Afloat on the Ohio
by Reuben Gold Thwaites · English · Gutenberg #29306 · 414,835 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Afloat on the Ohio
an historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo
Author: Reuben Gold Thwaites
Release date: July 4, 2009 [eBook #29306]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29306
Credits: E-text prepared by David Garcia, Alison Hadwin, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net>) from page images generously made available by Kentuckiana Digital Library (http://kdl.kyvl.org/)
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Transcriber's note:
Spellings and hyphenations are as in the original document.
Hyphenation was inconsistent, with the following words
appearing both with and without hyphens: saw-mill, tread-mill,
drift-wood, back-set, cotton-wood, farm-house, semi-circular,
search-light, fire-brick, out-door, ship-yard(s), and
house-boat(s). The name "Céleron" is used interchangebly with
"Céloron".
AFLOAT ON THE OHIO
An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff,
from Redstone to Cairo
by
REUBEN GOLD THWAITES
Secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin,
Editor of "The Jesuit Relations,"
Author of "The Colonies, 1492-1750," "Historic Waterways,"
"The Story of Wisconsin," "Our Cycling Tour in England,"
etc., etc.
Chicago
Way & Williams
1897
Copyright
by Reuben Gold Thwaites
A.D., 1897
_To
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, Ph. D.,
Professor of American History in the University of
Wisconsin, who loves his native West
and with rare insight and gift of phrase
interprets her story,
this Log of the "Pilgrim" is cordially inscribed._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Preface. xi
Chapter I.
On the Monongahela--The over-mountain path--Redstone
Old Fort--The Youghiogheny--Braddock's defeat. 1
Chapter II.
First day on the Ohio--At Logstown. 22
Chapter III.
Shingis Old Town--The dynamiter--Yellow Creek. 29
Chapter IV.
An industrial region--Steubenville--Mingo Bottom--In
a steel mill--Indian character. 39
Chapter V.
House-boat life--Decadence of steamboat traffic--Wheeling,
and Wheeling Creek. 50
Chapter VI.
The Big Grave--Washington and Round Bottom--A
lazy man's paradise--Captina Creek--George Rogers
Clark at Fish Creek--Southern types. 64
Chapter VII.
In Dixie--Oil and natural gas, at Witten's Bottom--The
Long Reach--Photographing crackers--Visitors in camp. 77
Chapter VIII.
Life ashore and afloat--Marietta, "the Plymouth Rock
of the West"--The Little Kanawha--The story of
Blennerhassett's Island. 87
Chapter IX.
Poor whites--First library in the West--An hour at
Hockingport--A hermit fisher. 99
Chapter X.
Cliff-dwellers, on Long Bottom--Pomeroy Bend--Letart's
Island, and Rapids--Game, in the early day--Rainy
weather--In a "cracker" home. 109
Chapter XI.
Battle of Point Pleasant--The story of
Gallipolis--Rosebud--Huntington--The genesis of a
houseboater. 125
Chapter XII.
In a fog--The Big Sandy--Rainy weather--Operatic
gypsies--An ancient tavern. 139
Chapter XIII.
The Scioto, and the Shawanese--A night at
Rome--Limestone--Keels, flats, and boatmen of the
olden time. 150
Chapter XIV.
Produce-boats--A dead town--On the Great Bend--Grant's
birthplace--The Little Miami--The genesis
of Cincinnati. 168
Chapter XV.
The story of North Bend--The "shakes"--Driftwood--Rabbit
hash--A side-trip to Big Bone Lick. 182
Chapter XVI.
New Switzerland--An old-time river pilot--Houseboat
life on the lower reaches--A philosopher in
rags--Wooded solitudes--Arrival at Louisville. 202
Chapter XVII.
Storied Louisville--Red Indians and white--A night on
Sand Island--New Albany--Riverside hermits--The
river falling--A deserted village--An ideal camp. 218
Chapter XVIII.
Village life--A traveling photographer--On a country
road--Studies in color--Again among colliers--In
sweet content--A ferry romance. 233
Chapter XIX.
Fishermen's tales--Skiff nomenclature--Green
River--Evansville--Henderson--Audubon and
Rafinesque--Floating shops--The Wabash. 251
Chapter XX.
Shawneetown--Farm-houses on stilts--Cave-in-Rock--Island
nights. 267
Chapter XXI.
The Cumberland and the Tennessee--Stately solitudes--Old
Fort Massac--Dead towns in Egypt--The
last camp--Cairo. 280
_Appendix A._--Historical outline of Ohio Valley
settlement. 296
_Appendix B._--Selected list of Journals of previous
travelers down the Ohio. 320
Index. 329
PREFACE.
There were four of us pilgrims--my Wife, our Boy of ten and a half
years, the Doctor, and I. My object in going--the others went for the
outing--was to gather "local color" for work in Western history. The
Ohio River was an important factor in the development of the West.
I wished to know the great waterway intimately in its various
phases,--to see with my own eyes what the borderers saw; in
imagination, to redress the pioneer stage, and repeople it.
A motley company have here performed their parts: Savages of the
mound-building age, rearing upon these banks curious earthworks for
archæologists of the nineteenth century to puzzle over; Iroquois
war-parties, silently swooping upon sleeping villages of the
Shawanese, and in noisy glee returning to the New York lakes, laden
with spoils and captives; La Salle, prince of French explorers and
coureurs de bois, standing at the Falls of the Ohio, and seeking to
fathom the geographical mysteries of the continent; French and English
fur-traders, in bitter contention for the patronage of the red
man; borderers of the rival nations, shedding each other's blood in
protracted partisan wars; surveyors like Washington and Boone and the
McAfees, clad in fringed hunting-shirts and leathern leggings, mapping
out future states; hardy frontiersmen, fighting, hunting, or farming,
as occasion demanded; George Rogers Clark, descending the river with
his handful of heroic Virginians to win for the United States the
great Northwest, and for himself the laurels of fame; the Marietta
pilgrims, beating Revolutionary swords into Ohio plowshares; and all
that succeeding tide of immigrants from our own Atlantic coast
and every corner of Europe, pouring down the great valley to plant
powerful commonwealths beyond the mountains. A richly-varied panorama
of life passes before us as we contemplate the glowing story of the
Ohio.
In making our historical pilgrimage we might more easily have
"steamboated" the river,--to use a verb in local vogue; but, from the
deck of a steamer, scenes take on a different aspect than when viewed
from near the level of the flood; for a passenger by such a craft, the
vistas of a winding stream change so rapidly that he does not realize
how it seemed to the canoeist or flatboatman of old; and there are too
many modern distractions about such a mode of progress. To our minds,
the manner of our going should as nearly as possible be that of the
pioneer himself--hence our skiff, and our nightly camp in primitive
fashion.
The trip was successful, whatever the point of view. Physically, those
six weeks "Afloat on the Ohio" were a model outing--at times rough, to
be sure, but exhilarating, health-giving, brain-inspiring. The Log of
the "Pilgrim" seeks faintly to outline our experiences, but no words
can adequately describe the wooded hill-slopes which day by day girt
us in; the romantic ravines which corrugate the rim of the Ohio's
basin; the beautiful islands which stud the glistening tide; the great
affluents which, winding down for a thousand miles, from the Blue
Ridge, the Cumberland, and the Great Smoky, pour their floods into
the central stream; the giant trees--sycamores, pawpaws, cork elms,
catalpas, walnuts, and what not--which everywhere are in view in this
woodland world; the strange and lovely flowers we saw; the curious
people we met, black and white, and the varieties of dialect which
caught our ear; the details of our charming gypsy life, ashore and
afloat, during which we were conscious of the red blood tingling
through our veins, and, alert to the whisperings of Nature, were
careless of the workaday world, so far away,--simply glad to be alive.
For the better understanding of the numerous historical references
in the Log, I have thought it well to present in the Appendix a brief
sketch of the settlement of the Ohio Valley. To this Appendix, as a
preliminary reading, I invite those who may care to follow "Pilgrim"
and her crew upon their long journey from historic Redstone down to
the Father of Waters.
A selected list of Journals of previous travelers down the Ohio, has
been added, for the benefit of students of the social and economic
history of this important gateway to the continental interior.
R. G. T.
Madison, Wis., October, 1897.
AFLOAT ON THE OHIO
CHAPTER I.
On the Monongahela--The over-mountain path--Redstone Old
Fort--The Youghiogheny--Braddock's defeat.
In camp near Charleroi, Pa., Friday, May 4.--Pilgrim, built for the
glassy lakes and smooth-flowing rivers of Wisconsin, had suffered
unwonted indignities in her rough journey of a thousand miles in a
box-car. But beyond a leaky seam or two, which the Doctor had righted
with clouts and putty, and some ugly scratches which were only
paint-deep, she was in fair trim as she gracefully lay at the foot of
the Brownsville shipyard this morning and received her lading.
There were spectators in abundance. Brownsville, in the olden day, had
seen many an expedition set out from this spot for the grand tour of
the Ohio, but not in the personal recollection of any in this throng
of idlers, for the era of the flatboat and pirogue now belongs
to history. Our expedition is a revival, and therein lies
novelty. However, the historic spirit was not evident among our
visitors--railway men, coal miners loafing out the duration of a
strike, shipyard hands lying in wait for busier times, small boys
blessed with as much leisure as curiosity, and that wonder of wonders,
a bashful newspaper reporter. Their chief concern centered in the
query, how Pilgrim could hold that goodly heap of luggage and still
have room to spare for four passengers? It became evident that her
capacity is akin to that of the magician's bag.
"A dandy skiff, gents!" said the foreman of the shipyard, as we
settled into our seats--the Doctor bow, I stroke, with W---- and the
Boy in the stern sheets. Having in silence critically watched us for a
half hour, seated on a capstan, his red flannel shirt rolled up to his
elbows, and well-corded chest and throat bared to wind and weather,
this remark of the foreman was evidently the studied judgment of an
expert. It was taken as such by the good-natured crowd, which, as we
pushed off into the stream, lustily joined in a chorus of "Good-bye!"
and "Good luck to yees, an' ye don't git th' missus drowndid 'fore ye
git to Cairo!"
The current is slight on these lower reaches of the Monongahela. It
comes down gayly enough from the West Virginia hills, over many a
rapid, and through swirls and eddies in plenty, until Morgantown
is reached; and then, settling into a more sedate course, is at
Brownsville finally converted into a mere mill-pond, by the back-set
of the four slack-water dams between there and Pittsburg. This means
solid rowing for the first sixty miles of our journey, with a current
scarcely perceptible.
The thought of it suggests lunch. At the mouth of Redstone Creek, a
mile below Dunlap Creek, our port of departure, we turn in to a shaly
beach at the foot of a wooded slope, in semi-rusticity, and fortify
the inner man.
A famous spot, this Redstone Creek. Between its mouth and that of
Dunlap's was made, upon the site of extensive Indian fortification
mounds, the first English agricultural settlement west of the
Alleghanies. It is unsafe to establish dates for first discoveries,
or for first settlements. The wanderers who, first of all white men,
penetrated the fastnesses of the wilderness were mostly of the sort
who left no documentary traces behind them. It is probable, however,
that the first Redstone settlement was made as early as 1750, the
year following the establishment of the Ohio Company, which had been
chartered by the English crown and given a half-million acres of
land west of the mountains and south of the Ohio River, provided it
established thereon a hundred families within seven years.
"Redstone Old Fort"--the name had reference to the aboriginal
earthworks--played a part in the Fort Necessity and Braddock campaigns
and in later frontier wars; and, being the western terminus of the
over-mountain road known at various historic periods as Nemacolin's
Path, Braddock's Road, and Cumberland Pike, was for many years the
chief point of departure for Virginia expeditions down the Ohio River.
Washington, who had large landed interests on the Ohio, knew Redstone
well; and here George Rogers Clark set out (1778) upon flatboats, with
his rough-and-ready Virginia volunteers, to capture the country north
of the Ohio for the American arms--one of the least known, but most
momentous conquests in history.
Early in the nineteenth century, Redstone became Brownsville. But,
whether as Redstone or Brownsville, it was, in its day, like most
"jumping off" places on the edge of civilization, a veritable Sodom.
Wrote good old John Pope, in his Journal of 1790, and in the same
strain scores of other veracious chroniclers: "At this Place we were
detained about a Week, experiencing every Disgust which Rooks and
Harpies could excite." Here thrived extensive yards in which were
built flatboats, arks, keel boats, and all that miscellaneous
collection of water craft which, with their roisterly crews, were the
life of the Ohio before the introduction of steam rendered vessels of
deeper draught essential; whereupon much of the shipping business went
down the river to better stages of water, first to Pittsburg, thence
to Wheeling, and to Steubenville.
All that is of the past. Brownsville is still a busy corner of the
world, though of a different sort, with all its romance gone. To
the student of Western history, Brownsville will always be a
shrine--albeit a smoky, dusty shrine, with the smell of lubricators
and the clang of hammers, and much talk thereabout of the glories of
Mammon.
The Monongahela is a characteristic mountain trough. From an altitude
of four or five hundred feet, the country falls in sharp steeps to a
narrow alluvial bench, and then a broad beach of shale and pebble; the
slopes are broken, here and there, where deep, shadowy ravines come
winding down, bearing muddy contributions to the greater flood.
The higher hills are crowned with forest trees, the lower ofttimes
checkered with brown fields, recently planted, and rows of vines
trimmed low to stakes, as in the fashion of the Rhine. The stream,
though still majestic in its sweep, is henceforth a commercial
slack-water, lined with noisy, grimy, matter-of-fact manufacturing
towns, for the most part literally abutting one upon the other all
of the way down to Pittsburg, and fast defiling the once picturesque
banks with the gruesome offal of coal mines and iron plants.
Surprising is the density of settlement along the river. Often, four
or five full-fledged cities are at once in view from our boat, the air
is thick with sooty smoke belched from hundreds of stacks, the ear
is almost deafened with the whirr and roar and bang of milling
industries.
Tipples of bituminous coal-shafts are ever in sight--begrimed
scaffolds of wood and iron, arranged for dumping the product of the
mines into both barges and railway cars. Either bank is lined with
railways, in sight of which we shall almost continually float, all the
way down to Cairo, nearly eleven hundred miles away. At each tipple
is a miners' hamlet; a row of cottages or huts, cast in a common mold,
either unpainted, or bedaubed with that cheap, ugly red with which one
is familiar in railway bridges and rural barns. Sometimes these huts,
though in the mass dreary enough, are kept in neat repair; but often
are they sadly out of elbows--pigs and children promiscuously at
their doors, paneless sash stuffed with rags, unsightly litter strewn
around, misery stamped on every feature of the homeless tenements.
Dreariest of all is a deserted mining village, and there are
many such--the shaft having been worked out, or an unquenchable
subterranean fire left to smolder in neglect. Here the tipple has
fallen into creaking decrepitude; the cabins are without windows or
doors--these having been taken to some newer hamlet; ridge-poles are
sunken, chimneys tottering; soot covers the gaunt bones, which for all
the world are like a row of skeletons, perched high, and grinning down
at you in their misery; while the black offal of the pit, covering
deep the original beauty of the once green slope, is in its turn being
veiled with climbing weeds--such is Nature's haste, when untrammeled,
to heal the scars wrought by man.
A mile or two below Charleroi is Lock No. 4, the first of the quartet
of obstructions between Brownsville and Pittsburg. We are encamped a
mile below the dam, in a cozy little willowed nook; a rod behind
our ample tent rises the face of an alluvial terrace, occupied by a
grain-field, running back for an hundred yards to the hills, at the
base of which is a railway track. Across the river, here some two
hundred and fifty yards wide, the dark, rocky bluffs, slashed with
numerous ravines, ascend sharply from the flood; at the quarried base,
a wagon road and the customary railway; and upon the stony beach, two
or three rough shelter-tents, housing the Black Diamond Brass Band, of
Monongahela City, out on a week's picnic to while away the period of
the strike.
It was seven o'clock when we struck camp, and our frugal repast was
finished by lantern-light. The sun sets early in this narrow trough
through the foothills of the Laurel range.
* * * * *
McKeesport, Pa., Saturday, May 5th.--Out there on the beach, near
Charleroi, with the sail for an awning, Pilgrim had been converted
into a boudoir for the Doctor, who, snuggled in his sleeping-bag,
emitted an occasional snore--echoes from the Land of Nod. W---- and
our Boy of ten summers, on their canvas folding-cots, were peacefully
oblivious of the noises of the night, and needed the kiss of dawn to
rouse them. But for me, always a light sleeper, and as yet unused to
our airy bedroom, the crickets chirruped through the long watches.
Two or three freighters passed in the night, with monotonous
swish-swish and swelling wake. It arouses something akin to awe, this
passage of a steamer's wake upon the beach, a dozen feet from the door
of one's tent. First, the water is sucked down, leaving for a moment
a wet streak of sand or gravel, a dozen feet in width; in quick
succession come heavy, booming waves, running at an acute angle with
the shore, breaking at once into angry foam, and wasting themselves
far up on the strand, for a few moments making bedlam with any
driftwood which chances to have made lodgment there. When suddenly
awakened by this boisterous turmoil, the first thought is that a dam
has broken and a flood is at hand; but, by the time you rise upon your
elbow, the scurrying uproar lessens, and gradually dies away along a
more distant shore.
We were slow in getting off this morning. But the dense fog had
been loath to lift; and at first the stove smoked badly, until
we discovered and removed the source of trouble. This stove is an
ingenious contrivance of the Doctor's--a box of sheet-iron, of slight
weight, so arranged as to be folded into an incredibly small space;
a vast improvement for cooking purposes over an open camp-fire, which
Pilgrim's crew know, from long experience in far distant fields, to be
a vexation to eyes and soul.
Coaling hamlets more or less deserted were frequent this
morning--unpainted, windowless, ragged wrecks. At the inhabited mining
villages, either close to the strand or well up on hillside ledges,
idle men were everywhere about. Women and boys and girls were
stockingless and shoeless, and often dirty to a degree. But,
when conversed with, we found them independent, respectful, and
self-respecting folk. Occasionally I would, for the mere sake of
meeting these workaday brothers of ours, with canteen slung on
shoulder, climb the steep flight of stairs cut in the clay bank, and
on reaching the terrace inquire for drinking water, talking familiarly
with the folk who came to meet me at the well-curb.
There are old-fashioned Dutch ovens in nearly every yard, a few
chickens, and often a shed for the cow, that is off on her daily climb
over the neighboring hills. Through the black pall of shale, a
few vegetables struggle feebly to the light; in the corners of the
palings, are hollyhocks and four-o'clocks; and, on window-sills, rows
of battered tin cans, resplendent in blue and yellow labels, are the
homes of verbenas and geraniums, in sickly bloom. Now and then, a
back door in the dreary block is distinguished by an arbored trellis
bearing a grape-vine, and furnishing for the weary housewife a shady
kitchen, _al fresco_. As a rule, however, there is little attempt to
better the homeless shelter furnished by the corporation.
We restocked with provisions at Monongahela City, a smart, newish
town, and at Elizabeth, old and dingy. It was at Elizabeth, then
Elizabethtown, that travelers from the Eastern States, over the old
Philadelphia Road, chiefly took boat for the Ohio--the Virginians
still clinging to Redstone, as the terminus of the Braddock Road.
Elizabethtown, in flatboat days, was the seat of a considerable
boat-building industry, its yards in time turning out steamboats for
the New Orleans trade, and even sea-going sailing craft; but, to-day,
coal barges are the principal output of her decaying shipyards.
By this time, the duties of our little ship's company are well
defined. W---- supervises the cuisine, most important of all offices;
the Doctor is chief navigator, assistant cook, and hewer of wood; it
falls to my lot to purchase supplies, to be carrier of water, to pitch
tent and make beds, and, while breakfast is being cooked, to dismantle
the camp and, so far as may be, to repack Pilgrim; the Boy collects
driftwood, wipes dishes, and helps at what he can--while all hands row
or paddle through the livelong day, as whim or need dictates.
Lock No. 3, at Walton, necessitated a portage of the load, over the
left bank. It is a steep, rocky climb, and the descent on the lower
side, strewn with stone chips, destructive to shoe-leather. The Doctor
and I let Pilgrim herself down with a long rope, over a shallow spot
in the apron of the dam.
At six o'clock a camping-ground for the night became desirable. We
were fortunate, last evening, to find a bit of rustic country in which
to pitch our tent; but all through this afternoon both banks of the
river were lined with village after village, city after city, scarcely
a garden patch between them--Wilson, Coal Valley, Lostock, Glassport,
Dravosburg, and a dozen others not recorded on our map, which bears
date of 1882. The sun was setting behind the rim of the river
basin, when we reached the broad mouth of the Youghiogheny (pr.
Yock-i-o-gai'-ny), which is implanted with a cluster of iron-mill
towns, of which McKeesport is the center. So far as we could see down
the Monongahela, the air was thick with the smoke of glowing chimneys,
and the pulsating whang of steel-making plants and rolling-mills made
the air tremble. The view up the "Yough" was more inviting; so, with
oars and paddle firmly set, we turned off our course and lustily
pulled against the strong current of the tributary. A score or two of
house-boats lay tied to the McKeesport shore or were bolstered high
upon the beach; a fleet of Yough steamers had their noses to the
wharf; a half-dozen fishermen were setting nets; and, high over all,
with lofty spans of iron cobweb, several railway and wagon bridges
spanned the gliding stream.
