the
wind, or plowing up between the forests, and walking against the
mighty current 'as things of life,' bearing speculators, merchants,
dandies, fine ladies, every thing real, and every thing affected, in
the form of humanity, with pianos, and stocks of novels, and cards,
and dice, and flirting, and love-making, and drinking, and
champagne, and on the deck, perhaps, three hundred fellows, who have
seen alligators, and neither fear whiskey, nor gun-powder.
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