A great variety of boats traveled the Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal, including fast-moving packet boats that carried passengers and were pulled by horses, slower freight boats that often hauled 150 tons of coal, sailing vessels, occasional steam boats, rafts made of lumber and sized exactly to the width of the locks, and ramshackle emigrant house boats occupied by families with a taste for the vagabond life. Packet boats always had the right of way through the lock, while freight boats competed fiercely for passage, sometimes with fistfights deciding which crew entered first. Steam boat passage was frowned upon because it could damage the canal walls. The raftmen lived in crude shacks on top of their loads as they were towed along the canal to market. Travel on packet boats mixed discomfort, inconvenience, and adventure, as Charles Dickens wrote after his 1842 canal boat trip between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, recalling the need to duck for bridges, cramped sleeping arrangements, primitive washing with canal water, plentiful meals, and a journey whose oddities he nevertheless remembered with great pleasure.