Classic Audiobook Collection - Afloat on the Ohio by Reuben Gold Thwaites ~ Full Audiobook [history]

Starting point is 00:00:00 afloat on the ohio by reuben goldthwaite's 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 re-people it. A motley company here have performed their parts, savages of the mound-building age rearing upon these banks curious earthworks for archaeologists of the 19th century to puzzle over. Iroquois war parties, silently swooping upon sleeping villages of the Shawnees, in a noisy glee returning to the New York lakes, laden with spoils and captives. La Salle, prince of the French explorers and courier de Bois, standing at the falls of the Ohio,

Starting point is 00:01:10 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, shading each other's blood in protracted partisan wars, Surveyers like Washington and Boone and the McAfee's clad in fringed hunting shirts and leathern leggings mapping out future states Hardy frontiersmen Fighting hunting or farming

Starting point is 00:01:39 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,

Starting point is 00:01:57 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.

Starting point is 00:02:23 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 chained so rapidly that he does not realize how it seemed to the canoeist or flat boatman of old and there are too many modern distractions about such a mode of progress to our minds the manner of our going should be as nearly as possible be that of the pioneer himself hence are skiff and a-and-a-movement of our skiff and a-movement of our going should be as nearly as possible be that of the pioneer himself hence are skiff and a 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 accelerating, 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 Gerdes Inn, the romantic ravines which corrugate the rim of the Ohio's basin, the beautiful islands which stud the glistening tide, the great affluence which, winding down for a thousand miles,

Starting point is 00:03:31 from the Blue Ridge, the Cumberland, and the Great Smoky, pour their floods into the central stream, the giant trees, sycamores, pawpaws, cork elms, cattlepaws, walnuts, and whatnot, 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 whispers 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,

Starting point is 00:04:19 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 to 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,

Starting point is 00:04:42 for the benefit of students of the social and economic history of this important gateway to the continental interior. R.G.T. Madison, Wisconsin, October 1897. End of preface. Chapter 1 of A Float on the Ohio. Unhistorical Pilgrimage. Of a thousand miles in a skiff from Redstone to Cairo. This is a Libravox recording.

Starting point is 00:05:13 All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libavox.org. Recording by Bill Mosley. Afloat on the Ohio by Ruben Gold Thwaites. Chapter 1 On the Monongahila, the Over Mountain Path, Redstone Old Fort, the Yukai O'Ganey

Starting point is 00:05:40 Braddock's defeat in a camp near Charleroi, Pennsylvania, Friday, May 4th, Pilgrim, built for the glassy lakes and smooth flowing rivers of Wisconsin, had suffered unwanted indignities in her rough journey of a thousand miles in a box car, but beyond a leaky seam were two which the doctor had ridded 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,

Starting point is 00:06:33 but not in the personal recollection of any of 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 laying in wait for busier times, small boys blessed with as much leisure as curiosity, and that wonder of wonders, a bashful newspaper report, quarter. Their chief concern centered in the query how Pilgrim could hold that goodly heap of

Starting point is 00:07:22 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, jent, said the foreman of the shipyard as we settled into our seats. The Dr. 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-cordid chest and throat bared to wind and weather,

Starting point is 00:08:02 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 goodbye and good luck to you and you don't get the missus drowned before you get to Cairo. The current is slight on these lower reaches of the Monongahela. It comes down gaily enough from the West Virginia Hills, over many a rapid, and through swirls and eddies in plenty until Morgantown is reached, and then settled into a more sedate course,

Starting point is 00:08:42 UZet Brownsville finally converted into a mere mill pond by the back set of the four slackwater dams between there and Pittsburgh. This means solid rowing for the first 60 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 into a shaly beach at the foot of a wooded slope in semi-resticity and fortify the inner man a famous spot this redstone creek between its mouth and that of dunlaps was made upon the side of extensive indian fortication mounds the first agricultural settlement west of the alleghenies it is unsafe to establish

Starting point is 00:09:39 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 references to the Aboriginal Earthworks,

Starting point is 00:10:28 played a part in the Fort Necessity and Braddock campaigns in later frontier wars, and being the western terminus of the Over Mountain Road, known at various historic periods as Nimacolin'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, new redstone well, and here George Rogers Clark

Starting point is 00:11:02 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 19th 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 strange scores of other voracious chroniclers.

Starting point is 00:11:44 Quote, At this place we were detained about a week experiencing every disgust which rooks and harpies could excite, in quote. Here thrived extensive yards in which were built flatboats, arcs, keelboats, and all that miscellaneous collection of watercraft, which, with their roisterly crews, were the life of the Ohio, before the introduction of steam, rendered vessels of deeper draft essential, whereupon much of the shipping business went down the river to better stages of water,

Starting point is 00:12:23 first to Pittsburgh, then to Wheeling, and to Steubenville. All of 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

Starting point is 00:12:50 and much talk thereabout of the glories of mammon. The Menongahela 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 oft-times checkered with brown fields, recently planted, and rows of vines trimmed low to stakes, as in the fashion of the rhyme. The stream, though still majestic in its sweep, is henceforth

Starting point is 00:13:43 a commercial slackwater, 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 Pittsburgh, and fast defiling the once-pictorist banks with the gruesome awful 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 city smoke belts from hundreds of stacks. The ear is almost deafened by the whir and roar and bang of milling industries. Tipples of bituminous coal shafts are ever in sight.

Starting point is 00:14:31 The grime 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, inside of which we shall almost continually float all the way down to Cairo, nearly 1,100 miles away. At each tipple is a miner's hamlet, a row of cottages or rye, huts, cast in a common mold, either unpainted, or be dogged 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.

Starting point is 00:15:19 Pigs and children promiscuously at their doors, painless sash stuffed with rags, unsightly litter strewn around, misery stamped on every feature of the homeless tenements. Drieriest 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.

Starting point is 00:15:53 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, awful 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, Charlerot, is lock number four, first of the quartet of obstructions between Brownsville and Pittsburgh. 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 a hundred yards to the hills, at the base of which is a railway track.

Starting point is 00:17:10 Across the river, here some 250 yards wide, the dark, rocky bluffs slashed with numerous ravines, ascends 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

Starting point is 00:17:53 through the foothills of the laurel range. McKeesport, Pennsylvania, 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.

Starting point is 00:18:19 Dubya 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.

Starting point is 00:18:51 It arouses something akin to awe this passage of a steamer's wake upon the beach, a dozen feet from the door one's tents. 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. He's running at an acute angle with the shore, breaking at once into angry foam, and wasting themselves far up on the strand,

Starting point is 00:19:25 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 lessons 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.

Starting point is 00:20:04 This stove is an ingenious contrivance of the doctors, 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 campfire, 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.

Starting point is 00:20:42 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 work-a-day brothers of ours with canteen slung on shoulder climb these steep flight of stairs cut in the clay bank and on the 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

Starting point is 00:21:36 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'clock and on window-sills rows of battered tin cans resplendent in blue and yellow labels are the homes of verbenas and geraniums in sickly bloomed now and then a back door in the dreary block is distinguished by an arbored trellis bearing a grapevine and furnishing for the weary housewife a shady kitchen al freshen 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 Elizabeth Town, that travelers from the eastern states over the old Philadelphia Road chiefly took boat for the Ohio,

Starting point is 00:22:48 The Virginian still clinging to Redstone as the terminus of the Braddock Road. Elizabeth Town, 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 seagoing sailing craft. But today, coal barges are the principal output of her decaying shipyards. By this time, the duties are the duties of her. of our little ship's company are well-defined. W.S. supervises the cuisine,

Starting point is 00:23:27 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,

Starting point is 00:23:48 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 live-long day, as whim or need dictates.

Starting point is 00:24:07 Lock number three 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.

Starting point is 00:24:38 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 Yakayo Ganey, which is implanted with a cluster of iron mill towns, of which McKeesport is the center.

Starting point is 00:25:25 So far as we could see down the Monongahila, the air was thick with the smoke of glowing chimneys and the pulsating wang of steel-making plants, and rolling mills made the air tremble. The view up the yawk 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 houseboats lay tied to the McKeesport shore, or were bolstered high upon the beach. A fleet of yacht steamers had their noses to the wharf.

Starting point is 00:26:08 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 yock 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-girth 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 McKee's port iron mills, down on the Monongahila shore. But it is not of these, we talk, lounging in the welcome warmth of the campfire. It is of the age of romance.

Starting point is 00:27:38 140-odd years ago, when Major Washington and Christopher Gist, with famished horses, floundered in the ice hereabout upon their famous midwitter trip to Fort Leboff. When the Forks of the York became the extreme outpost of Western advance, with all the accompanying horrors of frontier war, and later, when McKeysport for a time rivaled Redstone and Elizabeth Town

Starting point is 00:28:10 as a center for boat building and a point of departure for the Ohio. Hittsburg Sunday, 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

Starting point is 00:28:56 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 southeastern breeze ruffled the waters of the yawk, and for the first time the doctor ordered up the sail, with Dubya 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 houseboats, and the shabby street ends of MacKeesport, out into the Monagahela, where, luckily, the wind still held. At McKeesport, the hills on the right are of a relatively low altitude, smooth, and and well-rounded. It was here that Braddock and his slow progress toward Fort Duquesne

Starting point is 00:29:53 first crossed the Monongahila, to the wide level bottom on the left bank. He had found the inner country to the right of the river and below the yawk 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 re-approach the left bank till the bottom ceases. The right thence-force 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, about 100 yards inland, the brilliant column fell into an ambuscade of

Starting point is 00:30:44 Indians and French half-breeds, suffering their 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 fort stretches the great dam of lock number two, which we portaged with the usual difficulties of steep, stony banks, Braddock is but eight miles across country from Pittsburgh, although 12 by river. We have, all the way down, an almost constant succession of iron and still-making towns,

Starting point is 00:31:32 chief among them, homestead on the left bank, seven miles above Pittsburgh. The Great Strike of July 1892, with its attendant horrors, is a lurid chapter in the story of American history. the 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 today 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 gaily attired folk they look little like rioters yet it seems but the other day when homestead men and wretched men and wretched folk they were but the other day when homestead men and women and children, were hysterically reveling in atrocities, akin to those of the Paris commune. Approaching Pittsburgh, the high steeps are everywhere crowded with houses, great masses of smoke

Starting point is 00:32:55 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 number one, the last barrier between us and the Ohio, is a mile or two up the Minangahela 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.

Starting point is 00:33:52 Pilgrim, however, cannot hang up on the levee with any comfort to a crew. It is necessary with evening at hand and a thunderstorm angrily rising over the Pittsburgh Hills to get out of this grimy pool, flanked about with iron and coal yards, Stacks on a forest of shipping and to quickly seek the open country lower down on the Ohio. The lockkeepers appreciated our situation. Two or three sturdy, courteous men helping us carry our cargo by an intricate official route, over coils of rope and chains, over lines of shafting, and along busy walks overhanging the gnawing basin,

Starting point is 00:34:36 while the doctor, directed to a certain shoot 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 slackwater 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,

Starting point is 00:35:04 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 raps. 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, where they leaned lazily over their railings, the officers on the upper deck,

Starting point is 00:35:44 engineers and rastabouts 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 Menongahela in the heart of the city joins forces with the Allegheny 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 gunwills, and Dubya, with the coffee pot, and the boy with a tin basin, were hard pushed to keep the water below the thwart.

Starting point is 00:36:37 courts. Seeking the friendly shelter of a houseboat, 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 Pittsburgh and Allegheny City are spangled with electric lamps, which throw toward us long, shimmering lances of light,

Starting point is 00:37:19 in which the mighty stream, gray and mysterious, tempest-tossed, is seen to be surging onward with majestic sweep. Upon its bosom, we are to be born for a thousand miles. Our introduction has been unprolpicious. It is to be hoped that on further acquaintance, we may be better pleased with La Belle Riviere. End of Chapter 1, recording by Bill Mosley, Bernardo, Texas, USA.

Starting point is 00:38:02 Chapter 2 of afloat on the Ohio, an historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff from redstone to Cairo. This is a Libervox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visitlibrovox.org. Recording by Becky Cook A Float on the Ohio by Ruben Goldthroates, Chapter 2. First Day on the Ohio at Logstown

Starting point is 00:38:27 Beaver River Monday, May 7th. We have today rode 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 a little avail, for when we rested upon our oars pilgrim would be unmercifully driven upstream. 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 Charter,

Starting point is 00:38:59 three miles down for the river from Pittsburgh, and sent on our portly bag of conventional traveling clothes by express to cincinnati where we intended 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 enlightened cargo here at the mouth of charters creek was charter 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 today 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 thirty-two thousand acres along the ohio he held a patent from lord dunmore dated july fifth seventeen seventy five for nearly three thousand 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 seventeen eighty four 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 twelve thousand dollars just below chartier are the picturesque mackeys 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 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 monogohela

Starting point is 00:40:42 the hills are lower less precipitous more graceful there is a delightful roundness of mass and shade beautiful villas occupy commanding situations on hill-sides and hill-tops we catch glimpses the spires and copolas singly orange groups peeping above the trees and now and then a pretty suburban railway station the rail-rays upon either bank are built upon 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 are 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 undercurrent glimpses of sparkling waterfalls and deep tangle of moss and fern or by graceful stone arches draped with vines they are terraced vineyards after the fashion of the rhine land 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 invariable 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 two are to lengthen in the middle waters islands are more frequent all day the largest is nevils five miles long and thickly strewn with villas and market-gar gardens still others are but long sand-bars 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 broadened farm-steads are occasionally to be seen nestled in the undulations of the hills woodlands become more dense they 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 shawstown fort miles below the city. A sad-eyed shabby place with the pipeline for natural grass sprawling hither and

Starting point is 00:42:43 yon upon the surface of the ground, except at the street costings, 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 cookstove. We passed this afternoon one of the most interesting historic points upon the river, the picture of sight of ancient Logstown upon the summit of a low, steep bridge on the right bank just below economy and eighteen miles from pittsburg. Logstown was a Shawanese village as early as 1727 to 30, an already notable fur trading post when Conrad Weiser visited it in 1748. Washington and Jist stopped at Logestown for five days on their visit to the French at Fort Leboe, and several famous Indian treaties were signed there.

Starting point is 00:43:29 A short distance below Anthony Wayne's Western Army was encamped during the winter of 1792 to 1793, the place being then styled legionville in eighteen twenty four george rep founded in the neighborhood a german socialist community and this later settlement survives to the present day in the thriving little rescue 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 twenty five miles across the river on a broad level bottom are the manufacturing towns of rochester and beaver divided by the beaver river in the rear well-rounded hill rise gracefully, checkered with brown fields and woods in many shades of green, in the midst of which the flowering white doggwood rears its stately spray. Our sloping willow sand beach, of a hundred feet in width, is thick strewn with driftwood. Back of this clay bank, eight feet sheer, and a narrow bottom cut with small fruit and vegetable patches, the gardener's neat frame houses peeping from groves of apple, pear, and cherry upon the flanking hill sites.

Starting point is 00:44:30 A lofty oil well, Derek, surmounts the edge at 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, then the proprietor of the soil appeared, a middling-sized lanky man, with the red face and sandy goatee-simmy, mounting a collarless white shirt, all bestained with tobacco juice.

Starting point is 00:45:09 He inquired rather sharply concerning us, but when informed of our innocent Aaron and that we should stay with him but the night, he promptly softened, explaining that the presence of marauding fishermen and houseboat folk was incompatible with gardening for profit, and he would have none of them touching 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 gossiped. of being about the doctor and me for half an hour on crop conditions and the state of the country. Being sociable like, he said, and having nothing again you folks, as you know what's what,

Starting point is 00:45:45 I can see with half an eye. End of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 of A Float on the Ohio, an historic pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo. This is a Librevox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Robert Hoffman. A Float on the Ohio by Ruben Gold Thwaitis. Chapter 3.

Starting point is 00:46:22 Schengis Old Town The Dynamiter, Yellow Creek Nicely's Cluster, West Virginia, 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 just found here in November 1750.

Starting point is 00:46:51 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 it is now a slack water-dam the neighborhood became of early importance to the french as a fur-trading centre with customary liberality toward the indians whom they assiduously cultivated the french in seventeen fifty six built for them on this site a substantial town which the english indifferently called Saraconk, Sokhan, Kings Beaver Town, or Shingas 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

Starting point is 00:47:54 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-up lands 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 350 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

Starting point is 00:49:00 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 hillside of the stream but settlement is chiefly found upon the bottom 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, wo-begone hamlet, sidetracked 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 fairy gunwale, his cheeks supported by his hands,

Starting point is 00:50:09 and talked 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, rakeish-looking skiff hard by, which bore a red flag at its prow. You see that? That there red flag? Well, that's the law on us glycerin fellers. Over 500 pounds, two flags, under 5001 flag. I tell you're the steamboat steer clear of me, and don't you forget it, neither.

Starting point is 00:50:40 They just give me a wide berth they do, you bet. And the railroads, they don't carry no glycerine cartridge. They don't. All of it by my skiff, like you're seeing me going. 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 percent. The young fellow had the air of a self-confident rustic, with little experience in the world.

Starting point is 00:51:13 Indeed, it seemed from his elated manner as if this might be his first trip from home, and the blowing of oil wells in incidental speculation. The boy, quick at inventive nomenclature, and fresh from a reading of Robert Louis Stevenson called our visitor, quote, 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, quote, a clean hundred miles, and that's right smart fur, ain't it? How fur down be ye's going? 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.

Starting point is 00:51:54 and, oh, come now, don't be giving us taffy. Say honest, Indian. How fur down are you fellers going, 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 stand with him on the cost of the glycerine, they would, regardless of Ohio statutes, blow up the fish in the unfrequent portions of the river, and make $200 apiece by carrying the spoils into wheeling. The doctor, as a law-abiding citizen, good-naturely declined, and upon my return to the

Starting point is 00:52:47 flat, the dynamiter was handing the boy a huge stick of Barberpole candy, saying, your fellers? We're part friends anyhow, but sorry you won't go in on this spec. There's right smart money in it, and don't you forget 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, and Georgetown, 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.

Starting point is 00:53:34 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 framehouse 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

Starting point is 00:54:20 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 Westville, 48 miles, are a 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

Starting point is 00:55:14 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 downstream for two miles, find that we seek upon the lower end of the chief of Nicely'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, 120 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 interroven with the history of the Trans-Alegany border, and schoolboys have in many lands and tongues recited the pathetic

Starting point is 00:56:02 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 how and dry on our willowed island. Above, just out of sight, are moored a brace of steam-piled 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 Station faintly discernible near the horizon.

Starting point is 00:56:49 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-busted grossbeaks and a goodly company of daylight followers. In this darkening hour, the low plaintive note of the whippoor will is heard on every hand, now and then interrupted by the hoarse bark of owls. there is a gentle tinkling of cow-bells 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 gipsy-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 gaily checkers are sandbank the doctor and the boy are discussing the doings of briar rabbit for we are in the southland now and may any day meet good uncle remus footnote a on this creek that is yellow creek

Starting point is 00:58:12 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 Meadow, 1754. End of Chapter 3, recording by Robert Hoffman. Chapter 4 of A Float on the Ohio, an historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo. This is a Libravox recording.

