CHAPTER 3 Ten barechested men on shore pulled a sixty-foot keelboat on the Fever River in northwestern Illinois. A line passed through their hands to the bow where it was attached to a longer line running up to the top of an eighteen-foot-high mast near the boat’s center. The crew heaved on the cordelle in a rhythm synchronized with the bars of a work ditty sung by the French Creoles from Louisiana and Canada on the expedition of eight boats. Sprays of fresh river water