Trick or treat? ? [Halloween special]
On all major navigable rivers around the world, there is a current that flows towards the estuary, so it is possible to float with the water flow, and the only instruments needed are anchors and rudders to maneuver the vessel down the river. It was only with steam power that it became possible to sail upstream, until then you had to use sails if the current was not too strenuous, or manual force in the form of ox or horse pulling, and people wearing towbars. It was thus convenient for shipping companies and traders to send cargo by barge-like vessels of a simple construction, on a one-way trip to the end destinations of the Central European rivers, including the Upper and Middle Rhines. In North America, as the land around the Mississippi was cleared and developed, there was a need for cheap transportation to the larger port cities such as New Orleans, and as on the inner Central European rivers, it was not possible to return upstream. Agric
ultural goods such as potatoes, tobacco, cotton, alcoholic beverages (whiskey), grain, and live animals (cattle, chickens, and pigs) could be transported on a flatboat. Farmer Jacob Yoder of Pennsylvania built the first flatboat at Old Redstone Fort on the Monongahela River in 1781. His parents had come from Switzerland, where the navigable rivers and lakes of old had flat-bottomed boats of the typeweidling for fishing, freight and passenger transport. Yoder designed a boat that was nothing more than a simple box whose construction was so simple that it could be built by inexperienced people with tools and little boat building skills, and thus could be carried by the current on the rivers. The farmers would sell their agricultural products and the boat they had brought. Upon sale, the boat was broken up to reuse the wood that had been built into the structure. As wheel steamers took over the traffic, it led to a short-term upswing in the use of the flatboats, as the farmers could re
turn home within a few days, or get
