Word: keelboat
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...hero of The Big Sky is a raw Kentucky boy named Boone Caudill who goes West after he hits his Pap a lick with a piece of firewood. In St. Louis in 1830, he and his friend Jim Deakins join up for a keelboat expedition to the wild Blackfoot country at the headwaters of the Missouri. The cargo for trading is mostly whiskey; but their ace-in-the-hole, counted on to save the scalps of the whole company from Indians, is a twelve-year-old squaw named Teal Eye, daughter of a Blackfoot chief...
...autumn day in 1807 Henry Shreve finished building a keelboat and, after hiring a crew of ten Frenchmen and half-breeds, shoved off into the muddy Monongahela, bound for St. Louis. He was 22, had long been fascinated by the gay river traffic. "It seems," wrote his Quaker father, "as if people are crazy to get afloat on the Ohio...
Henry Shreve's keelboat floated past "bleak and dingy" Pittsburgh; past Charlestown with its two-story pillory and stocks ("there were not many towns that could punish two culprits at once"); past Wheeling, "a notoriously gay port"; past Marietta, where everybody asked...