Starting point is 00:58:40 all Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Robert Hoffman A Float on the Ohio by Ruben Gold Thwaitis. Chapter 4 An industrial region, Stubinville, Mingo Bottom, in a steel mill, Indian character. Mingo Junction, Ohio, Wednesday, May 9th. We had a cold night.

Starting point is 00:59:10 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 on 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 the promise of a warm day. Throughout the morning, Pilgrim glided through a thickly settled district, reminding us of the Mahongahela. Sewer pipe and vitrified brickworks 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,

Starting point is 01:00:01 from clusters of shabby, down at the hill cabins to lines of neat and well-painted houses and shops. We visited the vitrified brickworks at New Cumberland, West Virginia, 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 Pittsburgh 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 workman 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.

Starting point is 01:00:51 Each of them has a large daily output of debris which is dumped unmercifully upon the water's edge in heaps from 50 to 100 feet high. Sometimes for nearly a mile in the river, length, the natural bank is deep buried out of sight, and we have from our canoe not 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 oafel, down to wheeling and beyond. Before noon we had left behind us this industrial region,

Starting point is 01:01:32 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.

Starting point is 01:02:02 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

Starting point is 01:02:44 respectability. Beautiful islands lend variety to the scene, some of them mere willowed towheads largely submerged in times of flood, while others are of a permanent character, often occupied by farms. We have with us a copy of Cummings' Western Pilot, Cincinnati, 1834, which is still a practicable guide for the Ohio, as the river shorelines are not subject to so rapid changes as those of the Mississippi, but many of the islands and Cummings 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 60 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 half a century

Starting point is 01:03:39 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 today, only Solomon Seal, Trillium, Wild Ginger, Crane Bill, Jack in the Pulpit, Wild Columbine. Poison Ivy is on every hand, in these tangled woods, with first, of many varieties, chiefly maiden hair, walking leaf, and bladder.

Starting point is 01:04:30 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 chestmen. At one o'clock we were at Stubinville, Ohio, 67 miles, where the broad stone dwarf lead sharply up to the smart, well-built

Starting point is 01:05:00 substantial town of some 16,000 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 Stubonville is Mingo Junction, where we are the guest, of a friend who is a superintendent of the iron and steel works here. The population of Mingo is 2,500. From 7 to 1,200 are employed in the works, according to the exigencies of business.

Starting point is 01:05:38 10% of them are Hungarians and Slavonians. A larger proportion would be dangerous, our host ofers, because of the tendency of these people to run the town, when sufficiently numerous to make it possible. The Slavs and the iron towns come to a major town, 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. Heard together in surprising promiscuity, maintain a low scale of clothing and diet,

Starting point is 01:06:12 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,

Starting point is 01:06:46 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 medieval 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 closed mill yard, with the midsummer sun in the 90s, seems chilly, wears a man out. only fit for the bone-yard 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

Starting point is 01:07:36 a ninety-cent man working in a place so hot that where 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 more in improving the morale of the town but deep-seated inexorable economic conditions apparently beyond present control render negatory 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, 150 miles distant, and intent on the destruction of the

Starting point is 01:08:36 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 or origin, and hospitality, veneration, and confidence were displayed towards the newcomers. But the mortality of the Europeans was soon made painfully evident to them. When the early Spaniards and afterwards the English kidnapped tribesmen for sale into slavery

Starting point is 01:09:24 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 sad. and often added greatly to the bitterness of the struggle by retaliation in kind.

Starting point is 01:10:13 The white borderers themselves were frequently brutal, reckless, lawless, and under such condition, clashing was inevitable. But worse agents of discord than the agricultural columnists were the itinerants who traveled through the woods visiting the tribes, exchanging goods for furs. These often cheated and robbed the Indian, taught in 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,

Starting point is 01:11:02 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 a waste, that they were best entitled to it who could make it the most productive. on the other hand the earlier sessions of land were made under a total misconception the indians supposed that the newcomers 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 and land the struggle was inevitable civilization against savagery no sentimental notions could prevent it it was in the nature of things that the way

Starting point is 01:12:02 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. of chapter four recording by robert hoffman chapter five of afloat on the ohio and historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff from redstone to caro this is a libravox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox dot org recording by robert hoffman afloat on the ohio by reuben goldthwaites

Starting point is 01:13:02 Chapter 5 Houseboat Life Decadence of Steamboat Traffic Wheeling and Wheeling Creek Above Moundsville, West Virginia, Thursday, May 10th Our friend saw us off at the Gravely Beach just below the works. There was a slight breeze ahead, but the atmosphere was agreeable, and Pilgrim bore a happy crew.

Starting point is 01:13:27 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, houseboat folk, and whatnot, that we attract little attention of ourselves.

Starting point is 01:14:08 But Pilgrim is indeed a curiosity here about. What remarks we overhear about her? Honey skiff, that? Right, smart skiff! Good skiff for her place, but no good for this year 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 in our luggage with plenty of spare room to move about in is easily propelled and as staunch as can be made upon these waters we meet nothing like her

Starting point is 01:14:43 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 inchboards, 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 in 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

Starting point is 01:15:39 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-pointed cottage. Perhaps the greater number of these crafts are afloat in the river and moored to the bank with a gangplank 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,

Starting point is 01:16:26 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,

Starting point is 01:17:01 while playing 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 $25 upon each craft of this character, and the other commonwealths abutting upon the river are considering the policy of doing likewise. The houseboat man have, however, recently formed a protective association, and proposed to fight the new laws on constitutional grounds, the contention being that the Ohio is a national highway,

Starting point is 01:17:42 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, may have a swarm or two of bees, and a cow enjoying free pasturage along a weedy bank or on neighboring hills. Occasionally, however, as the result of spasmodic local agitation, they are by wholesale ordered to

Starting point is 01:18:22 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 see 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 house folk folk, although of different character,

Starting point is 01:19:18 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, therefore, 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 more their floating shops to country beach or village levy, wherever business can be had. Floating theaters and opera companies, with large barges built as playhouses, towed from town to town by their godly painted tugs,

Starting point is 01:20:04 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 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 wrapped it and floated to the nearest largest 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,

Starting point is 01:20:44 and stay so long as the ensuing patronage warrants. A motley assortment, these neighbors of ours, an uncultimated 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 crews.

Starting point is 01:21:08 We are not in trade, We are not fishing. We are not canvassers. We are not show people. What in tarnation are ye, anyway? Oh, come now. No fellers is doing the river for fun, that's certain. You're just government agents. That's my way of thinking. Well, if you can find fun in it, then go ahead, I say. But all the same, we'll be friends, won't we? You bet, strangers, you're welcome to all in this year's shanty boat.

Starting point is 01:21:36 Ain't no backy about your clothes, your fellers. We meet with abundant courtesy of this rude sort, and weaponless sleep well at nights, fearing not from our comrades for the nuns. We again have railways on either bank. The iron horse has almost eclipsed the fire canoe as the Indians' picturesquely styled steamboat. We occasionally see boats tied up to wharfs, 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,

Starting point is 01:22:16 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 sure, 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,

Starting point is 01:22:51 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 the fact that Mingo is a railway junction. By rail he gets it. his coal and ore, and ships away his product. Where the coal to come a considerable distance, the river would be a 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,

Starting point is 01:23:29 they are a long stream because of the great beds of clay exposed by 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 newcomers save where the latter crossed the river and thus have left scores of 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 servable 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 ninety-one 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 dwarf sloping upward from the ohio is nearly as broad and imposing as that of pittsburg houseboats are here by the score some of them haunts of fishing clubs as we judge from the names emblazoned on their sides mystic crew south side club and the like

Starting point is 01:25:17 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 enraignment from the dude smart and straw hat collars and cuffs and white frilled shirt with glass diamond pin to the steamboat roused about, all slouch and rags and evil eyed. Wheeling Island, 300 acres, up to 30 years ago mentioned in travelers' journals as a rate beauty spot, is today 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-bride. 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

Starting point is 01:26:17 trans Allegheny 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 tearing here. The Zane stockade developed into Fort Fincair. The Zane stockade developed into Fort Fincault, in Lord Dunmore's time. Then, Fort Henry, during the Revolution, and everyone who knows

Starting point is 01:27:08 his Western history at all has read of the three famous sieges of Wheeling, 1777, 1781, and 1782, and the daring deed 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 grounds as the upper terminus of several steamboat lines. Below Wheeling,

Starting point is 01:27:58 are several miles of factory towns nestled by the strand, and numerous coal-tipples with their begrimmed villages. Fishermen have been frequent today, in houseboats of high and low degree, and in land camps composed of tents and board shanties, with rows of signs and tarred-pound nets stretched in the sun to dry. Toe-headed children abound, almost as nude as the pigs and dogs and chicken amongst which they waddle and roll. Women-folk busy themselves with the multifarious cares of homekeeping, 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,

Starting point is 01:28:49 101 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 stretched back of us for a quarter of a mile to the hills which bound to 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 scalls which scurry its bubbling surface. The storm does not break, but the bending treetops 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,

Starting point is 01:29:37 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 grated 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 Captain William Foreman and 20 other Virginia militiamen were killed in an Indian ambuscade, September 27, 1777. An inscribed stone monument was erected on the spot in 1835, but we could not find it. End of Chapter 4th. 5. Recording by Robert Hoffman.

Starting point is 01:30:30 Chapter 6 of Afloat on the Ohio, an historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Robert Hoffman. A Float on the Ohio by Ruben Gold Thwaitis.

Starting point is 01:30:55 Chapter 6. The Big Grave Washington and Roundbottom A lazy man's paradise Captina Creek George Roberts Clark at Fish Creek Southern Types Near Fishing Creek

Starting point is 01:31:12 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 mounds There are 5,000 people in this old, faded, country-fied town. They show you, with pride, the state penitentiary of West Virginia,

Starting point is 01:31:36 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 68 feet high and a hundred in diameter at the base, and has for over a century attracted the attention of travelers and archaeologists. We found it at the end of a straggling street on the edge of a town a quarter of a mile back from the river.

Starting point is 01:32:11 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 55 feet in diameter, and the center is somewhat depressed, like a basin. From the middle of this basin, a shaft, some 25 feet in diameter, has been sunk by explorers

Starting point is 01:32:55 for a distance of perhaps 50 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 descent. Dickens, who apparently wrote the greater part of his American notes while suffering from dyspepsia, has a note of appreciation for the big grave. Quote, 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

Starting point is 01:33:46 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, dothed, 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 Roundbottom, its counterpart on the West Virginia side, and coursing through it a pretty Meadow Creek, Butler's Run. Wrights, Washington, in 1781, to a correspondent who is thinking of renting lands in this region,

Starting point is 01:34:33 quote, I have a small tract called the Round Bottom containing about 600 acres, which would also let, it lies on the ohio opposite to pipe creek and a little above captaining 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 cressup's band murdered a number of inoffensive a tragedy which was one of the inciting causes of Lord Dunmore's War, 1774, unquote. We crossed over into Ohio and pulled up on the gravelly spit at the mouth of the pipe. While the others were botanizing high on the mountainside, I went along the beach path toward a group of whitewashed cabins, intent on replenishing the canteen. Upon opening the gate of one of them,

Starting point is 01:35:22 two grisly 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 man, with a dirty, buttonless flannel shirt which revealed a hairy breast. Upon his trousers hung a variety of patches, in many stages of gregers. 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.

Starting point is 01:36:07 His fat, waddling wife in a greasy black gown, followed with bare feet, and, arms akimbu, listened in the open door. A coal company owns the rocky riverfront, here and at many places below, and lets these cabins to the poor white element, so numerous on the Ohio. 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

Starting point is 01:36:55 skirts the banks at his feet. But I tell you, sir, the Italians and Hungarians is spoiling this year country for white men, and I don't see no prospect for it's being better till they get shoved out of it. 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 loathed. A fellow could go out and get a free bucket of coal from the hillside back yon. He might get all the light wood and patching stuff he wanted from the river drift, could, when he hankered after him, 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 old 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

Starting point is 01:37:41 Sea Islanders, in the anti-missionary days, had an easier time of it than this. What new fortune will befall, my friend, when he gets the Italians and Hungarians, quote, shoved out, and, quote, 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,

Starting point is 01:38:12 the whole girt about with the wide uplands of the winding valley, and overhead the march of sunny clouds. Captaina Creek, 108 miles, is not far down on the Ohio Bank, and beside it the little hamlet of Bohoughton 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 Canawa, wrote of this creek in 1770, quote, a pretty large creek on the west side, called by Nicholson, his interpreter, Fox Grapevine, by others Captima Creek, on which, eight miles up, is the town called Grapevine Town, unquote. Captina Village is its white successor, but there were also Indians at the mouth of the creek,

Starting point is 01:39:00 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, quote, instructed what Indians came over, unquote. In the course of his prayer, the missionary was particularly impressed by the attitude of the chief of grapevine town named Frank Stevens, who professed to believe in the Christian God. And he naively writes, quote,

Starting point is 01:39:39 I was informed that all the time the Indians looked very seriously at me. unquote jones appears to have been impressed also with the hardness of the beach or they camped in the open doubtless to avoid surprises quote instead of feathers my bed was gravel stones by the riverside which at first seemed not to suit me but afterward it became more natural unquote in those days traveling was beset with difficulties both ashore and afloat eight years later spring of seventeen eighty three flat boats 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 21 persons were carried into captivity, among them Catherine Mallott, a girl in her teens, who subsequently became the wife of that most notorious of border renegades, Simon Gertie. On the West Virginia shore, not over a third of a mile below Captina Creek,

Starting point is 01:40:45 empties graveyard 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 Alleghenies, 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.

Starting point is 01:41:25 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 the 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 had 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,

Starting point is 01:42:10 we first met a phenomenon common to the Ohio, the edges of the alluvial bottom being higher than the fields back of them forming a natural levy above which curiously rise to our view the spires and chimneys of the village harris's journal eighteen o three made early note of this and advanced an acceptable theory quote 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 inundation are lodged upon the borders of the bank, but cannot be floated far upon the champagne because obstructed by the growth of wood. Retaining their situation when the waters subside, they obstruct and detain the leaves and mud,

Starting point is 01:42:56 which would else recoil into the stream, and thus, in process of time, form a bank higher than the interior flats. Unquote. Tied up to Bearsville Landing is a gaily 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,

Starting point is 01:43:19 and its praises as a noisemaker 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 Virginia, 127 miles, a rather shabby town of 1500 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 tonight. And place cards advertising the event were everywhere rivaling the gaudy prince of the floating opera. Meanwhile, a talkative native was interviewing the doctor, down at the riverside. 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.

Starting point is 01:44:12 He was a short, chubby man with a dixie-goatty, his flannel shirt negligee, 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 laugh with which he meditatively tapped the gunwale, the meantime, with some skill, casting pebbles into the water with his bare toes. "'Axon your pardon, ma'am,' he said, scrambling from his perch upon W. 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 surmounts, relics of the prehistoric time when our Indians held to their curious fashion of building

Starting point is 01:45:07 earthworks. We no longer entertain the notion that a separate and a prouder race of wild men than we know erected these tumuli. The pleasant fiction has departed from us, but the works are nonetheless interesting, now that more is known of their origin. Two miles below New Martinsville, on the West Virginia shore, we pitch camp, just as 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 cowbells. The operatic calliope is in full blast at Bearsville,

Starting point is 01:45:53 it 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 maychaffers come stupidly dashing against our tent, and the toads are piping merrily. End of Chapter 6. Recording by Robert Hoffman. Chapter 7 of A Float on the Ohio and historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff from Redstone to Cairo.

Starting point is 01:46:27 This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. Recording by Sue Anderson. A float on a volunteer. on the Ohio by Ruben Gold Thwaites. Chapter 7. In Dixie, oil and natural gas at Witten's bottom, the long reach, photographing crackers, visitors in camp. Above Marietta, Saturday, May 12th.

Starting point is 01:47:02 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. latitude 39 degrees, 43 minutes, 26 seconds, touches the Ohio at the mouth of Proctor's run, 121 and 1 half 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

Starting point is 01:47:57 enclosing 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, the maple-strewn island between, all covered with scaffolds. The country looks like a rumpled

Starting point is 01:48:49 fox and geese board with pegs stuck all over it. A mile and a half below lies Sisterville, West Virginia, 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 land to the land. We land, at Witton'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, quote, struck here two or three years ago, and now within a distance of a few miles, there are hundreds of wells. Two hundred in this year gravel alone, sir, I was told by a red-headed man in a red shirt, who lived with his numerous family in a 12-foot square box at the rear of a

Starting point is 01:49:47 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 80s. 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,

Starting point is 01:50:40 lines, the shanties of the operatives with their rude lamp posts, and the face of nature so be smeared with the crude output of the wells, that every twig and leaf is thick with grease. Just above Wittons commences the long reach of the Ohio, a charming panorama for 16 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 a whitewashed porch in front and a vine arbor at the rear attracted our attention at the foot of the reach,

Starting point is 01:51:40 near Grape Island. I clambered up to photograph it. The ice was broken by asking for a drink of water. A gaunt girl of 18, the elder of two, with bare feet, her snaky hair streaming unkept about a smirking face, went with a broken-nosed pitcher to a run, which could be heard splashing over its rocky bed nearby. 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 pioneer from way back. He occupied his own land, a rare circumstance among these riverside crackers,

Starting point is 01:52:23 had 130 acres worth $20 the acre. Just John Ways back of the house in the cliffside, there was a coal vein two feet thick, as yet only worked for his own fuel. And lately he had started, struck a bank of fire-brick clay, which might someday be a good thing for the gals. On leaving, I casually mentioned my desire to photograph the family on the porch, where the light was good.

Starting point is 01:52:52 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 doughty 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 slickin his har and washing and fixin up afore having his picture taken but the old fellow was obdurate and joined me in remonstrance against this transformation to the commonplace on the part of it. of his womenfolk. However, there was no profit in arguing with them, and I took my snapshot with a conviction that the film was being wasted. We were in several small towns today, in pursuance of the policy of distributing our shopping, so as to see as much of the shore life

Starting point is 01:53:59 as practicable. Chief among them have been New Matamoros, 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 flowering mill at the head of the landing, a few cheap-looking, battle-mented 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

Starting point is 01:55:01 oil and gas wells, and great signs like those advertising boards which greet railway tracks travelers approaching our large cities, are here and there perched upon the banks, notifying steamboat pilots in letters a foot high, that a pipeline here crosses the river, the vicinity being consequently unsafe for mooring. Our camp tonight is on a bit of grassy ledge at the summit of a rocky bank, 10 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.

Starting point is 01:55:57 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 boar appeared. A middling-sized man, floored 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,

Starting point is 01:56:45 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 today in Marietta, when they ought to be worth twenty, 20 cents. Now on politics, and of course he was a populist, now on the hard times, and did we believe in

Starting point is 01:57:37 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 roundup, 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 goodbye 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.