It was a mile and a half up the Yough before we reached the open
country; and then only the rapidly-gathering dusk drove us ashore, for
on near approach the prospect was not pleasing. Finally settling into
this damp, shallow pocket in the shelving bank, we find broad-girthed
elms and maples screening us from all save the river front, the high
bank in the rear fringed with blue violets which emit a delicious
odor, backed by a field of waving corn stretching off toward
heavily-wooded hills. Our supper cooked and eaten by lantern-light,
we vote ourselves as, after all, serenely content out here in the
starlight--at peace with the world, and very close to Nature's heart.
There come to us, on the cool evening breeze, faint echoes of the
never-ceasing clang of McKeesport iron mills, down on the Monongahela
shore. But it is not of these we talk, lounging in the welcome warmth
of the camp-fire; it is of the age of romance, a hundred and forty odd
years ago, when Major Washington and Christopher Gist, with famished
horses, floundered in the ice hereabout, upon their famous midwinter
trip to Fort Le Boeuf; when the "Forks of the Yough" became the
extreme outpost of Western advance, with all the accompanying horrors
of frontier war; and later, when McKeesport for a time rivaled
Redstone and Elizabethtown as a center for boat-building and a point
of departure for the Ohio.
* * * * *
Pittsburg, Sunday, May 6th.--Many of the trees are already in full
leaf. The trillium is fading. We are in the full tide of early
summer, up here in the mountains, and our long journey of six weeks
is southward and toward the plain. The lower Ohio may soon be a
bake-oven, and the middle of June will be upon us before far-away
Cairo is reached. It behooves us to be up and doing. The river,
flowing by our door, is an ever-pressing invitation to be onward; it
stops not for Sunday, nor ever stops--and why should we, mere drift
upon the passing tide?
There was a smart thunder-shower during breakfast, followed by a cool,
cloudy morning. At eleven o'clock Pilgrim was laden. A south-eastern
breeze ruffled the waters of the Yough, and for the first time the
Doctor ordered up the sail, with W---- at the sheet. It was not long
before Pilgrim had the water "singing at her prow." With a rush, we
flew past the factories, the house-boats, and the shabby street-ends
of McKeesport, out into the Monongahela, where, luckily, the wind
still held.
At McKeesport, the hills on the right are of a relatively low
altitude, smooth and well rounded. It was here that Braddock, in his
slow progress toward Fort Duquesne, first crossed the Monongahela,
to the wide, level bottom on the left bank. He had found the inner
country to the right of the river and below the Yough too rough and
hilly for his march, hence had turned back toward the Monongahela,
fording the river to take advantage of the less difficult bottom. Some
four miles below this first crossing, hills reapproach the left
bank, till the bottom ceases; the right thenceforth becomes the
more favorable side for marching. With great pomp, he recrossed the
Monongahela just below the point where Turtle Creek enters from
the east. Within a hillside ravine, but a hundred yards inland,
the brilliant column fell into an ambuscade of Indians and French
half-breeds, suffering that heart-sickening defeat which will ever
live as one of the most tragic events in American history.
The noisy iron-manufacturing town of Braddock now occupies the site of
Braddock's defeat. Not far from the old ford stretches the great
dam of Lock No. 2, which we portaged, with the usual difficulties of
steep, stony banks. Braddock is but eight miles across country from
Pittsburg, although twelve by river. We have, all the way down, an
almost constant succession of iron and steel-making towns, chief among
them Homestead, on the left bank, seven miles above Pittsburg. The
great strike of July, 1892, with its attendant horrors, is a lurid
chapter in the story of American industry. With shuddering interest,
we view the famous great bank of ugly slag at the base of the steel
mills, where the barges housing the Pinkerton guards were burned by
the mob.
To-day, the Homesteaders are enjoying their Sunday afternoon outing
along the town shore--nurses pushing baby carriages, self-absorbed
lovers holding hands upon riverside benches, merry-makers rowing in
skiffs or crossing the river in crowded ferries; the electric cars,
following either side of the stream as far down as Pittsburg, crowded
to suffocation with gayly-attired folk. They look little like rioters;
yet it seems but the other day when Homestead men and women and
children were hysterically reveling in atrocities akin to those of the
Paris commune.
Approaching Pittsburg, the high steeps are everywhere crowded with
houses--great masses of smoke-color, dotted all over with white shades
and sparkling windows, which seem, in the gray afternoon, to be ten
thousand eyes coldly staring down at Pilgrim and her crew from all
over the flanking hillsides.
Lock No. 1, the last barrier between us and the Ohio, is a mile or two
up the Monongahela, with warehouses and manufacturing plants closely
hemming it in on either side. A portage, unaided, appears to be
impossible here, and we resolve to lock through. But it is Sunday, and
the lock is closed. Above, a dozen down-going steamboats are moored to
the shore, waiting for midnight and the resumption of business; while
below, a similar line of ascending boats is awaiting the close of the
day of rest. Pilgrim, however, cannot hang up at the levee with any
comfort to her crew; it is necessary, with evening at hand, and a
thunder-storm angrily rising over the Pittsburg hills, to get out
of this grimy pool, flanked about with iron and coal yards, chimney
stacks, and a forest of shipping, and to quickly seek the open country
lower down on the Ohio. The lock-keepers appreciated our situation.
Two or three sturdy, courteous men helped us carry our cargo, by an
intricate official route, over coils of rope and chains, over lines of
shafting, and along dizzy walks overhanging the yawning basin; while
the Doctor, directed to a certain chute in midstream, took unladen
Pilgrim over the great dam, with a wild swoop which made our eyes swim
to witness from the lock.
We had laboriously been rowing on slack-water, all the way from
Brownsville, with the help of an hour's sail this morning; whereas,
now that we were in the strong current below the dam, we had but to
gently paddle to glide swiftly on our way. A hundred steamers, more or
less, lay closely packed with their bows upon the right, or principal
city wharf. It was raining at last, and we donned our storm wraps. No
doubt yellow Pilgrim,--thought hereabout to be a frail craft for these
waters,--her crew all poncho-clad, slipping silently through the dark
water swishing at their sterns, was a novelty to the steamboat men,
for they leaned lazily over their railings, the officers on the
upper deck, engineers and roustabouts on the lower, and watched us
curiously.
Our period of elation was brief. Black storm-clouds, jagged and
portentous, were scurrying across the sky; and by the time we had
reached the forks, where the Monongahela, in the heart of the city,
joins forces with the Alleghany, Pilgrim was being buffeted about on
a chop sea produced by cross currents and a northwest gale. She can
weather an ordinary storm, but this experience was too much for her.
When a passing steamer threw out long lines of frothy waves to add
to the disturbance, they broke over our gunwales; and W---- with the
coffee pot and the Boy with a tin basin were hard pushed to keep the
water below the thwarts.
Seeking the friendly shelter of a house-boat, of which there were
scores tied to the left bank, we trusted our drenched luggage to the
care of its proprietor, placed Pilgrim in a snug harbor hard by, and,
hurrying up a steep flight of steps leading from the levee to the
terrace above, found a suburban hotel just as its office clock struck
eight.
Across the Ohio, through the blinding storm, the dark outlines of
Pittsburg and Allegheny City are spangled with electric lamps which
throw toward us long, shimmering lances of light, in which the mighty
stream, gray, mysterious, tempest-tossed, is seen to be surging onward
with majestic sweep. Upon its bosom we are to be borne for a thousand
miles. Our introduction has been unpropitious; it is to be hoped
that on further acquaintance we may be better pleased with La Belle
Rivière.
CHAPTER II.
First day on the Ohio--At Logstown.
Beaver River, Monday, May 7th.--We have to-day rowed and paddled under
a cloudless sky, but in the teeth of frequent squalls, with heavy
waves freely dashing their spray upon us. At such times a goodly
current, aided by numerous wing-dams, appears of little avail; for,
when we rested upon our oars, Pilgrim would be unmercifully driven up
stream. Thus it has been an almost continual fight to make progress,
and our five-and-twenty miles represent a hard day's work.
We were overloaded, that was certain; so we stopped at Chartier, three
miles down the river from Pittsburg, and sent on our portly bag of
conventional traveling clothes by express to Cincinnati, where
we intend stopping for a day. This leaves us in our rough boating
costumes for all the smaller towns _en route_. What we may lose in
possible social embarrassments, we gain in lightened cargo.
Here at the mouth of Chartier's Creek was "Chartier's Old Town" of a
century and a third ago; a straggling, unkempt Indian village then,
but at least the banks were lovely, and the rolling distances clothed
with majestic trees. To-day, these creek banks, connected with
numerous iron bridges, are the dumping-ground for cinders, slag,
rubbish of every degree of foulness; the bare hillsides are crowded
with the ugly dwellings of iron-workers; the atmosphere is thick with
smoke.
Washington, one of the greatest land speculators of his time, owned
over 32,000 acres along the Ohio. He held a patent from Lord Dunmore,
dated July 5, 1775, for nearly 3,000 acres lying about the mouth
of this stream. In accordance with the free-and-easy habit of
trans-Alleghany pioneers, ten men squatted on the tract, greatly to
the indignation of the Father of his Country, who in 1784 brought
against them a successful suit for ejectment. Twelve years later, more
familiar with this than with most of his land grants, he sold it to a
friend for $12,000.
Just below Chartier are the picturesque McKee's Rocks, where is the
first riffle in the Ohio. We "take" it with a swoop, the white-capped
waves dancing about us in a miniature rapid. Then we are in the open
country, and for the first time find what the great river is like.
The character of the banks, for some distance below Pittsburg, differs
from that of the Monongahela. The hills are lower, less precipitous,
more graceful. There is a delightful roundness of mass and shade.
Beautiful villas occupy commanding situations on hillsides and
hilltops; we catch glimpses of spires and cupolas, singly or in
groups, peeping above the trees; and now and then a pretty suburban
railway station. The railways upon either bank are built on neat
terraces, and, far from marring the scene, agreeably give life to
it; now and then, three such terraces are to be traced, one above the
other, against the dark background of wood and field--the lower and
upper devoted to rival railway lines, the central one to the common
way. The mouths of the beautiful tributary ravines are crossed either
by graceful iron spans, which frame charming undercut glimpses of
sparkling waterfalls and deep tangles of moss and fern, or by graceful
stone arches draped with vines. There are terraced vineyards, after
the fashion of the Rhineland, and the gentle arts of the florist and
the truck-gardener are much in evidence. The winding river frequently
sweeps at the base of rocky escarpments, but upon one side or the
other there are now invariably bottom lands--narrow on these upper
reaches, but we shall find them gradually widen and lengthen as we
descend. The reaches are from four to seven miles in length, but
these, too, are to lengthen in the middle waters. Islands are
frequent, all day. The largest is Neville's, five miles long and
thickly strewn with villas and market-gardens; still others are but
long sandbars grown to willows, and but temporarily in sight, for the
stage of water is low just now, not over seven feet in the channel.
Emerging from the immediate suburbs of Pittsburg, the fields broaden,
farmsteads are occasionally to be seen nestled in the undulations
of the hills, woodlands become more dense. There are, however, small
rustic towns in plenty; we are seldom out of sight of these.
Climbing a steep clay slope on the left bank, we visited one of
them--Shousetown, fourteen miles below the city. A sad-eyed, shabby
place, with the pipe line for natural gas sprawling hither and yon
upon the surface of the ground, except at the street crossings, where
a few inches of protecting earth have been laid upon it. The tariff
levied by the gas company is ten cents per month for each light, and a
dollar and a half for a cook-stove.
We passed, this afternoon, one of the most interesting historic points
upon the river--the picturesque site of ancient Logstown, upon the
summit of a low, steep ridge on the right bank, just below Economy,
and eighteen miles from Pittsburg. Logstown was a Shawanese village as
early as 1727-30, and already a notable fur-trading post when Conrad
Weiser visited it in 1748. Washington and Gist stopped at "Loggestown"
for five days on their visit to the French at Fort Le Boeuf, and
several famous Indian treaties were signed there. A short distance
below, Anthony Wayne's Western army was encamped during the winter of
1792-93, the place being then styled Legionville. In 1824 George Rapp
founded in the neighborhood a German socialist community, and this
later settlement survives to the present day in the thriving little
rustic town of Economy.
At four o'clock we struck camp on a heavily-willowed shore, at the
apex of the great northern bend of the Ohio (25 miles).[A] Across
the river, on a broad level bottom, are the manufacturing towns of
Rochester and Beaver, divided by the Beaver River; in their rear,
well-rounded hills rise gracefully, checkered with brown fields and
woods in many shades of green, in the midst of which the flowering
white dogwood rears its stately spray. Our sloping willowed
sand-beach, of a hundred feet in width, is thick strewn with
driftwood; back of this a clay bank, eight feet sheer, and a narrow
bottom cut up with small fruit and vegetable patches; the gardeners'
neat frame houses peeping from groves of apple, pear and cherry, upon
the flanking hillsides. A lofty oil-well derrick surmounts the edge of
the terrace a hundred yards below our camp. The bushes and the ground
round about the well are black and slimy with crude petroleum, that
has escaped during the boring process, and the air is heavy with its
odor. We are upon the edge of the far-stretching oil and gas-well
region, and shall soon become familiar enough with such sights and
smells in the neighborhood of our nightly camps.
No sooner had Pilgrim been turned up against a tree to dry, and a
smooth sandy open chosen for the camp, than the proprietor of the soil
appeared--a middling-sized, lanky man, with a red face and a sandy
goatee surmounting a collarless white shirt all bestained with tobacco
juice. He inquired rather sharply concerning us, but when informed of
our innocent errand, and that we should stay with him but the night,
he promptly softened, explaining that the presence of marauding
fishermen and house-boat folk was incompatible with gardening for
profit, and he would have none of them touch upon his shore. As to
us, we were welcome to stop throughout our pleasure, an invitation he
reinforced by sitting upon a stump, whittling vigorously meanwhile,
and glibly gossiping with the Doctor and me for a half-hour, on crop
conditions and the state of the country--"bein' sociable like," he
said, "an' hav'n' nuth'n 'gin you folks, as knows what's what, I kin
see with half a eye!"
[Footnote A: Figures in parentheses, similarly placed throughout the
volume, indicate the meandered river mileage from Pittsburg, according
to the map of the Corps of Engineers, U.S.A., published in 1881. The
actual mileage of the channel is a trifle greater.]
CHAPTER III.
Shingis Old Town--The dynamiter--Yellow Creek.
Kneistley's Cluster, W. Va., Tuesday, May 8th.--We were off at a
quarter past seven, and among the earliest shoppers in Rochester, on
the east bank of the Beaver, where supplies were laid in for the day.
This busy, prosperous-looking place bears little resemblance to the
squalid Indian village which Gist found here in November, 1750. It was
then the seat of Barney Curran, an Indian trader--the same Curran whom
Washington, three years later, employed in the mission to Venango. But
the smaller sister town of Beaver, on the lower side of the mouth,--or
rather the western outskirts of Beaver a mile below the mouth,--has
the most ancient history. On account of a ford across the Beaver,
about where is now a slack-water dam, the neighborhood became of
early importance to the French as a fur-trading center. With customary
liberality toward the Indians, whom they assiduously cultivated, the
French, in 1756, built for them, on this site, a substantial town,
which the English indifferently called Sarikonk, Sohkon, King Beaver's
Town, or Shingis Old Town. During the French and Indian War, the place
was prominent as a rendezvous for the enemies of American borderers;
numerous bloody forays were planned here, and hither were brought to
be adopted into the tribes, or to be cruelly tortured, according to
savage whim, many of the captives whose tales have made lurid the
history of the Ohio Valley.
Passing Beaver River, the Ohio enters upon its grand sweep to the
southwest. The wide uplands at once become more rustic, especially
those of the left bank, which no longer is threaded by a railway, as
heretofore all the way from Brownsville. The two ranges of undulating
hills, some three hundred and fifty feet high, forming the rim of the
basin, are about a half mile apart; while the river itself is perhaps
a third of a mile in width, leaving narrow bottoms on alternate sides,
as the stream in gentle curves rebounds from the rocky base of one
hill to that of another. When winding about such a base, there is at
this stage of the water a sloping, stony beach, some ten to twenty
yards in width, from which ascends the sharp steep, for the most part
heavily tree-clad--maples, birches, elms and oaks of goodly girth, the
latter as yet in but half-leaf. On the "bottom side" of the river, the
alluvial terrace presents a sheer wall of clay rising from eight to a
dozen feet above the beach, which is often thick-grown with willows,
whose roots hold the soil from becoming too easy a prey to the
encroaching current. Sycamores now begin to appear in the bottoms,
although of less size than we shall meet below. Sometimes the little
towns we see occupy a narrow and more or less rocky bench upon the
hill side of the stream, but settlement is chiefly found upon the
bottoms.
Shippingsport (32 miles), on the left bank, where we stopped this noon
for eggs, butter, and fresh water, is on a narrow hill bench--a dry,
woe-begone hamlet, side-tracked from the path of the world's progress.
While I was on shore, negotiating with the sleepy storekeeper, Pilgrim
and her crew waited alongside the flatboat which serves as the town
ferry. There they were visited by a breezy, red-faced young man, in a
blue flannel shirt and a black slouch hat, who was soon enough at his
ease to lie flat upon the ferry gunwale, his cheeks supported by his
hands, and talk to W---- and the Doctor as if they were old friends.
He was a dealer in nitroglycerin cartridges, he said, and pointed to a
long, rakish-looking skiff hard by, which bore a red flag at its
prow. "Ye see that? Thet there red flag? Well, thet's the law on us
glyser_een_ fellers--over five hundred poun's, two flags; un'er five
hundred, one flag. I've two hundred and fifty, I have. I tell yer th'
steamboats steer clear o' me, an' don' yer fergit it, neither; they
jist give me a wide berth, they do, yew bet! 'n' th' railroads, they
don' carry no glyser_een_ cartridge, they don't--all uv it by skiff,
like yer see me goin'."
These cartridges, he explained, are dropped into oil or gas wells
whose owners are desirous of accelerating the flow. The cartridge, in
exploding, enlarges the hole, and often the output of the well is at
once increased by several hundred per cent. The young fellow had the
air of a self-confident rustic, with little experience in the world.
Indeed, it seemed from his elated manner as if this might be his
first trip from home, and the blowing of oil wells an incidental
speculation. The Boy, quick at inventive nomenclature, and fresh
from a reading of Robert Louis Stevenson, called our visitor "the
Dynamiter," and by that title I suppose we shall always remember him.
The Dynamiter confided to his listeners that he was going down the
river for "a clean hundred miles, and that's right smart fur, ain't
it? How fur down be yees goin'?" The Doctor replied that we were going
nine hundred; whereat the man of explosives gave vent to his feelings
in a prolonged whistle, then a horse laugh, and "Oh come, now! Don'
be givin' us taffy! Say, hones' Injun, how fur down air yew fellers
goin', anyhow?" It was with some difficulty that he could comprehend
the fact. A hundred miles on the river was a great outing for this
village lad; nine hundred was rather beyond his comprehension,
although he finally compromised by "allowing" that we might be going
as far as Cincinnati. Wouldn't the Doctor go into partnership with
him? He had no caps for his cartridges, and if the Doctor would buy
caps and "stan' in with him on the cost of the glyser_een_," they
would, regardless of Ohio statutes, blow up the fish in unfrequented
portions of the river, and make two hundred dollars apiece by carrying
the spoils in to Wheeling. The Doctor, as a law-abiding citizen,
good-naturedly declined; and upon my return to the flat, the Dynamiter
was handing the Boy a huge stick of barber-pole candy, saying, "Well,
yew fellers, we'll part friends, anyhow--but sorry yew won't go in on
this spec'; there's right smart money in 't, 'n' don' yer fergit it!"
By the middle of the afternoon we reached the boundary line (40 miles)
between Pennsylvania on the east and Ohio and West Virginia on the
west. The last Pennsylvania settlements are a half mile above the
boundary--Smith's Ferry (right), an old and somewhat decayed village,
on a broad, low bottom at the mouth of the picturesque Little Beaver
Creek;[A] and Georgetown (left), a prosperous-looking, sedate town,
with tidy lawns running down to the edge of the terrace, below which
is a shelving stone beach of generous width. Two high iron towers
supporting the cable of a current ferry add dignity to the twin
settlements. A stone monument, six feet high, just observable through
the willows on the right shore, marks the boundary; while upon the
left bank, surmounting a high, rock-strewn beach, is the dilapidated
frame house of a West Virginia "cracker," through whose garden-patch
the line takes its way, unobserved and unthought of by pigs, chickens
and children, which in hopeless promiscuity swarm the interstate
premises.
For many days to come we are to have Ohio on the right bank and West
Virginia on the left. There is no perceptible change, of course, in
the contour of the rugged hills which hem us in; yet somehow it stirs
the blood to reflect that quite within the recollection of all of
us in Pilgrim's crew, save the Boy, that left bank was the house of
bondage, and that right the land of freedom, and this river of ours
the highway between.
East Liverpool (44 miles) and Wellsville (48 miles) are long stretches
of pottery and tile-making works, both of them on the Ohio shore.
