Word: keelboat
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...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...
...niece, the beauteous and witty Margaret Agnew whose father was Lieutenant Governor of the Isle of Man. Ostracized by both families, the honeymooning couple crossed the Atlantic to New York. Hunting for a home in the wilderness, they reached Pittsburgh by post, floated down the Ohio River on a keelboat. Some 14 miles below Marietta and hard by the mouth of the Little Kanawha, the wandering Blennerhassetts came upon a narrow island three miles long. There, in 1798, Harman Blennerhassett began building a mansion...