The first coal used in this county was not taken from under the ground but from the beds of the streams. The greatest amount was found in the bed of the Warrior River and, long before the war, was raised from the water and shipped in flatboats to Mobile. The mode of raising the coal was very simple. First the boat was built in sum- mer, when the water was low, and then anchored in midstream till it was loaded with coal. The coal was broken loose from the bed of the stream with crowbars and then raised by cranes above the sides of the boat. The loaded vessel was then tied to the shore to wait for a tide which was expected in the winter and spring rains. A fleet of coal boats being collected, the voyage to Mobile began when the river had risen sufficiently to carry these boats over the shoals, some of which were long and dangerous. But the river men were expert with oars and generally made the trip in safety, though the loss of a boat was by no means in- frequent. "About the year 1850 Mr. James A. Mudd, a brother of Judge William S. Mudd, and a very enterprising merchant of Elyton, embarked in the coal business, in the manner above described, and established a coal yard in Mobile. I met him there in January, 1852, at a hotel when he was carrying on a prosperous business. "In the early eighteen-fifties the Rev. Mr. Parham, of Selma, canvassed Jefferson County in the interest of the Alabama and Tennessee River Railroad, intended to connect Selma and Gun- ter's Landing, for which purpose the State of Alabama had appro- priated a certain per cent of the sale of the public lands. In a speech at Elyton, which I heard, he stated that Sir Charles Lyell, the great English geologist, on landing from a steamboat on the Alabama River, had taken up some of the soil into his hands, and after inspecting it, exclaimed: 'This is the richest soil I ever looked at, but the wealth of Alabama lies in the counties of Shelby, Jefferson, and Walker.' "In 1855 or 1856, Dr. L. C. Garland, of the State University, canvassed the counties along the line of the N. E. and S. W. rail- road (now the Alabama Great Southern) and advocated the building of rolling mills in Jefferson County to manufacture the rails for clothing the road. He had no doubt of the practicability of manufacturing railroad iron from the ores of Jefferson County,and had the State of Alabama then made an appropriation for this purpose it would have saved the $7,000,000 which it after- ward gave Stanton for building the road. "In the closing years of the war Rev. R. K. Hargrove, now bishop of the Southern Methodist Episcopal church, came to Ely- ton with a view to purchasing as much of Red Mountain as he could then buy with $30,000. He put up at Roebuck's stand on the Huntsville road (now about Twenty-first Avenue and Twenti- eth Street) and spent three days in making inquiries about prices of mountain lands. He found that he could buy these lands for about $1,000 per square mile, and could therefore have owned the whole of Red Mountain from Trussville to Bessemer for $30,000. After considering the question thoroughly, the bishop told me that he concluded not to make the purchase, although fully persuaded it would one day be of great value, because, as he said, 'The ex- istence of this ore has been known to civilized men for a hundred years and they have never made any use of it, and it may be another hundred years before they will need it. That will be too long hence to do me or my children any good.' He, like others, had supposed the prosperity of the South depended on agriculture and thought the time might be distant when they would go to making iron!" Although Walker County was established as early as 1823 from portions of Tuskaloosa and Marion counties, nevertheless, as Joel C. Du Bose writes: "Settlers were slow to occupy this section of the country be- cause of its remoteness from navigable waters and the consequent difficulties of reaching the market. In 1816 Richard Brecken- ridge made a horseback trip from some point near Columbus, Mississippi, through this region. His diary gives an account of what he saw and experienced during the two weeks of his lone passage through the wilds without meeting with a human being or discovering any signs of the habitation of white men or Indians. On August 20 he came upon some deserted Indian cabins at the site of Old Warrior Town at the confluence of Sipsey and Mul- berry Forks. These were probably cabins that had escaped de- struction at the hands of Col. John Coffee in October, 1813, when he attacked and burnt the town. "After the close of the Creek War emigrants rushed to secure homes in the lands ceded by the Creeks. A little later, after Breckenridge's journey, the hardy pioneers began to settle in what is now Walker County, once the corner of the land possessions of the Creeks, the Chickasaws, and the Cherokees. Among them were some of the soldiers of General Jackson. One of these was Mathias Turner, a noted hunter of bears and wolves and other wild animals. He lived near Lost Creek, a few miles above its junction with Wolf Creek. James, his last surviving son, for many years, was business manager for Captain Musgrove.Although Walker County was at first strictly an agricultural section and linked with the commercial world by a dangerous river, the people gave themselves at once to the daring business of flatboating products over the treacherous shoals of the Warrior River to Tuskaloosa, Demopolis, and Mobile. "Between 1820 and 1830 William Jones went through Squaw Shoals on the first flatboat that ever