The working river: what floated, and what never did

CANOE, FLATBOAT, AND THE LIMITS OF THE WATER

A highway for canoes, a road for flatboats, no river for steamboats: For the Miami and the French the three rivers were simply the road: bark and dugout canoes moved furs, goods, and armies between Detroit, Kekionga, and the Wabash towns in every season the water allowed, and the whole strategic value of the place — the reason for the forts whose story opens this record — was that the road had exactly one short muddy interruption in it. American settlement added the flatboat: in the spring rises, flatboats loaded with the country produce the Exports section tallies were floated down the Maumee from Fort Wayne toward Toledo, a one-way commerce that the river's depth permitted only when the river was up. What the Maumee never had, at its head, was a steamboat era. Commercial navigation on the modern river is a lower-river fact: Toledo's port traffic in oil, grain, iron ore, and coal, and a channel that stays navigable about twelve miles up to Perrysburg before the river shallows to recreational use. Above that, the Maumee was always a river to be crossed, fished, and floated down in season — not sailed up. The canals of the 1830s and 1840s, dug at ruinous expense beside both the Maumee and the Wabash, exist precisely because the rivers themselves would not do the work year-round.

The legal ghost of the question outlived the commerce: in September 2017 the Journal Gazette was still explaining that the "navigability status of the St. Marys River" is "a complicated issue" — the old federal question of which waters are navigable in law, on which riparian rights and public access still turn. The canoes, at least, never waited for a ruling.

Sources:

1. Maumee River reference record, Transportation — Toledo's commercial traffic, the shallowing at Perrysburg twelve miles up, and recreational navigation above.
2. the Exports section of this history — the flatboat-and-canal trade tallies of the 1840s.
3. Journal Gazette, September 15, 2017, "Navigability status of the St. Marys River a complicated issue," as compiled by the Allen County Genealogical Society.