Printed "at the Sign of the Buffalo," Jan.

1, 1793.] Most of the books were either text-books of the simpler kinds or else theological.
Except when there was an Indian campaign, politics and the river commerce formed the two chief interests for all Kentuckians, but especially for the well-to-do.
Features of the River Travel.
In spite of all the efforts of the Spanish officials the volume of trade on the Mississippi grew steadily.

Six or eight years after the close of the Revolution the vast stretches of brown water, swirling ceaselessly between the melancholy forests, were already furrowed everywhere by the keeled and keelless craft.

The hollowed log in which the Indian paddled; the same craft, the pirogue, only a little more carefully made, and on a little larger model, in which the creole trader carried his load of paints and whiskey and beads and bright cloths to trade for the peltries of the savage; the rude little scow in which some backwoods farmer drifted down stream with his cargo, the produce of his own toil; the keel boats which, with square-sails and oars, plied up as well as down the river; the flotilla of huge flat boats, the property of some rich merchant, laden deep with tobacco and flour, and manned by crews who were counted rough and lawless even in the rough and lawless backwoods--all these, and others too, were familiar sights to every traveller who descended the Mississippi from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, [Footnote: John Pope's "Tour," in 1790.

Printed at Richmond in 1792.] or who was led by business to journey from Louisville to St.Louis or to Natchez or New Madrid.
The fact that the river commerce throve was partly the cause and partly the consequence of the general prosperity of Kentucky.