Starting point is 01:58:28 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.

Starting point is 01:58:58 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 Terry, the doctor, to get him started, offered to walk a peace with him. Our comrades stayed 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 fake ear by Perfesh,

Starting point is 01:59:54 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 healed and stayed and kept store at the boat, while the fakir, as the walking partner, rustled round among the 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 of my perfesh catching on down thar. The result of this pumping process must have been satisfactory,

Starting point is 02:00:43 for when we parted with him, the fakir declared he was going to try on thar next winter if I bust my bottom dollar. End of Chapter 7 Chapter 8 of A Float on the Ohio An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff From Redstone to Cairo This is a Librevox recording All Libravox recordings are in the public domain

Starting point is 02:01:10 For more information or to volunteer Please visit Libravox.org Recording by Robert Hoffman A Float on the Ohio by Ruben Gold Thwaites. Chapter 8. Life ashore and afloat. Marietta, the Plymouth Rock of the West. The Little Canawa

Starting point is 02:01:32 The Story of Blenner Hassett's Island. Blenner Hassett'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 gaily 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 passed over into the river trough, where a silvery haze lent peculiar charm to flood and bank. Upriver, one of the three brother aisles, dark and heavily forested, seemed in the

Starting point is 02:02:18 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 past 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

Starting point is 02:03:11 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 lumbercraft this morning, descending from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. The half-dozen men in charge were housed midway in a rude little shanty, and leave 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-in-frequent windstorms blowing upon the stream,

Starting point is 02:03:59 and it will take them another week to cover the 300 miles between this and their destination. Far different fellow, these commonplace raftsmen of today, 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 adrift 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 said,

Starting point is 02:04:40 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 downshore 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, quote, the current might have more hold 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 tin-type 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,

Starting point is 02:05:27 but I thanked them, saying their craft was too slow for our needs, at which they laughed heartily, and, load we might be traitors, too, anxious to get in ahead of them. But there's plenty of room on the river for you and we, stranger? Well, good luck, Ties. We'll see you down below somewhere, I reckon. Just before lunch, we were at Marietta, at the mouth of the Muskegum, 171 miles, a fine stream, here 250 yards wide. A storied river, this mesquigum. We first definitely hear of it in 1748, the year the original Ohio company was formed. Celeron was here the year following, with his little band of French Sorcer. soldiers and Indians, vainly endeavoring to turn English traders out of the Ohio Valley.

Starting point is 02:06:16 Christopher Gist came, some months later, then the trader Krogan, for Old Wyandotte 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 Muskegum the ill-fated convert villages of Shunbrun, Gnaden Hutton, and Salem. In 1785, Fort Harmar was reared on the side of the side of the city of the city of the city. of Wyandotte town. Lastly, in the early spring of 1788 came, in Ohio River flatboats, that famous body of New England veterans of the Revolution under General Rufus Putnam, and planted Marietta, the Plymouth Rock of the West.

Starting point is 02:06:57 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 camp Martius and a Sacra Via and all that out here among the same, 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 of the shadows of Harvard and Yale, and in the awesome presence of crowds of huge monumental earthworks, whose age and their day was believed to far outdate the foundations of the eternal city itself. They loved learning for learning's sake,

Starting point is 02:07:37 and here in the log cabins of Marietta, 800 miles west of their beloved Boston, among many another good thing that 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 Muskegum. information, property, and strength will be its characteristics. I know many of the settlers personally, and there never were better men calculated to promote the welfare of such a community.

Starting point is 02:08:18 And when in 1825, Lafayette had read to him the list of Marietta pioneers, nearly 50 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. Myasma, 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 shipbuilding yards here,

Starting point is 02:08:52 but that industry gradually declined, with the growth of the railway systems. In our day, Marietta, with its 10,000 inhabitants, prospers chiefly in a market town in an educational center, with some manufacturing interests. We were struck today, 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, Vermont. Omitting its riverfront and its mound cemetery, Marietta might be bodily set down almost anywhere in Massachusetts, or Vermont, or Connecticut.

Starting point is 02:09:30 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, West Virginia, at the mouth of the Little Canawa, 183 miles. In the full glare of the scorching sun, Parkersburg looks harsh and dry, but it is well built,

Starting point is 02:10:51 and as seen from the river, apparently prosperous. The Ohio is here crossed by the once famous million-dollar bridge of the Baltimore and Ohio railway. The wharf is at the junction of the two streams, but chiefly on the shore of the unattractive Little Canawa, which is spanned by several bridges and abounds in steamers and houseboats moored to the land. Clark and Jones did not think well of the Little Canawa lands, yet there were several families on the river as early as 1763, and Trent, Crogon, and other Fort Pitt fur

Starting point is 02:11:23 traders had posts here. There were only half a dozen houses in 1800, and Parkersburg itself was not laid out until ten years later. Blenner-Hassett'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. Blenner-Hassets is some three and a half miles long. Of its 500 acres, 400 are under cultivation in three separate tenant farms. We landed at the upper end, where Blenner Hacet had its wharf, facing the Ohio shore, and found that we were trespassing upon the Blenner Hassett pleasure grounds. A seedy-looking man, who represented himself to be the proprietor, promptly accosted us and levied a lending fee of ten cents per head, which included the right

Starting point is 02:12:15 to remain overnight. A little questioning developed the fact that 30 acres at the head of the island belonged 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 leveling toll on visitors. He declared to me that 15,000 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 Blennerhassett's is one of the best known in Western annals. Rich in culture and worldly possessions, but wildly impracticable,

Starting point is 02:13:01 Harmon Blennerhassett and his beautiful wife came to America in 1798. Buying this lovely island in the Ohio, 600 miles west of Tidewater, they built a large mansion, which they furnished luxuriously, adorning it with fine pictures in 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

Starting point is 02:13:34 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 Blennerhassets in his plans, the import of which they probably little understood, but the fantastic Englishman had suffered a considerable reduction of fortune

Starting point is 02:14:10 and was anxious to recoup, and Burr's representations were aglow with the promise of such rewards in the golden southwest as Cortez and Coronado sought. Blenner Hassett's purse was open 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 shorelines, all hung with giant sycamores, are still in evidence.

Starting point is 02:14:45 President Jefferson's proclamation, October 1806, shattered the, plot, and Blennerhasset 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 Blennerhasset'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 in the noble trees which once graced the lawn. As for the

Starting point is 02:15:29 Blennerhassets 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 spoilation of her home, passed away in New York before the claim was allowed and was buried by the Sisters of Charity. End of Chapter 8, recording by Robert Hoffman. Chapter 9 of A Float on the Ohio, and historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles on a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.

Starting point is 02:16:17 Recording by Robert Hoffman. A Float on the Ohio by Ruben Gold Thwaites. Chapter 9. Poor Whites. First library in the west. An hour at Hawkingport. A Hermit Fisher. Long Bottom. Monday, May 14th.

Starting point is 02:16:42 Pushing upstream for two miles this morning, the commissary department replenished the day's store. at Parkersburg. Four Paws 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,

Starting point is 02:17:05 mainly negroes and poor whites. Among the latter, flat, pallid faces, either flabby or too lean, or under the swarms of blue, white, and yellow sunbonnets. Sad faces, sad faces, with lackluster eyes, coarse hair of undecided hue, and coarser speech. These Audries of Dixieland 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.

Starting point is 02:17:36 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 Belpray, short for Bell Prairie, and is now locally pronounced Belprye, settled by revolutionary soldiers on the Marietta Grant in 17, I always think well of Belpray because here was established the first circulating library in the northwest.

Starting point is 02:18:25 Old Israel Putnam, he of the Wolf Den and Bunker Hill, amassed many books. His son Israel, on moving to Belpray 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 rivers, 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. The shares were sold at $10 each. Of the blessings wrought in this rude frontier community by the books which the elder Israel had collected for his Connecticut fireside,

Starting point is 02:19:22 there can be no more eloquent testimony than that borne by an old settler who, in 1802, writes to an Eastern friend, quote, In order to make the long winter evenings pass more smoothly, by great exertion I purchased a share in the Belpray library, six miles distant. many a night have I passed, using pine knots instead of candles, reading to my wife while she sat hatchling, carding, or spinning, unquote. 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

Starting point is 02:20:18 Blennerhassett's Island. Notice of our coming had preceded us, and we were warmly welcomed at a substantial farmhouse in the outskirts of Belpray, with every evidence about of our abundant prosperity. The maternal great-grandfather of our host for an hour was Rufus Putnam, an ancestor are 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, quote, the land is good, though with many stones, natural conditions, you know, for New Englanders, unquote. It was pleasant for a New England man,

Starting point is 02:21:05 not long removed from his native soil to find these people, who are a century away from home, still claiming kinship. At the big hawk-hawking river, 197 miles, on a high semicircular bottom is Hawkingport, a hamlet with a population of 300. Here, on a still higher bench, a quarter of a mile back from the river, Lord Dunmore built Fort Gower,

Starting point is 02:21:31 one of a chain of posts along his march against the northwest, Indians, 1774. It was from here that he marched to the Picouet Plains, on the Sayoto, near Circlesville, Ohio, 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 has been very warm, and we needed an awning as far down as Hawkingport, where we cooled off by lying on the grass in the shade of a village blacksmith's shop, which is, as well, the fairy house, with the bell hung between two tall posts at the top of the bank, its rope dangling down for public use. The Smith, fairy man, 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.

Starting point is 02:22:35 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.

Starting point is 02:23:09 Life goes easily in Hawkingport. Years ago there was some business up the big hawking, short for big hawk-hocking, a stream of a half-dozen rods width, but now no steamers venture up. The railroads do it all. As for the Ohio, well, the steamers now and then put off a box or bail for the four shopkeepers, 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 the ruins down there below.

Starting point is 02:23:43 Hawkingport is a type of several rustic hamlets we have seen today. 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 subtropical 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 formally, for the wakes they turn out are no longer savage, but wakes, even when sent out by stern-wheeler's at full speed, now give us little trouble.

Starting point is 02:24:34 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 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 surfboat.

Starting point is 02:25:10 We heard, the other day, of a boat-lawful. of daring youngsters being caught by the wheel, their crafts smashed into kindling wood, and they themselves all drowned but one. The hills today sometimes break sharply off, leaving an eroded, often vine-fistooned 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 rock 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

Starting point is 02:25:55 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 and long, shaky locks, and clothing and dirty tatters. As he put out in his skiff to reach the live box, he continuously sawed. spewed tobacco juice about him, and in an undertone growled garrulously, as though used to soliloquise in his hermitage, where he lay at outs with the world. He had been in this spot for two years, he said,

Starting point is 02:26:53 and sold fish to the Daly Parkersburg steamer, when there were any fish. But for six months past, he, quote, hadn't made enough to keep him in grub, unquote, and had now and then to go up to the city and earned something. For 40 years he had followed the Apostles' calling on, quote, This Year Ohio, unquote, 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.

Starting point is 02:27:40 But before handing it over, demanded the requisite fifteen cents. Evidently he had had dealings with the 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,

Starting point is 02:28:15 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 home-seeking. The doctor is our agent for this task, for being bow-or, he can clamber out most easily. This evening, he ranged both shores for a considerable distance, ill success, so that we are settled on a narrow Ohio sand beach in the midst of a sparse willow copse willow copse only two feet above the river. Dinner was had at the very water's edge. After a time, a windstorm arose and flap the tent right vigorously, causing us to pin down tightly and weight

Starting point is 02:28:56 the sodcloth, while amid distant thundering, every preparation was made for a speedy embarkation in the event of a flood. The bellow of the frogs all about us, the scream of the toads, and the heavy swash of passing steamers dangerously near our door will be a sufficient lullaby tonight. End of Chapter 9, recording by Robert Hoffman. Chapter 10 of A Float on the Ohio, a historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff,

Starting point is 02:29:33 from Redstone to Cairo. This is a Librevox. recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Teresa Sheridan. A Float on the Ohio by Ruben Gold Thawadis Chapter 10 Cliff Dwellers on Long Bottom, Pomeroy Bend, Let's Arts Island and Rapids, Game in the Early Day, rainy weather in a cracker home. Lettarts Island, Tuesday, May 15th. After we had gone to bed last night, we in the tent, the doctor and the 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

Starting point is 02:30:31 stretched canvas, and visions of a sudden rise in the fickle river were upper, most 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 today. 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. clamoring 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

Starting point is 02:31:56 i took a kodak shot at this also at a group of tassal-headed children at the door of a decrepit shanty built entirely within a crevice of the the rock there hiberian mother with one hand holding an apron over her head and the other shielding her eyes shrilly crying to a neighborhood cliff-dweller miss mccarthy miss mccarthy there's a feller here a photographing 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 work-a-day dresses of women and children seen along the river red calico predominance but blues and yellows in the blue's and young in the workaday dresses of women and children seen along the river red calico predominance but blues and yellows and even greens are seen, brightly spashing 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 Promeroy, 247 miles. It is of itself a series of smaller bends, and as we twist about upon our course, the wind strikes us. successfully on all quarters, sometimes giving the doctor a chance to try his sale, which he raises

Starting point is 02:33:43 on the slightest provocation, but at 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 plough 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 horseweed, which rears a cane-like stock full 18 or 20 feet high. It has now attained but four or five feet, but the dry stalks of last year's growth are everywhere, showing what a formidable barrier to landing these giant weeds must be in midsummer. We chose for a camping

Starting point is 02:34:58 place Lettarts Island, 232 miles, on the West Virginia side, not far below Millwood. 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 gate, in which the doctor and I found it difficult to keep our footing, while having our customary evening dip.

Starting point is 02:35:39 Our island is too 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. Darylick 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 cover lids wild grasses which flourish on all these flooded lands here attain enormous size

Starting point is 02:36:22 dispensing with our cots for the nonce we have spread our blankets over heaps of dried grass pulled from the monster turfs 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 drought. When the feeders in the Alleghenies 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 Lettarts 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,

Starting point is 02:37:27 indulged in flights of fancy. They are of slight consequence, however, even at this slow stage of water, save to the careless canoeist who has no experience in rapid water, well strewn with sunken boulders. The scenery of the locality is wild and somewhat impressive. Though 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.

Starting point is 02:38:16 Krogan was at Lethart, 1765, on one of his land-viewing trips for the Ohio Company, and tells us that he saw a vast migrating herd of buffalo across the river here. In the beginning of colonization in this valley, and elk were to be seen in herds of astonishing size. Traces of their well-beaten paths through the hills and toward the salt lakes 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. coolness in the heat of the day. He commenced his raids on them a hundred miles below

Starting point is 02:39:09 Pittsburgh. Hutchins 1778 says, the whole country abounds in bears, elks, buffalo, deer, turkeys, etc. Bears, panthers, wolves, eagles, and wild turkeys were indeed very plenty at first, but soon became extinct. The theory is advanced by Dr. Dolly. rodridge in his notes on virginia that hunter's dogs introduced hydrophobia along the wolves and this ridded the country of them sooner than they would naturally have gone but they were still so numerous in eighteen seventeen 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 the plan was abandoned. Then they instituted a blockade by erecting a tight board fence around the mound, and, thus entrapping

Starting point is 02:40:26 the reptiles, extirpated the colony in a few days. Parraquets were once abundant west of the Alleghenies up to the southern shore of the great lakes, and great flocks haunted the salt springs, but today they may be found only in the middle southern states. There were, in a state of nature, no crows, blackbirds, or songbirds in this valley. They followed in the wake of the colonists. The honeybee came with the white man, or rather just pre-consum. seated him. Rats followed the first settlers, then opossums, and fox squirrels still later. It is thought, too, that the sandhill and whooping cranes and the great blue herons, which we

Starting point is 02:41:14 daily see in their stately flight, are birds of these latter 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 today there are a 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,

Starting point is 02:41:51 so useful in a climate as warm as this. three miles below lettard'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 longbottom 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 eighteen twenty found only one figure remaining a man in a sitting posture making a pipe today even thus much has been largely obliterated by the elements but antiquity itself is not quite dead there is a shipyard 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,

Starting point is 02:43:08 although only the tops of the buildings were, from the river level, to be seen above the high bank. These, in 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 thunderstorm broke upon us in full furry 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 patsy lunch

Starting point is 02:44:16 an hour later we bailed out pilgrim and once more ventured upon our way it is a busy district between racine and sheffield two hundred and fifty one miles for eleven miles upon the ohio bank there are a few breaks between the towns racine syracuse minersville pomeroy coal port middleport and sheffield coal mines and salt works abound with the other industries interspersed, and the neighborhood appears highly prosperous. Its metropolis is Pomeroy, in shape a shoestring 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, be speaking in their names, a Connecticut ancestry. The afternoon sun gushed out, and the face of nature was cleanly beautiful,

Starting point is 02:45:25 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 68 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 rock 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 corn-field to a little log farmhouse whose broad porch was shingled with shakes and shaded by a lusty great fine. Fences, houses, and outbuildings have been newly whitewashed, and there was all about an uncommon air of neatness. A stout little girl of 11 or 12 met me at the narrow gate opening

Starting point is 02:46:32 through the garden palings. It may be because a gypsying trip like this ruffins 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 parlayed 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 saucy possibly retruce 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 gentleman company she prettied 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

Starting point is 02:48:16 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 there thought new shanghai rooster mr 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 load 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 load that 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 you're talkin mister a right smart business that o bosun o people around a seon o the world and nothin 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 in doing if he is to be the monarch of a stern-wheeler on the oh

Starting point is 02:50:16 but many another cracker boy has attained this exalted station and sam is of the sort to win his way soon the kind came lowing into the yard and my peaked young friend who had met me at the gate stood in the doorway talking with us both while their brother charlie an awkward self-conscious lad of ten took my pail and milked it the required two quarts it is a large square room where i was so agreeably entertained the well chinked logs are scrupulously washed the parental bed with gay pillow shams bought from a pedlar 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 a 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, which, appropriate holes for ten types of father, mother, and children, complete the furnishings of the apartment, which is parlor, sitting room, dining room, and bedroom all in one.

Starting point is 02:51:40 My little queen was evidently proud of her throne room, and note it 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 Charlie take the pail out to the cow, for an extra squirt or two for good measure. I was bidding them all goodbye, and the queen was pressing me to coming in in the morning, for more stuff. F. Ye, load, you want any. When the mother of the little brood appeared from over the fields, where she had been to carry water to her lord,

Starting point is 02:52:20 a fair, intelligent, 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. arms. Sort of weak in her lungs, poor thing, she sadly said, as I snapped my fingers at the smiling top. 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 the sweet tempered women been infused into the coarse clay of the bottom.

Starting point is 02:53:05 End of Chapter 10 by Teresa Sheridan. Chapter 11 of A Float on the Ohio. Unhistorical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles and a Skiff. From Redstone to Cairo. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, Please visit Libavox.org.

Starting point is 02:53:33 Recording by Bill Mosley. Afloat on the Ohio by Ruben Goldthwaite. Chapter 11 Battle of Point Pleasant The Story of Gallipolis, Rosebud, Huntingdon, The Genesis of a Houseboater Near Glenwood, West Virginia, Thursday, May 17th.

