Origin of "Up Salt River."

Prof. Schele De Vere gives the origin of the phrase "Up Salt River" in his book called "Americanisms--The English of the New World." Before the day of steam all navigation of the Ohio River was carried on by flat-boats and keel-boats. It was necessary to row the keel-boats up stream. The labor was painful and exhausting. There were slaves all along the Kentucky side of the river in those days. When a negro had been refractory or "sassy," it was the custom to punish him by hiring him out to row keel-boats up the river. This punishment was called "rowing up." In time it became the popular slave term for a scolding or punishment. Prof. De Vere quotes this sentence from the New York Herald of May 7th, 1856: "We hope the President gave his Secretary a good rowing up for his imbecility." Salt River was, and is, a little tributary of the Ohio, in Kentucky. It was so crooked and dangerous that rowing a keel-boat up its waters was about the hardest labor a man could undertake. Hence, to row a man up Salt River was as severe a punishment as could be imposed on him. The expression became proverbial. One day, on the floor of Congress, a member from Kentucky made use of the phrase in a happy allusion, "He is rowing up Salt River." The expression was thence crystallized in the popular speech of the country. From that day to this the person or party badly defeated in an election is said to have "Gone up Salt River."