Early pioneers along the Great Miami River sought ways to get their goods to market in New York, but because the landscape made it impossible to drive cattle there, they built flatboats and rafts to float wheat, corn, lard, furs, and flour south to New Orleans by way of the Great Miami, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers. For the return trip, travelers broke up the raft for firewood and walked back along the Natchez Trace, 444 miles of road commemorating an ancient wilderness trail from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee. Thomas Jefferson suggested a canal as an inland route, and in 1825 the General Assembly passed canal legislation that enabled construction from Middletown, Ohio, to Dayton and Piqua. Piqua became a boomtown because goods from Cincinnati and beyond arrived there, including coffee, salt, glass windows, and other expensive imported objects, while raw materials could be brought up the canal. Industry was born and new towns bloomed along the waterway. Lock No. 14, known as Boone Lock, raised or lowered canal boats to different water levels, and behind it stood the lock tender's house, where passengers could rent rooms and buy whiskey and a hot meal because canal boats moved only in daylight hours. Passage through the locks was slow because boats had to wait their turn and conflicts often arose over right-of-way, but locks also gave people places to get off the boats to rest, shop, or spend the night, and small communities grew up at lock sites to serve passenger needs. Much of Boone Lock is missing, including the wooden wheeler gates that closed in a V to contain the water; one gate had a small door called a wicket that was opened to fill the lock for upstream boats or empty it for downstream boats, and the gates were opened for the canal boat after the lock reached the needed depth. The Miami and Erie Canal used cargo boats, passenger boats, and combination cargo and passenger boats, while the rarely used State Boat was another type. A mule skinner walked animals on the towpath to provide towing power, and the steersman had to compensate for the pull of the mule lines to keep 50 to 60 tons of goods on a straight path down the canal.