There is nothing there to lure us, however, and we determined to camp
on the banks of Yellow Creek (51 miles), a peaceful little Ohio stream
some two rods in width, its mouth crossed by two great iron spans, for
railway and highway. But although Yellow Creek winds most gracefully
and is altogether a charming bit of rustic water, deep-set amid
picturesque slopes of field and wood, we fail to find upon its banks
an appropriate camping-place. Upon one side a country road closely
skirts the shore, and on the other a railway, while for the mile or
more we pushed along small farmsteads almost abutted. Hence we retrace
our path to the great river, and, dropping down-stream for two miles,
find what we seek upon the lower end of the chief of Kneistly's
Cluster--two islands on the West Virginia side of the channel.
It is storied ground, this neighborhood of ours. Over there at the
mouth of Yellow Creek was, a hundred and twenty years ago, the camp of
Logan, the Mingo chief; opposite, on the West Virginia shore, Baker's
Bottom, where occurred the treacherous massacre of Logan's family. The
tragedy is interwoven with the history of the trans-Alleghany border;
and schoolboys have in many lands and tongues recited the pathetic
defense of the poor Mingo, who, more sinned against than sinning, was
crushed in the inevitable struggle between savagery and civilization.
"Who is there to mourn for Logan?"
We are high and dry on our willowed island. Above, just out of sight,
are moored a brace of steam pile-drivers engaged in strengthening
the dam which unites us with Baker's Bottom. To the left lies a broad
stretch of gravel strand, beyond which is the narrow water fed by the
overflow of the dam; to the right, the broad steamboat channel rolls
between us and the Ohio hills, while the far-reaching vista downstream
is a feast of shade and tint, by land and water, with the lights and
smoke of New Cumberland and Sloan's Station faintly discernible near
the horizon. All about us lies a beautiful world of woodland.
The whistle of quails innumerable broke upon us in the twilight,
succeeding to the calls of rose-breasted grosbeaks and a goodly
company of daylight followers; in this darkening hour, the low,
plaintive note of the whip-poor-will is heard on every hand, now
and then interrupted by the hoarse bark of owls. There is a gentle
tinkling of cowbells on the Ohio shore, and on both are human voices
confused by distance. All pervading is the deep, sullen roar of a
great wing-dam, a half mile or so down-stream.
The camp is gypsy-like. Our washing lies spread on bushes, where it
will catch the first peep of morning sun. Perishable provisions rest
in notches of trees, where the cool evening breeze will strike them.
Seated upon the "grub" box, I am writing up our log by aid of the
lantern hung from a branch overhead, while W----, ever busy, sits by
with her mending. Lying in the moonlight, which through the sprawling
willows gayly checkers our sand bank, the Doctor and the Boy are
discussing the doings of Br'er Rabbit--for we are in the Southland
now, and may any day meet good Uncle Remus.
[Footnote A: On this creek was the hunting-cabin of the Seneca (Mingo)
chief, Half King, who sent a message of welcome to Washington, when
the latter was on his way to Great Meadows (1754).]
CHAPTER IV.
An industrial region--Steubenville--Mingo Bottom--In a steel
mill--Indian character.
Mingo Junction, Ohio, Wednesday, May 9th.--We had a cold night upon
our island. Upon arising this morning, a heavy fog enveloped us, at
first completely veiling the sun; soon it became faintly visible, a
great ball of burnished copper reflected in the dimpled flood which
poured between us and the Ohio shore. Weeds and willows were sopping
wet, as was also our wash, and the breakfast fire was a comfortable
companion. But by the time we were off, the cloud had lifted, and the
sun gushed out with promise of a warm day.
Throughout the morning, Pilgrim glided through a thickly settled
district, reminding us of the Monongahela. Sewer-pipe and
vitrified-brick works, and iron and steel plants, abound on the
narrow bottoms. The factories and mills themselves generally wear
a prosperous look; but the dependent towns vary in appearance, from
clusters of shabby, down-at-the-heel cabins, to lines of neat and
well-painted houses and shops.
We visited the vitrified-brick works at New Cumberland, W. Va. (56
miles), where the proprietor kindly explained his methods, and talked
freely of his business. It was the old story, too close a competition
for profit, although the use of brick pavements is fast spreading.
Fire clay available for the purpose is abundant on the banks of the
Ohio all the way from Pittsburg to Kingston (60 miles). A few miles
below New Cumberland, on the Ohio shore, we inspected the tile works
at Freeman, and admired the dexterity which the workmen had attained.
But what interested us most of all was the appalling havoc which these
clay and iron industries are making with the once beautiful banks of
the river. Each of them has a large daily output of debris, which is
dumped unmercifully upon the water's edge in heaps from fifty to a
hundred feet high. Sometimes for nearly a mile in length, the natural
bank is deep buried out of sight; and we have from our canoe naught
but a dismal wall of rubbish, crowding upon the river to the
uttermost limit of governmental allowance. Fifty years hence, if these
enterprises multiply at the present ratio, and continue their present
methods, the Upper Ohio will roll between continuous banks of clay and
iron offal, down to Wheeling and beyond.
Before noon we had left behind us this industrial region, and were
again in rustic surroundings. The wind had gone down, the atmosphere
was oppressively warm, the sun's reflection from the glassy stream
came with almost scalding effect upon our faces. We had rigged an
awning over some willow hoops, but it could not protect us from this
reflection. For an hour or two--one may as well be honest--we fairly
sweltered upon our pilgrimage, until at last a light breeze ruffled
the water and brought blessed relief.
The hills are not as high as hitherto, and are more broken. Yet
they have a certain majestic sweep, and for the most part are
forest-mantled from base to summit. Between them the river winds with
noble grace, continually giving us fresh vistas, often of surpassing
loveliness. The bottoms are broader now, and frequently semicircular,
with fine farms upon them, and prosperous villages nestled in generous
groves. Many of the houses betoken age, or what passes for it in this
relatively new country, being of the colonial pattern, with fan-shaped
windows above the doors, Grecian pillars flanking the front porch, and
wearing the air of comfortable respectability.
Beautiful islands lend variety to the scene, some of them mere
willowed "tow-heads" largely submerged in times of flood, while others
are of a permanent character, often occupied by farms. We have with us
a copy of Cuming's _Western Pilot_ (Cincinnati, 1834), which is still
a practicable guide for the Ohio, as the river's shore lines are not
subject to so rapid changes as those of the Mississippi; but many of
the islands in Cuming's are not now to be found, having been swept
away in floods, and we encounter few new ones. It is clear that the
islands are not so numerous as sixty years ago. The present works of
the United States Corps of Engineers tend to permanency in the
_status quo_; doubtless the government map of 1881 will remain an
authoritative chart for a half century or more to come.
W----'s enthusiasm for botany frequently takes us ashore. Landing at
the foot of some eroded steep which, with ragged charm, rises sharply
from the gravelly beach, we fasten Pilgrim's painter to a stone, and
go scrambling over the hillside in search of flowers, bearing in mind
the Boy's constant plea, to "Get only one of a kind," and leave the
rest for seed; for other travelers may come this way, and 'tis a sin
indeed to exterminate a botanical rarity. But we find no rarities
to-day--only solomon's seal, trillium, wild ginger, cranebill,
jack-in-the-pulpit, wild columbine. Poison ivy is on every hand, in
these tangled woods, with ferns of many varieties--chiefly maidenhair,
walking leaf, and bladder. The view from projecting rocks, in these
lofty places, is ever inspiring; the country spread out below us, as
in a relief map; the great glistening river winding through its hilly
trough; a rumpled country for a few miles on either side, gradually
trending into broad plains, checkered with fields on which farmsteads
and rustic villages are the chessmen.
At one o'clock we were at Steubenville, Ohio (67 miles), where
the broad stoned wharf leads sharply up to the smart, well-built,
substantial town of some sixteen thousand inhabitants. W---- and I had
some shopping to do there, while the Doctor and the Boy remained down
at the inevitable wharf-boat, and gossiped with the philosophical
agent, who bemoaned the decadence of steamboat traffic in general, and
the rapidly falling stage of water in particular.
Three miles below Steubenville is Mingo Junction, where we are the
guests of a friend who is superintendent of the iron and steel works
here. The population of Mingo is twenty-five hundred. From seven to
twelve hundred are employed in the works, according to the exigencies
of business. Ten per cent of them are Hungarians and Slavonians--a
larger proportion would be dangerous, our host avers, because of the
tendency of these people to "run the town" when sufficiently numerous
to make it possible. The Slavs in the iron towns come to America for a
few years, intent solely on saving every dollar within reach. They are
willing to work for wages which from the American standard seem low,
but to them almost fabulous; herd together in surprising promiscuity;
maintain a low scale of clothing and diet, often to the ruin of
health; and eventually return to Eastern Europe, where their savings
constitute a little fortune upon which they can end their days in
ease. This sort of competition is fast degrading legitimate American
labor. Its regulation ought not to be thought impossible.
A visit to a great steel-making plant, in full operation, is an
event in a man's life. Particularly remarkable is the weird spectacle
presented at night, with the furnaces fiercely gleaming, the fresh
ingots smoking hot, the Bessemer converter "blowing off," the great
cranes moving about like things of life, bearing giant kettles of
molten steel; and amidst it all, human life held so cheaply. Nearer to
mediæval notions of hell comes this fiery scene than anything imagined
by Dante. The working life of one of these men is not over ten years,
B---- says. A decade of this intense heat, compared to which a breath
of outdoor air in the close mill-yard, with the midsummer sun in the
nineties, seems chilly, wears a man out--"only fit for the boneyard
then, sir," was the laconic estimate of an intelligent boss whom I
questioned on the subject.
Wages run from ninety cents to five dollars a day, with far more at
the former rate than the latter. A ninety-cent man working in a place
so hot that were water from a hose turned upon him it would at once be
resolved into scalding steam, deserves our sympathy. It is pleasing
to find in our friend, the superintendent, a strong fellow-feeling
for his men, and a desire to do all in his power to alleviate their
condition. He has accomplished much in improving the _morale_ of the
town; but deep-seated, inexorable economic conditions, apparently
beyond present control, render nugatory any attempts to better the
financial condition of the underpaid majority.
Mingo Junction--"Mingo Bottom" of old--was an interesting locality
in frontier days. On this fertile river beach was long one of the
strongest of the Mingo villages. During the last week of May, 1782,
Crawford's little army rendezvoused here, en route to Sandusky, a
hundred and fifty miles distant, and intent on the destruction of the
Wyandot towns. But the Indians had not been surprised, and the army
was driven back with slaughter, reaching Mingo the middle of
June, bereft of its commander. Crawford, who was a warm friend of
Washington, suffered almost unprecedented torture at the stake, his
fate sending a thrill of horror through all the Western settlements.
Let us not be too harsh in our judgment of these red Indians. At
first, the white colonists from Europe were regarded by them as of
supernatural origin, and hospitality, veneration, and confidence were
displayed toward the new-comers. But the mortality of the Europeans
was soon made painfully evident to them. When the early Spaniards, and
afterward the English, kidnaped tribesmen for sale into slavery,
or for use as captive guides, and even murdered them on slight
provocation, distrust and hatred naturally succeeded to the sentiment
of awe. Like many savage races, like the earlier Romans, the Indian
looked upon the member of every tribe with which he had not made a
formal peace as a public enemy; hence he felt justified in wreaking
his vengeance on the race, whenever he failed to find individual
offenders. He was exceptionally cruel, his mode of warfare was
skulking, he could not easily be reached in the forest fastnesses
which he alone knew well, and his strokes fell heaviest on women and
children; so that whites came to fear and unspeakably to loathe the
savage, and often added greatly to the bitterness of the struggle by
retaliation in kind. The white borderers themselves were frequently
brutal, reckless, lawless; and under such conditions, clashing
was inevitable. But worse agents of discord than the agricultural
colonists were the itinerants who traveled through the woods visiting
the tribes, exchanging goods for furs; these often cheated and robbed
the Indian, taught him the use of intoxicants, bullied and browbeat
him, appropriated his women, and in general introduced serious
demoralization into the native camps. The bulk of the whites doubtless
intended to treat the Indian honorably; but the forest traders were
beyond the pale of law, and news of the details of their transactions
seldom reached the coast settlements.
As a neighbor, the Indian was difficult to deal with, whether in the
negotiation of treaties of amity, or in the purchase of lands. Having
but a loose system of government, there was no really responsible
head, and no compact was secure from the interference of malcontents,
who would not be bound by treaties made by the chiefs. The English
felt that the red men were not putting the land to its full use, that
much of the territory was growing up as a waste, that they were best
entitled to it who could make it the most productive. On the
other hand, the earlier cessions of land were made under a total
misconception; the Indians supposed that the new-comers would, after
a few years of occupancy, pass on and leave the tract again to the
natives. There was no compromise possible between races with
precisely opposite views of property in land. The struggle was
inevitable--civilization against savagery. No sentimental notions
could prevent it. It was in the nature of things that the weaker must
give way. The Indian was a formidable antagonist, and there were times
when the result of the struggle seemed uncertain; but in the end he
went to the wall. In judging the vanquished enemy of our civilization,
let us not underestimate his intellect, or the many good qualities
which were mingled with his savage vices, or fail to credit him with
sublime courage, and a tribal patriotism which no disaster could cool.
CHAPTER V.
Houseboat life--Decadence of steamboat traffic--Wheeling, and
Wheeling Creek.
Above Moundsville, W. Va., Thursday, May 10th.--Our friends saw us
off at the gravelly beach just below the "works." There was a slight
breeze ahead, but the atmosphere was agreeable, and Pilgrim bore a
happy crew, now as brown as gypsies; the first painful effects of
sunburn are over, and we are hardened in skin and muscle to any
vicissitudes which are likely to be met upon our voyage. Rough
weather, river mud, and all the other exigencies of a moving camp,
are beginning to tell upon clothing; we are becoming like gypsies in
raiment, as well as color. But what a soul-satisfying life is this
gypsying! We possess the world, while afloat on the Ohio!
There are, in the course of the summer, so many sorts of people
traveling by the river,--steamboat passengers, campers, fishers,
house-boat folk, and what not,--that we attract little attention of
ourselves, but Pilgrim is indeed a curiosity hereabout. What remarks
we overhear are about her,--"Honey skiff, that!" "Right smart skiff!"
"Good skiff for her place, but no good for this yere river!" and
so on. She is a lap-streak, square-sterned craft, of white cedar
three-eighths of an inch thick; fifteen feet in length and four of
beam; weighs just a hundred pounds; comfortably holds us and our
luggage, with plenty of spare room to move about in; is easily
propelled, and as stanch as can be made. Upon these waters, we meet
nothing like her. Not counting the curious floating boxes and punts,
which are knocked together out of driftwood, by boys and poor whites,
and are numerous all along shore, the regulation Ohio river skiff is
built on graceful lines, but of inch boards, heavily ribbed, and is a
sorry weight to handle. The contention is, that to withstand the swash
of steamboat wakes breaking upon the shore, and the rush of drift in
times of flood, a heavy skiff is necessary; there is a tendency
to decry Pilgrim as a plaything, unadapted to the great river. A
reasonable degree of care at all times, however, and keeping the boat
drawn high on the beach when not in use,--such care as we are familiar
with upon our Wisconsin inland lakes,--would render the employment of
such as she quite practicable, and greatly lessen the labor of rowing
on this waterway.
The houseboats, dozens of which we see daily, interest us greatly.
They are scows, or "flats," greatly differing in size, with
low-ceilinged cabins built upon them--sometimes of one room, sometimes
of half a dozen, and varying in character from a mere shanty to a
well-appointed cottage. Perhaps the greater number of these craft are
afloat in the river, and moored to the bank, with a gang-plank running
to shore; others are "beached," having found a comfortable nook in
some higher stage of water, and been fastened there, propped level
with timbers and driftwood. Among the houseboat folk are young working
couples starting out in life, and hoping ultimately to gain a foothold
on land; unfortunate people, who are making a fresh start; men
regularly employed in riverside factories and mills; invalids, who, at
small expense, are trying the fresh-air cure; others, who drift up and
down the Ohio, seeking casual work; and legitimate fishermen, who find
it convenient to be near their nets, and to move about according to
the needs of their calling. But a goodly proportion of these boats are
inhabited by the lowest class of the population,--poor "crackers" who
have managed to scrape together enough money to buy, or enough energy
and driftwood to build, such a craft; and, near or at the towns, many
are occupied by gamblers, illicit liquor dealers, and others who,
while plying nefarious trades, make a pretense of following the
occupation of the Apostles.
Houseboat people, whether beached or afloat, pay no rent, and
heretofore have paid no taxes. Kentucky has recently passed, more as
a police regulation than as a means of revenue, an act levying a State
tax of twenty-five dollars upon each craft of this character; and the
other commonwealths abutting upon the river are considering the policy
of doing likewise. The houseboat men have, however, recently formed
a protective association, and propose to fight the new laws on
constitutional grounds, the contention being that the Ohio is a
national highway, and that commerce upon it cannot be hampered by
State taxes. This view does not, however, affect the taxability of
"beached" boats, which are clearly squatters on State soil.
Both in town and country, the riffraff of the houseboat element are in
disfavor. It is not uncommon for them, beached or tied up, to remain
unmolested in one spot for years, with their pigs, chickens, and
little garden patch about them, mayhap a swarm or two of bees, and
a cow enjoying free pasturage along the weedy bank or on neighboring
hills. Occasionally, however, as the result of spasmodic local
agitation, they are by wholesale ordered to betake themselves to
some more hospitable shore; and not a few farmers, like our friend at
Beaver River, are quick to pattern after the city police, and order
their visitors to move on the moment they seek a mooring. For the
truth is, the majority of those who "live on the river," as the phrase
goes, have the reputation of being pilferers; farmers tell sad tales
of despoiled chicken-roosts and vegetable gardens. From fishing,
shooting, collecting chance driftwood, and leading a desultory life
along shore, like the wreckers of old they naturally fall into this
thieving habit. Having neither rent nor taxes to pay, and for the most
part not voting, and having no share in the political or social life
of landsmen, they are in the State, yet not of it,--a class unto
themselves, whose condition is well worthy the study of economists.
Interspersed with the houseboat folk, although of different character,
are those whose business leads them to dwell as nomads upon the
river--merchant peddlers, who spend a day or two at some rustic
landing, while scouring the neighborhood for oil-barrels and junk,
which they load in great heaps upon the flat roofs of their
cabins, giving therefor, at goodly prices, groceries, crockery, and
notions,--often bartering their wares for eggs and dairy products, to
be disposed of to passing steamers, whose clerks in turn "pack" them
for the largest market on their route; blacksmiths, who moor their
floating shops to country beach or village levee, wherever business
can be had; floating theaters and opera companies, with large barges
built as play-houses, towed from town to town by their gaudily-painted
tugs, on which may occasionally be perched the vociferous "steam
piano" of our circus days, "whose soul-stirring music can be heard
for four miles;" traveling sawyers, with old steamboats made over into
sawmills, employed by farmers to "work up" into lumber such logs as
they can from time to time bring down to the shore--the product
being oftenest used in the neighborhood, but occasionally rafted,
and floated to the nearest large town; and a miscellaneous lot
of traveling craftsmen who live and work afloat,--chairmakers,
upholsterers, feather and mattress renovators, photographers,--who
land at the villages, scatter abroad their advertising cards, and stay
so long as the ensuing patronage warrants.
A motley assortment, these neighbors of ours, an uncultivated field
for the fiction writers. We have struck up acquaintance with many of
them, and they are not bad fellows, as the world goes. Philosophers
all, and loquacious to a degree. But they cannot, for the life of
them, fathom the mystery of our cruise. We are not in trade? we are
not fishing? we are not canvassers? we are not show-people? "What 'n
'tarnation air ye, anny way? Oh, come now! No fellers is do'n' th'
river fur fun, that's sartin--ye're jist gov'm'nt agints! That's my
way o' think'n'. Well, 'f ye kin find fun in 't, then done go ahead,
I say! But all same, we'll be friends, won't we? Yew bet strangers!
Ye're welcome t' all in this yere shanty boat--ain't no bakky 'bout
yer close, yew fellers?" We meet with abundant courtesy of this rude
sort, and weaponless sleep well o' nights, fearing naught from our
comrades for the nonce.
We again have railways on either bank. The iron horse has almost
eclipsed the "fire canoe," as the Indians picturesquely styled the
steamboat. We occasionally see boats tied up to the wharves, evidently
not in commission; but, in actual operation, we seldom meet or pass
over one or two daily. To be sure, the low stage of water,--from
six to eight feet thus far, and falling daily,--and the coal strike,
militate against navigation interests. But the truth is, there is very
little business now left for steamboats, beyond the movement of coal,
stone, bricks, and other bulky material, some way freight, and a light
passenger traffic. The railroads are quicker and surer, and of course
competition lowers the charges.
The heavy manufacturing interests along the river now depend little
upon the steamers, although originally established here because of
them. I asked our friend, the superintendent at Mingo, what advantage
was gained by having his plant upon the river. He replied: "We can
get all the water we want, and we use a great deal of it; and it is
convenient to empty our slag upon the banks; but our chief interest
here is in the fact that Mingo is a railway junction." By rail he gets
his coal and ore, and ships away his product. Were the coal to come a
considerable distance, the river would be the cheaper road; but it is
obtained from neighboring hill mines that are practically owned by the
railways. This coal, by the way, costs $1.10 at the shaft mouth, and
$1.75 landed at the Mingo works. As for the sewer-pipe, brick, and
pottery works, they are along stream because of the great beds of clay
exposed by the erosion of the river.
