Every flatboat man possessed two major ambitions. One was to become the acknowledged champion of the river, the only bully who dared wear a red turkey-feather in his hat. The other was to visit New Orleans for a spree of whole0hearted wallowing in the fleshpots, for which exercise the town offered infinitely more facilities than any other city west of the Allegheny Mountains. Men frequently shipped aboard cargo boats for no other renumeration than a guarantee that eventually the craft would tie up along Tchoupitoulas Street. From the source of the Mississippi to its several mouths, New Orleans was lovingly known among the rank and file of the flatboat crews as the City of Sin. But the captains and the sober traders gave the town another nickname – they called it Dixie. Originally this word was applied only to New Orleans; not until the Civil War, when D. D. Emmett’s famous song, written in 1859, became the favorite battle-song of the Confederacy, was it in general use to designate the entire South. It came about in this fashion:
A few years after Louisiana became a part of the United States, at a time when the American monetary system was in a chaotic condition, one of the New Orleans banks began issuing ten-dollar notes, one side of which was printed in English and the other in French. On the latter, in large letters, was the French word for ten, dix. Since the proper pronunciation of French was not one of the accomplishments of the river men, one of these notes was known simply as a dix; collectively they were dixies, a name which was soon applied to the city of issue as well.
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