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Hemp, Flax, and Iron: The Russian Viewlike an oar. The bark was constructed of the longestfirplanksavailable and braced with timbers crudely fashioned fromboughs and roots whose curves suited them to such use. Thebark was created with little care and little expense—onehundred to three hundred rubles—because its life was short.After the long trip to St. Petersburg or Riga or Archangel, itwas usually broken up and sold for firewood, seldom bringingmore than twenty or thirty rubles. 19Whe n Americansfinally wo n the Mississippi Basin from theSpanish, French, British, Indians, and wilderness, they foundthemselves with the same transportation problem as the Russians.Until the coming of steamboats and railroads, naturedictated to Midwesterners (then Far Westerners) the samesolution as she had to Russians. Farmers in the region ofPittsburgh, for instance, wh o wanted to send their produce outto the world market built themselves a kind of rough barge orraft, put aboard their goods and a crew of two or three adolescentsand maybe one or two men who had made the trip before,pushed the whole ramshackle conglomeration of barge, wheat,flour, pork, and gangling sons into the waters of the Ohio, andwaved goodbye. Four to six weeks and 1,950 miles later, if allwent well, the barge reached Ne w Orleans, where its contentswere sold, and the barge itself broken up and peddled aslumber. As a young man Abraham Lincoln made two suchtrips to Ne w Orleans, one from Indiana and one from Illinois. 20At that time he would have felt much more comfortable aboarda Volga bark than on one of those ne w spark-spitting steamboats.O f all the great nations of Europe, Russia probably couldhave best survived if all foreign trade had been cut off. Russian