It is fortunate for the stability of these towns, that the Ohio flows
along the transcontinental pathway westward, so that the great railway
lines may serve them without deflection from their natural course. Had
the great stream flowed south instead of west, the industries of the
valley doubtless would gradually have been removed to the transverse
highways of the new commerce, save where these latter crossed the
river, and thus have left scores of once thriving communities mere
'longshore wrecks of their former selves. This is not possible, now.
The steamboat traffic may still further waste, until the river is no
longer serviceable save as a continental drainage ditch; but, chiefly
because of its railways, the Ohio Valley will continue to be the seat
of an industrial population which shall wax fat upon the growth of the
nation's needs.
By the middle of the afternoon, we were at Wheeling (91 miles). The
town has fifty thousand inhabitants, is substantially built, of a
distinctly Southern aspect; well stretched out along the river,
but narrow; with gaunt, treeless, gully-washed hills of clay rising
abruptly behind, giving the place a most forbidding appearance from
the water. There are several fine bridges spanning the Ohio; and
Wheeling Creek, which empties on the lower edge of town, is crossed by
a maze of steel spans and stone arches; the well-paved wharf, sloping
upward from the Ohio, is nearly as broad and imposing as that of
Pittsburg;[A] houseboats are here by the score, some of them the
haunts of fishing clubs, as we judge from the names emblazoned on
their sides--"Mystic Crew," "South Side Club," and the like.
For the first time upon our tour, negroes are abundant upon the
streets and lounging along the river front. They vary in color from
yellow to inky blackness, and in raiment from the "dude," smart
in straw hat, collars and cuffs, and white-frilled shirt with
glass-diamond pin, to the steamboat roustabout, all slouch and rags,
and evil-eyed.
Wheeling Island (300 acres), up to thirty years ago mentioned in
travelers' journals as a rare beauty-spot, is to-day thick-set with
cottages of factory hands and small villas, and commonplace;
while smoky Bridgeport, opposite on the Ohio side, was from our
vantage-point a mere smudge upon the landscape.
Wheeling Creek is famous in Western history. The three Zane brothers,
Ebenezer, Jonathan and Silas,--typical, old-fashioned names these,
bespeaking the God-fearing, Bible-loving, Scotch-Presbyterian
stock from which sprang so large a proportion of trans-Alleghany
pioneers,--explored this region as early as 1769, built cabins, and
made improvements--Silas at the forks of the creek, and Ebenezer and
Jonathan at the mouth. During three or four years, it was a hard fight
between them and the Indians; but, though several times driven from
the scene, the Zane brothers stubbornly reappeared, and rebuilt their
burned habitations.
Before the Revolutionary War broke out, the fortified home of the
Zanes, at the creek mouth, was a favorite stopping stage in the
savage-haunted wilderness; and many a traveler in those early days has
left us in his journal a thankful account of his tarrying here. The
Zane stockade developed into Fort Fincastle, in Lord Dunmore's time;
then, Fort Henry, during the Revolution; and everyone who knows his
Western history at all has read of the three famous sieges of Wheeling
(1777, 1781, and 1782), and the daring deeds of its men and women,
which help illumine the pages of border annals. Finally, by 1784, the
fort at Wheeling, that had never surrendered, was demolished as no
longer necessary, for the wall of savage resistance was now pushed far
westward. Wheeling had become the western end of a wagon road across
the Panhandle, from Redstone, and here were fitted out many flatboat
expeditions for the lower Ohio; later, in steamboat days, the shallow
water of the upper river caused Wheeling to be in midsummer the
highest port attainable; and to this day it holds its ground as the
upper terminus of several steamboat lines.
Below Wheeling are several miles of factory towns nestled by the
strand, and numerous coal tipples, with their begrimed villages.
Fishermen have been frequent to-day, in houseboats of high and low
degree, and in land camps composed of tents and board shanties, with
rows of seines and tarred pound-nets stretched in the sun to dry;
tow-headed children abound, almost as nude as the pigs and dogs
and chickens amongst which they waddle and roll; women-folk busy
themselves with the multifarious cares of home-keeping, while their
lords are in shady nooks mending nets, or listlessly examining trout
lines which appear to yield but empty hooks; they tell us that when
the river is falling, fish bite not, and yet they serenely angle on,
dreaming their lives away.
A half mile above Big Grave Creek (101 miles), we, too, hurry into
camp on a shelving bank of sand, deep-fringed with willows; for over
the western hills thunder-clouds are rising, with wind gusts. Level
fields stretch back of us for a quarter of a mile, to the hills which
bound the bottom; at our front door majestically rolls the growing
river, perhaps a third of a mile in width, black with the reflection
of the sky, and wrinkled now and then with squalls which scurry over
its bubbling surface.[B]
The storm does not break, but the bending tree-tops crone, and toads
innumerable rend the air with their screaming whistles. We had great
ado, during the cooking of dinner, to prevent them from hopping into
our little stove, as it gleamed brightly in the early dusk; and have
adopted special precautions to keep them from the tent, as they jump
about in the tall grass, appeasing their insectivorous appetites.
[Footnote A: Upon the Ohio and kindred rivers, the term "wharf"
applies to the river beach when graded and paved, ready for the
reception of steamers. Such a wharf must not be confounded with a lake
or seaside wharf, a staging projected into the water.]
[Footnote B: It was in this neighborhood, a mile or two above our
camp, where the bottom is narrower, that Capt. William Foreman and
twenty other Virginia militiamen were killed in an Indian ambuscade,
Sept. 27, 1777. An inscribed stone monument was erected on the spot in
1835, but we could not find it.]
CHAPTER VI.
The Big Grave--Washington, and Round Bottom--A lazy man's
Paradise--Captina Creek--George Rogers Clark at Fish
Creek--Southern types.
Near Fishing Creek, Friday, May 11th.--There had been rain during the
night, with fierce wind gusts, but during breakfast the atmosphere
quieted, and we had a genial, semi-cloudy morning.
Off at 8 o'clock, Pilgrim's crew were soon exploring Moundsville.
There are five thousand people in this old, faded, countrified town.
They show you with pride the State Penitentiary of West Virginia, a
solemn-looking pile of dark gray stone, with the feeble battlements
and towers common to American prison architecture. But the chief
feature of the place is the great Indian mound--the "Big Grave" of
early chroniclers. This earthwork is one of the largest now remaining
in the United States, being sixty-eight feet high and a hundred
in diameter at the base, and has for over a century attracted the
attention of travelers and archæologists.
We found it at the end of a straggling street, on the edge of the
town, a quarter of a mile back from the river. Around the mound has
been left a narrow plat of ground, utilized as a cornfield; and the
stout picket fence which encloses it bears peremptory notice that
admission is forbidden. However, as the proprietor was not easily
accessible, we exercised the privilege of historical pilgrims, and,
letting ourselves in through the gate, picked our way through rows of
corn, and ascended the great cone. It is covered with a heavy growth
of white oaks, some of them three feet in diameter, among which the
path picturesquely zigzags. The summit is fifty-five feet in diameter,
and the center somewhat depressed, like a basin. From the middle of
this basin a shaft some twenty-five feet in diameter has been sunk by
explorers, for a distance of perhaps fifty feet; at one time, a level
tunnel connected the bottom of this shaft with the side of the cone,
but it has been mostly obliterated. A score of years ago, tunnel and
shaft were utilized as the leading attractions of a beer garden--to
such base uses may a great historical landmark descend!
Dickens, who apparently wrote the greater part of his _American Notes_
while suffering from dyspepsia, has a note of appreciation for the
Big Grave: "... the host of Indians who lie buried in a great mound
yonder--so old that mighty oaks and other forest trees have struck
their roots into its earth; and so high that it is a hill, even among
the hills that Nature planted around it. The very river, as though it
shared one's feelings of compassion for the extinct tribes who lived
so pleasantly here, in their blessed ignorance of white existence,
hundreds of years ago, steals out of its way to ripple near this
mound; and there are few places where the Ohio sparkles more brightly
than in the Big Grave Creek."
There is a sharp bend in the river, just below Moundsville, with
Dillon's Bottom stretching long and wide at the apex on the Ohio
shore--flat green fields, dotted with little white farmsteads, each
set low in its apple grove, and a convoluted wall of dark hills
hemming them in along the northern horizon. Then below this comes
Round Bottom, its counterpart on the West Virginia side, and coursing
through it a pretty meadow creek, Butler's Run.
Writes Washington, in 1781, to a correspondent who is thinking of
renting lands in this region: "I have a small tract called the round
bottom containing about 600 Acres, which would also let. It lyes on
the Ohio, opposite to pipe Creek, and a little above Capteening."
Across the half mile of river are the little levels and great slopes
of the Ohio hills, through which breaks this same Pipe Creek; and
hereabout Cresap's band murdered a number of inoffensive Shawanese,
a tragedy which was one of the inciting causes of Lord Dunmore's War
(1774).
We crossed over into Ohio, and pulled up on the gravelly spit at the
mouth of Pipe. While the others were botanizing high on the mountain
side, I went along a beach path toward a group of whitewashed cabins,
intent on replenishing the canteen. Upon opening the gate of one of
them, two grizzly dogs came bounding out, threatening to test the
strength of my corduroy trousers. The proprietor cautiously peered
from a window, and, much to my relief, called off the animals.
Satisfied, apparently, that I was not the visitor he expected, the
fellow lounged out and sat upon the steps, where I joined him. He was
a tall, raw-boned, loose-jointed young man, with a dirty, buttonless
flannel shirt which revealed a hairy breast; upon his trousers hung a
variety of patches, in many stages of grease and decrepitude; a gray
slouch hat shaded his little fishy eyes and hollow, yellow cheeks; and
the snaky ends of his yellow mustache were stiff with accumulations of
dried tobacco juice. His fat, waddling wife, in a greasy black gown,
followed with bare feet, and, arms akimbo, listened in the open door.
A coal company owns the rocky river front, here and at many places
below, and lets these cabins to the poor-white element, so numerous on
the Ohio's banks. The renter is privileged to cultivate whatever land
he can clear on the rocky, precipitous slopes, which is seldom more
than half an acre to the cabin; and he may, if he can afford a cow,
let her run wild in the scrub. The coal vein, a few rods back of the
house, is only a few inches thick, and poor in quality, but is freely
resorted to by the cotters. He worked whenever he could find a job, my
host said--in the coal mines and quarries, or on the bottom farms, or
the railroad which skirts the bank at his feet.
"But I tell ye, sir, th' _I_talians and Hungarians is spoil'n' this
yere country fur white men; 'n' I do'n' see no prospect for hits be'n'
better till they get shoved out uv 't!" Yet he said that life wasn't
so hard here as it was in some parts he had heard tell of--the climate
was mild, that he "'lowed;" a fellow could go out and get a free
bucket of coal from the hillside "back yon;" he might get all the
"light wood 'n' patchin' stuff" he wanted, from the river drift;
could, when he "hankered after 'em," catch fish off his own front-door
yard; and pick up a dollar now and then at odd jobs, when the rent was
to be paid, or the "ol' woman" wanted a dress, or he a new coat.
This is clearly the lazy man's Paradise. I do not remember to have
heard that the South Sea Islanders, in the ante-missionary days, had
an easier time of it than this. What new fortune will befall my friend
when he gets the Italians and Hungarians "shoved out," and "things
pick up a bit," I cannot conceive.
A pleasing panorama he has from his doorway--across the river, the
fertile fields of Round Bottom, once Washington's; Captina Island,
just below, long and thickly-willowed, dreamily afloat in a glassy
sea, reflecting every change of light; the whole girt about with the
wide uplands of the winding valley, and overhead the march of sunny
clouds.
Captina Creek (108 miles) is not far down on the Ohio bank, and beside
it the little hamlet of Powhattan Point, with the West Virginia hills
thereabout exceptionally high and steep, and wooded to the very top.
Washington, who knew the Ohio well, down to the Great Kanawha, wrote
of this creek in 1770: "A pretty large creek on the west side, called
by Nicholson [his interpreter] Fox-Grape-Vine, by others Captema
creek, on which, eight miles up, is the town called Grape-Vine Town."
Captina village is its white successor. But there were also Indians
at the mouth of the creek; for when George Rogers Clark and his
missionary companion, Jones, two years later camped opposite on the
Virginia shore, they went over to make a morning call on the natives,
who repaid it in the evening, doubtless each time receiving freely
from the white men's bounty.
The next day was Sunday, and the travelers remained in camp, Jones
recording in his journal that he "instructed what Indians came over."
In the course of his prayer, the missionary was particularly impressed
by the attitude of the chief of Grape-Vine Town, named Frank Stephens,
who professed to believe in the Christian God; and he naively writes,
"I was informed that, all the time, the Indians looked very seriously
at me." Jones appears to have been impressed also with the hardness
of the beach, where they camped in the open, doubtless to avoid
surprises: "Instead of feathers, my bed was gravel-stones, by the
river side ... which at first seemed not to suit me, but afterward it
became more natural."
In those days, traveling was beset with difficulties, both ashore
and afloat. Eight years later (spring of 1780), three flatboats
were descending the Ohio, laden with families intending to settle in
Kentucky, when they suffered a common fate, being attacked by Indians
off Captina Creek. Several men and a child were killed, and twenty-one
persons were carried into captivity--among them, Catherine Malott,
a girl in her teens, who subsequently became the wife of that most
notorious of border renegades, Simon Girty.
On the West Virginia shore, not over a third of a mile below Captina
Creek, empties Grave Yard Run, a modest rivulet. It would of itself
not be noticeable amid the crowd of minor creeks and runs, coursing
down to the great river through rugged ravines which corrugate
the banks. But it has a history. Here, late in October or early in
November, 1772, young George Rogers Clark made his first stake west of
the Alleghanies, rudely cultivating a few acres of forest land on what
is now called Cresap's Bottom, surveying for the neighbors, and in
the evenings teaching their children in the little log cabin of his
friend, Yates Conwell, at the mouth of Fish Creek, a few miles below.
Fish Creek was in itself famous as one of the sections of the great
Indian trail, "The Warrior Branch," which, starting in Tennessee, came
northward through Kentucky and Southern Ohio, and, proceeding by way
of this creek, crossed over to Dunkard Creek, thence to the mouth of
Redstone. Washington stopped at Conwell's in March or April, 1774; but
Clark was away from home at the time, and the "Father of his Country"
never met the man who has been dubbed the "Washington of the West."
Lord Dunmore's War was hatching, and a few months later the Fish Creek
surveyor and schoolmaster had entered upon his life work as an Indian
fighter.
At Bearsville (126 miles) we first meet a phenomenon common to the
Ohio--the edges of the alluvial bottom being higher than the fields
back of them, forming a natural levee, above which curiously rise to
our view the spires and chimneys of the village. Harris' _Journal_
(1803) made early note of this, and advanced an acceptable theory: "We
frequently remarked that the banks are higher at the margin than at
a little distance back. I account for it in this manner: Large trees,
which are brought down the river by the inundations, are lodged upon
the borders of the bank, but cannot be floated far upon the champaign,
because obstructed by the growth of wood. Retaining their situation
when the waters subside, they obstruct and detain the leaves and mud,
which would else recoil into the stream, and thus, in process of time,
form a bank higher than the interior flats."
Tied up to Bearsville landing is a gayly painted barge, the home
of Price's Floating Opera Company, and in front its towing-steamer,
"Troubadour." A steam calliope is part of the visible furniture of the
establishment, and its praises as a noise-maker are sung in large
type in the handbills which, with numerous colored lithographs of the
performers, adorn the shop windows in the neighboring river towns.
Two miles farther down, on a high bank at the mouth of Fishing Creek,
lies New Martinsville, West Va. (127 miles), a rather shabby town
of fifteen hundred souls. As W---- and I passed up the main street,
seeking for a grocery, we noticed that the public hall was being
decorated for a dance to come off to-night; and placards advertising
the event were everywhere rivaling the gaudy prints of the floating
opera.
Meanwhile, a talkative native was interviewing the Doctor, down at the
river side. It required some good-natured fencing on the part of
our skipper to prevent the Virginian from learning all about our
respective families away back to the third generation. He was a short,
chubby man, with a Dixie goatee, his flannel shirt negligée, and a
wide-brimmed straw hat jauntily set on the back of his head. He was
sociable, and sat astride of our beached prow, punctuating his
remarks with squirts of tobacco juice, and a bit of lath with which
he meditatively tapped the gunwale, the meantime, with some skill,
casting pebbles into the water with his bare toes. "Ax'n yer pardon,
ma'm!" he said, scrambling from his perch upon W----'s appearance; and
then, pushing us off, he bowed with much Southern gallantry, and
hat in hand begged we would come again to New Martinsville, and stay
longer.
The hills lining these reaches are lower than above, yet graceful in
their sweeping lines. Conical mounds sometimes surmount them, relics
of the prehistoric time when our Indians held to the curious fashion
of building earthworks. We no longer entertain the notion that a
separate and a prouder race of wild men than we know erected these
tumuli. That pleasant fiction has departed from us; but the works are
none the less interesting, now that more is known of their origin.
Two miles below New Martinsville, on the West Virginia shore, we
pitch camp, just as the light begins to sink over the Ohio hills.
The atmosphere is sweet with the odor of wild grape blossoms, and
the willow also is in bloom. Poison ivy, to whose baneful touch
fortunately none of us appear susceptible, grows everywhere about.
From the farmhouse on the narrow bottom to our rear comes the
melodious tinkle-tinkle of cow bells. The operatic calliope is in full
blast, at Bearsville, its shrieks and snorts coming down to us through
four miles of space, all too plainly borne by the northern breeze; and
now and then we hear the squeak of the New Martinsville fiddles. There
are no mosquitoes as yet, but burly May-chafers come stupidly dashing
against our tent, and the toads are piping merrily.
CHAPTER VII.
In Dixie--Oil and natural gas, at Witten's Bottom--The Long
Reach--Photographing crackers--Visitors in camp.
Above Marietta, Saturday, May 12th.--Since the middle of yesterday
afternoon we have been in Dixie,--that is, when we are on the West
Virginia shore. The famous Mason and Dixon Line (lat. 39° 43' 26")
touches the Ohio at the mouth of Proctor's Run (121-1/2 miles).
There was a heavy fog this morning, on land and river. But through
shifting rifts made by the morning breeze, we had kaleidoscopic,
cloud-framed pictures of the dark, jutting headlands which hem us in;
of little white cabins clustered by the country road which on either
bank crawls along narrow terraces between overtopping steeps and
sprawling beach, or winds through fertile bottoms, according to
whether the river approaches or recedes from its inclosing bluffs; of
hillside fields, tipped at various angles of ascent, sometimes green
with springing grain, but oftenest gray or brown or yellow, freshly
planted,--charming patches of color, in this somber-hued world of
sloping woodland.
At Williamson's Island (134 miles) the fog lifted. The air was heavy
with the odor of petroleum. All about us were the ugly, towering
derricks of oil and natural gas wells--Witten's Bottom on the right,
with its abutting hills; the West Virginia woods across the river,
and the maple-strewn island between, all covered with scaffolds. The
country looks like a rumpled fox-and-geese board, with pegs stuck
all over it. A mile and a half below lies Sistersville, W. Va., the
emporium of this greasy neighborhood--great red oil-tanks and smoky
refineries its chiefest glory; crude and raw, like the product it
handles. We landed at Witten's Bottom,--W----, the Boy, and I,--while
the Doctor, philosophically preferring to take the oily elephant for
granted, piloted Pilgrim to the rendezvous a mile below.
Oil was "struck" here two or three years ago, and now within a
distance of a few miles there are hundreds of wells--"two hun'rd in
this yere gravel alone, sir!" I was told by a red-headed man in a red
shirt, who lived with his numerous family in a twelve-foot-square box
at the rear of a pumping engine. An engine serves several wells,--the
tumbling-rods, rudely boxed in, stretching off through the fields
and over the hills to wherever needed. The operatives dwell in little
shanties scattered conveniently about; in front of each is a vertical
half-inch pipe, six or eight feet high, bearing a half bushel of
natural-gas flame which burns and tosses night and day, winter
and summer, making the Bottom a warm corner of the earth, when the
unassisted temperature is in the eighties. It is a bewildering scene,
with all these derricks thickly scattered around, engines noisily
puffing, walking-beams forever rearing and plunging, the country
cobwebbed with tumbling-rods and pipe lines, the shanties of the
operatives with their rude lamp-posts, and the face of Nature so
besmeared with the crude output of the wells that every twig and leaf
is thick with grease.
Just above Witten's commences the Long Reach of the Ohio--a charming
panorama, for sixteen and a half miles in a nearly straight line
to the southwest. Little towns line the alternating bottoms, and
farmsteads are numerous on the slopes. But they are rocky and narrow,
these gentle shoulders of the hills, and a poor class of folk occupy
them--half fishers, half farmers, a cross between my Round Bottom
friend and the houseboat nomads.
A picturesquely-dilapidated log house, with whitewashed porch in
front, and a vine arbor at the rear, attracted our attention at the
foot of the reach, near Grape Island. I clambered up, to photograph
it. The ice was broken by asking for a drink of water. A gaunt girl of
eighteen, the elder of two, with bare feet, her snaky hair streaming
unkempt about a smirking face, went with a broken-nosed pitcher to a
run, which could be heard splashing over its rocky bed near by. The
meanwhile, I took a seat in the customary arcade between the living
room and kitchen, and talked with her fat, greasy, red-nosed father,
who confided to me that he was "a pi'neer from way back." He occupied
his own land--a rare circumstance among these riverside "crackers;"
had a hundred and thirty acres, worth twenty dollars the acre; "jist
yon ways," back of the house, in the cliff-side, there was a coal vein
two feet thick, as yet only "worked" for his own fuel; and lately, he
had struck a bank of firebrick clay which might some day be a "good
thing for th' gals."