crossed them. He was the father of Jasper and Pink Jones, two very old men now (1909) living in this county, near the old home place. The boat was loaded with staves and belonged to William Dunn. It was sold with its cargo at Tuskaloosa. For the return trip a keel was bought and loaded with two hundred sacks of salt and other merchandise to be carried up the river to Baltimore. No cable could be found strong enough, however, to pull the loaded keel over the Squaw Shoals. When the most violent rapids were reached the salt would be taken from the keel and carried by hand to a point up stream from which the keel could be pulled with its load. The keel would be reloaded and carried until again checked by the rushing waters. It required ten days to get the keel over Squaw Shoals. When the most violent rapids were reached the salt men of the crew were assisted by two bachelor farmers living near, and they returned the favor by helping to roll logs on the farm. From this early day boats carried annually, coal, corn, staves, and live-stock to the markets in the lower rivers. "The numerous outcroppings of coal, and the high prices offered for it in the markets made the gathering and shipping of it an important industry. With picks and crowbars it would be dug and prized from its beds on the land and in the bottoms of the creeks and river, and loaded into boats. Labor was needed to get the coal ready for shipment and boats were needed in which the shipments could be made. Daring pilots were also called into service, and many a hair-breadth escape from destruction is re- lated of boats and crews as they passed in the swift rushing waters over the rocky shoals. A pilot and from four to ten helpers formed the crew of a boat. Noted among the pilots were John Bess, James Tuggle, William Payne, James Short, James Patton, William Benson and John Ballenger. The latter was a splendid swimmer, but after piloting many boats safely through the Shoals he lost a boat and was drowned in Squaw Shoals in 1861. James Cain and Stephen Busby were among the first to gather coal from the bottom of Lost Creek and flatboat it to Mobile. They were paid as high as ten dollars a ton for their first shipments. James Cain was active from the beginning in the mining, hand- ling, and shipping of coal on the Warrior and its tributaries, and his friends claim for him that he was the first coal operator in Alabama. William Whitson dug coal out of Wolf Creek about 1837. His first shipments were from the lower sections of the creek, not far from where it empties into Lost Creek. "The streams were all too shallow for boats during the drysummer months. During this time there was all along Warrior River and its tributary streams much activity in the gathering of coal, building of boats, working of crops, manufacture of staves, and raising of stock. The average size of a flatboat was seventy feet long by twenty-five feet wide. The average cost of it was seventy dollars, the estimate being a dollar a foot measured in the length. The average size of a keel was sixty feet by sixteen. The boats were loaded in the dry season and when the freshets of the fall season came they were pushed out into the swollen waters and steered down the river. "The population of the county in 1830 was 2,202. It was ten years later before this number was doubled, and fifty years before it reached 10,000. The people were sturdy, honest, industrious, and independent, and many of them were restlessly striving for business conveniences. The river shoals were always under dis- cussion and study. The continuous reports of the dangers and difficulties in transporting products on the river secured a government contract in 1835 to Richard Chilton and James Cain to clean out Squaw Shoals and direct the current of the waters so that keels and flatboats could pass over them with less danger. The work was duly undertaken, and some good was effected, but the dangers of passage were still so great that the little relief through the government contract work was scarcely reckoned in the course of business. "The Squaw Shoals are twenty-six miles above Tuskaloosa and they extend seven miles up the river. About seven miles above these are Black Rock Shoals where the last work was done under a government contract on the Shoals in the Warrior River in Walker County. The contract for this work was awarded in 1850 to Robert Cain, son of James Cain, whose bond was signed by John Gurgainus, Sr. The two agreed to take the contract together, and they arranged that one of them would sign the con- tract and the other would endorse it, thus meeting the government requirements. This work was to dam the waters on the south side and throw them to the north bank, and thereby make a safer channel. "In the early forties a good deal of coal mining was under- taken. Jacob Gibson and others, across the river from Cordova, raised coal out of the bottom of the river, prizing it up with crow- bars and loading it into boats. Jacob Phillips, the Sanderses, the Burtons, and the Gravlees were also engaged in mining coal. William Gravlee, the elder of the family, ran a transportation line of boats. "Judge William Howlette shipped coal from Bench Field, near the railroad bridge on the side with Cordova. The Bordens also shipped from this neighborhood, mining out further from the river where F. B. Miller is now mining. James Davis, Wil- liam Robertson, Reuben Morgan, James Hancock, John Sullivan and others dug coal out of the bottom and the banks of the river

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