Starting point is 02:54:01 By 8 o'clock this morning we were in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, at the mouth of the great Canawa River, 263 miles. Sailoran was here, the 18th 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 today in the Museum of the Virginia Historical Society. The great Canawa Valley long had a romantic interest for Englishmen concerned in western lands.

Starting point is 02:54:52 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 Alleghenies and the Ohio, the West Virginia of today, erected into the province of Vandalia, with himself as governor

Starting point is 02:55:26 and his capital at the mouth of the great Kanawa. Washington owned a 10,000-acre tract on both sides of the river, commenting 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, quote, the scheme for establishing a new government on the Ohio, end quote,

Starting point is 02:56:00 and the contiguity of his lands, quote, to the seat of government, which is more than probable, will be fixed at the mouth of the great Kanawa, in quote. Had not the revolution broken out, and nipped this and many other budding plan for Western colonization, there is little doubt that what was, we call West Virginia would have been established as a state a century earlier than it was. Footnote, Washington was much interested in a plan to connect by a canal, the James and Great

Starting point is 02:56:41 Canawa 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, quote, party spirit and sectional jealousies, unquote, until 1832, when a new company was incorporated under which the James was improved, 1836 to 53, but the Kanawa was untouched. In 1874, United States engineers presented a plan calling for an expenditure of 60 millions, but there the matter rests.

Starting point is 02:57:37 The Kanawa is navigable by large steamers for 60 miles, up to the falls at Charleston, and beyond almost to its source by Lightcraft. A few days ago, we were at, Mingo Bottom, where lived Chief Logan, whose family were treacherously slaughtered by border ruffians 1774. The Mingoes, ablaze with the fire of vengeance, carried the warpipe through the neighboring villages. Runners were sent in every direction to rouse the tribes.

Starting point is 02:58:12 Tomahawks were unearthed. Warposts were planted. Messages of defiance sent to the Virginians, and in a few. few days Lord Dunmore's war was in full swing, from Cumberland Gap to Fort Pitt, from the Alleghenies 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 Muskingham,

Starting point is 02:58:51 and an army of nearly three thousand backwoodsmen, armed with smooth boars and clad and fringed buckskin hunting shirts, was put in the field. One division of this army, 11 hundred strong, under General Andrew Lewis, descended the great Canala River, and on Point Pleasant met Cornstalk,

Starting point is 02:59:15 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

Starting point is 02:59:49 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. footnote, 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 General 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. 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.

Starting point is 03:01:01 Cornstock'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 Fort's pit 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 claimed to land south of the Ohio River, returned their white prisoners and stolen horses, and gave hostages or future good behavior.

Starting point is 03:01:50 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 fitzburg 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,

Starting point is 03:02:44 empties into the canawa a half-mile up the stream at the back of the town. It was painful to meet several men of indiams. 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 matabalys 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, Ohio, 267 miles, which has a story all its own. The district belonged a century ago to the Skioto Company, an offshoot of the Marietta Enterprise. Joel Barlow, the poet of the revolution, was sent to Paris, May 1788, as agent for a

Starting point is 03:04:16 the sale of lands. As the result of his personal popularity there, and his flaming immigration circulars and maps, he disposed of 100,000 acres to settle on which 600 French immigrants 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 servants while many were without trade or profession upon arrival in alexandria virginia they found that their deeds were valueless the land never having been paid for by the schiotto's 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

Starting point is 03:05:27 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 immigrants 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 today 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 of

Starting point is 03:07:01 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 bandstand in the centre 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 seventeen ninety to eighteen ninety 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 back 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.

Starting point is 03:08:34 A vicious dog came down to meet me halfway, 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 cool. 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

Starting point is 03:09:29 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,

Starting point is 03:10:13 a mile or two above Glenwood, West Virginia, 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 chance to come home ahead of her fellows i sat on the rear porch gossiping with the farm wife a pennsylvania dutch dame of ample purport portions, 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 housepoke people.

Starting point is 03:11:24 As for these latter, though they were her customers, she had none too good and 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 huntingland west virginia friday may eighteenth backed by ravine grooved hills and edged at the water-side 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 enclosed by palings the majority of these small farmers whose tracks 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

Starting point is 03:12:57 one man having a hundred and twenty acres told me he paid three dollars a month for his house and for pastureage a dollar a month per head we were in several of the small towns to-day at millersport ohio two hundred ninety-three miles while dubya and the doctor were uptown 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 Miller's Port boat costs $1,200. The proprietor charges 20% of each freight bill for handling and storing goods, a fee of 25 cents for each steamer that lands,

Starting point is 03:14:02 and certain special fees for livestock. Athalia, Haskellville, and Guyondot 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, West Virginia, 306 miles, was a right smart chunk of a town. And it is. There are 16,000 people here,

Starting point is 03:14:38 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 Cerrado, West Virginia. To Catlitzburg, Kentucky, nine miles away. Huntington is the center of a large group of riverside towns supported by ironmaking and other industries. Guy and Dot and Saradoe in West Virginia,

Starting point is 03:15:13 Katlettsburg, just over the border in Kentucky, and Proctorville, Broderickville, Frampton, Burlington, and South Point on the opposite shore. We are camping tonight 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 brim straw hat is perched over one ear to add to the general effect and between his teeth a corn-cob pipe his

Starting point is 03:16:31 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, Kentucky, 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

Starting point is 03:17:11 as a river pirate of the first water. End of Chapter 11. Recording by Bill Mosley-Bernardo, Texas, USA. Chapter 12 of A Float on the Ohio unhistorical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo. This is a Librovox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visitlibrovox.org.

Starting point is 03:17:53 Recording by Bill Mosley A Float on the Ohio by Ruben Gold Thwaites. chapter twelve in a fog the big sandy rainy weather operatic gipsies an ancient tavern ironton ohio saturday may nineteenth 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 gust 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 windbreak 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 for, farewell. A dense fog hung like a cloud over land and river. There was a stiff northeast wind,

Starting point is 03:19:12 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 upstream, 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 oaring groups, standing out with startling distinctness from somber backgrounds, of houseboats, many hewed moored to willowed banks or bolstered high upon shaly beaches, of the opposite bottom with its corrugated cliff of clay,

Starting point is 03:20:08 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 smokestacks 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 seredo the last town in west virginia a small sawmilling community stuck upon the edge of the clay cliff with the broad level bottoms of the small small sawmilling community stuck upon the edge of the clay cliff with the broad level bottoms stretching out behind like a prairie. A giant railway bridge here spans the Ohio,

Starting point is 03:21:09 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. Katlettsburg, the first Kentucky town,

Starting point is 03:21:43 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 177, and entered for one John Frye, 2,084 acres round the site of Louisa, a dozen miles up the river, which was the first survey made in Kentucky. But a few months later, then Boone's first advent as a hunter, on the dark and bloody ground,

Starting point is 03:22:23 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,

Starting point is 03:22:53 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, Hardaport, 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, Kentucky, 320 miles, we stopped for supplies.

Starting point is 03:23:42 There are 6,000 inhabitants here, with some good buildings and a fine, broad stone wharf, but it is rather a dingy place. The steamer Bonan's, 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 townwards with their bags and bundles, the other hurrying down with theirs to the boat, which was ringing its bell, blowing off steam, and other ways creating an uproar which seemed to turn the heads of the negro restabouts 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

Starting point is 03:24:55 A rainstorm broke the fog, a cold, raw, miserable rain. No clothing we could dawn 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, and 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,

Starting point is 03:25:43 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 least. lunch this noon, hovering over the smoking stove which was set in the tent door, with a windscreen 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. Dubia, reading to us between chattering teeth from berries when a man's single. It is good Scottish weather we're having, but somehow our thoughts could not rest on thrums,

Starting point is 03:26:41 and we were, for the nantes, 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. An 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 tonight.

Starting point is 03:27:26 Our bachelor doctor volunteered to be that one. so we bade him godspeed 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 traipsing about and a skiff in such weather as this, coming from nobody knows where and camping a night 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,

Starting point is 03:28:28 these blessed people open their hearts and their beds to us without question, and what more can weary pilgrims pray for? Skiotoville, Ohio, Sunday, May 20th. After breakfast and settling our modest score, we rejoined the doctor, and at ten o'clock pulled out again, being bidden goodbye to 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.

Starting point is 03:29:07 Today 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,

Starting point is 03:29:46 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 Sugarloaf Hills with their castellated escarpments go marching by with stately sweep. Greenup Courthouse, 334 miles,

Starting point is 03:30:20 is a bright little Kentucky county seat, well built in the feet of thickly, deforested 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 bestroon with gigantic boulders, which have in ages past rolled down from the hilltops above. Here, among the rocks, we again set up a rude screen from the steel piercings, 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

Starting point is 03:31:13 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 seal, yellow spikes of toad flax, blue and pink flocks, glossy May apple, high up on the hillside, the fire pink and winter green, and down by the sandy shore, great beds of blue wild lupin, and occasionally stately spikes of the familiar moth malayne. With the temperature falling rapidly in a drizzling rain taking the starch out of our enthusiasm, the early sought a camping ground. For miles along here, springs ooze from the base of a high clay bank walling in the wide and rocky Ohio beach,

Starting point is 03:32:13 and dry spots are a few and far between. We found one, however, a half mile above Little Skioto River, 346 miles, with driftwood 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. Footnote, two miles up the little Skioto, Pine Creek enters, perhaps a mile and a half up this creek was,

Starting point is 03:32:51 In 1771, a mingo town called Horsehead Bottom, which cut some figure in border history as a nest of Indian marauders. Dinner over, the crew hauled pilgrim under cover and within prepared for her sailing master a cozy bed, with the entire ship's stock of sleeping bags and blankets. W. the boy and I then started off to find quarters in Skiotovil, 1,000. inhabitants, which lies just below the river's mouth, here a dozen rods wide. Scambling 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 pincemon. The country road leading into the village is some distance inland,

Starting point is 03:33:52 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 Scootoville 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,

Starting point is 03:34:26 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-starged apron, white cap, and gold-rimmed glasses. She even ninely 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

Starting point is 03:35:02 well of a tavern-keeping martha washington end of chapter twelve according by bill moseley bernardo texas u s a Chapter 13 of A Float on the Ohio, an historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Robert Hoffman A Float on the Ohio by Ruben Gold Thwaites. The Sioda and the Shawanese, a night at Rome, limestone, keels, flats, and boatmen of the olden time. Rome, Ohio, Monday, May 21st.

Starting point is 03:36:04 At intervals through the night, rain fell, and the temperature was but 46 degrees 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 amphitheaters, broad green meadows, rocky escarpments,

Starting point is 03:36:34 and many colored fields, light and shade gaily chased each other. Never were the vistas of the widening river more beautiful than today. There are sawmill 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.

Starting point is 03:37:06 At the mouth of the Saita, 354 miles, is Portsmouth, Ohio, 15,000 inhabitants, a well-built, substantial town with good shops. It lies on a hill-backed terrace some 40 feet above the level of the neighboring bottoms, which give evidence of being victims of the high floods periodically covering the lowlands about the junction of the rivers. Just across the Ceyota 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 approached the river. The country about the mouth of the Saita has long figured in western annals. Being a favorite rendezvous for the Shawanese,

Starting point is 03:37:53 it naturally became a resort for French and English fur traders. The principal part of the first Shawnee village, Shanoa town, in the old journals, was below the Sioda's mouth on the site of Alexandria. It was the chief town of this considerable tribe, and here just 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 50 feet above the ordinary level and destroying the larger part of the Shawnee's village.

Starting point is 03:38:35 Some of the Indians moved to the Little Miami, and others up to the Sioda, where they built successively old and new Chilicothe, but the majority remained and rebuilt their town on the higher land north of the Ciotta, where Portsmouth now stands. An outlying band had had, from before just day, a small town across the Ohio, the site of Springville, and it was here that George Crogan had his stone trading house,

Starting point is 03:39:06 which was doubtless after the manner of the times of Frontier Fortyreys, In the French and Indian War, 1758, the Shawanese, tiring of continual conflict, withdrew from their Ohio River settlements to old or upper Chilicothe, and thus closed the once-important fur trade at the mouth of the Sioda. 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 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 Canawa Valley and her final return home in Kindred, who viewed her as one delivered from the grave,

Starting point is 03:40:04 is one of the most thrilling in Western history. 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 18th century were a continual source of alarm to those whose business led them to follow this otherwise inviting highway to the continental interior. Flat boats 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

Starting point is 03:40:48 near land, subject the voyagers to a fierce fuselot of bullets, against which even stout plank barricades proved of small avail. Vanceburg, Kentucky, 375 miles, is a little town at the bottom of a amphitheater of hills. There was a floating photographer there, as we passed, with a gangplank run out to the shore and framed specimens of his work hung along the townside 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 planting mill, the clipper, which we had seen before, upriver, 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

Starting point is 03:41:41 occupied with tramp work, for there is a great deal of logging carried on in a small and careful way by farmers living on these wooden hills. Vanceburg 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, where 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, three hundred and eighty one miles an ohio village this rome and so fallen from its once proud estate that its post-office no longer bears the name it is simply stouts 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 soon

Starting point is 03:42:57 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 rainwater 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 moats, much of it is used in the country parts.

Starting point is 03:44:03 This morning, a bevy of negroes came down to 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 royally mess. At dusk, there was again a damp chill, and for the third time we left the doctor to keep Bachelors' 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.

Starting point is 03:44:38 For two commercial drummers, who were to depart by the early morning boat, occupied the regular spa room, the landlady informed us, and a bit of a cubbyhole off the back stairs had to be arranged for us. Guests are rarities at the hostelry in Rome. Near Ripley, Ohio,

Starting point is 03:44:57 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 overnight. 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,

Starting point is 03:45:45 in improvements of every sort. Thus far, we have not ourselves noticed differences of that degree, doubtless before the late Civil War, all the antebellum 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 today, 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,

Starting point is 03:46:31 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 averted, or as my own previous reading on the subject led me to expect, is grossly to exaggerate. After leaving Manchester, Ohio, 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,

Starting point is 03:47:13 now and then are stone quarries upon the banks, with capacious barges moored in front, and upon one or two rocky ledgers were stone crushers, getting out material for concrete pavements. When we ask the bargemen, in passing, whether their loads are destined, the invariable reply is, the city, meaning Cincinnati, still 70 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 and width,

Starting point is 03:47:52 and at no season can it be over two or three. One finds it with difficulty along the mill-strewn shore of Maysville, Kentucky, 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, most invariably booked for this point, thence taking stage to Lexington, and travelers in the early days seldom passed it by unvisited. But years before there was any settlement

Starting point is 03:48:28 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 Pittsburgh, with powder given by Patrick Henry, then governor of Virginia, for the defense of Kentucky settlers from British incited savages, he was chased by the ladder 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 25 miles from limestone, too was another attraction of the early time, the great Blue Lick Sulfur Spring. Here, in a valley surrounded by wooden hills, formerly congregated great herds of buffalo

Starting point is 03:49:25 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 compare 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 Nemecolin'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

Starting point is 03:50:14 centered either on Fort Pitt or Redstone or on Cumberland Gap. On the outgoing 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 upstream 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

Starting point is 03:50:59 in their migrations to the promised land of Old Kentucky. And we should not overlook the fact that of much importance was still a third route up the james and down the great canawa a route whose advantage to virginia washington early saw and tried in vain to have improved by a canal connecting the two rivers 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 canawa with his surveying party in seventeen seven 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. Pittsburgh, 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,

Starting point is 03:52:00 and boat yards were common up both the Monongahela and the Yogiogany, for a distance of 60 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 Pittsburgh 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. 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 watercraft, of all shapes and structures. These, Flint, who knew the river well, separates into seven classes.

Starting point is 03:52:59 1. Stately barges, the size of an Atlantic schooner with a raised and outlandish-looking deck. One of these required a crew of 25 to work it upstream. 2. Keelboats, long, slender, and graceful in form, carrying from 15 to 30 tons, easily propelled over the shallows, and much used in low water and in hunting trips to Missouri, Arkansas and the Red River Country. Three, Kentucky Flats, or Broadhorns. A species of Ark, very nearly resembling a New England pigsty.

Starting point is 03:53:42 These were from 40 to 100 feet in length, 15 feet in beam, and carried from 20 to 70 tons. Some of these flats were not unlike the houseboats of today. It is no uncommon spectacle to see a large face, family, old and young, servants, cattle, hogs, horses, sheep, fowls, and animals of all kinds, all embarked on one such bottom. Number four, covered sleds, fairy flats, or allegheny skiffs, carrying from eight to twelve tons. Number five, parrogues of from two to four tons burthen, sometimes hollowed from one big tree, or the trunks of two-tree

Starting point is 03:54:28 united and a plank rim fitted to the upper part. Number six, common skiffs and dugouts. Number seven, monstrous anomalies, not classifiable, and often whimsical in design. To these might be added the floating shops or stores with a small flagout to indicate their character, so frequently seen by Palmer 1817, and thriftily surviving unto this day. day minus the flag. And Hall, 1828, speaks of a flat-bottomed rowboat, 12 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

Starting point is 03:55:19 classes here enumerated were allowed to drift downstream 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 upstream, the sweeps served as oars, and in the shallows long pushing, poles were used. As for the boatmen who professionally propelled the keels in flats of the Ohio, they were a class unto themselves, half-horse, half alligator, a contemporary style of them,

Starting point is 03:56:08 rough fellows, much given to fighting and drunkenness, and ribaldry, with a genius for coarse drollery and stinging repartee. The Rivertown suffered sadly at the hands of this lawless, dissolute element. Each boat carried from 30 to 40 boatmen, and a number of such boats frequently traveled in company. After the Indian scare was over, they generally stopped overnight 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,

Starting point is 03:56:58 while there was always present an element which abetted and throve on the vice of the rivermen. 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 affected 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.

Starting point is 03:57:36 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 bank, 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 autumn 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 shore of the Monongahela, waiting for a rise of water to float them to their destination.

Starting point is 03:58:26 The western merchants were lounging discontentedly about the streets of Pittsburgh, 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 today? 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

Starting point is 03:59:47 has been general through the basin, and the Ohio is rising steadily. End of Chapter 13, recording by Robert Hoffman. Chapter 14 of Afloat on the Ohio, an historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Bill Mosley.

Starting point is 04:00:28 A float on the Ohio by Ruben Goldthwaiths. Chapter 14. Produce Boats. A dead town. On the Great Bend. Grant's birthplace. The Little Miami. The Genesis of.