On leaving, I casually mentioned my desire to photograph the family on
the porch, where the light was good. While I walked around the house
outside, they passed through the front room, which seemed to be the
common dormitory as well as parlor. To my surprise and chagrin,
the girls and their dowdy mother had, in those brief moments of
transition, contrived to arrange their hair and dress to a degree
which took from them all those picturesque qualities with which they
had been invested at the time of my arrival. The father was being
reproved, as he emerged upon the porch, for not "slick'n' his ha'r,
and wash'n' and fix'n' up, afore hay'n' his pictur' taken;" but the
old fellow was obdurate, and joined me in remonstrance against this
transformation to the commonplace, on the part of his women-folk.
However, there was no profit in arguing with them, and I took my
snap-shot with a conviction that the film was being wasted.
We were in several small towns to-day, in pursuance of the policy of
distributing our shopping, so as to see as much of the shore life as
practicable. Chief among them have been New Matamoras (141 miles) and
St. Mary's (154 miles), in West Virginia, and Newport, in Ohio (155
miles). Rather dingy villages, these--each, after their kind, with a
stone wharf thick-grown with weeds; a flouring mill at the head of
the landing; a few cheap-looking, battlemented stores; boys and men
lounging about with that air of comfortable idling which impresses one
as the main characteristic of rustic hamlets, where nobody seems ever
to have anything to do; a ferry running to the opposite shore--for
cattle and wagons, a heavy flat, with railings, made to drift with
the current; and for foot passengers, a lumbering skiff, with oars
chucking noisily in their roomy locks.
Every now and then we run across bunches of oil and gas wells;
and great signs, like those advertising boards which greet railway
travelers approaching our large cities, are here and there perched
upon the banks, notifying steamboat pilots, in letters a foot
high, that a pipe line here crosses the river, the vicinity being
consequently unsafe for mooring.
Our camp, to-night, is on a bit of grassy ledge at the summit of a
rocky bank, ten miles above Marietta, on the Ohio side. A rod or so
back of us is the country road, which winds along at the foot of
a precipitous steep. It is narrow quarters here, and too near the
highway for comfort, but nothing better seemed to offer at the time we
needed it; and the outlook is pleasant, through the fringing oaks and
elms, across the broad river into West Virginia.
We had not yet pitched tent, and all hands were still clambering over
the rocks with Pilgrim's cargo, rather glad that there was no more of
it, when our first camp-bore appeared--a middling-sized man, florid
as to complexion, with a mustache and goatee, and in a suit of seedy
black, surmounted by a crushed-in Derby hat; and, after the fashion of
the country, giving evidence, on his collarless white shirt, of a free
use of chewing tobacco. I have seldom met a fellow with better staying
qualities. He was a strawberry grower, he said, and having been into
Newport, a half dozen miles up river, was walking to his home, which
was a mile or two off in the hills. Would we object if, for a few
moments, he tarried here by the roadside? and perhaps we could
accommodate him with a drink of water? Patiently did he watch the
preparation of dinner, and spice each dish with commendations of
W----'s skill at making the most of her few utensils.
Right glibly he chattered on; now about the decadence of womankind;
now about strawberry-growing upon these Ohio hills--with the crop just
coming on, and berries selling at a shilling to-day, in Marietta, when
they ought to be worth twenty cents; now on politics, and of course
he was a Populist; now on the hard times, and did we believe in free
silver? He would take no bite with us, but sat and talked and talked,
despite plain hints, growing plainer with the progress of time, that
his family needed him at nightfall. Dinner was eaten, and dishes
washed; the others left on a botanical round-up, and I produced my
writing materials, with remarks upon the lateness of the hour. At last
our guest arose, shook the grass from his clothes, with a shake of
hands bade me good-night, wishing me to convey his "good-bye" to the
rest of our party, and as politely as possible expressed the great
pleasure which the visit had given him.
Some farmer boys came down the hillside to fish at the bank, and
talked pleasantly of their work and of the ever-changing phases of
the river. Other farmers passed our roadside door, in wagons, on
buckboards, by horseback, and on foot; in neighborly tone, but with
ill-disguised curiosity in their eyes, wishing me good evening. When
the long twilight was almost gone, and the moon an hour high over the
purple dusk of the West Virginia hills, the botanists returned,
aglow with their exercise, and rich with trophies of blue and dwarf
larkspur, pink and white stone-crop, trailing arbutus, and great
laurel.
And then, as we were preparing to retire, a sleek and dapper fellow,
though with clothes rather the worse for wear, came trudging along
the road toward Marietta. Seeing our camp, he asked for a drink. Being
apparently disposed to tarry, the Doctor, to get him started, offered
to walk a piece with him. Our comrade staid out so long, that at last
I went down the road in search of him, and found the pair sitting on
a moonlit bank, as cozily as if they had been always friends. The
stranger had revealed to the Doctor that he was a street fakir, "by
perfesh," and had "struck it rich" in Chicago during the World's
Fair, but somehow had lost the greater part of his gains, and was
now associated with his brother, who had a junk-boat; the brother was
"well heeled," and staid and kept store at the boat, while the fakir,
as the walking partner, "rustled 'round 'mong th' grangers, to stir
up trade." The Doctor had, in their talk, let slip something about
certain Florida experiences, and when I arrived on the scene was being
skillfully questioned by his companion as to the probabilities of
"a feller o' my perfesh ketch'n' on, down thar?" The result of this
pumping process must have been satisfactory: for when we parted with
him, the fakir declared he was "go'n' try't on thar, next winter, 'f I
bust me bottom dollar!"
CHAPTER VIII.
Life ashore and afloat--Marietta, "the Plymouth Rock of the
West"--The Little Kanawha--The story of Blennerhassett's
Island.
Blennerhassett's Island, Sunday, May 13th.--The day broke without fog,
at our camp on the rocky steep above Marietta. The eastern sky was
veiled with summer clouds, all gayly flushed by the rising sun, and
in the serene silence of the morning there hung the scent of dew, and
earth, and trees. In the east, the distant edges of the West Virginia
hills were aglow with the mounting light before it had yet peeped over
into the river trough, where a silvery haze lent peculiar charm to
flood and bank. Up river, one of the Three Brothers isles, dark and
heavily forested, seemed in the middle ground to float on air. A
bewitching picture this, until at last the sun sprang clear and strong
above the fringing hills, and the spell was broken.
The steamboat traffic is improving as we get lower down. Last evening,
between landing and bedtime, a half dozen passed us, up and down,
breathing heavily as dragons might, and leaving behind them foamy
wakes which loudly broke upon the shore. Before morning, I was at
intervals awakened by as many more. A striking spectacle, the passage
of a big river steamer in the night; you hear, fast approaching, a
labored pant; suddenly, around the bend, or emerging from behind an
island, the long white monster glides into view, lanterns gleaming on
two lines of deck, her electric searchlight uneasily flitting to and
fro, first on one landmark, then on another, her engine bell sharply
clanging, the measured pant developing into a burly, all-pervading
roar, which gradually declines into a pant again--and then she
disappears as she came, her swelling wake rudely ruffling the moonlit
stream.
We caught up with a large lumber raft this morning, descending from
Pittsburg to Cincinnati. The half-dozen men in charge were housed
midway in a rude little shanty, and relieved each other at the
sweeps--two at bow, and two astern. It is an easy, lounging life, most
of the way, with some difficulties in the shallows, and in passing
beneath the great bridges. They travel night and day, except in the
not infrequent wind-storms blowing up stream; and it will take them
another week to cover the three hundred miles between this and their
destination. Far different fellows, these commonplace raftsmen of
to-day, from the "lumber boys" of a half-century or more ago, when the
river towns were regularly "painted red" by the men who followed the
Ohio by raft or flatboat. Life along shore was then more picturesque
than comfortable.
Later, we stopped on the Ohio shore to chat with a group of farmers
having a Sunday talk, their seat a drift log, in the shade of
a willowed bank. They proved to be market gardeners and
fruit-growers--well-to-do men of their class, and intelligent in
conversation; all of them descendants of the sturdy New Englanders who
settled these parts.
While the others were discussing small fruits with these transplanted
Yankees, who proved quite as full of curiosity about us as we
concerning them, I went down shore a hundred yards, struggling through
the dense fringe of willows, to photograph a junk-boat just putting
off into the stream. The two rough-bearded, merry-eyed fellows at the
sweeps were setting their craft broadside to the stream--that "the
current might have more holt of her," the chief explained. They were
interested in the kodak, and readily posed as I wished, but wanted to
see what had been taken, having the common notion that it is like
a tintype camera, with results at once attainable. They offered our
party a ride for the rest of the day, if we would row alongside and
come aboard, but I thanked them, saying their craft was too slow for
our needs; at which they laughed heartily, and "'lowed" we might be
traders, too, anxious to get in ahead of them--"but there's plenty o'
room o' th' river, for yew an' we, stranger! Well, good luck to yees!
We'll see yer down below, somewhar, I reckon!"
Just before lunch, we were at Marietta, at the mouth of the Muskingum
(171 miles), a fine stream, here two hundred and fifty yards wide. A
storied river, this Muskingum. We first definitely hear of it in 1748,
the year the original Ohio Company was formed. Céloron was here the
year following, with his little band of French soldiers and Indians,
vainly endeavoring to turn English traders out of the Ohio Valley.
Christopher Gist came, some months later; then the trader Croghan,
for "Old Wyandot Town," the Indian village at the mouth, was a noted
center in Western forest traffic. Moravian missionaries appeared in
due time, establishing on the banks of the Muskingum the ill-fated
convert villages of Schönbrunn, Gnadenhütten, and Salem. In 1785, Fort
Harmar was reared on the site of Wyandot Town. Lastly, in the early
spring of 1788, came, in Ohio river flatboats, that famous body of
New England veterans of the Revolution, under Gen. Rufus Putnam, and
planted Marietta--"the Plymouth Rock of the West."
We smile at these Ohio pilgrims, for dignifying the hills which girt
in the Marietta bottom, with the names of the seven on which Rome is
said to be built--for having a Campus Martius and a Sacra Via, and all
that, out here among the sycamore stumps and the wild Indians. But a
classical revival was just then vigorously affecting American thought,
and it would have been strange if these sturdy New Englanders had not
felt its influence, fresh as they were from out the shadows of Harvard
and Yale, and in the awesome presence of crowds of huge monumental
earthworks, whose age, in their day, was believed to far outdate
the foundations of the Eternal City itself. They loved learning
for learning's sake; and here, in the log-cabins of Marietta, eight
hundred miles west of their beloved Boston, among many another good
thing they did for posterity, they established the principle of public
education at public cost, as a national principle.
They were soldier colonists. Washington, out of a full heart, for he
dearly loved the West, said of them: "No colony in America was ever
settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced
at the Muskingum. Information, property, and strength will be its
characteristics. I know many of the settlers personally, and there
never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a
community." And when, in 1825, La Fayette had read to him the list
of Marietta pioneers,--nearly fifty military officers among them,--he
cried: "I know them all! I saw them at Brandywine, Yorktown, and Rhode
Island. They were the bravest of the brave!"
Yet, for a long time, Marietta met with small measure of success.
Miasma, Indian ravages, and the conservative temperament of the people
combined to render slow the growth of this Western Plymouth. There
were, for a time, extensive ship-building yards here; but that
industry gradually declined, with the growth of railway systems. In
our day, Marietta, with its ten thousand inhabitants, prospers chiefly
as a market town and an educational center, with some manufacturing
interests. We were struck to-day, as we tarried there for an hour
or two, with the remarkable resemblance it has in public and private
architecture, and in general tone, to a typical New England town--say,
for example, Burlington, Vt. Omitting its river front, and its
Mound Cemetery, Marietta might be set bodily down almost anywhere in
Massachusetts, or Vermont, or Connecticut, and the chance traveler
would see little in the place to remind him of the West. I know of no
other town out of New England of which the same might be said.
Below Marietta, the river bottoms are, for miles together, edged with
broad stretches of sloping beach, either deep with sand or naturally
paved with pebbles--sometimes treeless, but often strewn with clumps
of willow and maple and scrub sycamore. The hills, now rounder, less
ambitious, and more widely separated, are checkered with fields and
forests, and the bottom lands are of more generous breadth. Pleasant
islands stud the peaceful stream. The sylvan foliage has by this time
attained very nearly its fullest size. The horse chestnut, the pawpaw,
the grape, and the willow are in bloom. A gentle pastoral scene is
this through which we glide.
It is evident that it would be a scalding day but for the gentle
breeze astern; setting sail, we gladly drop our oars, and, with the
water rippling at our prow, sweep blithely down the long southern
reach to Parkersburg, W. Va., at the mouth of the Little Kanawha (183
miles). In the full glare of the scorching sun, Parkersburg looks
harsh and dry. But it is well built, and, as seen from the river,
apparently prosperous. The Ohio is here crossed by the once famous
million-dollar bridge of the Baltimore & Ohio railway. The wharf is
at the junction of the two streams, but chiefly on the shore of the
unattractive Little Kanawha, which is spanned by several bridges, and
abounds in steamers and houseboats moored to the land. Clark and Jones
did not think well of Little Kanawha lands, yet there were several
families on the river as early as 1763, and Trent, Croghan, and other
Fort Pitt fur-traders had posts here. There were only half-a-dozen
houses in 1800, and Parkersburg itself was not laid out until ten
years later.
Blennerhassett's Island lies two miles below--a broad, dark mass of
forest, at the head joined by a dam to the West Virginia shore, from
which it is separated by a slender channel. Blennerhassett's is some
three and a half miles long; of its five hundred acres, four hundred
are under cultivation in three separate tenant farms. We landed at the
upper end, where Blennerhassett had his wharf, facing the Ohio shore,
and found that we were trespassing upon "The Blennerhassett Pleasure
Grounds." A seedy-looking man, who represented himself to be the
proprietor, promptly accosted us and levied a "landing fee" of ten
cents per head, which included the right to remain over night. A
little questioning developed the fact that thirty acres at the head
of the island belong to this man, who rents the ground to a market
gardener,--together with the comfortable farmhouse which occupies
the site of Blennerhassett's mansion,--but reserves to himself the
privilege of levying toll on visitors. He declared to me that fifteen
thousand people came to the island each summer, generally in large
railway and steamboat excursions, which gives him an easily-acquired
income sufficient for his needs. It is a pity that so famous a place
is not a public park.
The touching story of the Blennerhassetts is one of the best known in
Western annals. Rich in culture and worldly possessions, but wildly
impracticable, Harman Blennerhassett and his beautiful wife came to
America in 1798. Buying this lovely island in the Ohio, six hundred
miles west of tidewater, they built a large mansion, which they
furnished luxuriously, adorning it with fine pictures and statuary.
Here, in the midst of beautiful grounds, while Blennerhassett studied
astronomy, chemistry, and galvanism, his brilliant spouse dispensed
rare hospitality to their many distinguished guests; for, in those
days, it was part of a rich young man's education to take a journey
down the Ohio, into "the Western parts," and on returning home to
write a book about it.
But there came a serpent to this Eden. Aaron Burr was among their
visitors (1805), while upon his journey to New Orleans, where he hoped
to set on foot a scheme to seize either Texas or Mexico, and set up
a republic with himself at the head. He interested the susceptible
Blennerhassetts in his plans, the import of which they probably little
understood; but the fantastic Englishman had suffered a considerable
reduction of fortune, and was anxious to recoup, and Burr's
representations were aglow with the promise of such rewards in the
golden southwest as Cortes and Coronado sought. Blennerhassett's purse
was opened to the enterprise of Burr; large sums were spent in boats
and munitions, which were, tradition says, for a time hid in the bayou
which, close by our camp, runs deep into the island forest. It has
been filled in by the present proprietor, but its bold shore lines,
all hung with giant sycamores, are still in evidence.
President Jefferson's proclamation (October, 1806) shattered the plot,
and Blennerhassett fled to join Burr at the mouth of the Cumberland.
Both were finally arrested (1807), and tried for treason, but
acquitted on technical grounds. In the meantime, people from
the neighboring country sacked Blennerhassett's house; then came
creditors, and with great waste seized his property; the beautiful
place was still further pillaged by lawless ruffians, and turned
into ignoble uses; later, the mansion itself was burned through the
carelessness of negroes--and now, all they can show us are the old
well and the noble trees which once graced the lawn. As for the
Blennerhassetts themselves, they wandered far and wide, everywhere
the victims of misfortune. He died on the Island of Guernsey (1831), a
disappointed office-seeker; she, returning to America to seek redress
from Congress for the spoliation of her home, passed away in New
York, before the claim was allowed, and was buried by the Sisters of
Charity.
CHAPTER IX.
Poor whites--First library in the West--An hour at
Hockingport--A hermit fisher.
Long Bottom, Monday, May 14th.--Pushing up stream for two miles this
morning, the commissary department replenished the day's stores at
Parkersburg. Forepaugh's circus was in town, and crowds of rustics
were coming in by wagon road, railway trains, and steamers and ferries
on both rivers. The streets of the quaint, dingy Southern town were
teeming with humanity, mainly negroes and poor whites. Among the
latter, flat, pallid faces, either flabby or too lean, were under
the swarms of blue, white, and yellow sunbonnets--sad faces, with
lack-luster eyes, coarse hair of undecided hue, and coarser
speech. These Audreys of Dixie-land are the product of centuries of
ill-treatment on our soil; indented white servants to the early coast
colonists were in the main their ancestors; with slave competition,
the white laborer in the South lost caste until even the negro
despised him; and ill-nurture has done the rest. Then, too, in these
bottoms, malaria has wrought its work, especially among the underfed;
you see it in the yellow skin and nerveless tone of these lanky
rustics, who are in town to enjoy the one bright holiday of their
weary year.
Across the river, in Ohio, is Belpré (short for Belle Prairie, and now
locally pronounced Bel'pry), settled by Revolutionary soldiers, on
the Marietta grant, in 1789-90. I always think well of Belpré, because
here was established the first circulating library in the Northwest.
Old Israel Putnam, he of the wolf-den and Bunker Hill, amassed
many books. His son Israel, on moving to Belpré in 1796, carried a
considerable part of the collection with him--no small undertaking
this, at a time when goods had to be carted all the way from
Connecticut, over rivers and mountains to the Ohio, and then floated
down river by flatboat, with a high tariff for every pound of freight.
Young Israel was public-spirited, and, having been at so great cost
and trouble to get this library out to the wilderness, desired his
fellow-colonists to enjoy it with him. It would have been unfair not
to distribute the expense, so a stock company was formed, and shares
were sold at ten dollars each. Of the blessings wrought in this rude
frontier community by the books which the elder Israel had collected
for his Connecticut fireside, there can be no more eloquent testimony
than that borne by an old settler, who, in 1802, writes to an Eastern
friend: "In order to make the long winter evenings pass more smoothly,
by great exertion I purchased a share in the Belpré library, six
miles distant. Many a night have I passed (using pine knots instead
of candles) reading to my wife while she sat hatcheling, carding or
spinning." The association was dissolved in 1815 or 1816, and the
books distributed among the shareholders; many of these volumes are
still extant in this vicinity, and several are in the college museum
at Marietta.
There are few descendants hereabout of the original New England
settlers, and they live miles apart on the Ohio shore. We went up
to visit one, living opposite Blennerhassett's Island. Notice of our
coming had preceded us, and we were warmly welcomed at a substantial
farmhouse in the outskirts of Belpré, with every evidence about of
abundant prosperity. The maternal great-grandfather of our host for
an hour was Rufus Putnam, an ancestor to be proud of. Five acres
of gooseberries are grown on the place, and other small-fruits in
proportion--all for the Parkersburg market, whence much is shipped
north to Cleveland. Our host confessed to a little malaria, even on
this upper terrace--or "second bottom," as they style it--but "the
land is good, though with many stones--natural conditions, you know,
for New Englanders." It was pleasant for a New England man, not long
removed from his native soil, to find these people, who are a century
away from home, still claiming kinship.
At the Big Hockhocking River (197 miles), on a high, semicircular
bottom, is Hockingport, a hamlet with a population of three hundred.
Here, on a still higher bench, a quarter of a mile back from the
river, Lord Dunmore built Fort Gower, one of a chain of posts along
his march against the Northwest Indians (1774). It was from here that
he marched to the Pickaway Plains, on the Scioto (near Circleville,
O.), and concluded that treaty of peace to which Chief Logan refused
his consent. There are some remains yet left of this palisaded
earthwork of a century and a quarter ago, but the greater part has
been obliterated by plowing, and a dwelling occupies a portion of the
site.
It had been very warm, and we had needed an awning as far down as
Hockingport, where we cooled off by lying on the grass in the shade
of the village blacksmith's shop, which is, as well, the ferry-house,
with the bell hung between two tall posts at the top of the bank, its
rope dangling down for public use. The smith-ferryman came out with
his wife--a burly, good-natured couple--and joined us in our lounging,
for it is not every day that river travelers put in at this dreamy,
far-away port. The wife had camped with her husband, when he was boss
of a railway construction gang, and both of them frankly envied us our
trip. So did a neighboring storekeeper, a tall, lean, grave young man,
clean-shaven, coatless and vestless, with a blue-glass stud on his
collarless white shirt. Apparently there was no danger of customers
walking away with his goods, for he left his store-door open to all
comers, not once glancing thitherward in the half-hour he sat with us
on a stick of timber, in which he pensively carved his name.
