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Cursing Down The Coosa River
After the Treaty of New Echota, December 29, 1835, the hapless Cherokee Indians of Northeast Alabama were corralled like cattle and forced to take up the "trail of tears" to the distant west. Close upon their dismissal, white settlers by the thousands swarmed into the beautiful and fertile Coosa River Valley. From Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia, the Carolinas they came mainly, but from other areas as well, and by 1840 prosperous plantations dotted the countryside in a wide, swinging curve from the headwaters of the Tallapoosa, across the Coosa, to the southernmost reaches of the Tennessee. But the prosperous planters of the region faced at once the serious problems of getting their great cotton, corn and wheat crops to market. The so-called roads of the period were nothing more than trails of the crudest sort, following the line of least resistance, and extremely rough and crooked. There were no railroads, of course. Only the Coosa River afforded a means of transportation. Rafts, flatboats, and keelboats, guided downstream with the current, were propelled upstream by oars and pushed along by large poles manned by slaves, a back breaking job, very slow and expensive. Because of shoals and rapids the best flatboats could not cover more than six or seven miles upstream per day. During winter and early spring months, when the river was swollen, flatboats and rafts loaded with farm products were floated all the way to Mobile, where both boat and cargo were often converted into cash. The navigators would then make their ways back home on foot or on horseback. But here again they encountered a long and tiresome journey, most of it through wild, unbroken country. At many places along the river where the current was swift and filled with treacherous rock formations, and there were many such places between Greensport (on the line between St. Clair and Benton, now Calhoun, counties and Wetumpka , men made their livelihood before the coming of the steam boat piloting rafts and flatboats through dangerous stretches of the Coosa. But the beautiful Coosa, which, it has been said, because of her circuitous course touched every farm in the Valley from Rome to Greensport, was ideal for steam navigation. Land distance between the two towns is just short of seventy-five miles, but by river it is approximately two hundred. But below Greensport-for about 142 miles down to Wetumpka - the treacherous shoals and falls made steamboat operation impossible. Above Greensport, on a average of every three miles, shoals, and sandbars were encountered: Horseleg Shoals, six miles southwest of Rome; Yancey's Shoals, three miles east of Cedar Bluff; and Leota Shoals, two miles northeast of Greensport, were serious obstacles, when the crest of the Coosa was at low or even normal stage.
thanks to Dennis Nordmen |