Starting point is 04:00:47 Cincinnati. Point Pleasant, Ohio, 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 waterline creeping nearer and nearer to the tent door. As we sweep onward today 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 these unwelcome companions of the voyage and we wish no entangling alliances much tobacco is raised on the rounded gently sloping hills below maizeville a way up on the acclivities in sheltered spots near the fields in which they are to be transplanted or in fenced fenced corners in the ever-broadening bottoms, we note white patches of thin cloth pinned down over the

Starting point is 04:02:20 young plants to protect them from untoward frosts. There are many tobacco warehouses to be seen along the banks. Apparently farmers cooperate in maintaining such, and in front of each, a roadway leads down to the water's edge, indicating a steamboat landing. On the town wharves are often seen portly barrels, locally puncheons, filled with the weed, awaiting shipment by boat, most of the product goes to Louisville, but there are also large buyers in the smaller Kentucky towns. Occasionally today we have seen moored to some rustic landing, a great covered barge, quite of the fashion of the golden age of Ohio boating. At one end a room is partitioned off to serve as cabin,

Starting point is 04:03:17 and the sweeps are operated from the roof. These are produce boats, which are laden with coarse vegetables and sometimes livestock, and floated down to Cincinnati or Louisville, and even to St. Louis and New Orleans. In Antebellum days, produce boats were common enough, and much money was made by speculative buyers who would dispose of their cargo in the most favorable port, sell the barge, and then return by rail or steamer, just as in still earlier days the keel or flatboat owner would sell both freight and vessel on the lower Mississippi,

Starting point is 04:04:02 or abandon the craft if he could not sell it, and Hoof it home, as a contemporary chronicler puts it. Ripley, LeVana, 417 miles, Higginsport, 421 miles, Chilo, 431 miles, Neville, 435 miles, and Point Pleasant, 442 miles, are the Ohio towns today, and Dover, 417 miles, Augusta, 424 miles, and Foster, 435 miles, their rivals on the Kentucky shore. Sawmills and distilleries are the leading industries, and there are broad paved wharves, but a listless air pervades them all, as if once they bask in the light of better days.

Starting point is 04:05:01 Foster is rather the shabbiest of the lot As I passed through to find the post office At the upper edge of town Where the hills come down to meet the bottom I saw that half of the store building Still intact were closed Many dwellings and warehouses were in ruins And numerous open cellars were grown to grass and weeds

Starting point is 04:05:31 few people were in sight, and they loafing at the corners. The post office occupied a vacated store, evidently not swept these six months past. The youthful master, with chair tilted back, and his feet on an old washstand, which did duty as office table, was listlessly whittling a finger ring from a peach stone, but shoving his feet along,

Starting point is 04:06:01 you made room for me to write a postal card which I had brought for the purpose. What is the matter with this town, I asked, as I scratched away? Dade, I reckon, as he blew away the peach stone dust, which had accumulated in the folds of his greasy vest. Yes, I see it is dead. What killed it? Oh, just gone date, sort of natural doth, I reckon. We had a pretty, very very, view this morning, three or four miles below Augusta, from the top of a tree-denuted Kentucky hill, some 250 feet high. Hauling pilgrim into the willows, we set out over a low, cultivated bottom, whose edges

Starting point is 04:06:50 were being lapped by the rising river, to the detriment of the springing corn. Then, scrambling up the terrace on which the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway runs, we crawled under a barbed-wire fence and ascended through a pasture, our right-of-way contested for a moment by a gigantic Berkshire boar, which was not easily vanquished. When at last we gained the top, by dint of clamoring over rail fences and up steep slopes, be strewn with mulanes and boulders, and over patches of freshly ploughed hardscrabble,

Starting point is 04:07:30 the site was well worth the rough climb. The broad Ohio bottom opposite was thick dotted with orchard clumps, from which rose the white houses and barns of small tillers. On the generous slopes of the Kentucky hills, all corrugated with wooded ravines, were scores of fertile farmsteads, each with its ample tobacco shed, the better class of farmers on the hilltops, their buildings often silhouetted against the western sky,

Starting point is 04:08:04 and the meaner saw it down low on the river's bank. Through the pastoral scene, the broad river winds with noble sweep, until both above and below it loses itself in the purple mist of the distant hill. hills. We are now upon the Great Bend of the Ohio, beginning at Neville, 435 miles, and ending at Harris's Landing, 519 miles, with North Bend, 482 miles at the apex. The bend is itself a series of convolutions, and our point of view is ever-changing, so that we have kaleidoscopic vistas, and with each new setting good-humoredly dispute with each other, we at the oars and the others in the stern sheets,

Starting point is 04:08:59 as to which is the more beautiful, the unfolding or the dissolving view. Our camp tonight is beside a little hillside torrent on the lower edge of Point Pleasant. We are well up on the rocky slope. An abandoned stone quarry lies back of us, up the hill a bit, and leading into the village, half a mile away, is a picturesque country road overhung with sumacs and honey locusts, overtopped on one side by a precipitous pasture, and on the other, dropping suddenly to a beach thick groan to willows, maples, and scrub sycamores. The boy and I made an expedition into the town for milk and water, but were obliged to climb one of the sharpest ascent's hereabout before our search was rewarded.

Starting point is 04:09:55 A pretty little farmstead it is, up there on the lofty hill above us, with a wealth of chickens and an ample dairy and fat fields and woods gently sloping backward into the interior. The good farmwife was surprised that I was willing to pack commodities, so plentiful with her, down so steep a path, but canoeing pilgrims must not falter at trifles such as this. Point Pleasant is the birthplace of General Grant. Not every Hamlet has its hero hereabout.

Starting point is 04:10:38 Everyone we met this evening, seeing we were strangers, the boy and I, told us of this halo which crowns their home. Cincinnati, Thursday, May 24th. During the night there were frequent heavy downpours, during which the swollen torrent by our side roared among its boulders right lustily, and occasionally a heavy farm wagon across the country bridge, which spans the ravine just above us, its rumblings echoing in the quarried glen for all the world like distant thunder.

Starting point is 04:11:20 Before turning in, each built a cairn upon, the beach, at the point which he thought the water might reach by a morning. The boy, more venturesome than the rest, piled his cairn highest up the slope, and when daylight revealed the fact that the river, in its four feet rise, had crept nearest his goal, there was much juvenile rejoicing. There is a gray sky this morning, with a cold headwind on the starboard quarter, we hug the lee of the Ohio shore. The river is well up in the willows now,

Starting point is 04:12:02 crowding pilgrim as closely as we may within the narrow belt of unruffled water. Our oars are swept by their bending boughs, which lightly tremble on the surface of the flood. The numerous rock-cumbered ravines coursing down the hills or through the bottom land, A few days since, hell but slender streams, or were the most of them wholly dry. But now they are brimming with noisy currents all flecked with foam.

Starting point is 04:12:40 Pretty pictures, these yawning gullies, overhung with cottonwoods and sycamores, with thick undergrowth of greenbriar and wild columbine, and the yellow buds of the Selandine poppy. The hills are showing better cultivation as we approach the great city. The farmhouses are in better style. The market gardens, larger, prosperity more evident. Among the pleasing sites are frequent farmsteads at the summits of the slopes, with orchards and vineyards and gardens and fields stretching down almost to the river,

Starting point is 04:13:22 quite indeed on the Ohio side. But in Kentucky, flanked at the base by the railway terrace, numerous ferries connect the Kentucky Railway stations with the eastern bank. One which we saw just above New Richmond, Ohio, 446 miles, was run by horsepower, a weary nag and a treadmill above each side paddle. Although Kentucky has the railway, there is just here apparent, a greater degree of thrift in Ohio. The towns, more numerous, fields and truck gardens more ample,

Starting point is 04:14:04 on the whole a better class of farmhouses, and frequently along the country road, which closely skirts the shore, comfortable little broad balcony ends, dependent on the trade of fishing and outing parties. Just below the Newport Waterworks are several coal barge harbors, mooring grounds where barges lie in waiting until hauled off by tugs to the storage wharves in the rear of one of these fleets at the base of a market gardener we found a sunny nook for lunch for here on the kentucky side the cold wind has full sweep and we are glad of shelter when it rest across the river is a broad low bottom given up to market gardeners

Starting point is 04:14:55 who jealously cultivate down to the water's edge, leaving the merest fringe of willows to protect their domain. At the foot of this fertile plain, the Little Miami River, 460 miles, pours its muddy contribution into the Ohio, and beyond this rises the amphitheater of hills on which Cincinnati, 466 miles, is mainly built.

Starting point is 04:15:25 we see but the outskirts here for two miles below us there is a sharp bend in the river and only a dark pall of smoke marks where the city lies but these outlying slopes are well dotted with gray and white groups of settlement separated by stretches of woodland over which play changing lights for cloud masses are sweeping the ohio hills while we are still basking in the sun above us crowning the kentucky ascent or nestled on their wooded shoulders are many beautiful villas Evidently the homes of the ultra wealthy. Close at hand we have the pleasant chink-chink of caulking hammers, for barges are built and repaired in this snug harbor. Now and then a river tug comes, with noisy bluster of smoke and steam,

Starting point is 04:16:27 and amid much tightening and slackening of rope and wild profanity takes captive a laden barge, as a cowboy might a refractory steer in the midst of a herd, and hauls it off to be disgorged downstream. And just as we conclude our lunch, German women come with hose to practice the gentle art of horticulture, a characteristic conglomeration in the heart of our busy west, the millionaire on the hilltop, the tiller on the slope,

Starting point is 04:17:02 shipwright on the beach and grimy commerce master of the flood setting afloat on a boiling current thick with driftwood we soon were coursing between city-line shores on the kentucky side newport and covington respectively above and below licking river and in an hour we're making our way through the labyrinth of steamers thickly moored with their noses to land and cautious creeping around to a quiet spot at the stern of a giant wharf boat. No slight task this, with the river on the jump, and a false move liable to swamp us if we strike an obstruction at full gate. No doubt we all breathed freer when Pilgrim, too, was beached, although it be only confessed in the privacy of the log. With her and her cargo safely stored in the wharf boat,

Starting point is 04:18:07 we sought a hotel and, regaining our bag of clothing, shipped ahead of us from McKee's Rocks, donned urban attire for an inspection of the city. And a noble city it is that has grown out of the two blockhouses, which George Rogers Clark planted here in 1780, on his raid against the Indians of Chilicothe. In 1788, John Cleves Sims, the first United States judge of the Northwest Territory,

Starting point is 04:18:43 purchased from Congress a million acres of land lying on the Ohio between the two Miami rivers. Matthias Denman bought from him a square mile at the eastern end of the grant. on a most delightful high bank, opposing the licking, and on a cash valuation of the land of $200, took in with him as partners, Robert Patterson and John Philson.

Starting point is 04:19:14 Philson was a schoolmaster, had written the first history of Kentucky, and seems to have enjoyed much local distinction. To him was entrusted the task of inventing a name for the settlement which the company proposed to plant here. The outcome was Losantaville, a pedagogical hash of Greek, Latin, and French. L for licking, OS, os, mouth,

Starting point is 04:19:45 anti-opposite, Ville, City. Licking opposite city, or city-opposite-licking, whichever is preferred. This was in August. The fates worked quickly, for in October, poor Philson was scoped by the Indians in the neighborhood of the Big Miami, before a settler had yet been enticed to Los Santaville. But the survivors knew how to boom a town. Lots were given away by lottery to intending actual settlers,

Starting point is 04:20:21 and in a few months, Sims was able to write that, It populates considerably. A few weeks previous to the planting of Los Antiville, a party of men from Redstone had settled Columbia at the mouth of the little Miami, about where the suburb of California now is, and a few weeks later a third colony was started by Sims himself at North Bend, near the Big Miami,

Starting point is 04:20:51 at the western extremity of his grant, and this the judge wished to make the capital, of the new Northwest Territory. At first it was a race between these three colonies. A few miles below North Bend, Fort Finney had been built in 1785 or 96. Hence the bend had at first the start, but a high flood dampened its prospects. The troops were withdrawn from this neighborhood to Louisville, and in the winter of 1789 to 90, Fort Washington was built at Los Antiville by General Harmer.

Starting point is 04:21:34 The neighborhood of the new fortress became in the ensuing Indian War, the center of the district. To Losantiville with its fort came Arthur St. Clair, the new governor of the Northwest Territory, January 1790, and making his headquarters here laid violent hands on Philson's invention, at once changing the name to Cincinnati, in honor of the Society of the Cincinnati, of which the new official was a prominent member. So that Sims sorrowfully writes, Los Santaville will become extinct.

Starting point is 04:22:20 Five years of Indian campaigning followed, the features of which were the crushing defeats of harmer and st clair and the final victory of mad anthony wayne at fallen timbers it was not until the treaty of greenville seventeen ninety five the result of wayne's brilliant dash into the wilderness that the revolutionary war may properly be said to have ended in the west those were stirring times on the ohio both ashore and afloat. But amidst them all, Cincinnati grew apace. Ellicott in 1796 speaks of it as a very respectable place, and in 1814, Flint found it the only port that could be called a town from Steubenville to Natchez, a distance of 1,500 miles.

Starting point is 04:23:16 In 1825, he reports it greatly grown, and crowded with immigrants from Europe and Europe, from our own eastern states. The impetus thus early gained has never lessened, and Cincinnati is today one of the best built and most substantial cities in the Union. End of Chapter 14. Recording by Bill Mosley, Bernardo, Texas, USA. Chapter 15 of A Float on the Ohio, an historical pilgrimage.

Starting point is 04:23:56 miles in a skiff from Redstone to Cairo this is a Libravox recording all Libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or a volunteer please visit Libravox.org recording by John Smith a float on the Ohio by Ruben Gold the warts chapter 15 the story of North Bend the shakes driftwood Rabbit Hash, a side trip to Big Bone Lick, near Petersburg, Kentucky, Friday, May 25th. This morning, an hour before noon, as we looked upon the river from the top of the Cincinnati wharf, a wild scene presented itself. The shore up and down, as far as could be seen, was densely lined with packets and freighters. Beyond them, the great stream, here half a mile wide, was rushing past like a mill race, and black with all manner of drift, some of it formed into great rafts, from each of which sprawled, a network of huge branches. Had we been strangers to this off-scoring of a thousand miles of

Starting point is 04:25:07 beach swirling past us at a six-mile gate, we might well have doubted the prudence of launching little pilgrim upon such a sea, but for two days past we had been amidst something of the sort and knew that to Canoas it was less dangerous than it appeared. A strong headwind, meeting this surging tide, is lashing it into a white-capped fury. But lying too with paddle and oars, and dodging fairies and towing tugs as best we may, Pilgrim bears us swiftly past the long line of steamers at the war.

Starting point is 04:25:46 Past Newport and Covington, and the insignificant licking, and out under great railway bridges, which cobweb the sky, soon Cincinnati shrouded in smoke, has disappeared around the bend, and we are in the fast, thinning suburbs, homes of beer gardens and excursion barges, havens for freight flats, and villas of low and high degree. When we are out here in the swim, the drift stream has a more peaceful aspect than when looked at from the shore. Instead of rushing past as if dooming to destruction, everything else afloat. The debris falls behind. When we roll, for our progress is then the greater. Dropping our oars, our gruesome companions on the river pass us slowly, for they catch less wind than we. and then so silent the steady march of all we seem to be drifting upstream until on glancing at the shore the hills appear to be swiftly going down and the willow fringes up

Starting point is 04:26:58 until the sight makes us dizzy and we are content to be at whits with these optical delusions we no longer have the beach of gravel or sand or a strip of clay knee deep in mud the water now twelve feet higher than before the rise has covered all. It is indeed swaying the branches of sycamores and willows and meeting the edges of the cornfields of venturesome farmers who have cultivated far down taking the risk of a June fresh. Often could we, if we wish, grow quite within the bulwark of willows, where a week ago we would have ventured to camp. The Kentucky side, today from Covington out, has been through. thoroughly ristic, seldom broken by settlement. While Ohio has given us a succession of suburban towns all the way out to North Bend, 482 miles, which is small manufacturing place, lying on a narrow bottom at the base of a convulsion of gentle wooded hills. One sees that Cincinnati has a better and broader base. North Bend was handicapped by nature in its early race. When Ohio

Starting point is 04:28:13 came into the Union 1803 it was specified that the boundary between her and Indiana should be a line running due north from the mouth of the big Miami but the latter an erratic stream frequently the victim of floods comes wriggling down to the Ohio through a broad bottom grown thick to willows and in times of high water its mouth is a changeable locality the boundary monument is planted on the meridian of what was the mouth 90 odd years ago but today the Miami breaks through an opening in the quivering line of willow forest a hundred yards eastward 487 miles Garrison Creek is a modest Kentucky affluent just above the Miami's mouth at the point a group of

Starting point is 04:29:07 rustics set on a log at the bank top watching us approach landing in search of milk and water I was taken by one of them in a lumbresome skiff, a short distance up the creek, and presented to his family. They are genuine crackers of the coarsest type, tall, lean, sallow, fishy-eyed with towel-collared hair, an ungangly gait, barefooted, and in nondescript clothing all patches and tatters. The tousle-headed woman, surrounded by her copies in miniature, keeps the milk neatly in an outer dairy perhaps because of market requirements. But in the crazy old log house, pigs and chickens are free comers, and the cistern from which they drink is foul. Here in this

Starting point is 04:29:56 damp, low pocket of a bottom, annually flooded to the door, seal, in the midst of vegetation of the rankest order and quite unheatful of the simplest of sanitary laws. These yellow-skinned crackers are cradled, wedded, and bearded, and there are thousands like unto them, for we are now in the heart of the shake country, and shall hear enough the plague through the remainder of our pilgrimage. As for ourselves, we fear not, for it is not until autumn that danger is imminent, and we are taking due precaution under the doctor's guidance. Two miles beyond is the Indiana town of Lawrenceburg. With the Uncamped aspects so common to the small river places and two miles still farther on a Kentucky bottom

Starting point is 04:30:48 Petersburg whose chiefest building as viewed from the stream is a huge distillery on a high sandy terrace a mile or so below we pitch our nightly camp All about our willows rustling musically in the evening breeze and soaring far aloft the now familiar Sycamores nearly opposite in Indiana the little city of a is sparkling with points of light, strains of dance, music reaches over the way and occasional shouts and gay laughter. While now and then in the thickening dusk of the long day, we hear skiffs go chuckling by from Petersburg way and the gleeful voices of men and women doubtless being varied to the ball. Near Warsaw, Kentucky, Saturday, May 26. Our first mosquito appeared last night, but he was easily slaughtered.