Life goes easily in Hockingport. Years ago there was some business up
the Big Hocking (short for Big Hockhocking), a stream of a half-dozen
rods' width, but now no steamer ventures up--the railroads do it all;
as for the Ohio--well, the steamers now and then put off a box or bale
for the four shop-keepers, and once in a while a passenger patronizes
the landing. There is still a little country traffic, and formerly
a sawmill was in operation here; you see its ruins down there below.
Hockingport is a type of several rustic hamlets we have seen
to-day; they are often in pairs, one either side of the river, for
companionship's sake.
We are idling, despite the knowledge that on turning every big bend we
are getting farther and farther south, and mid-June on the Lower Ohio
is apt to be sub-tropical. But the sinking sun gives us a
shadowy right bank, and that is most welcome. The current is only
spasmodically good. Every night the river falls from three to six
inches, and there are long stretches of slack-water. The steamers pick
their way carefully; we do not give them as wide a berth as formerly,
for the wakes they turn are no longer savage--but wakes, even when
sent out by stern-wheelers at full speed, now give us little trouble;
it did not take long to learn the knack of "taking" them. Whether
you meet them at right angles, or in the trough, there is the same
delicious sensation of rising and falling on the long swells--there
is no danger, so long as you are outside the line of foaming breakers;
within those, you may ship water, which is not desirable when there
is a cargo. But the boys at the towns sometimes put out in their rude
punts into the very vortex of disturbance, being dashed about in the
white roar at the base of the ponderous paddle wheels, like a Fiji
Islander in his surf-boat. We heard, the other day, of a boatload of
daring youngsters being caught by the wheel, their craft smashed into
kindling-wood, and they themselves all drowned but one.
The hills, to-day, sometimes break sharply off, leaving an eroded,
often vine-festooned palisade some fifty feet in height, at the base
of which is a long, tree-clad slope of debris; then, a narrow, level
terrace from fifty to a hundred yards in width, which drops suddenly
to a rocky beach; this in turn is often lined along the water's edge
with irregularly-shaped boulders, from the size of Pilgrim to fifteen
or twenty feet in height, and worn smooth with the grinding action
of the river. The effect is highly picturesque. We shall have much of
this below.
At the foot of one of these palisades lay a shanty-boat, with nets
sprawled over the roof to dry, and a live-box anchored hard by.
"Hello, the boat!" brought to the window the head of the lone
fisherman, who dreamily peered at us as we announced our wish to
become his customers. A sort of poor-white Neptune, this tall, lean,
lantern-jawed old fellow, with great round, iron-rimmed spectacles
over his fishy eyes, his hair and beard in long, snaky locks, and
clothing in dirty tatters. As he put out in his skiff to reach the
live-box, he continuously spewed tobacco juice about him, and in an
undertone growled garrulously, as though used to soliloquize in his
hermitage, where he lay at outs with the world. He had been in this
spot for two years, he said, and sold fish to the daily Parkersburg
steamer--when there were any fish. But, for six months past, he
"hadn't made enough to keep him in grub," and had now and then to go
up to the city and earn something. For forty years had he followed the
apostles' calling on "this yere Ohio," and the fishing was never so
poor as now--yes, sir! hard times had struck his business, just like
other folks'. He thought the oil wells were tainting the water, and
the fish wouldn't breed--and the iron slag, too, was spoiling the
river, and he knew it. He finally produced for us, out of his box, a
three-pound fish,--white perch, calico bass, and catfish formed his
stock in trade,--but, before handing it over, demanded the requisite
fifteen cents. Evidently he had had dealings with a dishonest world,
this hermit fisher, and had learned a thing or two.
Perfect camping places are not to be found every day. There are so
many things to think of--a good landing place; good height above the
water level, in case of a sudden rise; a dry, shady, level spot for
the tent; plenty of wood, and, if possible, a spring; and not too
close proximity to a house. Occasionally we meet with what we want,
when we want it; but quite as often, ideal camping places, while
abundant half the day, are not to be found at five o'clock, our usual
hour for homeseeking. The Doctor is our agent for this task, for,
being bow oar, he can clamber out most easily. This evening, he ranged
both shores for a considerable distance, with ill success, so that
we are settled on a narrow Ohio sand-beach, in the midst of a sparse
willow copse, only two feet above the river. Dinner was had at the
very water's edge. After a time, a wind-storm arose and flapped the
tent right vigorously, causing us to pin down tightly and weight the
sod-cloth; while, amid distant thundering, every preparation was made
for a speedy embarkation in the event of flood. The bellow of the
frogs all about us, the scream of toads, and the heavy swash of
passing steamers dangerously near our door, will be a sufficient
lullaby to-night.
CHAPTER X.
Cliff-dwellers on Long Bottom--Pomeroy Bend--Letart's Island
and Rapids--Game in the early day--Rainy weather--In a
"cracker" home.
Letart's Island, Tuesday, May 15th.--After we had gone to bed last
night,--we in the tent, the Doctor and Pilgrim under the fly, which
serves as a porch roof,--the heavenly floodgates lifted; the rain,
coming in sheets, beat a fierce tattoo on the tightly-stretched
canvas, and visions of a sudden rise in the fickle river were
uppermost in our dreams. Everything about us was sopping at daybreak;
but the sun rose clear and warm from a bed of eastern clouds, and the
midnight gale had softened to a gentle breeze.
Palisades were frequent to-day. We stopped just below camp, at an
especially picturesque Ohio hamlet,--Long Bottom (207 miles),--where
the dozen or so cottages are built close against the bald rock.
Clambering over great water-worn boulders, at the river's brink, the
Doctor and I made our way up through a dense tangle of willows and
poison ivy and grape-vines, emerging upon the country road which
passes at the foot of this row of modern cliff-dwellings. For the most
part, little gardens, with neat palings, run down from the cottages
to the road. One sprawling log house, fairly embowered in vines, and
overtopped by the palisade rising sheer for thirty feet above its back
door, looked in this setting for all the world like an Alpine chalet,
lacking only stones on the roof to complete the picture. I took a
kodak shot at this, also at a group of tousle-headed children at
the door of a decrepit shanty built entirely within a crevice of the
rock--their Hibernian mother, with one hand holding an apron over
her head, and the other shielding her eyes, shrilly crying to a
neighboring cliff-dweller: "Miss McCarthy! Miss McCarthy! There's
a feller here, a photergraph'n' all the people in the Bottom! Come,
quick!" Then they eagerly pressed around me, Germans and Irish,
big and little, women and children mostly, asking for a view of
the picture, which I gave all in turn by letting them peep into the
ground-glass "finder"--a pretty picture, they said it was, with the
colors all in, and "wonderfully like," though a wee bit small.
Speaking of color, we are daily struck with the brilliant hues in
the workaday dresses of women and children seen along the river. Red
calico predominates, but blues and yellows, and even greens, are seen,
brightly splashing the somber landscape.
After Long Bottom, we enter upon the south-sweeping Pomeroy Bend of
the Ohio, commencing at Murraysville (208 miles) and ending at Pomeroy
(247 miles). It is of itself a series of smaller bends, and, as we
twist about upon our course, the wind strikes us successively on all
quarters; sometimes giving the Doctor a chance to try his sail, which
he raises on the slightest provocation,--but at all times agreeably
ruffling the surface that would otherwise reflect the glowing sun like
a mirror.
The sloping margins of the rich bottoms are now often cultivated
almost to the very edge of the stream, with a line of willow trees
left as a protecting fringe. Farmers doing this take a gambling risk
of a summer rise. Where the margins have been left untouched by the
plow, there is a dense mass of vegetation--sycamores, big of girth and
towering to a hundred feet or more, abound on every hand; the willows
are phenomenally-rapid growers; and in all available space is the
rank, thick-standing growth of an annual locally styled "horse-weed,"
which rears a cane-like stalk full eighteen or twenty feet high--it
has now attained but four or five feet, but the dry stalks of last
year's growth are everywhere about, showing what a formidable barrier
to landing these giant weeds must be in midsummer.
We chose for a camping place Letart's Island (232 miles), on the West
Virginia side, not far below Milwood. From the head, where our tent
is pitched on a sandy knoll thick-grown to willows, a long gravel
spit runs far over toward the Ohio shore. The West Virginia channel is
narrow, slow and shallow; that between us and Ohio has been lessened
by the island to half its usual width, and the current sweeps by at
a six-mile gait, in which the Doctor and I found it difficult to keep
our footing while having our customary evening dip. Our island is two
long, forested humps of sand, connected by a stretch of gravel beach,
giving every evidence of being submerged in times of flood; everywhere
are chaotic heaps of driftwood, many cords in extent; derelict trees
are lodged in the tops of the highest willows and maples--ghostly
giants sprawling in the moonlight; there is an abandon of vegetable
debris, layer after layer laid down in sandy coverlids. Wild grasses,
which flourish on all these flooded lands, here attain enormous size.
Dispensing with our cots for the nonce, we have spread our blankets
over heaps of dried grass pulled from the monster tufts of last year's
growth. The Ohio is capable of raising giant floods; it is still
falling with us, but there are signs at hand, beyond the slight
sprinkle which cooled the air for us at bedtime, of rainy weather
after the long drouth. When the feeders in the Alleghanies begin to
swell, we shall perch high o' nights.
* * * * *
Near Cheshire, O., Wednesday, May 16th.--The fine current at the
island gave us a noble start this morning. The river soon widens, but
Letart's Falls, a mile or two below, continue the movement, and we
went fairly spinning on our way. These so-called falls, rapids
rather, long possessed the imagination of early travelers. Some of
the chroniclers have, while describing them, indulged in flights of
fancy.[A] They are of slight consequence, however, even at this
low stage of water, save to the careless canoeist who has had no
experience in rapid water, well-strewn with sunken boulders. The
scenery of the locality is wild, and somewhat impressive. The Ohio
bank is steep and rugged, abounding in narrow little terraces of red
clay, deeply gullied, and dotted with rough, mean shanties. It all had
a forbidding aspect, when viewed in the blinding sun; but before we
had passed, an intervening cloud cast a deep shadow over the scene,
and, softening the effect, made the picture more pleasing.
Croghan was at Letart (1765), on one of his land-viewing trips for
the Ohio Company, and tells us that he saw a "vast migrating herd" of
buffalo cross the river here. In the beginning of colonization in this
valley, buffalo and elk were to be seen in herds of astonishing size;
traces of their well-beaten paths through the hills, and toward the
salt licks of Kentucky and Illinois, were observable until within
recent years. Gordon, an early traveler down the Ohio (1766), speaks
of "great herds of buffalo, we observed on the beaches of the river
and islands into which they come for air, and coolness in the heat
of the day;" he commenced his raids on them a hundred miles below
Pittsburg. Hutchins (1778) says, "the whole country abounds in Bears,
Elks, Buffaloe, Deer, Turkies, &c."[B] Bears, panthers, wolves,
eagles, and wild turkeys were indeed very plenty at first, but soon
became extinct. The theory is advanced by Dr. Doddridge, in his _Notes
on Virginia_, that hunters' dogs introduced hydrophobia among the
wolves, and this ridded the country of them sooner than they would
naturally have gone; but they were still so numerous in 1817, that the
traveler Palmer heard them nightly, "barking on both banks."
Venomous serpents were also numerous in pioneer days, and stayed
longer. The story is told of a tumulus up toward Moundsville, that
abounded in snakes, particularly rattlers. The settlers thought to dig
them out, but they came to such a mass of human bones that that
plan was abandoned. Then they instituted a blockade, by erecting a
tight-board fence around the mound, and, thus entrapping the reptiles,
extirpated the colony in a few days.
Paroquets were once abundant west of the Alleghanies, up to the
southern shore of the Great Lakes, and great flocks haunted the salt
springs; but to-day they may be found only in the middle Southern
states. There were, in a state of nature, no crows, blackbirds, or
song-birds in this valley; they followed in the wake of the colonist.
The honey bee came with the white man,--or rather, just preceded him.
Rats followed the first settlers, then opossums, and fox squirrels
still later. It is thought, too, that the sand-hill and whooping
cranes, and the great blue herons which we daily see in their stately
flight, are birds of these later days, when the neighborhood of man
has frightened away the enemies which once kept them from thriving
in the valley. Turkey buzzards appear to remain alone of the ancient
birds; the earliest travelers note their presence in great flocks, and
to-day there are few vistas open to us, without from one to dozens of
them wheeling about in mid-air, seeking what they may devour. Public
opinion in the valley is opposed to the wanton killing of these
scavengers, so useful in a climate as warm as this.
Three miles below Letart's Rapids, is the motley settlement of
Antiquity, O., a long row of cabins and cottages nestled at the base
of a high, vine-clad palisade, similar to that which yesterday we
visited at Long Bottom. Some of these cliff-dwellings are picturesque,
some exhibit the prosperity of their owners, but many are squalid. At
the water's edge is that which has given its name to the locality, an
ancient rock, which once bore some curious Indian carving. Hall (1820)
found only one figure remaining, "a man in a sitting posture, making
a pipe;" to-day, even thus much has been largely obliterated by the
elements. But Antiquity itself is not quite dead. There is a ship-yard
here; and a sawmill in active operation, besides the ruins of two
others.
We also passed Racine (240 miles), another Ohio town--a considerable
place, no doubt, although only the tops of the buildings were,
from the river level, to be seen above the high bank; these, and an
enticing view up the wharf-street. Of more immediate interest,
just then, were the heavens, now black and threatening. Putting in
hurriedly to the West Virginia shore, we pitched tent on a shelving
clay beach, shielded by the ever-present willows, and in five minutes
had everything under shelter. With a rumble and bang, and a great
flurry of wind, the thunder-storm broke upon us in full fury. There
had been no time to run a ditch around the tent, so we spread our
cargo atop of the cots. The Boy engineered riverward the streams
of water which flowed in beneath the canvas; W----, ever practical,
caught rain from the dripping fly, and did the family washing, while
the Doctor and I prepared a rather pasty lunch.
An hour later, we bailed out Pilgrim, and once more ventured upon our
way. It is a busy district between Racine and Sheffield (251 miles).
For eleven miles, upon the Ohio bank, there are few breaks between the
towns,--Racine, Syracuse, Minersville, Pomeroy, Coalport, Middleport,
and Sheffield. Coal mines and salt works abound, with other industries
interspersed; and the neighborhood appears highly prosperous. Its
metropolis is Pomeroy, in shape a "shoe-string" town,--much of it not
over two blocks wide, and stretching along for two miles, at the foot
of high palisades. West Virginia is not far behind, in enterprise,
with the salt-work towns of New Haven, Hartford, and Mason
City,--bespeaking, in their names, a Connecticut ancestry.
The afternoon sun gushed out, and the face of Nature was cleanly
beautiful, as, leaving the convolutions of the Pomeroy Bend, we
entered upon that long river-sweep to the south-by-southwest, which
extends from Pomeroy to the Big Sandy, a distance of sixty-eight
miles. A mile or two below Cheshire, O. (256 miles), we put in for
the night on the West Virginia shore. There is a natural pier of rocky
ledge, above that a sloping beach of jagged stone, and then the little
grassy terrace which we have made our home.
Searching for milk and eggs, I walked along a railway track and then
up through a cornfield, to a little log farm-house, whose broad porch
was shingled with "shakes" and shaded by a lusty grape-vine. Fences,
house, and outbuildings had been newly whitewashed, and there was all
about an uncommon air of neatness. A stout little girl of eleven or
twelve, met me at the narrow gate opening through the garden palings.
It may be because a gypsying trip like this roughens one in many
ways,--for man, with long living near to Nature's heart, becomes of
the earth, earthy,--that she at first regarded me with suspicious
eyes, and, with one hand resting gracefully on her hip, parleyed over
the gate, as to what price I was paying in cash, for eggs and milk,
and where I hailed from.
With her wealth of blond hair done up in a saucy knot behind; her
round, honest face; her lips thick, and parted over pearly teeth; her
nose saucily _retrousse_; and her flashing, outspoken blue eyes,
this barefooted child of Nature had a certain air of authority, a
consciousness of power, which made her womanly beyond her years. She
must have seen that I admired her, this little "cracker" queen, in her
clean but tattered calico frock; for her mood soon melted, and
with much grace she ushered me within the house. Calling Sam, an
eight-year-old, to "keep the gen'lem'n comp'ny," she prettily excused
herself, and scampered off up the hillside in search of the cows.
A barefooted, loose-jointed, gaunt, sandy-haired, freckled, open-eyed
youngster is Sam. He came lounging into the room, and, taking my
hat, hung it on a peg above the fireplace; then, dropping into a big
rocking-chair, with his muddy legs hanging over an arm, at once, with
a curious, old-fashioned air, began "keeping company" by telling me of
the new litter of pigs, with as little diffidence as though I were an
old neighbor who had dropped in on the way to the cross-roads. "And
thet thar new Shanghai rooster, mister, ain't he a beauty? He cost a
dollar, he did--a dollar in silver, sir!"
There was no difficulty in drawing Sam out. He is frankness itself.
What was he going to make of himself? Well, he "'lowed" he wanted to
be either a locomotive engineer or a steamboat captain--hadn't made
up his mind which. "But whatever a boy wants to be, he will be!" said
Sam, with the decided tone of a man of the world, who had seen things.
I asked Sam what the attractions were in the life of an engine driver.
He "'lowed" they went so fast through the world, and saw so many
different people; and in their lifetime served on different roads,
maybe, and surely they must meet with some excitement. And in that of
a steamboat captain? "Oh! now yew're talk'n', mister! A right smart
business, thet! A boss'n' o' people 'round, a seein' o' th' world,
and noth'n' 't all to do! Now, that's right smart, I take it!" It was
plain where his heart lay. He saw the steamers pass the farm daily,
and once he had watched one unload at Point Pleasant--well, that was
the life for him! Sam will have to be up and doing, if he is to be the
monarch of a stern-wheeler on the Ohio; but many another "cracker" boy
has attained this exalted station, and Sam is of the sort to win his
way.
Soon the kine came lowing into the yard, and my piquant young friend
who had met me at the gate stood in the doorway talking with us both,
while their brother Charley, an awkward, self-conscious lad of ten,
took my pail and milked into it the required two quarts. It is
a large, square room, where I was so agreeably entertained. The
well-chinked logs are scrupulously whitewashed; the parental bed, with
gay pillow shams, bought from a peddler, occupies one corner; a huge
brick fireplace opens black and yawning, into the base of a great
cobblestone chimney reared against the house without, after the
fashion of the country; on pegs about, hang the best clothes of the
family; while a sewing-machine, a deal table, a cheap little mirror
as big as my palm, a few unframed chromos, and a gaudy "Family Record"
chart hung in an old looking-glass frame,--with appropriate holes for
tintypes of father, mother and children,--complete the furnishings of
the apartment, which is parlor, sitting-room, dining-room, and bedroom
all in one.
My little queen was evidently proud of her throne-room, and noted with
satisfaction my interest in the Family Record. When I had paid her
for butter and eggs, at retail rates, she threw in an extra egg, and,
despite my protests, would have Charley take the pail out to the cow,
"for an extra squirt or two, for good measure!"
I was bidding them all good-bye, and the queen was pressing me to come
again in the morning "fer more stuff, ef ye 'lowed yew wanted any,"
when the mother of the little brood appeared from over the fields,
where she had been to carry water to her lord. A fair, intelligent,
rather fine-looking woman, but barefooted like the rest; from her neck
behind, dangled a red sunbonnet, and a sunny-haired child of five was
in her arms--"sort o' weak in her lungs, poor thing!" she sadly said,
as I snapped my fingers at the smiling tot. I tarried a moment with
the good mother, as, sitting upon the porch, she serenely smiled upon
her children, whose eyes were now lit with responsive love; and I
wondered if there were not some romance hidden here, whereby a dash of
gentler blood had through this sweet-tempered woman been infused into
the coarse clay of the bottom.
[Footnote A: Notably, Ashe's _Travels_; but Palmer, while saying that
"they are the only obstruction to the navigation of the Ohio, except
the rapids at Louisville," declares them to be of slight difficulty,
and, referring to Ashe's account, says, "Like great part of his book,
it is all romance."]
[Footnote B: The last buffalo on record, in the Upper Ohio region, was
killed in the Great Kanawha Valley, a dozen miles from Charleston,
W. Va., in 1815. Five years later, in the same vicinity, was killed
probably the last elk seen east of the Ohio.]
CHAPTER XI.
Battle of Point Pleasant--The story of
Gallipolis--Rosebud--Huntington--The genesis of a
house-boater.
Near Glenwood, W. Va., Thursday, May 17th.--By eight o'clock this
morning we were in Point Pleasant, W. Va., at the mouth of the Great
Kanawha River (263 miles). Céloron was here, the eighteenth of August,
1749, and on the east bank of the river, the site of the present
village, buried at the foot of an elm one of his leaden plates
asserting the claim of France to the Ohio basin. Ninety-seven years
later, a boy unearthed this interesting but futile proclamation, and
it rests to-day in the museum of the Virginia Historical Society.
