Early pioneers along the Great Miami River sought a way to get their goods to market in New York, but because the landscape made driving cattle there impossible, 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. Travelers broke up the rafts for firewood for the return trip and walked back along the Natchez Trace, a 444-mile 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 legislation enabling construction of the canal in Middletown, Ohio, continuing 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, and raw materials could then be brought up the canal. Industry was born and new towns bloomed along the waterway. Lock No. 14, known as Boone Lock, raised and lowered canal boats between water levels, and the nearby lock tender's house provided rooms, whiskey, and hot meals for passengers because canal boats traveled only in daylight. Boats had to wait their turn at the locks, causing many conflicts over right-of-way, and locks became places where people could rest, shop, or spend the night, leading small communities to spring up around them. 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 before the gates were opened. The Miami and Erie Canal used cargo boats, passenger boats, and combination cargo and passenger boats, while the rarely used State Boat was one example, and mule skinners walked animals on the towpath to provide towing power as steersmen compensated for the pull of mule lines to keep 50 to 60 tons of goods moving straight down the canal.