Starting point is 04:31:39 it has been a comfort to be free thus far from these pests of camp-lop we had prepared for them by laying in a bolt of black tarleton and at wheeling greatly superior this to ordinary white mosquito bar but thus far it has remained in the shopman's wrapper the fog this morning was of the heaviest at four o'clock we were awakened by the sharp clanging of the pilot's signal bell and there Poking her nose in among our willows, a dozen feet from the tent, was the big sandy, one of the St. Louis and Cincinnati packet line. She had evidently lost her bearings in the mist, but with a deal of ringing and a nosy churning of the water by the reverse paddle wheel, pulled out and disappeared into the gloom. The river still rising is sweeping down an ever-increasing body of rubbish. islands and beaches away back to the Alleghenies on the mainstream and on thousands of miles of affluence are yielding up those vast rafts of driftwood and fallen timber which have continually impressed us on our way with a sense of the enormous wastage everywhere in progress necessary of course in view of the prohibitive cost of transportation nonetheless one thinks pitifully of the ten

Starting point is 04:33:06 of thousands who in congested districts each winter suffer unto death for want of fuel and here is this wealth of forest debris the useless plaything of the river but not only wreckage of this character is borne upon the flood the thievish river has picked up valuable saw logs that have run astray lumber of many sorts boxes barrels and now and then the body of a cow or horse that has tumbled to its death from some treacherous clay cliff or rocky terrace The beaches have been swept clean by the rushing flood of whatever lay upon them, be it good or bad, for the great scavenger exercises no discretion. The bulk of the matter now follows the current in an almost solid raft as it carumes from shore to shore, having swift water everywhere at this stage. For the most part we avoid entangling pilgrim in the procession but row upon the outskirts. Interested in the curious medley and observant of the many birds which perch upon the branches of the floating trees and seeing glithery on their way, the current bears hard upon the allura beach and townspoke by scores are out in skiffs or are standing by the water's edge, engaged with boat hooks and sparing choice morsels from the debris rushing by their door, heaping it upon the shore to dry or gathering it in little rafts, which they moor to the bank. It is a busy scene. The wreckers, men, women, and children alike are so engaged in their grab-bag game that they have no eyes for us.

Starting point is 04:34:44 Unobserved, we watch them at close range and speculate upon their respective chances. Rabbit Hatch, Kentucky, 502 miles, is a crude hamlet of a hundred souls, lying nestled in a green amplifier fitter. A horsepower ferry runs over to the larger village of Ryevon. Sun. It's Indiana neighbor. There is a small general store in Rabbit Hash with post office and paint shop attachment and nearby tobacco warehouse in a blacksmith shop with a few cottages scattered at intervals over the bottom. The postmaster who is also the storekeeper and painter greeted me with joy as I deposited with him mail matter bearing 18 cents worth of stamps. For his is one of

Starting point is 04:35:31 those offices where the salary is the value of the stamps. cancelled it is not every day that so libero patron comes along jimmy bill but go em it business look em up there'll be somethin o rest us a wanton in this year office at your necks election i reckon it was the blacksmith who is also the ferryman who thus bantered the delighted postmaster a broad-faced big-chested brown armed man with his neck muscles standing out like chords, and his mild blue eyes dancing with fun, his rustic disciple of tubal cane, he sent just without the door, leather apron upon,

Starting point is 04:36:18 and his red shirt sleeves rolled up playing checkers on an upturned soapbox with a jolly fat farmer from the hill country whose broad straw hat was cocked on the back of his bald head. The merry laughter of the two was in fact, The half-dozen spectators, small farmers whose teams and saddle horses were hitched to the post-office railing were themselves hilarious over the game. And a saffron-skinned, hollow-cheeked woman in a blue sunbonnet and with a market basket over her arm, stopped for a moment at the threshold to look on, and then passed within the store, her eyes having caught the merriment, although her facial muscles had apparently lost her power of smiling.

Starting point is 04:37:05 joining the little company I found that the farmer was a blundering player but made up in fun what he liked in science. I tried to ascertain the origin of the name Rabbit Hash as applied to the Hamlet. Everyone had a different opinion, evidently invented on the spur of the moment, but all owed that none but the tobacco agent could tell, and he was off in the country for the day. as for themselves they had they confessed never thought of it before it always had been rabbit hash and like enough would be to the end of time we are on the lookout for big bone creek wishing to make a side trip to the famous big bone lick but among the many openings through the willows of the kentucky shore we may well miss it hence make constant inquiry as we proceed there was a houseboat in the mouth of one goodly affluent as we hove in sight a fat woman whose gunny sack apron was her chief attire hurried up the gang plank and disappeared within hello the boat one of us held the woman's fuzzy head appeared at the window what creek is this gunpowder i reckon in a deep manlike voice how far below is big bone just a piece how many miles two i reckon big bone creek five hundred twelve miles some fifty or sixty feet wide at the mouth opens through a willow patch between pretty slopping hills a houseboat lay just within a favorite situation for them these creek mouse for here they are undisturbed by steamer wakes and the fishing is usually good the proprietor could rather distinguish looking lotto despite his old clothes

Starting point is 04:39:03 and plantation straw hat, was sitting in a chair as Cabin door, angling. His white wife was leaning over him lovingly. As we shot into the scene, but at once withdrew inside, this man, with his side whiskers and fine hair, may have been a head waiter or a dance fiddler in better days. This soft, plentive voice and hacking cough bespoke the in the belt. He told us what he knew about the creek, which was little enough, as he had but recently come to these parts. At an ordinary stage in the Ohio, the Big Boon cannot be ascended in a skiff for more than half a mile. Now upon the back set, we are able to proceed for two miles leaving, but another two miles of walking to the lick itself. The creek curves gracefully around the bases of the sugarloaf heels of the interior.

Starting point is 04:40:00 Under the swaying arc of willows and of ragged sprawling sycamores, their bark all patched up with green and gray and buff and white, we have charming vistas. The quiet water, thick grown with aquatic plants, the winding banks bearing green dragons and many another flower-loving damp shade. The frequent rocky palisides oozing with springs and great blue herons stretching their long. necks in wonder and then setting off with a stately flight which reminds one of the cranes on Japanese wear through the dense fringe of vegetation we have occasional climpses of the hillside farms their slopping fields sprinkled with stones there are often barren pastures numerous abandoned tracks overgrown with weeds and blue grass lush in the meadows along the edges of the creek and in little

Starting point is 04:40:57 pocket bottoms. The varied vegetation has a subtropical luxuriance. And in this now close, warm air, there is a rank smell suggestive of malaria. These bottoms are annually overflowed so that the crude little farmsteads are on the rising ground. Whitewashed cabins, many of them of logs, serve as houses. For stock, there are the various shanties affording practically no shelter, best of all the rude tobacco drying sheds and many of which some of last year's crop can still be seen hanging on the strips. We are out of the world here, and barefooted men and boys who with listless air are fishing for the banks gaze at us and dull wonder as we thread our torturous way. Finally we learned that we could with profit go no higher. Before us were two miles

Starting point is 04:41:57 of what was described as the roughest sort of hill road and the afternoon sun was powerful so we accepted the invitation of a rustic fisherman to rest with his woman folks in a little cabin up the hill a bit seeing her safely housed with a good-natured cracker farm wife the doctor the boy and i trudged off towards big boon lick the waxy clay of the road bed had reached been wetted by a shower the walking consequently was none of the best but we were repaid with charming views of hill and veil a softly rolling scene dotted with gray and brownfields chumps of woodland rail-fenced pastures and cabins of the crudest sort for in the autumn tide the curse of malaria haunts the basin of the big boom

Starting point is 04:42:53 and none but he of fortune spurned with care here in his beauty spot to plant his vine and fig tree. Now and then our path leads us across the winding creek, which in these upper reaches tumbles noisily over ledges of jagged rock above which luxuriant sycamores and alms and maples arch gracefully. At each picturesque fording place with its inevitable watering pool are stepping stones for foot pilgrims often a flock of geese are sailing in the pool with crane necks and flapping wings hissing defiance to disturbers of their sylvan peace the

Starting point is 04:43:37 travelers we meet are on horseback most of them the yellow-skinned hollow-cheeked folk with lacklesser eyes whom we note in the cabin doors are dawdling about their daily routine on nearing the lick two young horsewoman out of the common look interestingly at us, and I stopped to inquire the way. Although the village spire is peering above the treetops yonder, pretty buxom, sweet-faced lassies these with soft, pleasant voices, each with her market basket over her arm, going homeward from shopping. It would be interesting to know their story. What is it that brings these daughters of a brighter world here into this Valley of the living death.

Starting point is 04:44:22 Two hundred yards farther where the road forks and the one at the right hand descends to the small hamlet of Big Bone Lick. There is an interesting picture. Beneath the Way Post, a girl in a blue calicoat gown, her face deep hidden in a red sunbonnet, sits upon a chestnut mount with a laden market basket before her, while by her side astride a cold black pony, which fretfully paused to be on his way. Is a roughly dressed youth, his face shaded by a broad, slouched hat of the cowboy order. They have evidently met there by appointment and are so earnestly conversing.

Starting point is 04:45:05 She with her hand resting lovingly, perhaps, depreciently upon his bridal arm, and is free hand nervously stroking her horse's mane. while his eyes are far afield that they do not observe us as we pass and we are free to weave from the incident any sort of cracker romance which fancy may dictate the source of big bone creek is a marshy basin some fifty acres in extent rimmed with gently sloping hills and freely pitted with copious springs of a water strongly sulphurous and taste with a suggestion of salt the odor is so powerful as to be able to beaute with a great source of salt the odor is so powerful as to be all pervading, a quarter of a mile away and to be readily detected at twice that distance. The collection of springs constitutes big bone lick, probably the most famous of the many similar licks in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. The salt licks of the Ohio basin were from the earliest times resorted to be in great numbers by wild beasts and were favorite camping grounds for

Starting point is 04:46:12 Indians and for white hunters and explorers. This one was first visited by the French as early as 1729 and became famous because the great quantities of remains of animals which lay all over the marsh, particularly noticeable being the gigantic bones of the extinct mammoth, hence the name adopted by the earliest American hunters, Big Bone. These monsters had evidently been murdered in the swamp while seeking to lick the salty mud and died in their tracks. Pioneer Chronicles abound in references to the lick, and we read frequently of hunting parties using the ribs of the mammoth for tent poles

Starting point is 04:46:54 and sections of the vertebrae as camp stools and tables. But in our own day, there are no surface evidence of this once rich treasure of giant fossils. Although occasionally a find is made by insurprising excavators, several bones having thus been unearth only a week ago they are now on exhibition in the neighboring village preparatory to being shipped to an eastern museum as we hurried back over the rolling highway thunder clouds grandly rose out of the west and great drops of rain gave us moist warning of the coming storm was watching us from the cavendor as we made the last turning in the road and accompanied by the far wife and her two daughters came tripping down to the landing she had been

Starting point is 04:47:46 entertained in the one downstairs room as royalty as these honest cracker women folk knew how seated in the family rocking chair as she had heard in those two hours social gossip of a wide neighborhood learned too that the cold wet weather the last fortnight had killed turkey chicks and goslings by the score heard of the damage being done to corn and tobacco by the prevalent high water, was told how Bess and Brindle fared, off in the rocky pasture, which yields little else than mullets. And how far back Towser had to go to claim relationship to a collie? And weren't we really show people

Starting point is 04:48:32 going down the river this way in a skiff? Or if we weren't show people, had we an agency for something or were we only in trade it seems a difficult task to make these people on the bottoms believe that we are skipping it for pleasure it is a sort of pleasure so far removed from their notions of the fitness of things and so at last we have given up trying and let them think of our pilgrimage what they will the entire family now assembled on the muddy bank and bade us a really affectionate farewell, as if we had been in this isolated corner of the world, most welcomed guests who were going all too soon, in a few strokes of the oars, we were rounding the bend and waving our

Starting point is 04:49:23 hands at the little knot of watchers went forth from their wives doubtless forever. The storm soon burst upon us in a full fury. Clad in rubber, we rested under giant trees are beneath projecting rock ledges, taking advantage of occasional walls to push on for a few rod to some new shelter. The numerous little hillside runs, which in our journey up, were but dry gullies, choked with leaves and boulders, were now brimming with muddy torrents, rushing all foam, flecked, and with deafening roar into the central stream. At last the cloud curtain rolled away. The sun gushed out. with fiery rays the arch of foliage sparkled with splendor in meadow and on hillside the face of nature was clearly beautiful at the creek mouth the distinguished mulatto still was fishing from his chair and standing by his side was his wife throwing his spoon they nodded to us pleasantly as old friends returned gliding by their boat pilgrim was soon once more in the full current of the swift-flowing ohio we are high up tonight

Starting point is 04:50:37 on a little grass terrace in Kentucky two miles above Warsaw the usual country road lies back of us a rod or two and then a slender field surmounted by a woodland hill fortune favors us almost nightly with beautiful abiding places in no place could we sleep more comfortably than in our cotton home end of chapter fifteen recording by john smith Chapter 16 of A Float on the Ohio. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Timothy Livwright. Chapter 16, New Switzerland, an old-time river pilot. houseboat life on the lower reaches, a philosopher in rags, wooded solitudes,

Starting point is 04:51:47 arrival at Louisville, near Madison, Indiana, Sunday, May 27th. At supper last night, a houseboat fisherman, going by in his skiff, parted the willows, fringing our beach, and offered to sell us some of his wares. We bought from him a two-pound catfish which he tethered to a bush overhanging the water until we were ready to dress it, giving us warning that meanwhile it would be best to have an eye on our purchase, or the turtles would devour it. Hungry thieves, these turtles, the fishermen said. You could leave nothing edible in water or on land unprotected without constant fear of the reptiles, which reminds me that yesterday the doctor and the boy found on the beach a beautiful box tortoise.

Starting point is 04:52:44 Our fish was swimming around finally at the end of his cord when the executioner arrived and when finally hung up in a tree was safe from the marauders. This morning the fisherman was around again, hoping to obtain another dime from the commissariat, but though we had breakfast creditably from the little cat, we had no thought of, of stocking our larder with his kind. So the grisly man of nets took a fresh chew of tobacco and sat a while in his boat, passing the time of day with us,

Starting point is 04:53:20 punctuating his remarks with frequent expectorations. The new Kentucky houseboat law taxes each craft of this sort seven and a half dollars, he said, five dollars going to the state and the remainder to the collector. There was to be a patrol boat to see that the fellers done step to the captain's office and settle. But the houseboaters were going to combine and fight the law in constitutional grounds, for they had been told that it was clearly an interference with commerce on a national highway. As for the houseboaters voting, well, some of them did, but most of them didn't.

Starting point is 04:54:03 The Indiana Registry law requires a six-month residence. and in kentucky it is a full year so that a houseboat man who moves about and he just isn't in it sir that's all however our visitor was not much disturbed over the practical disfranchisement of his class it seemed rather to amuse him he was much more concerned than the new tax which he thought an outrageous imposition in bidding us a cheery good-bye he noticed my kodak ye'd be one of them photograph parties, hey? And laughed knowingly as though he had caught me in a familiar trick. No child of nature so simple in these days as not to recognize a Kodak. Warsaw, Kentucky, 524 miles just below, has some bankside evidences of manufacturing,

Starting point is 04:55:01 but on the whole is rather down at the heel. A contrast this to Vivay, 533 miles on the Indiana shore, which, though a small town on a low-lying bottom, is neat and apparently prosperous. Vive was settled in 1803 by John James Dufour and several associates from the district of Vivay in Switzerland, who purchased from Congress four square miles hereabout, and christening it New Switzerland, sought to establish extensive vineyards in the heart of this Middle West. The Swiss prospered. The colony has had sufficient vitality

Starting point is 04:55:46 to preserve many of its original characteristics unto the present day. Much of the land in the neighborhood is still owned by the descendants of Dufour and his fellows, but the vineyards are not much in the, evidence. In fact, the grape-growing industry on the banks of the Ohio, although commenced at different points with great promise by French, Swiss, Germans, and Americans alike, has not realized their expectations. The Ohio has proved to be unlike the Rhine in this respect. In the long run,

Starting point is 04:56:21 the vine in America appears to fare better in a more northern latitude. Three miles above Vivé, Plum Creek, I was interested in the Indiana farm upon which Heathcote Pickett settled in 1795. Some say in 1790. In his day, Pickett was a notable flatboat pilot. He was credited with having conducted more craft down the river to New Orleans than any other man of his time, going down on the boat and returning on foot. It is seen. said that he made over twenty trips of this character, which is certainly a marvelous record at a time when there were only Indian trails through the bore than a thousand miles of dense forest between Vivee and New Orleans, and when a savage enemy might be expected to lurk behind

Starting point is 04:57:19 any tree ready to slay the rash pale face. Picketts must have been a life of continuous adventure as thrilling as the career of Daniel Boone himself. Yet he is now known to but a local antiquarian or two, and one stumbles across him only in footnotes. The border annals of the West abound with incidents as romantic as any which have been applauded by men. Daniel Boone is not the only hero of the frontier. He is not even the chief hero.

Starting point is 04:57:54 He is but a type whom an accident, of literature has made conspicuous. The Kentucky River, 541 miles, enters at Carrollton, Kentucky, a well-to-do town with busy-looking wharves upon both streams, through a wide and rather uninteresting bottom. But over beyond this, one sees that it has come down through a deep-cut valley rimmed with dark rolling hills which speak eloquently of a diversified landscape along its banks. The Indian Kentucky, a small stream but half a dozen rods wide, enters from the north five miles below. Injun Kentuck, it was called by a jovial junk boatman station at the mouth of the tributary. There are on the Ohio several examples of this peculiar,

Starting point is 04:58:51 nomenclature. A river enters from the south, and another affluent coming in from the north, nearly opposite, will have the same name with the prefix Indian. The reason is obvious. The land north of the Ohio remained Indian territory many years after Kentucky and Virginia were recognized as white man's country, hence the convenient distinction. The river coming in from the north, near the Kentucky, for instance, became Indian Kentucky, and so on through the list. Houseboats are less frequent in these reaches of the river. The towns are fewer and smaller than above. Consequently, there is less demand for fish or for desultory labor.

Starting point is 04:59:41 Yet we seldom pass a day in the most rustic sections without seeing from half a dozen to a dozen of these craft. sometimes they are a few rods up the mouths of tributaries half hidden by willows and overhanging sycamores or in picturesque little openings of the willow fringe along the main shore or boldly planted at the base of some rocky ledge at the towns they are variously situated in the water up the beach away or high upon the bottom whither some great flood has carried them in years gone by. Occasionally, when high and dry upon the land, they have a bit of vegetable garden about them, rented for a time from the farmer. But even with the floaters, chickens are commonly kept, generally in a coop on the roof, connected with the shore by a special gangplank for the fowls. And the other day, we saw a thrifty houseboater who had several colonies of bees.

Starting point is 05:00:48 There was a rise of only two feet last night. Evidently the flood is nearly at its greatest. We are now 20 feet above the level of ten days ago and are frequently swirling along over what were then sharp, stony slopes, and brushing the topmost boughs of the lower lines of willows and scrub sycamores. Thus we have a better view of the country, and approaching closely to the banks can from our seats at any time pluck blue lupine by the armful. It thrives mightily on these graveled shores, and so do the bignonia vine, the poison ivy, and the Virginia creeper.

Starting point is 05:01:34 The hills are steeper now, especially in Indiana. Many of them, although stony, worked out and almost worthless, are still in patches cultivated to the very tex. top, but for the most part they are clothed and restful green. Overhead in the summer haze, turkey buzzards wheel gracefully, occasionally chased by audacious hawks, and in the woods we hear the warbill of songbirds, shadowy idle scenes these rustic reaches of the lower Ohio, through which man may dream in nature's lap all regardless of the workaday world. It was early evening when we passed Madison, Indiana, 553 miles, a fairly prosperous factory town of about 12,000 souls.