The Great Kanawha Valley long had a romantic interest for Englishmen
concerned in Western lands. It was in the grant to the old Ohio
Company; but that corporation, handicapped in many ways, was
practically dead by the time of Lord Dunmore's war. It had many
rivals, more or less ephemeral, among them the scheme of George Mercer
(1773) to have the territory between the Alleghanies and the Ohio--the
West Virginia of to-day--erected into the "Province of Vandalia,"
with himself as governor, and his capital at the mouth of the Great
Kanawha. Washington owned a ten-thousand-acre tract on both sides
of the river, commencing a short distance above the mouth, which
he surveyed in person, in October, 1770; and in 1773 we find him
advertising to sell or lease it; among the inducements he offered was,
"the scheme for establishing a new government on the Ohio," and the
contiguity of his lands "to the seat of government, which, it is more
than probable, will be fixed at the mouth of the Great Kanawha."
Had not the Revolution broken out, and nipped this and many another
budding plan for Western colonization, there is little doubt that
what we call West Virginia would have been established as a state, a
century earlier than it was.[A]
A few days ago we were at Mingo Bottom, where lived Chief Logan, whose
family were treacherously slaughtered by border ruffians (1774).
The Mingos, ablaze with the fire of vengeance, carried the war-pipe
through the neighboring villages; runners were sent in every direction
to rouse the tribes; tomahawks were unearthed, war-posts were planted;
messages of defiance sent to the Virginians; and in a few days Lord
Dunmore's war was in full swing, from Cumberland Gap to Fort Pitt,
from the Alleghanies to the Wabash.
His lordship, then governor of Virginia, was full of energy, and
proved himself a competent military manager. The settlers were
organized; the rude log forts were garrisoned; forays were made
against the Indian villages as far away as Muskingum, and an army of
nearly three thousand backwoodsmen, armed with smooth-bores and clad
in fringed buckskin hunting-shirts, was put in the field.
One division of this army, eleven hundred strong, under Gen. Andrew
Lewis, descended the Great Kanawha River, and on Point Pleasant met
Cornstalk, a famous Shawnee chief, who, while at first peaceful, had
by the Logan tragedy been made a fierce enemy of the whites, and was
now the leader of a thousand picked warriors, gathered from all parts
of the Northwest. On the 10th of October, from dawn until dusk, was
here waged in a gloomy forest one of the most bloody and
stubborn hand-to-hand battles ever fought between Indians and
whites--especially notable, too, because for the first time the rivals
were about equal in number. The combatants stood behind trees,
in Indian fashion, and it is hard to say who displayed the best
generalship, Cornstalk or Lewis.[B] When the pall of night covered the
hideous contest, the whites had lost one-fifth of their number, while
the savages had sustained but half as many casualties. Cornstalk's
followers had had enough, however, and withdrew before daylight,
leaving the field to the Americans.
A few days later, General Lewis joined Lord Dunmore--who headed the
other wing of the army, which had proceeded by the way of Forts Pitt
and Gower--on the Pickaway plains, in Ohio; and there a treaty was
made with the Indians, who assented to every proposition made them.
They surrendered all claim to lands south of the Ohio River, returned
their white prisoners and stolen horses, and gave hostages for future
good behavior.
Here at Point Pleasant, a year later, Fort Randolph was built, and
garrisoned by a hundred men; for, despite the treaty, the Indians were
still troublesome. For a long time, Pittsburg, Redstone, and Randolph
were the only garrisoned forts on the frontier. The Point Pleasant of
to-day is a dull, sleepy town of twenty-five hundred inhabitants, with
that unkempt air and preponderance of lounging negroes, so common to
small Southern communities. The bottom is rolling, fringed with
large hills, and on the Ohio side drops suddenly for fifty feet to
a shelving beach of gravel and clay. Crooked Creek, in whose narrow,
winding valley some of the severest fighting was had, empties into
the Kanawha a half-mile up the stream, at the back of the town. It was
painful to meet several men of intelligence, who had long been engaged
in trade here, to whom the Battle of Point Pleasant was a shadowy
event, whose date they could not fix, nor whose importance understand;
it seemed to be little more a part of their lives, than an obscure
contest between Matabeles and whites, in far-off Africa. It is time
that our Western and Southern folk were awakened to an appreciation of
the fact that they have a history at their doors, quite as significant
in the annals of civilization as that which induces pilgrimages to
Ticonderoga and Bunker Hill.
Four miles below, Pilgrim was beached for a time at Gallipolis, O.
(267 miles), which has a story all its own. The district belonged,
a century ago, to the Scioto Company, an offshoot of the Marietta
enterprise. Joel Barlow, the "poet of the Revolution," was sent to
Paris (May, 1788) as agent for the sale of lands. As the result of his
personal popularity there, and his flaming immigration circulars and
maps, he disposed of a hundred thousand acres; to settle on which, six
hundred French emigrants sailed for America, in February, 1790.
They were peculiarly unsuited for colonization, even under the most
favorable conditions--being in the main physicians, jewelers and other
artisans, a few mechanics, and noblemen's servants, while many were
without trade or profession.
Upon arrival in Alexandria, Va., they found that their deeds
were valueless, the land never having been paid for by the Scioto
speculators; moreover, the tract was filled with hostile Indians.
However, five hundred of them pushed on to the region, by way of
Redstone, and reached here by flatboat, in a destitute condition.
The Marietta neighbors were as kind as circumstances would allow,
and cabins were built for them on what is now the Public Square of
Gallipolis. But they were ignorant of the first principles of forestry
or gardening; the initial winter was exceptionally severe, Indian
forays sapped the life of the colony, yellow fever decimated the
survivors; and, altogether, the little settlement suffered a series of
disasters almost unparalleled in the story of American colonization.
Although finally reimbursed by Congress with a special land grant, the
emigrants gradually died off, until now, so at least we were assured,
but three families of descendants of the original Gauls are now living
here. It was the American element, aided by sturdy Germans, who in
time took hold of the decayed French settlement, and built up the
prosperous little town of six thousand inhabitants which we find
to-day. It is a conservative town, with little perceptible increase
in population; but there are many fine brick blocks, the stores
have large stocks attractively displayed, and there is in general a
comfortable tone about the place, which pleases a stranger. The Public
Square, where the first Gauls had their little forted town, appears to
occupy the space of three or four city blocks; there is the customary
band-stand in the center, and seats plentifully provided along the
graveled walks which divide neat plots of grass. Over the riverward
entrance to the square, is an arch of gas-pipe, perforated for
illumination, and bearing the dates, "1790-1890,"--a relic, this, of
the centennial which Gallipolis celebrated in the last-named year.
It was with some difficulty that we found a camping-place, this
evening. For several miles, the approaches were nearly knee-deep in
mud for a dozen feet back from the water's edge, or else the banks
were too steep, or the farmers had cultivated so closely to the brink
as to leave us no room for the tent. In one gruesome spot on the Ohio
bank, where a projecting log fortunately served as a pier, the Doctor
landed for a prospecting tour; while I ascended a zigzag path, through
steep and rugged land, to a nest of squalid cabins perched by a shabby
hillside road. A vicious dog came down to meet me half-way, and might
have succeeded in carrying off a portion of my clothing had not his
owner whistled him back.
A queer, dingy, human wasp-nest, this dirty little shanty hamlet of
Rosebud. Pigs and children wallowed in comradeship, and as every cabin
on the precipitous slope necessarily has a basement, this is used as
the common barn for chickens, goats, pigs, and cow. It was pleasant to
find that there was no sweet milk to be had in Rosebud, for it is kept
in open pans, in these fetid rooms, and soon sours--and the cows had
not yet come down from the hills. Water, too, was at a premium. There
was none to be had, save what had fallen from the clouds, and been
stored in a foul cistern, which seemed common property. I drew a
pailful of it, not to displease the disheveled group which surrounded
me, full of questions; but on the first turning in the lane, emptied
the vessel upon the back of a pig, which was darting by with murderous
squeal.
The long twilight was well nigh spent, when, on the Ohio side a mile
or two above Glenwood, W. Va. (287 miles), we came upon a wide,
level beach of gravel, below a sloping, willowed terrace, above which
sharply rose the "second bottom." Ascending an angling farm roadway,
while the others pitched camp, I walked over the undulating bottom
to the nearest of a group of small, neat farmhouses, and applied
for milk. While a buxom maid went out and milked a Jersey, that had
chanced to come home ahead of her fellows, I sat on the rear porch
gossiping with the farm-wife--a Pennsylvania-Dutch dame of ample
proportions, attired in light-blue calico, and with huge spectacles
over her broad, flat nose. She and her "man" own a hundred and fifty
acres on the bottom, with three cows and other stock in proportion,
and sell butter to those neighbors who have no cows, and to houseboat
people. As for these latter, though they were her customers, she
had none too good an opinion of them; they pretended to fish, but in
reality only picked up a living from the farmers; nevertheless, she
did know of some "weakly, delicate people" who had taken to boat life
for economy's sake, and because an invalid could at least fish, and
his family help him at it.
* * * * *
Near Huntington, W. Va., Friday, May 18th.--Backed by ravine-grooved
hills, and edged at the waterside with great picturesque boulders,
planed and polished by the ever-rushing river, the little bottom farms
along our path to-day are pretty bits. But the houses are the
reverse of this, having much the aspect of slave-cabins of the olden
time--small, one-story, log and frame shanties, roof and gables
shingled with "shakes," and little vegetable gardens inclosed by
palings. The majority of these small farmers--whose tracts seldom
exceed a hundred acres--rent their land, rather than own it. The plan
seems to be half-and-half as to crops, with a rental fee for house and
pasturage. One man, having a hundred-and-twenty acres, told me he
paid three dollars a month for his house, and for pasturage a dollar a
month per head.
We were in several of the small towns to-day. At Millersport, O.
(293 miles), while W---- and the Doctor were up town, the Boy and I
remained at the wharf-boat to talk with the owner. The wharf-boat is
a conspicuous object at every landing of importance, being a covered
barge used as a storehouse for coming and going steamboat freight.
It is a private enterprise, for public convenience, with certain
monopolistic privileges at the incorporated towns. This Millersport
boat cost twelve hundred dollars; the proprietor charges twenty per
cent of each freight-bill, for handling and storing goods, a fee of
twenty-five cents for each steamer that lands, and certain special
fees for live stock. Athalia, Haskellville and Guyandotte were other
representative towns. Stave-making appears to be the chief industry,
and, as timber is getting scarce, the communities show signs of decay.
We had been told, above, that Huntington, W. Va. (306 miles), was "a
right smart chunk of a town." And it is. There are sixteen thousand
people here, in a finely-built city spread over a broad, flat plain.
Brick and stone business buildings abound; the broad streets are
paved with brick, and an electric-car line runs out along the bottom,
through the suburb of Ceredo, W. Va., to Catlettsburg, Ky., nine miles
away. Huntington is the center of a large group of riverside towns
supported by iron-making and other industries--Guyandotte and Ceredo,
in West Virginia; Catlettsburg, just over the border in Kentucky; and
Proctorville, Broderickville, Frampton, Burlington, and South Point,
on the opposite shore.
We are camping to-night in the dense willow grove which lines the West
Virginia beach from Huntington to the Big Sandy. Above us, on the wide
terrace, are fields and orchards, beyond which we occasionally hear
the gong of electric cars. A public path runs by the tent, leading
from the lower settlements into Huntington. Among our visitors have
been two houseboat men, whose craft is moored a quarter of a mile
below. One of them is tall, thick-set, forty, with a round, florid
face, and huge mustaches,--evidently a jolly fellow at his best,
despite a certain dubious, piratical air; a jaunty, narrow-brimmed
straw hat is perched over one ear, to add to the general effect;
and between his teeth a corn-cob pipe. His younger companion is
medium-sized, slim, and loose-jointed, with a baggy gait, his cap
thrown over his head, with the visor in the rear--a rustic clown, not
yet outgrown his freckles. But three weeks from the parental farm in
Putnam County, Ky., the world is as yet a romance to him. The
fellow is interesting, because in him can be seen the genesis of a
considerable element of the houseboat fraternity. I wonder how long it
will be before his partner has him broken in as a river-pirate of the
first water.
[Footnote A: Washington was much interested in a plan to connect, by a
canal, the James and Great Kanawha Rivers, separated at their sources
by a portage of but a few miles in length. The distance from Point
Pleasant to Richmond is 485 miles. In 1785, Virginia incorporated the
James River Company, of which Washington was the first president. The
project hung fire, because of "party spirit and sectional jealousies,"
until 1832, when a new company was incorporated, under which the James
was improved (1836-53), but the Kanawha was untouched. In 1874, United
States engineers presented a plan calling for an expenditure of sixty
millions, but there the matter rests. The Kanawha is navigable by
large steamers for sixty miles, up to the falls at Charleston, and
beyond almost to its source, by light craft.]
[Footnote B: Hall, in _Romance of Western History_ (1820), says that
when Washington was tendered command of the Revolutionary army, he
replied that it should rather be given to Gen. Andrew Lewis, of whose
military abilities he had a high opinion. Lewis was a captain in
the Little Meadows affair (1752), and a companion of Washington in
Braddock's defeat (1755).]
CHAPTER XII.
In a fog--The Big Sandy--Rainy weather--Operatic gypsies--An
ancient tavern.
Ironton, O., Saturday, May 19th.--When we turned in, last night, it
was refreshingly cool. Heavy clouds were scurrying across the face
of the moon. By midnight, a copious rain was falling, wind-gusts were
flapping our roof, and a sudden drop in temperature rendered sadly
inadequate all the clothing we could muster into service. We slept
late, in consequence, and, after rigging a wind-break with the rubber
blankets, during breakfast huddled around the stove which had been
brought in to replace Pilgrim under the fly. When, at half-past nine,
we pushed off, our houseboat neighbors thrust their heads from the
window and waved us farewell.
A dense fog hung like a cloud over land and river. There was a stiff
north-east wind, which we avoided by seeking the Ohio shore, where
the high hills formed a break; there too, the current was swift, and
carried us down right merrily. Shattered by the wind, great banks of
fog rolled up stream, sometimes enveloping us so as to narrow our
view to a radius of a dozen rods,--again, through the rifts, giving
us momentary glimpses on the right, of rich green hills, towering dark
and steep above us, iridescent with browns, and grays, and many shades
of green; of whitewashed cabins, single or in groups, standing out
with startling distinctness from sombre backgrounds; of houseboats,
many-hued, moored to willowed banks or bolstered high upon shaly
beaches; of the opposite bottom, with its corrugated cliff of clay;
and, now and then, a slowly-puffing steamboat cautiously feeling its
way through the chilling gloom--a monster to be avoided by little
Pilgrim and her crew, for the possibility of being run down in a fog
is not pleasant to contemplate. On board one of these steamers was a
sorry company--apparently a Sunday-school excursion. Children in gala
dress huddled in swarms on the lee of the great smoke-stacks, and in
imagination we heard their teeth chatter as they glided by us and in
another moment were engulfed in the mist.
We catch sight for a moment, through a cloud crevasse, of Ceredo, the
last town in West Virginia--a small saw-milling community stuck upon
the edge of the clay cliff, with the broad level bottom stretching out
behind like a prairie. A giant railway bridge here spans the Ohio--a
weird, impressive thing, as we sweep under it in the swirling current,
and crane our necks to see the great stone piers lose themselves in
the cloud. But the Big Sandy River (315 miles), which divides West
Virginia and Kentucky, was wholly lost to view. In an opening a few
moments later, however, we had a glimpse of the dark line of her
valley, below which the hills again descend to the Ohio's bank.
Catlettsburg, the first Kentucky town, is at the junction, and extends
along the foot of the ridge for a mile or two, apparently not over
two blocks wide, with a few outlying shanties on the shoulders of the
uplands. Washington was surveying here, on the Big Sandy, in 1770, and
entered for one John Fry 2,084 acres round the site of Louisa, a dozen
miles up the river; this was the first survey made in Kentucky--but
a few months later than Boone's first advent as a hunter on the
"dark and bloody ground," and five years before the first permanent
settlement in the State. Washington deserves to be remembered as a
Kentucky pioneer.
We have not only steamers to avoid,--they appear to be unusually
numerous about here,--but snags as well. With care, the whereabouts of
a steamer can be distinguished as it steals upon us, from the superior
whiteness of its column of "exhaust," penetrating the bank of dark
gray fog; and occasionally the echoes are awakened by the burly roar
of its whistle, which, in times like this, acts as a fog-horn. But the
snag is an insidious enemy, not revealing itself until we are within
a rod or two, and then there is a quick cry of warning from the
stern sheets--"Hard a-port!" or "Starboard, quick!" and only a strong
side-pull, aided by W----'s paddle, sends us free from the jagged,
branching mass which might readily have swamped poor Pilgrim had she
taken it at full tilt.
At Ashland, Ky. (320 miles), we stopped for supplies. There are six
thousand inhabitants here, with some good buildings and a fine, broad,
stone wharf, but it is rather a dingy place. The steamer "Bonanza" had
just landed. On the double row of flaggings leading up to the summit
of the bank, were two ant-like processions of Kentucky folk--one,
leisurely climbing townward with their bags and bundles, the other
hurrying down with theirs to the boat, which was ringing its bell,
blowing off steam, and in other ways creating an uproar which seemed
to turn the heads of the negro roustabouts and draymen, who bustled
around with a great chatter and much false motion. The railway may be
doing the bulk of the business, but it does it unostentatiously; the
steamboat makes far more disturbance in the world, and is a finer
spectacle. Dozens of boys are lounging at the wharf foot, watching the
lively scene with fascinated eyes, probably every one of them stoutly
possessed of an ambition akin to that of my young friend in the
Cheshire Bottom.
A rain-storm broke the fog--a cold, raw, miserable rain. No clothing
we could don appeared to suffice against the chill; and so at last we
pitched camp upon the Ohio shore, three miles above the Ironton wharf
(325 miles). It is a muddy, dreary nest up here, among the dripping
willows. Just behind us on the slope, is the inclined track of the
Norfolk & Western railway-transfer, down which trains are slid to
a huge slip, and thence ferried over the river into Kentucky; above
that, on a narrow terrace, is an ordinary railway line; and still
higher, up a slippery clay bank, lies the cottage-strewn bottom which
stretches on into Ironton (13,000 inhabitants).
We were a sorry-looking party, at lunch this noon, hovering over the
smoking stove which was set in the tent door, with a wind-screen in
front, and moist bedding hung all about in the vain hope of drying it
in the feeble heat. And sorrier still, through the long afternoon, as,
each encased in a sleeping-bag, we sat upon our cots circling around
the stove, W---- reading to us between chattering teeth from Barrie's
_When a Man's Single_. 'Tis good Scottish weather we're having; but
somehow our thoughts could not rest on Thrums, and we were, for the
nonce, a wee bit miserable.
Dinner degenerated into a smoky bite, and then at dusk there was a
council of war. The air hangs thick with moisture, our possessions are
in various stages from damp to sopping wet, and efforts at drying over
the little stove are futile under such conditions. It was demonstrated
that there was not bed-clothing enough, in such an emergency as this;
indeed, an inspection of that which was merely damp, revealed the fact
that but one person could be made comfortable to-night. Our bachelor
Doctor volunteered to be that one. So we bade him God-speed, and
with toilet bag in hand I led my little family up a tortuous path, so
slippery in the rain that we were obliged in our muddy climb to cling
to grass-clumps and bushes. And thus, wet and bedraggled, did we sally
forth upon the Ironton Bottom, seeking shelter for the night.
Fortunately we had not far to seek. A kindly family took us in,
despite our gruesome aspect and our unlikely story--for what manner
of folk are we, that go trapesing about in a skiff, in such weather
as this, coming from nobody knows where and camping o' nights in the
muddy river bottoms? Instead of sending us on, in the drenching rain,
to a hotel, three miles down the road, or offering us a ticket on the
Associated Charities, these blessed people open their hearts and their
beds to us, without question, and what more can weary pilgrims pray
for?
* * * * *
Sciotoville, O., Sunday, May 20th.--After breakfast, and settling our
modest score, we rejoined the Doctor, and at ten o'clock pulled out
again; being bidden good-bye at the landing, by the children of our
hostess, who had sent us by them a bottle of fresh milk as a parting
gift.
It had rained almost continuously, throughout the night. To-day we
have a dark gray sky, with fickle winds. A charming color study, all
along our path; the reds and grays and yellows of the high clay-banks
which edge the reciprocating bottoms, the browns and yellows of
hillside fields, the deep greens of forest verdure, the vivid white
of bankside cabins, and, in the background of each new vista, bold
headlands veiled in blue. W---- and the Boy are in the stern sheets,
wrapped in blankets, for there is a smart chill in the air, and we at
the oars pull lively for warmth. In our twisting course, sometimes
we have a favoring breeze, and the Doctor rears the sail; but it is a
brief delight, for the next turn brings the wind in our teeth, and we
set to the blades with renewed energy. In the main, we make good time.
The sugar-loaf hills, with their castellated escarpments, go marching
by with stately sweep.
Greenup Court House (334 miles) is a bright little Kentucky
county-seat, well-built at the feet of thickly-forested uplands. At
the lower end of the village, the Little Sandy enters through a wooded
dale, which near the mouth opens into a broad meadow. Not many miles
below, is a high sloping beach, picturesquely bestrewn with gigantic
boulders which have in ages past rolled down from the hill-tops above.
