From: john@jfeldredge.com   
      
   On Thu, 10 Jul 2014 07:43:21 -0700, William Vetter wrote:   
      
   > You cannot "sail" very much up the rivers, without steam power.  You can   
   > tack very slowly with a sailship up the mouths of some of the larger,   
   > quieter US rivers.  When we talk of river travel to "the interior" of   
   > the US, we mean up or along the St. Lawrence or Hudson Rivers toward the   
   > Great Lakes, or up the Mississippi River, and then up the Ohio River.   
   > You need to remember two things: 1) it is relatively easy to travel down   
   > the Mississippi with the current in rafts and flatboats, but it will   
   > take a grueling year for a crew of human beings to punt upriver to maybe   
   > Vicksburg in a keelboat designed to do that, 2) the smaller tributaries   
   > to the Mississippi weren't navigable more than maybe fifty miles up   
   > their mouths (e.g., the Arkansas R.) by anything larger than a canoe   
   > until modern times, because the US Army Corp of Engineers dredges them   
   > regularly.   
      
   I don't know whether or not you would classify the Cumberland River as a   
   "small tributary" of the Ohio River, but it had commercial steamboat   
   service throughout the 19th century, for several decades before any major   
   dredging was done on it.  If you are interested, I can refer you to 19th-   
   century photographs of steamboats docked in Nashville, Tennessee.  Prior   
   to the invention of the steamboat, commercial shipping was pretty much   
   one-way downstream, admittedly.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)