Starting point is 05:02:29 Scores of the inhabitants were out in boats, collecting driftwood, and upon the wharf was a great crowd of people waiting for an excursion boat which was to return them to Louisville, whence they had come for a day's outing. It was a lifeless melancholy party, as excursion folk are apt to be at the close of a gala day, and they wearily stared at us as we paddled past. Just below, on the Kentucky shore, on my usual search for milk and water, I landed at a cluster of rude cottages set in pleasant market gardens. While the others drifted by with pilgrim, I had a goodly walk before,

Starting point is 05:03:15 for finding milk, for a cow is considered a luxury among these small riverside cultivators. The man who owns one sells milk to his poorer neighbors. Such a nabab was at last found. The animal was called down from the rocky hills by her barefooted owner who lank and malaria-skinned, leaned wearily against the well curb, while his wife, also guiltless of hose and shoes milked into my pail directly from the lean and hungry brindle. By the time the crew were reunited storm clouds, thick and black were fast rising in the west, scudding down shore for a mile, with oars and paddle aiding the swift current, we failed to find a proper camping place on the

Starting point is 05:04:07 muddy bank of the far stretching bottom. Rain drops were now pattering on our rubber spreads, it was evident that a blow was coming. But despite this, we bent to the work with renewed vigor and shot across to the lee shore of Indiana, finally landing in the midst of a heavy shower and hurriedly pitching tent on a rocky slope at the base of a vertical bank of clay. Above us, a government beacon shines brightly through the persistent storm with the keeper's neat little house and garden a hundred yards away, and the treetops up a heavily forested hill beyond the wind moans right dismally in this sheltered nook we shall be but lulled to sleep with the ceaseless pelting of the rain louisville monday may twenty eighth at midnight the heavens cleared with a cold north wind the early morning atmosphere was nipping and we were glad of the shelter of the tent during breakfast the river fell eight

Starting point is 05:05:13 inches during the night and on either bank as a muddy strip which will rapidly widen as the water goes down. Below us, 20 rods or so more to the boulder-strewn shore was a shanty boat. In the bustle of landing last night we had not noticed this neighbor and it was pitch dark before we had time to get our bearings. I think it is the most dilapidated affair we have seen on the river, The frame of the cabin is out of plumb, old clothes served for sides, and flapped loudly in the wind, while two little boys who peered at us through slits in the airy walls looked fairly miserable with cold. The proprietor of the craft came up to visit us while breakfast was being prepared and remained until we were ready to depart, a tall, slouchy fellow,

Starting point is 05:06:13 clothed in shreds and patches he was in the prime of his life with a depressed nose set in a battered though not unpleasant countenance none of our party had ever before seen such garments on a human being old bits of flannel frayed strips of bagging stuff and other curious odds and ends of fabrics in all the primitive colors the whole roughly basted together with sack thread he was a philosopher was this rag-tag and bob-tail of a man, a philosopher with some mother-wit about him. For an hour he sat on his haunches, crouching over our little stove, and following with cat-like care w's every movement in the culinary art. She felt she was under the eye of a critic

Starting point is 05:07:04 who, though not voicing his opinions, looked as if he knew a thing or two. As a conversationalist, our visitor was fluent, to a fault. It required but slight urging to draw him out. His history and that of his fathers for three generations back, he recited in much detail. He himself had, in his best days, been a subcontractor in railway construction. But fate had gone against him, and he had fallen to the low estate of a shanty boatman. His wife had gone back on him, and he was left with two little boys whom he proposed to bring up his gentleman.

Starting point is 05:07:47 Yes, sir, gentlemen, you hear me? If I is only a shanty boat feller. I thought I'd come to visit of you, he had said by way of introduction. You're from a city, ain't you? Yeah, I just thought hit. City folks is more accommodating than country folks. Why, well, you fellers just go back here in the hills away, and then our country folks, they'd hardly answer you. They're that selfish like. Give me city folks, I'd say,

Starting point is 05:08:20 for getting along with. And then in a rambling monologue, while chewing a straw, he discussed humanity in general and the professions in particular. I ain't got no use for lawyers. Mighty hard show them fellers has for getting to heaven. As for doctor, well, they have hard sledding too, but them fellers has to do piles of disagreeable work. Yes, they do. I'd just rather fish for living than be a doctor. Still, sir, give me an educated man every time, says I. Well, sir, and you hear me?

Starting point is 05:08:58 One of the richest fellows right here in Madison was born and raised on a shanty boat, and no mistake. He just don't pick up his education from folks passing by, just as your fellows is a pass, and they might say a few words of information to him. He don't get a fine education just that way. And they ain't no flies on him these days when money getting is round. Just nothing like it, sir, education does the biz. An observant man was this philosopher and had studied human nature to some purpose.

Starting point is 05:09:33 He described the condition of the poor farmers along the river as being pitiful. They had no money to hire help and were an odd lot anyway. The farther back in the hills you get, the worse they are. He loved to talk about himself in his lowly condition, in contrast with his former glory as a subcontractor on the railway. When a man was down, he said he lost all his friends, and to illustrate this familiar phase of life told two stories which he had often read in a book that he owned.

Starting point is 05:10:06 They were curious, old-fashioned. tales of feudal days evidently written in a former century. He did not know the title of the volume, and he related them in what evidently were the actual words of the author. A curious recitation in the pedantic literary style of the ancient storyteller, but in the dialect of an Ohio River Cracker. His greatest ambition, he told us, was to own a floating sawmill, although he carefully inquired about the laws regulating peddlers in our state and intimated that some time he might

Starting point is 05:10:45 look us up in that capacity in our northern home. As we approach Louisville today, the settlements somewhat increase in number, although none of the villages are of great size, and especially in Kentucky they are from 10 to 20 miles apart. The fine hills continue close upon our path until a few miles above Louisville, when they recede, leaving on the Kentucky side a broad, flat, plain, several miles square for the city's growth. For the most part, these stony slopes are well-wooded with elm, bucky, maple, ash, oak, locust, hickory, sycamore, cottonwood, a few cedars, and here and there a catulpa and a paw-paw giving a touch of tropical luxuriance to the hillside forest, while black bushes, bignonia vines, and poison ivy are everywhere abundant.

Starting point is 05:11:43 Otherwise, there is little of interest to the botanist. Red birds, catbirds, bluebirds, blackbirds, and crows are chattering noisily in the trees, and turkey buzzards everywhere swirl and swoop in mid-air. The narrow little bottoms are sandy, and on lowland as well as highland there is much poor, rock-bewitched soil. the little whitewashed farmsteads look pretty enough in the morning haze lying half hid in forest clumps but upon approach they invariably prove unkempt and dirty and swarming with shiftless barefooted unhealthy folk whom no imagination can invest with picturesque qualities. Their ragged, unpainted tobacco sheds are straggling about over the hills,

Starting point is 05:12:35 and here and there a white patch in the corner of a gray field indicates the nursery of tobacco plants, soon to be transplanted into ampler soil. It is not uncommon to find upon a hillside a freshly built log cabin set in the midst of a clearing with bristling stumps all round, reminding one of the homes of new settlers on the far-away logging streams of northern Wisconsin or Minnesota. The resemblance is the closer, for such notches cut in the edge of the Indiana and Kentucky wilderness, are often found after a row of many miles through a winding forest solitude, apparently but little change from primeval conditions.

Starting point is 05:13:21 Now and then, we come across quarries where stone is slid down great shoots to barges which lie moored by the rocky bank, and frequently is the stream lined with great boulders which stand knee-deep in the flood that eddies and gurgles around them. On the upper edge of the great Louisville plain, we pitched tent in the middle of the afternoon, and having brought our bag of land clothes with us in the skiff from Cincinnati, took turns under the canvas in affecting what transformation was desirable, preparatory to a visit to the city.

Starting point is 05:13:59 In the early twilight, we were floating past Toehead Island with its almost solid flank of houseboats, threading our way through a little fleet of pleasure yachts, and at last shooting into the snug harbor of the boat club. The good-natured

Starting point is 05:14:15 captain of the U.S. life-saving station took Pilgrim and her cargo and charge for the night, and by dusk we were bowling over metropolitan pavements on route to the house of our friend. Strange contrast, this lap of luxury to the soldier-like simplicity of our canvas home. We've been roughing it for so long, less than a month, although it seems a year, that all these conveniences of civilization these social conventionalities have to us a sort of foreign air, thus easily may man descend into the savage state. End. Chapter 16.

Starting point is 05:14:58 Chapter 17 of A Float on the Ohio, an historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo. This is a Liebervox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. Recording by Andrea Straano. A float on the Ohio by... by Reuben Gold Thwaites. Chapter 17. Storied Louisville, Red Indians and White, A Night on Sand Island, New Albany, Riverside Herbets, the River Falling, a deserted village, an ideal camp.

Starting point is 05:15:34 Sand Island, Tuesday, May 29th. Our Louisville host is the best living authority on the annals of his town. It was a delight and an inspiration to go with him today, the rounds of historic places. Much that was to me heretofore foggy in Louisville's story was made clear upon becoming familiar with the setting. The contention is made that LaSalle was here at the Falls of the Ohio during the closing months of 1669, but it was over a century later, under British domination, before a settlement was thought of. Dr. John Connolly entertained a scheme for founding of town at the Falls. But Lord Dunmore's War, 1774, and the revolution quickly following, combined to put an end to it, so that when George Rogers Clark arrived on the scene with this little band of Virginia volunteers, May 1778,

Starting point is 05:16:27 en route to capture the northwest for the state of Virginia, he found naught but a savage haunted wilderness. His log ford on Corn Island in the midst of the rapids served as a base of military operations, and was the nucleus of American settlement, although later the inhabitants moved to the mainland and founded Louisville. The falls at Louisville are the only considerable obstruction to Ohio River navigation. At an average stage, the descent is but 27 feet and two and a half miles. In high flood, the rapids degenerate into merely swift water without danger to descending craft. At ordinary height, it was the custom of pioneer boatmen in descending to lighten their cruxeners. craft of at least a third of the cargo and thus pass them down to the foot of the northside

Starting point is 05:17:14 portage, Clarksville, Indiana, which is three-quarters of a mile in length. Going up, lightened boats were towed against the stream. With the advent of larger craft, a canal with locks became necessary, the Louisville and Portland Canal of today, which is operated by the general government. The action of the water, hastened by the destruction of trees whose roots originally bound the loose soil, has greatly worn the islands in the rapids. Little is now left of historic corn island, and that little is at low water being blasted and ground into cement by mill hard by on the main shore.

Starting point is 05:17:51 Today with a flood of nearly 20 feet above the normal stage of the season, not much of the island is visible. Clumps of willows and cinnambores, swayed by the Russian current, give a general idea of the contour. Goose Island, although much smaller than in Clark's Day, is a considerable tract of wooded land with a rock foundation. Clark was once its owner, his home being opposite the Indiana shore, where he had a fine view of the river, the rapids, and the several islands. As for Clarksville, somewhat lower down, and back from the river a half mile, it is now but a cluster of dwellings on the outskirts of New Albany, a manufacturing town which is rapidly absorbing all the neighboring territory. Feeling obliged to make an early start, we concluded to pass

Starting point is 05:18:37 the night just below the canal on Sand Island, lying between New Albany and Louisville's noisy manufacturing suburb, Portland. An historic spot is this insular home of ours. At the Treaty of Fort Charlotte, Cornstalk told Lord Dunmore the legend familiar among Ohio River savages that here, in ages past, occurred the last great battle between the white and the red Indians. It is one of the puzzles of the antiquarians, this tradition that white Indians once lived on the land, but were swept away by the Reds. Cornstalk had used it to spur his followers to mighty deeds. It was a precedent which Pontiac dwelt upon when organizing his conspiracy, and King Philip is said to have been inspired by it. But this is no place

Starting point is 05:19:24 to discuss the genesis of the tale. Suffice it that on Sand Island have been discovered great quantities of ancient remains, no doubt in its day it was an overfilled burying ground. Noise is far different from the clash of savage arms are in the air tonight. Far above our heads, a great iron bridge crosses the Ohio, some of its peers resting on the island, a busy combination thoroughfare for steam and electric railways, for pedestrians and for vehicles, flying between New Albany and Portland, the whir of the trolley, the scream and rumble of locomotives, the rattle of wagons, and just above the island head the burly roar of steamboat signaling the locks. These are the sounds which are prevalent. Through all this hubbub, electric lamps are

Starting point is 05:20:12 flashing, and just now a steamer searchlight swept our island shore, lingering for a moment upon the little camp, doubtless while the pilot satisfied his curiosity. Let us hope that savage warriors never owe nights walk the earth above their graves, for such scenes as this might well cause those whose bones lie here to doubt their senses. Near Brandenburg, Kentucky, Wednesday 30th. We stopped at New All, Indiana, 603 miles this morning, to stock the larder and to forward our shore clothes by Express to Cairo. It is a neat and busy manufacturing town with an excellent public market. A gala aspect was prevalent, for it is Memorial Day. The shops and principal buildings were gay with bunting, and men in Grand Army uniforms stood in knots at the street corners.

Starting point is 05:21:00 The broad fertile plain on both sides of the river, upon which Louisville and New Albany are the principal towns, extends for eight or nine miles below the rapids. The first hills to approach the stream are those in Indiana. Salt River, some 10 or 12 rods wide, enters from the south 21 miles below New Albany, between uninteresting high clay banks with a lazy-looking little village of West Point, Kentucky, occupying a small rise of ground just below the mouth. The Kentucky hills come close to the bank, a mile or two farther down, and then the familiar characteristics of the reaches above Louisville are resumed. Hills and bottoms, sparsely settled with ragged farmsteads, regularly alternating. At 5 o'clock, we put in at a rocky ledge out of the Indiana

Starting point is 05:21:49 side, a mile and a half above Brandenburg. Behind us rises a precipitous hill, treaclead to the summit. The doctor found up there a new flocks and a pretty pink stone crop to add to our herbarium. While here, as elsewhere, the bignonia grows profusely in every crevice of the rock. At dark, two ragged and ill-smelling young shanty-boat men, who are moored hard by, came up to see us and by our campfire to whittle chips and groan about hard times. But at last we tired of their idle gossip, which had in it no element of the picturesque, and got rid of them by hinting our desire to turn in. The towns were few today and small.

Starting point is 05:22:30 Brandenburg, with 800 souls, was the largest, a sleepy, ill-paved, shambling place with apparently nobody engaged in any serious calling. Its chief distinction is an architectural monstrosity, which we were told is the courthouse. The Little White Hamlet of New Amsterdam, Indiana, 650 miles, looked trim and bright in the midst of a green thicket. Richardson's landing, Kentucky, as a disheveled row of old deserative houses, once used by lime burners, with a great barge wrecked upon the beach. At the small characterless Indiana village of Leavenworth, 658 miles, I sought a traveling photographer of whom I had been told at Brandenburg. My quest was for a dark room where I might recharge my exhausted Kodak, but the man of plates had packed up his tent and moved on, I would

Starting point is 05:23:22 no doubt find him in Alton, Indiana, 15 miles lower down. We have had stately eroded hills and broad fertile bottoms hemming us in all day. and marvelous oxbows in the erratic stream. The hillsides are heavily wooded, sometimes the slopes coming straight down to the stony beach without intervening terrace. Where there are such terraces, they are narrow and rocky and the homes of shanty men,

Starting point is 05:23:45 but upon the bottoms are whitewashed dwellings of frame or log tenanted by a better class, who sometimes have goodly orchards and extensive corn cribs. The villages are generally in the deep cut notches of the hills, where the interior can be conveniently reached by wagon road, a country rumpled like this, they say, for 10 or 12 miles back, and then stretching off into level plains of fertility. Now and then, a deserted cabin on the terraces,

Starting point is 05:24:13 windowless and gaunt, tells the story of some Cracker family that malaria had killed off, or that has pulled up stakes and gone to seek a better land. At Leavenworth, the river, which has been flowing northwest for 30 miles, takes a sudden sweep to the southwest. and thence forward we have a rapid current however we need still to ply our blades for there is a stiff headwind with an eager nip in it to escape which we seek the lee as often as may be and bask in the undisturbed sunlight right glad we were at lunchtime to find a sheltered nook amidst a heap of boulders on the kentucky shore and to sit on the sun-warm sand and drink hot tea by the side of a camp-fire rejoicing in the kindness of providence there are a few houseboats since leaving louisville Today we have seen but three or four, one of them merrily going upstream under full sail. Islands too are few, the upper and lower blue river, a pretty pair, being the first we have met since Sunday. The water is falling, it now being three or four feet below the stage of a few days since,

Starting point is 05:25:17 as can readily be seen from the broad dado of mud left on the leaves of willows and sycamores, while the drift, recently an ever-present feature of the current, is rapidly lodging in the branches of the willows and piling up against the sand spits, and scrawling snags and bobbing Sawyers are catching on the bars and being held for the next fresh. There is little life alongshore in these lower waters. There are two lines of ever-widening willowed beach of rock and sand or mud. Above them, perpendicular walls of clay,

Starting point is 05:25:49 which edge either rocky terraces backed by grant sweeps of convoluted hills, sometimes wooded to the top and sometimes eroded into palisades, or wide-stretching bottoms given over to small farms or maybe dense tangles of forest. In the midst of this world of shade nestle the whitewashed cabins of the small tillers, but though they swarm with children, it is not often that the inhabitants appear by the riverside. We catch a glimpse of them while landing on our petty errands. We now then see a houseboater at his nets, and in the villages, a few lackadaisical folk are lounging by the wharf. But as a rule, in these closing days of our pilgrimage, we glide through what is almost a solitude.

Starting point is 05:26:30 The imagination has not to go far afield to rehabilitate the river as it appeared to the earliest voyagers. Late in the afternoon, as usual wishing water and milk, we put a shore in Indiana, where a rustic landing indicated a settlement of some sort, although our view was confined to a pretty wooded bank and an unpainted warehouse at the top of the path. It was a fertile bottom, a half-mile wide. and stretching a mile or two along the river. Three neat houses, one of them of logs, constituted the village,

Starting point is 05:27:01 and all about were grain fields rippled into waves by the northwest breeze. The first house, a quarter of a mile inland, I reached by a country roadway. It proved to be the post office of Point Sandy. Chickens clucked around me, a spaniel came fawning for attention, a tethered cow moored plaintively,

Starting point is 05:27:18 but no human being was visible. At last I discovered a penciled notice pinned to the horse block to the effect that the postmaster had gone into Alton, five miles distant, for the day. And should William Askins call in his absence that said Askins was to remember that he promised to call yesterday but never came, and now would he be kind enough to come without fail tomorrow before sundown, or the postmaster would be obliged to write that letter they had spoken about? It was quite evident that Askins had not called, for he surely would not have left that mysterious notice sticking there for all Point Sandy.

Starting point is 05:27:53 to read and gossip over. It is to be hoped that there will be no bloodshed over this affair. Across the way in Kentucky, there would be no doubt as to the outcome. I looked at Boss and wondered whether in Indiana it were felony to milk another man's cow in his absence with no ginger jar at hand into which to drop a compensatory dime. Then I saw that she was dry and concluded that to attempt it might be thought a violation of ethics. The postmaster's well, too, proved to be a cistern, pardon the hibernus. and so I went farther. The other frame house also turned out to be deserted, but evidently only for the day, for the lilac bushes in the front yard were hung with men's flannel shirts drying in the sun.