Here, among the rocks, we again set up a rude screen from the still
piercing wind; and, each wrapped in a gay blanket, lunch as operatic
gypsies might, in a romantic glen, enjoying mightily our steaming
chocolate, and the warmth of our friendly stove--for dessert, taking
a merry scamper for flowers, over the ragged ascent from whence the
boulders came. Everywhere about is the trumpet creeper, but not yet
in bloom. The Indian turnip is in blossom here, and so the smaller
Solomon's seal, yellow spikes of toad-flax, blue and pink phlox,
glossy May apple; high up on the hillside, the fire pink and
wintergreen; and, down by the sandy shore, great beds of blue wild
lupin, and occasionally stately spikes of the familiar moth mullein.
With the temperature falling rapidly, and a drizzling rain taking the
starch out of our enthusiasm, we early sought a camping ground. For
miles along here, springs ooze from the base of the high clay bank
walling in the wide and rocky Ohio beach, and dry spots are few and
far between. We found one, however, a half mile above Little Scioto
River (346 miles),[A] with drift-wood enough to furnish us for years,
and the beach thick-strewn with fossils of a considerable variety of
small bivalves, which latter greatly delighted the Doctor and the Boy,
who have brought enough specimens to the tent door to stock a college
museum.
Dinner over, the crew hauled Pilgrim under cover, and within prepared
for her sailing-master a cosy bed, with the entire ship's stock of
sleeping-bags and blankets. W----, the Boy, and I then started off
to find quarters in Sciotoville (1,000 inhabitants), which lies just
below the river's mouth, here a dozen rods wide. Scrambling up the
slimy bank, through a maze of thorn trees, brambles, and sycamore
scrubs, we gained the fertile bottom above, all luscious with tall
grasses bespangled with wild red roses and the showy pentstemon. The
country road leading into the village is some distance inland, but at
last we found it just beyond a patch of Indian corn waist high, and
followed it, through a covered bridge, and down to a little hotel at
the lower end of town.
A quaint, old-fashioned house, the Sciotoville tavern, with an inner
gallery looking out into a small garden of peaches, apples, pears,
plums, and grapes--a famous grape country this, by the way. In our
room, opening from the gallery, is an antique high-post bedstead;
everywhere about are similar relics of an early day. In keeping
with the air of serene old age, which pervades the hostelry, is the
white-haired landlady herself. In well-starched apron, white cap, and
gold-rimmed glasses, she benignly sits rocking by the office stove,
her feet on the fender, reading Wallace's _Prince of India_; and
looking, for all the world, as if she had just stepped out of some old
portrait of--well, of a tavern-keeping Martha Washington.
[Footnote A: Two miles up the Little Scioto, Pine Creek enters.
Perhaps a mile and a half up this creek was, in 1771, a Mingo town
called Horse Head Bottom, which cuts some figure in border history as
a nest of Indian marauders.]
CHAPTER XIII.
The Scioto, and the Shawanese--A night at
Rome--Limestone--Keels, flats, and boatmen of the olden time.
Rome, O., Monday, May 21st.--At intervals through the night, rain
fell, and the temperature was but 46° at sunrise. However, by the time
we were afloat, the sun was fitfully gleaming through masses of gray
cloud, for a time giving promise of a warmer day. Dark shadows rested
on the romantic ravines, and on the deep hollows of the hills; but
elsewhere over this gentle landscape of wooded amphitheatres, broad
green meadows, rocky escarpments, and many-colored fields, light and
shade gayly chased each other. Never were the vistas of the widening
river more beautiful than to-day.
There are saw-mill and fire-brick industries in the little towns,
which would be shabby enough in the full glare of day. But they
are all glorified in this changing light, which brings out the rich
yellows and reds in sharp relief against the gloomy background of the
hills, and mellows into loveliness the soft grays of unpainted wood.
At the mouth of the Scioto (354 miles), is Portsmouth, O. (15,000
inhabitants), a well-built, substantial town, with good shops. It
lies on a hill-backed terrace some forty feet above the level of the
neighboring bottoms, which give evidence of being victims of the high
floods periodically covering the low lands about the junction of the
rivers. Just across the Scioto is Alexandria, and on the Kentucky side
of the Ohio can be seen the white hamlet of Springville, at the feet
of the dentated hills which here closely approach the river.
The country about the mouth of the Scioto has long figured in Western
annals. Being a favorite rendezvous for the Shawanese, it naturally
became a resort for French and English fur-traders. The principal
part of the first Shawanese village--Shannoah Town, in the old
journals--was below the Scioto's mouth, on the site of Alexandria;
it was the chief town of this considerable tribe, and here Gist
was warned back, when in March, 1751, he ventured thus far while
inspecting lands for the Ohio Company. Two years later, there was a
great--perhaps an unprecedented--flood in the Ohio, the water rising
fifty feet above the ordinary level, and destroying the larger part of
the Shawanese village. Some of the Indians moved to the Little Miami,
and others up the Scioto, where they built, successively, Old and New
Chillicothe; but the majority remained, and rebuilt their town on
the higher land north of the Scioto, where Portsmouth now stands. An
outlying band had had, from before Gist's day, a small town across the
Ohio, the site of Springville; and it was here that George Croghan had
his stone trading house, which was doubtless, after the manner of the
times, a frontier fortress. In the French and Indian war (1758), the
Shawanese, tiring of continual conflict, withdrew from their Ohio
River settlements to Old (or Upper) Chillicothe, and thus closed the
once important fur-trade at the mouth of the Scioto. It was while
the Indian town at Portsmouth was still new (1755), that a party of
Shawanese brought here a Mrs. Mary Inglis, whom they had captured
while upon a scalping foray into Southwestern Virginia. The story of
the remarkable escape of this woman, at Big Bone Lick, of her long and
terrible flight through the wilderness along the southern bank of the
Ohio and up the Great Kanawha Valley, and her final return to home and
kindred, who viewed her as one delivered from the grave, is one of the
most thrilling in Western history.[A]
Although the Shawanese had removed from their villages on the Ohio,
they still lived in new towns in the north, within easy striking
distance of the great river; and, until the close of the eighteenth
century, were a continual source of alarm to those whose business
led them to follow this otherwise inviting highway to the continental
interior. Flatboats bearing traders, immigrants, and travelers were
frequently waylaid by the savages, who exhausted a fertile ingenuity
in luring their victims to an ambuscade ashore; and, when not
successful in this, would in narrow channels, or when the current
swept the craft near land, subject the voyagers to a fierce fusilade
of bullets, against which even stout plank barricades proved of small
avail.
Vanceburgh, Ky. (375 miles), is a little town at the bottom of a
pretty amphitheatre of hills. There was a floating photographer there,
as we passed, with a gang-plank run out to the shore, and framed
specimens of his work hung along the town side of his ample barge.
Men with teams were getting wagon-loads of sand from the beach,
for building purposes. And, a mile or two down, a floating saw and
planing-mill--the "Clipper," which we had seen before, up river--was
busied upon logs which were being rolled down the beach from the bank
above. There are several such mills upon the river, all seemingly
occupied with "tramp work," for there is a deal of logging carried on,
in a small and careful way, by farmers living on these wooded hills.
Vanceburgh was for the time bathed in sunlight; but, as we continued
on our way, a heavy rain-cloud came creeping up over the dark Ohio
hills, and, descending, cut off our view, at last lustily pelting us
as we sat encased in rubber. We had been in our ponchos most of the
day, as much for warmth as for shelter; for there was an all-pervading
chill, which the fickle sun, breaking its early promise, had failed to
dissipate. Thus, amid showers alternating with sunbeams, we proceeded
unto Rome (381 miles). An Ohio village, this Rome, and so fallen from
its once proud estate that its postoffice no longer bears the name--it
is simply "Stout's," if, in these degenerate days, you would send a
letter hither.
It was smartly raining, when we put in on the stony beach above Rome.
The tent went up in a hurry, and under it the cargo; but by the time
all was housed the sun gushed out again, and, stretching a line, we
soon had our bedding hung to dry. It is a charming situation; in
this melting atmosphere, we have perhaps the most striking effects of
cloud, hill, bottom, islands, and glancing river, which have yet been
vouchsafed us.
The Romans, like most rural folk along the river below Wheeling,
chiefly drink cistern water. Earlier in our pilgrimage, we stoutly
declined to patronize these rain-water reservoirs, and I would daily
go far afield in search of a well; but lately, necessity has driven
us to accept the cistern, and often we find it even preferable to the
well, on those rare occasions when the latter can be found at villages
or farm-houses. But there are cisterns and cisterns--foul holes like
that at Rosebud, others that are neatness itself, with all manner of
grades between. As for river water, ever yellow with clay, and thick
as to motes, much of it is used in the country parts. This morning, a
bevy of negroes came down the bank from a Kentucky field; and each in
turn, creeping out on a drift log,--for the ground is usually muddy a
few feet up from the water's edge,--lay flat on his stomach and drank
greedily from the roily mess.
At dusk, there was again a damp chill, and for the third time we left
the Doctor to keep bachelor's hall upon the beach. It was raining
smartly by the time the tavern was reached, nearly a mile down
the bank. Our advent caused a rare scurrying to and fro, for two
commercial "drummers," who were to depart by the early morning boat,
occupied the "reg'lar spar' room," the landlady informed us, and a bit
of a cubby-hole off the back stairs had to be arranged for us. Guests
are rarities, at the hostelry in Rome.
* * * * *
Near Ripley, O., Tuesday, May 22nd.--There was an inch of snow last
night, on the hills about, and a morning Cincinnati paper records a
heavy fall in the Pennsylvania mountains. The storm is general, and
the river rose two feet over night. When we set off, in mid-morning,
it was raining heavily; but in less than an hour the clouds broke, and
the rest of the day has been an alternation of chilling showers and
bursts of warm sunshine, with the same succession, of alluring vistas,
over which play broad bands of changing light and shade, and overhead
the storm clouds torn and tossed in the upper currents.
Our landlord at Rome asserted at breakfast that Kentucky was fifty
years behind the Ohio side, in improvements of every sort. Thus far,
we have not ourselves noticed differences of that degree. Doubtless
before the late civil war,--all the ante-bellum travelers agree
in this,--when the blight of slavery was resting on Virginia and
Kentucky, the south shore of the Ohio was as another country; but
to-day, so far as we can ascertain from a surface view, the little
villages on either side are equally dingy and woe-begone, and large
Southern towns like Wheeling, Parkersburg, Point Pleasant, and
Maysville are very nearly an offset to Steubenville, Marietta,
Pomeroy, Ironton, and Portsmouth. North-shore towns of wealth and
prominence are more numerous than on the Dixie bank, and are as a
rule larger and somewhat better kept, with the negro element less
conspicuous; but to say that the difference is anywhere near as marked
as the landlord averred, or as my own previous reading on the subject
led me to expect, is grossly to exaggerate.
After leaving Manchester, O. (394 miles), with a beautiful island at
its door, there are spasmodic evidences of the nearness of a great
city market. A large proportion of the hills are completely denuded of
their timber, and patched with rectangular fields of green, brown, and
yellow; upon the bottoms there are frequent truck farms; now and then
are stone quarries upon the banks, with capacious barges moored in
front; and upon one or two rocky ledges were stone-crushers, getting
out material for concrete pavements. When we ask the bargemen, in
passing, whither their loads are destined, the invariable reply is,
"The city"--meaning Cincinnati, still seventy miles away.
Limestone Creek (405 miles) occupies a large space in Western story,
for so insignificant a stream. It is now not over a rod in width, and
at no season can it be over two or three. One finds it with difficulty
along the mill-strewn shore of Maysville, Ky., the modern outgrowth of
the Limestone village of pioneer days. Limestone, settled four years
before Marietta or Cincinnati, was long Kentucky's chief port of entry
on the Ohio; immigrants to the new state, who came down the Ohio,
almost invariably booked for this point, thence taking stage to
Lexington, and travelers in the early day seldom passed it by
unvisited. But years before there was any settlement here, the valley
of Limestone Creek, which comes gently down from low-lying hills, was
regarded as a convenient doorway into Kentucky. When (1776) George
Rogers Clark was coming down the river from Pittsburg, with powder
given by Patrick Henry, then governor of Virginia, for the defence of
Kentucky settlers from British-incited savages, he was chased by the
latter, and, putting into this creek, hastily buried the precious
cargo on its banks. From here it was cautiously taken overland to the
little forts, by relays of pioneers, through a gauntlet of murderous
fire.
About twenty-five miles from Limestone, too, was another attraction of
the early time,--the great Blue Lick sulphur spring; here, in a
valley surrounded by wooded hills, formerly congregated great herds
of buffalo and deer, which licked the salty earth, and hunters soon
learned that this was a royal ground for game. The Battle of the Blue
Lick (1782) will ever be famous in the annals of Kentucky.
The Ohio was a mighty waterway into the continental interior, in
the olden days of Limestone. Its only compeer was the so-called
"Wilderness Road," overland through Cumberland Gap--the successor
of "Boone's trail," just as Braddock's Road was the outgrowth of
"Nemacolin's path." Until several years after the Revolutionary War,
the country north of the Ohio was still Indian land, and settlement
was restricted to the region south of the river; so that practically
all West-going roads from the coast colonies centered either on Fort
Pitt or Redstone, or on Cumberland Gap. On the out-going trip, the
Wilderness Road was the more toilsome of the two, but it was safer,
for the Ohio's banks were beset with thieving and often murdering
savages. In returning east, many who had descended the river preferred
going overland through the Gap, to painfully pulling up stream through
the shallows, with the danger of Indians many times greater than when
gliding down the deep current. The distance over the two routes from
Philadelphia, was nearly equal, when the windings of the river were
taken into account; but the Carolinians and the Georgians found
Boone's Wilderness Road the shorter of the two, in their migrations
to the promised land of "Ol' Kaintuck." And we should not overlook the
fact, that of much importance was still a third route, up the James
and down the Great Kanawha; a route whose advantage to Virginia,
Washington early saw, and tried in vain to have improved by a canal
connecting the two rivers.[B]
Even before the opening of the Revolution, the Ohio was the path of
a considerable emigration. We have seen Washington going down to the
Great Kanawha with his surveying party, in 1770, and finding that
settlers were hurrying into the country for a hundred miles below Fort
Pitt. By the close of the Revolution, the Ohio was a familiar stream.
Pittsburg, from a small trading hamlet and fording-place, had grown
by 1785 to have a thousand inhabitants, chiefly supported by
boat-building and the Kentucky carrying trade; and boat-yards were
common up both the Monongahela and the Youghiogheny, for a distance
of sixty miles. Nevertheless, it was not until 1792 that there were
regular conveniences for carrying passengers and freight down the
Ohio; the emigrant or trader, on arrival at Pittsburg or Redstone,
had generally to wait until he could either charter a boat or have one
built for him, although sometimes he found a chance "passenger flat"
going down.[C] This difficulty in securing river transportation was
one of the reasons why the majority chose the Wilderness Road.
"The first thing that strikes a stranger from the Atlantic," says
Flint (1814), "is the singular, whimsical, and amusing spectacle of
the varieties of water-craft, of all shapes and structures." These,
Flint, who knew the river well, separates into seven classes: (1)
"Stately barges," the size of an Atlantic schooner, with "a raised and
outlandish-looking deck;" one of these required a crew of twenty-five
to work it up stream. (2) Keel-boats--long, slender, and graceful in
form, carrying from fifteen to thirty tons, easily propelled over
the shallows, and much used in low water, and in hunting trips to
Missouri, Arkansas, and the Red River country. (3) Kentucky flats
(or "broad-horns"), "a species of ark, very nearly resembling a New
England pig-stye;" these were from forty to a hundred feet in length,
fifteen feet in beam, and carried from twenty to seventy tons. Some
of these flats were not unlike the house-boats of to-day. "It is no
uncommon spectacle to see a large family, old and young, servants,
cattle, hogs, horses, sheep, fowls, and animals of all kinds," all
embarked on one such bottom. (4) Covered "sleds," ferry-flats, or
Alleghany skiffs, carrying from eight to twelve tons. (5) Pirogues, of
from two to four tons burthen, "sometimes hollowed from one big tree,
or the trunks of two trees united, and a plank rim fitted to the upper
part." (6) Common skiffs and dug-outs. (7) "Monstrous anomalies," not
classifiable, and often whimsical in design. To these might be added
the "floating shops or stores, with a small flag out to indicate
their character," so frequently seen by Palmer (1817), and thriftily
surviving unto this day, minus the flag. And Hall (1828) speaks of a
flat-bottomed row-boat, "twelve feet long, with high sides and roof,"
carrying an aged couple down the river, they cared not where, so long
as they could find a comfortable home in the West, for their declining
and now childless years.
The first four classes here enumerated, were allowed to drift down
stream with the current, being steered by long sweeps hung on pivots.
The average speed was about three miles an hour, but the distances
made were considerable, from the fact that in the earliest days they
were, from fear of Indians, usually kept on the move through day and
night,--the crew taking turns at the sweeps, that the craft might not
be hung up on shore or entangled in the numerous snags and sawyers. In
going up stream, the sweeps served as oars, and in the shallows long
pushing-poles were used.
As for the boatmen who professionally propelled the keels and flats
of the Ohio, they were a class unto themselves--"half horse, half
alligator," a contemporary styled them. Rough fellows, much given
to fighting, and drunkenness, and ribaldry, with a genius for coarse
drollery and stinging repartee. The river towns suffered sadly at
the hands of this lawless, dissolute element. Each boat carried
from thirty to forty boatmen, and a number of such boats frequently
traveled in company. After the Indian scare was over, they generally
stopped over night in the settlements, and the arrival of a squadron
was certain to be followed by a disturbance akin to those so familiar
a few years ago in our Southwest, when the cowboys would undertake
to "paint a town red." The boatmen were reckless of life, limb, and
reputation, and were often more numerous than those of the villagers
who cared to enforce the laws; while there was always present an
element which abetted and throve on the vice of the river-men. The
result was that mischief, debauchery, and outrage ran riot, and in the
inevitable fights the citizens were generally beaten.
The introduction of steamboats (1814) soon effected a revolution. A
steamer could carry ten times as much as a barge, could go five times
as fast, and required fewer men; it traveled at night, quickly passing
from one port to another, pausing only to discharge or receive cargo;
its owners and officers were men of character and responsibility, with
much wealth in their charge, and insisted on discipline and correct
deportment. The flatboat and the keel-boat were soon laid up to rot on
the banks; and the boatmen either became respectable steamboat hands
and farmers, or went into the Far West, where wild life was still
possible.
Shipment on the river, in the flatboat days, was only during the
spring and autumnal floods; although an occasional summer rise, such
as we are now getting, would cause a general activity. In the autumn
of 1818, Hall reports that three millions of dollars' worth of
merchandise were lying on the shores of the Monongahela, waiting for
a rise of water to float them to their destination. "The Western
merchants were lounging discontentedly about the streets of Pittsburg,
or moping idly in its taverns, like the victims of an ague." The
steamers did something to alleviate this condition of affairs; but
it was not until the coming of railways, to carry goods quickly
and cheaply across country to deep-water ports like Wheeling, that
permanent relief was felt.
But what of the Maysville of to-day? It extends on both sides of
Limestone Creek for about two miles along the Kentucky shore, at no
point apparently over five squares wide, and for the most part but
two or three; for back of it forested hills rise sharply. There is a
variety of industries, the business quarter is substantially built,
and there are numerous comfortable homes with pretty lawns.
On the opposite shore is Aberdeen, where Kentucky swains and lasses,
who for one reason or another fail to get a license at home, find
marriage made easy--a peaceful, pleasant, white village, with trees
a-plenty, and romantic hills shutting out the north wind.
We are camped to-night on a picturesque sand-slope, at the foot of
a willow-edged bottom, and some seven feet above the river level. We
need to perch high, for the storm has been general through the basin,
and the Ohio is rising steadily.
[Footnote A: See Shaler's _Kentucky_ (Amer. Commonwealth series),
Collins's _History of Kentucky_, and Hale's _Trans-Alleghany
Pioneers_. Shaler gives the date as 1756; but Hale, a specialist in
border annals, makes it 1755.]
[Footnote B: See _ante_, p. 126.]
[Footnote C: Palmer (1817) paid five dollars for his passage from
Pittsburg to Cincinnati (465 miles), without food, and fifty cents per
hundred pounds for freight to Marietta. Imlay (1792) says the rate
in his time from Pittsburg to Limestone was twenty-five cents per
hundred. In 1803, Harris paid four dollars-and-a-half per hundred for
freight, by wagon from Baltimore to Pittsburg.]
CHAPTER XIV.
Produce boats--A dead town--On the Great Bend--Grant's
birthplace--The Little Miami--The genesis of Cincinnati.
Point Pleasant, O., Wednesday, May 23rd.--The river rose three feet
during the night. Steamers go now at full speed, no longer fearing
the bars; and the swash upon shore was so violent that I was more than
once awakened, each time to find the water line creeping nearer
and nearer to the tent door. As we sweep onward to-day, upon an
accelerated current, the fringing willows, whose roots before the
rise were many feet up the slopes of sand and gravel, are gracefully
dipping their boughs in the rushing flood. With the rise, come the
sweepings of the beaches--bits of lumber, fallen trees, barrels,
boxes, 'longshore rubbish of every sort; sometimes it hangs in ragged
rafts, and we steer clear of such, for Pilgrim's progress is greater
than that of t
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