Flatboat Travel

In 1976, the late historian, Bob Wheeler, wrote about the flatboat travel in the Cumberland and Ohio Rivers that border the North West and South sides of Crittenden County.

Flat-boating down the Ohio River could not have been the prevalent mode of arrival of pioneer families intent on settling in this area.

It would have been extremely difficult to land and dock these flatboats, which contained fragile household and farming equipment of the early years, without expert piloting.

The Cumberland River access to what became Crittenden County was even more foreboding for the settler flatboats than the shores of the Ohio to the north.

Before the day of the navigational dam at original Eddyville there was a whirl-pool-eddy of sufficient size and force to prevent current driven flatboats from finding a free passage down river.

it was just on the southern edge of a sharp twisting S curve around old Kuttawa before resuming its north northwesterly course to the Ohio River.

The Indian name of the Cumberland River was Suwanee which translated "beautiful or placid stream."  It is quite traveled as far as the present site of Barkley Dam.

The current switching in the S curve just above the dam site cut into the banks often and thus keep the naturally eddy-filled stretch of river full of fallen trees and other drift. These floating logs and entwining roots were called "deadheads" and "sawyers" by the early river travelers.

When they became hung in the mud of the shallow bottoms near the edge of the river and pushed upright by the onward flow of the stream until their tops were just submerged, they could not be very easily seen by the unwary amateur river pilots who poled their way upriver in the shallows near the banks to avoid pushing against the swift current.  This was undoubtedly a very slow process for a powerless pioneer flatboat.

The "deadheads" would smash into the hull of the flatboat, puncturing a gaping underwater hole which caused immediate sinking of the boat.

Thus until the dawn of steam on the rivers had broken into full day on the lower Ohio and Cumberland in the 1820's, there was little commercial through traffic to the Mississippi and New Orleans.

The supplying of the settlers who had pioneered what was to be Crittenden County was done overland, and soon became a profitable market to many advanced-type commercial flatboats, so enterprising pioneers like Robert Kirk (Tolu area) and George Flynn (Weston) took advantage of ownership of natural harbors to provide docks for this trade.