A Young Hoosier's Adventures on the Mississippi River

DAWN E. BAKKEN

The instance of a young man of enterprize and standing, as a merchant, trader, planter, or even farmer, who has not made at least one trip to New Orleans is uncommon.... Every principal farmer along the great water courses builds and sends to New Orleans the produce of his farm in a flat boat. Thus a great proportion of the males of the West ... have made this passage to New Orleans.... They have experienced that expansion of mind which cannot fail to be produced by traversing long distances of country, and viewing different forms of nature and society. Every boat, that has descended from Pittsburgh, or the Missouri, to New Orleans, could publish a journal of no inconsiderable interest. Rev. Timothy Flint, 18281
On December 20, 1834, a flatboat carrying 14,000 pounds of barrel-packed pork and beef, more than 350 chickens, and a variety of other agricultural products set off down the Wabash River headed to New Orleans. Among the five crew members was twenty-two-year-old Asbury C. Jaquess of Posey County, Indiana, who kept a journal of the voyage. Jaquess, like thousands of other young men, took the opportunity to leave family and farm for a few months, to see places to which he had never gone (and might never go again), and to experience the adventures of life along the Mississippi River.	1
The first page of Asbury Jaquess's journal Courtesy Judith Lindell
Asbury's desire to travel and see something of the wider world beyond the Wabash Valley may have come to him from his father. At the age of 12, Jonathan Jaquess, Jr., left his home in New Jersey and signed on as a cabin boy on a trading vessel. He eventually rose to command his own ship and was trading in the Caribbean when the Revolutionary War began. Jaquess served in a New Jersey regiment and fought in several major battles. In 1789, Jaquess moved with his second wife Esther and their three children from New Jersey to the Kentucky frontier. Esther soon gave birth to a fourth child, but she and the infant both died during the family's first year in Kentucky. In 1791 Jaquess married widowed Rebekah Fraser Rankin. The couple went on to have nine children, and by 1811, looking for more land for his own family and for other relatives who had settled nearby, Jaquess and a group of men bought a large tract of land in Posey County, Indiana. In 1815 the extended family group of forty-four people moved from Kentucky to Indiana; at the time of the move Jonathan and Rebekah's youngest child, Asbury Cloud, was only three years old.2	2
Jonathan Jaquess, Jr., in addition to being a successful farmer, became the first storekeeper in the township. As Jonathan and Rebekah's children grew and married, their father gave each of them a quarter-section of land. Sometime in the early 1830s, according to family histories, several families "formed themselves into a band for mutual benefit and welfare."3 They combined all of their crops and animal products for an entire growing year and decided to float the lot down to New Orleans in search of new markets and greater profits. It was this decision, acted upon in the year 1834, that also sent twenty-two-year-old Asbury Jaquess on a journey from Posey County, Indiana, to the port of New Orleans.	. . .