Transportation rates can be only approximately given, because they varied with the condition of the weather or of the roads, and were frequently agreed upon by a special bargain. In 1817 steamboats are said to have descended the Ohio and the Mississippi at the rate of ten miles per hour, and to have charged passengers six cents per mile. Freight, by steamboat, from New Orleans to Shippingport (Falls of the Ohio), and thence by boats to Zanesville, was about $6.50 per 100 pounds.(415) It took about one month to make the trip from New Orleans to Shawneetown--June 6 to July 10 in a specific case. Nine-tenths of the trade was still carried on in the old style--by flat-boats, barges, pirogues, etc.(416) In December, 1817, freight from Shawneetown to Louisville was $1.12-½ per hundred weight; to New Orleans, $1.00; to Pittsburg, $3.50; to Shawneetown from Pittsburg, $1.00; from Louisville, $0.37-½; from New Orleans, $4.50. The great difference between the rates up stream and those down stream was due to the difficulty of going against the current.(417) Cobbett estimated that Birkbeck's settlement, fifty miles north of Shawneetown, could be reached from the eastern seaboard for five pounds sterling per person.(418) In 1819, the passenger rate, by steamboat, from New Orleans to Shawneetown, was $110; the freight rate $0.04-½ to $0.06 per pound, the high charges being attributed to a lack of competition, which the many new boats then building were expected to remedy.(419) A party of nine people with somewhat more than six thousand pounds of luggage, wishing to start from Baltimore for Illinois, in July, 1819, learned that the water was so low that large boats could with difficulty pass from Pittsburg to Wheeling. They accordingly went from Baltimore to Wheeling, a distance of two hundred and eighty miles, by land. They had two wagons with six horses and a driver to each wagon. The price for transportation was three hundred and fifty dollars. At Wheeling a contract was made for transportation to Louisville, six hundred miles distance. For this, fifty dollars was paid, the passengers agreeing to help navigate the boat. At Louisville an ark was bought for twenty-five dollars, and two men were hired for eighteen dollars and their board, to take the party to Shawneetown, about three hundred miles distant. At Shawneetown the master of a keel-boat was engaged to take the luggage of six thousand pounds to a point about eleven miles from Birkbeck's settlement, for 37-½ cents per hundred pounds. The travelers proceeded on foot. The time occupied in the journey was: From Baltimore to Wheeling, sixteen days; from Wheeling to Shawneetown, thirty-eight days; from Shawneetown to the Birkbeck settlement, four days.(420) A traveler in Illinois, in 1819, said that the usual price of land carriage was fifty cents per hundred pounds for each twenty miles; sometimes higher, never lower, and that it would not pay to have corn transported twenty miles.(421) In 1820, the charge for carrying either baggage or persons from Baltimore to Wheeling was reported as from five to seven dollars per hundred weight. Persons wishing to travel cheaply had their luggage transported while they walked.(422)