Word: flatboatmen
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...bygone days the job would have been not just daunting but preposterous. River towns still treasure tales of binging, brawling and murder among flatboatmen whose godlessness was a point of pride. The stereotype is outdated: massive consolidation hit the freight-barge business in the 1980s, and large firms like the Ingram Barge Co., which owns the Grainger, imposed large-firm professionalism: no drinking or smoking on board and a zero-tolerance drug policy enforced with random testing. Even a crew bent on mayhem would have trouble scheduling it. The tows run 24 hours a day, and for the length...
...style of American painters or sent them, like Benjamin West (the Pennsylvania prodigy who became the second president of the Royal Academy) into European careers. Often the homespun Doric is better than the mail-order Ionic. George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was no Poussin, but his groups of flatboatmen and river traders, leaning on crates with the air of Arcadian shepherds on a ruin whilst floating through the delicate silver haze of the Missouri, are often genuinely classical in their construction and repose...
...mist-shrouded painting of the river at night, done in 1905 by Frederick Oakes Sylvester. Between the two were a handful of great and near-great artists: naturalist-painters such as John James Audubon, Missouri's George Caleb Bingham who immortalized the river's roistering flatboatmen, and Indian Painters Charles Bodmer and George Catlin...
...paintings now rank with the best. Christ-Janer's up-to-date biography of the slight, religious, sharp-tongued cabinetmaker's apprentice is of most interest for its reproductions (many of the originals have vanished). To evoke the U. S. past as successfully as these paintings of flatboatmen, fur traders, political scenes, many a novelist would give his right...
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