Murdock's flatboat will resemble the one in this Currier and Ives illustration.

Within days of trudging weary and footsore back into the yard of the homeplace, he would ride his mare down to Vincennes to purchase Congressional land, for which he paid $1.25 an acre. Scattered across every township in those days were numerous 40- and 80-acre tracts of land, just waiting to be claimed.

Thanks in part to year after year of adventures on flatboats, he eventually became a substantial landowner and wealthy, at least by the standards of the day. Some of the land is still in Susie's family.

That old flatboater was named Joshua Franklin. As it turns out, he was Susie's great-great-grandfather. We know precious little about him except a silly but true story. We know that on July 6, 1856, he was arrested and fined 50 cents for the high crime of fishing on Sunday! People took their religion real seriously back in those days — fishing on Sunday was a sin, and illegal to boot.

Many of us have stories like Joshua's in our family closet, but they have mostly been thrown out as useless trash, or just plain forgotten. Thanks to Clarence Dyar, Susie's flatboat heritage survives, at least these little tatters of it. I am personally grateful to Clarence, for nearly the same reason. He set off a slow-burning fireworks of a dream in my mind that continues to glow and smolder a quarter-century afterwards.

Clarence Dyar's story of Joshua Franklin brings to mind something else that we usually forget, namely that human memory has a long reach indeed. There I was, in 1980, talking to a guy who himself had talked to a man who had taken flatboats from Indiana to New Orleans in 1837.

Since that day in Worthington years ago, I've been pondering flatboats and the adventures and travails known by thousands of our forefathers. I've slowly come to recognize that there's a great untold story there, an experience that no longer lingers in any living human memory.

It needs to be unearthed (or maybe I should say pulled out of the murky waters into which it sank long ago) to let the sun shine on it and the fresh air blow over it. To be shared so others can see how marvelous and how undeserving to be forgotten it was.

It occurs to me that I must recreate that experience. I must live it. I'm not talking about merely imagining it and writing about it; it's much more than that.

I want to see what those flatboaters saw, to smell what they smelled and feel the wind on my face as they felt it — and that's why I'm going to build my flatboat one of these days.

It occurs to me that 25 years from now, when I go, God willing, myself an octogenarian, with Susie to attend a Franklin reunion down in Owen or Greene county, there'll be a boy there with curious eyes and an alert mind.

I'll tell him the story of Joshua Franklin, and maybe my own flatboat story, and then I'll hope he'll pass those stories on to some other kid, perhaps 75 years on.

Maybe, in that way, I'll pull an old chain of memories out of the river and pass it on.

Contact Murdock at murdockl@purdue.edu