Starting point is 05:28:35 A buck goat came bleeding toward me with many a flourish of his horns, from which it was plain to be seen why the family wash was not spread upon the grass. From here I followed a narrow path through a wheat field, the grain up to my shoulders toward the log dwelling. A mangy little curd is spewed of my right to knock at the door, but, flourishing my two tin pails at him, he flew yelping to take refuge in the hen-coop. To my summons at the portal, there came no response, save the mewing of the cat within. It was clear that the people of Point Sandy were not at home today. I would have retreated to the boat, but, Chancing to glance up at the overhanging hills, which edged in the bottom, saw two men sitting on a boulder in front of a rude log hut on the brink of a cliff, curiously watching my movements on the plane. Thankful now that the postmaster's cow had gone dry

Starting point is 05:29:25 and that these observant mountaineers had not had an opportunity to misinterpret my conduct, I had once hurried toward the hill, hopeful that at the top some bovine might be housed whose product could lawfully be acquired. But after a long and laborious climb over shifting stones and ragged ledges, I was met with the discouraging information

Starting point is 05:29:45 that the only cow in these parts was Hawkins' cow and Hawkins was the postmaster. Down yon, where you were reading the notices on the horse block. Either had they any water up there on the cliff top. Don't use very much, stranger. And what we do, we done get at Smithfields in the log house, down yon. Now reckon their cisterns done gone dry anyhow. But what is the matter down there? I asked of the old man.

Starting point is 05:30:13 They were father and son, this lounging pair who thus loftily sat in judgment on the little world at their feet. Why are all the folks away from home? He looked surprised and took a fresh chew while cogitating on my alarming ignorance of point Sandy affairs. Why ain't you heard? I thought every fella on the river knew that here. Why, old Hawkins, his wife's brothers buried in Elton today, and the neighbors don't go in to the funeral? Where are your shanty boat bin beach that you ain't here that year? As the sun near the horizon, we tried other places below with no better success, and two miles above Alton, Indiana, 673 miles, struck camp at sundown,

Starting point is 05:30:58 without milk for our coffee, for water being obliged to settle on boil the royally element which bears us onward through the lengthening days. Were there no hardships, this would be no pilgrimage worthy of the name, we are out philosophically to take the world as it is. He who was not content to do so had best not stir from home. But our camping place tonight is ideal. We are upon a narrow, grassy ledge. Below us, the sloping beach is strewn with jagged rocks.

Starting point is 05:31:26 Behind us rises steeply a grand hillside forest, in which lie, mantled with moss and lichens, and deep buried in undergrowth, boulders as large as a cracker's hut. Romantic glens abound, and a little run comes noisily down a ravine hard by. It is a witching back. door filled with surprises at every turn beaches elms maples lindens pawpaws tulip trees here attain a monster growth with grape-bines their fruit now set hanging in great festoons from the branches

Starting point is 05:32:00 and all about are the flowers which thrive best in shady solitudes wild licorice a small green briar and although not yet in bloom the sessile trillium we are thoroughly isolated a half mile above us faintly gleams a government beacon, and we noticed on landing that three-quarters of a mile below is a small cabin flanking the hill. Not disturbs our quiet, save the calls of the birds at roosting time, and now and then the hoarse bellow of a passing packet, with its legacy of boisterous wake. End of Chapter 17, recording by Andrea Estrano. Chapter 18 of A Float on the Ohio, an historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo. This is a Libravox recording.

Starting point is 05:32:50 All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Roland Magyar in Orlando, Florida. A Float on the Ohio by Ruben Gold Thwaites, Chapter 18. Village Life, a traveling photographer, on a country road, studies in color, again among colliers, in sweet content, a ferry. Romance. Near Troy, Indiana, Friday, June 1st, below Alton, the hills are not so high as above. We have, however, the same thoroughly rustic landscape, the same small farms on the bottoms,

Starting point is 05:33:29 and wretched cabins on the slopes, the same frontier-like clearings thick with stumps, the same shabby little villages, and frequent oxbow windings of the generous stream, with lovely vistas unfolding and dissolving with panoramic regularity. It is not a region where houseboaters flourish. There is but one every 10 miles or so. As for steamboats, we see on average one a day, while two or three usually pass us in the night. A dry, unpainted little place is Alton, Indiana, with three down at the hill shops, a tavern, a saloon, and a few dwellings. There was no bread obtainable here, for love or money, and we were fain to be content with a bag of crackers

Starting point is 05:34:09 from the post office grocery. The promised photographer, who appears to be a rapid traveler, was said to have gone on to Concordia 8 miles below. Deepwater Landing, Indiana, 676 miles, is a short row of new whitewashed houses with a great board sign displaying the name of the hamlet,

Starting point is 05:34:28 doubtless to attract the attention of pilots. A rude little showcase, nailed up beside the door of the house at the head of the landing path, contains tempting samples of crockery and tinware. Apparently, some enterprising soul is trying to grow a town here, on this narrow ledge of clay,

Starting point is 05:34:44 his landing in his shop as a nucleus. But it is an unlikely spot, and I doubt if his boom will develop to the corner lot stage. Rono, Indiana, a mile below, with its lime-washed building set in a bower of trees at the base of a bald bluff, is a rather pretty study in gray and green and white. The most notable feature is a little schoolhouse like Masonic Hall set high on a stone foundation, with a steep outer stairway, which gives one an impression that Rono is a victim of floods and that the brethren occasionally come in boats to lodge meetings. Concordia, Kentucky, 681 miles, rests on the summit of a steep clay bank, from which men were loading a barge with bark. Great piles of blocks for staves ornamented the crest of the rise,

Starting point is 05:35:28 a considerable industry for these parts, we were told. But the photographer, whom we were chasing, had taken every Concordian who wished his services and moved on to Derby, another Kentucky village, which at last we found six miles farther down the river. The principal occupation of the people of Derby is getting out timber from the hillside forest, six to ten miles in the interior. Oak, Elm, and Sycamore railway ties are the specialty, these being worth 20 cents each when landed upon the wharf. A few months ago, Derby was completely destroyed by fire, but although the timber business is on the wane here, much of the place was rebuilt on the old foundations. Hence the fresh, unpainted buildings, with battlement fronts, which, with the prevalence of open-door saloon with a woodsy swagger on the part of the inhabitants, give the place a breezy frontier aspect now, seldom to be met with this side of the Rockies.

Starting point is 05:36:18 Here at last was the traveling photographer. His tent, flapping loudly in the wind, occupied an empty lot in the heart of the village, a saloon on either side and a lumberman's boarding-house across the way, where the artist was at dinner, pending which I waited for him at the door of his canvas gallery. He evidently seeks to magnify his calling, Does this raw youth of the camera by affecting what he conceives to be the traditional garb of the artistic bohemian, but which resembles more closely the costume of the minstrel stage, a battered silk hat surmounting flowing locks glistening with hair oil, a loose velveteen jacket over a gay figured vest, and a great brass watch chain from which dangle silver coins? As this grotesque dandy, evidently not long from his native village, came mincing across the road in patent leather slippers,

Starting point is 05:37:03 smoking a cigarette, with one thumb in an armhole of his, his vest and the other hand twirling an incipient mustache, he was plainly conscious of creating something of a swell and derby. It was a crazy little dark room to which I was shown, a portable affair, much like a coffin case, which I expected momentarily to upset as I stood within and be smothered in a cloud of ill-smelling chemicals. However, with care I finally emerged without accident and sufficiently compensated the artist, who seemed not over-favorable to amateur competition, although he chatted freely enough about his business. It generally took him ten days, he said, to finish a town of five or six hundred inhabitants like Derby.

Starting point is 05:37:40 He traveled on steamers with his tenting outfit, but next season hoped to have money enough to do the thing in style in a houseboat of his own, an establishment which could cost, say, $400. Then in the winter, he could beach himself at some fair-sized town, and perhaps make his board by running a local gallery, taking to the water again on the earliest spring fresh. I could live like a fight-in' cock then, cap'n't. you just bet your bottom dollar. The temperature mounted with the progress of the day, and the wind dying down, the atmosphere was oppressive.

Starting point is 05:38:08 By the time Stephenport, Kentucky, 695 miles was reached, in the middle of the afternoon, the sun was beating fiercely upon the glassy flood, and our awning came again into play, although it could not save us from the annoyance of the reflection. The barren clay bank at the mouth of sinking creek, upon which lies Stevensport, seems fairly ablaze with heat,

Starting point is 05:38:27 as I went up into the straggling hamlet to seek for supplies. There were no eggs to be had here, but at last milk was found in the farther end of the village, at a modest little cottage quite embowered in roses with two sentry plants and tubs in the backyard, and a trim fruit and vegetable garden to the rear of that enclosed in palings. I remained a few minutes to chat with the little housewife, who knows her roses well, and is versed in the gentle art of horticulture. But her horizon is painfully narrow, first and dearest, the plants about her, which is not so bad in a larger way, Stevensport and its petty affairs, but beyond that very little, and that little vague.

Starting point is 05:39:03 It is ever thus in such a far-away sidetracked village as this, the world lies in the basin of the hills which these people see from their doors. If they have something to love and do for, as this good woman has in her bushes, seeds and bulbs, then may they dwell happily in rustic obscurity. But where, as is more common, the small beer of neighborhood gossip is their meat and drink. There are no folk on the footstool more wretched than the denizens of a dead little hamlet like Stevensport. We are housed this night on the Kentucky side, a mile and a half above Cloverport, whose half-dozen lights are glimmering in the stream. In the gloaming, while dinner was being prepared, a ragged but sturdy wanderer came into camp. He was, he said, a mountaineer looking for work on the bottom farms.

Starting point is 05:39:44 Heretofore he had, when he wanted it, always found it. But this season no one appeared to have any money to expand for labor. and it seemed likely he would be obliged to return home without receiving an offer. We made the stranger no offer of a seat at our humble board, having no desire that he passed the night in our neighborhood. For darkness was coming on a pace, and if he tarried, the woodland road would be as black as a pocket before he could reach Cloverport, his alleged destination. So starting him off with a biscuit or two, he was soon on his way toward the village, whistling a lively tune. Crooked Creek, Indiana, Saturday the second. We had but fairly got to bed last night.

Starting point is 05:40:20 After our late dinner, when the heavens suddenly darkened, fierce gusts of wind shook the tent violently, and then rain fell in blinding sheets. For a time it was a lively work for the doctor and me, tightening guy ropes and ditching in the soft sand, for we were in an exposed position, catching the full force of the storm. At last everything secured,

Starting point is 05:40:39 we and Serenity slept it out, awakening to find a beautiful morning, the great perfumed air as clear as crystal, the outlines of woods and hills and streams standing out with sharp definition, and overall a hushed charmed, most soothing to the spirit. Cloverport, 705 miles, is a typical Kentucky town of somewhat less than 4,000 inhabitants. The wharf boat, which runs up and down an iron tramway, according to the height of the flood, was swarming with Negroes, watching with keen delight the departure of the E.D. Rogan,

Starting point is 05:41:09 as she noisily backed out into the river and scattered the crowd with great showers of spray from her gigantic sternwheel. It was a busy scene on board, Negro roused about shipping the gangplank and singing, singing in a low pitch and old-time plantation melody. Stokers stripped to the waist, shoveling coal into the gaping furnaces, chambermaids hanging the ship's linen out to dry, passengers crowded by the shore rail. On the main deck, the bustling mate shouting orders, apparently for the benefit of landsmen, for no one on board appeared to heed him, and high up in front of the pilot house, the spruce captain in gold-laced cap and glass in hand, as immovable as the sphinx. At the head of the slope were a picturesque melody of colored folk,

Starting point is 05:41:48 of true southern plantation types so seldom seen north of Dixie. Two wee pickinneys, drawn in an express cart by a half-dozen other sable elves, attracted our attention, as W. and I went uptown for our day's marketing. We stopped to take a snapshot at them, to the intense satisfaction of the little kink-haired mother of the twins, who, bearing her blue calico gown, looked as if she might have just stepped out of a Zulu group. Cloverport has brickworks, gas wells, a flowering mill, and other industries. The streets are unkempt, as in most Kentucky towns, and mules attached to crazy little carts are the chief beasts of burden. But the shops are well stocked. There were many farmers in town on horse and muleback, doing their Saturday shopping, and an air of business confidence prevails.

Starting point is 05:42:31 In this district, coal mines again appear with their riverside tipples and they're awful defiling the banks. In general, these reaches have many of the aspects of the Monongahela, although the hills are lower and mining is on a smaller scale. Canleton, Indiana, 717 miles is the headquarters of the American Cannell Coal Company. There are also woolen and cotton mills, sewer pipe factories, and potteries. W. and I went up into the town on an errand for supplies. We distribute our small patronage for the sake of frequently going ashore, and we're interested in noting the cheery tone of the businessman, who reported that the financial depression, noticeable elsewhere in the Ohio Valley,

Starting point is 05:43:08 was practically been unfelt here. Hawesville, Kentucky, just across the river, has a similarly proxious. prosperous look, but we did not row across to inspect it at close range. Tell City, Indiana, three miles below, is another flourishing factory town, whose wharf boat was the scene of much bustle. Four miles still lower down lies the sleepy little Indiana village of Troy, which appears to have profited nothing from having lively neighbors. From the neighborhood of Derby, the Enverning Hills had, as we proceeded, been lessening in height, although still ruggedly beautiful. A mile or two below Troy, both ranges suddenly

Starting point is 05:43:40 roll back into the interior, leaving broad bottoms on either hand, occasionally edged with high clay banks, through which the river has cut its devious way. At other times, these bottoms slope gently to the beach, and everywhere are cultivated with such care that often no room is left for the willow fringe, which heretofore has been an ever-present feature of the landscape. Hereafter, to the mouth, we shall, for the most part, row between parallel walls of clay, with here and there a bankside ledge of rock and shale, and now and then a cragid spur running out to meet the river. We have now, enter the great corn and tobacco belt of the lower Ohio, the region of annual overflow, where the town seeks the highlands and the bottom farmers erect their few crew buildings on post,

Starting point is 05:44:20 prepared in case of exceptional flood to take to boats. The prevalent eagerness on the part of farmers to obtain the utmost from their land made it difficult this evening to find a proper camping place. We finally found a narrow triangle of clay terrace in Indiana at the mouth of Crooked Creek, 727 miles, where not long since had tarried a houseboater engaged in, and making rustic furniture. It is a pretty little bit, in a group of big willows and sycamores, and would be comfortable but for the sand flies,

Starting point is 05:44:48 which for the first time give us annoyance. The creek itself, some four rods wide and overhung with stately trees, winds gracefully through the rich bottom. We have founded a charming water to explore, being able to proceed for nearly a mile through lovely little wide spreads abounding in lilies and sweet

Starting point is 05:45:03 with the odor of grape blossoms. Across the river, at Emmerich's Landing, a little cluster of unpainted cabins lies the white barge of a photographer, just such a home as the Derby artist covets. The Ohio is here about a half a mile wide, but high-pitched voices of people on the opposite bank are plainly heard across the smooth sounding board, and in the quiet evening air comes to us the chuck-ch-ch-of-orrs nearly a mile away. Following a torrid afternoon with exasperating headwinds, this cool, fresh atmosphere in the long twilight is inspiring. Overhead is the slender

Starting point is 05:45:36 streak of the moon's first quarter, its reflection shimmering in the broad and placid stream rushing noiselessly by us to the sea. In blissful content we sit upon the bank and drink in the glories of the night. The days of our pilgrimage are nearing their end, but our enthusiasm for this, Al fresco life, is in no measure abating. That we might ever thus dream and drift upon the river of life, far from the labored strivings of the world, is our secret wish tonight. We had long been sitting thus, having silent communion with our thoughts, when the boy, his little head resting on W's shoulder, broke the spell by murmuring from the fullness of his heart. Mother, why cannot we keep on doing this always?

Starting point is 05:46:14 Yellow Bank Island, Sunday, June 3rd. Pilgrim still attracts more attention than her passengers. When we stop at the village wharfs or grate our keel upon some rustic landing, it is not long before the doctor, who now always remains with the boat, no matter who goes ashore, is surrounded by an admiring group, who wrapped Pilgrim on the ribs, try to lift her by the bow, and study her graceful lines with the air of connoisseurs. Barefooted men fishing on the shores in broad straw hats and blue jeans invariably pass the time of day with us as we glide by, crying out as a parting salute. You have a honey skiff bar, or right smart skiff that year.

Starting point is 05:46:51 We have many long, dreary reaches today. Clay banks 12 to 20 feet in height and growing taller as the watery seeds, rise sheer on either side. Fringing the top of each is often a row of locust, whose roots in a feeble way hold the soil. But the river cuts in at the base, wherever the changing current in pinches on the shore, and at low water great slices with a gurgling splash fall into the stream, which now is of the color of dull gold from the clay held in solution.

Starting point is 05:47:17 Often ruins of buildings may be seen upon the brink that have collapsed from this undercut of the fickle flood, and many others still inhabited are in dangerous proximity to the edge, only biting their time. This morning we passed the Indiana hamlets of Lewisport 731 miles and Grandview, 770, 36 miles, and by noon we're at Rockport, 741 miles. A smart little city of 3,000 souls, romantically perched upon a great rock, which on the right bank rises abruptly from the wide expanse of bottom. From the river, there is little to be seen of Rockport, say two wharves. One above, the other below, the bold cliff, which springs sheer for 100 feet above the stream. Two angling roads leading up into the town, a house or two on the edge of the hill, and a huge water tower crowning all. A few miles below, we ran

Starting point is 05:48:03 through a narrow channel, a few rods wide, separating an elongated island from the Indiana shore. It much resembles the small tributary streams with a lush undergrowth of weeds down to the water's edge, and arched with monster sycamores, elms, maples, and persimmons. Frequently had we seen skiffs upon the shore, arranged with stern paddle wheels, turned by levers operated by men standing or sitting in the boat. But we had seen none in operation until, shooting down this side channel, we met such a craft coming up, manned by two fellows, who seemed to be having a a treadmill task of it. They assured us, however, that when a man was used to manipulating the levers, he found it easier than rowing, especially in ascending stream. Yellow Bank Island.

Starting point is 05:48:43 Our camp tonight lies nearest the Indiana shore, with Owensboro, Kentucky, 749 miles just across the way. We have had no more beautiful home on our long pilgrimage than this sandy islet, heavily grown to stately willows. While the others were preparing dinner, I pulled across the rapid current to an Indiana ferry landing where there is a row of mean-framed cabins like the Negro quarters of a southern farm, all elevated on posts some four feet above the level. A half-dozen families live there, all of them small tenant farmers, save the ferryman, a strapping good-nature fellow who appears to be the nabob of the community. Several hollow sycamore stumps house sows and their litters,

Starting point is 05:49:21 but the only cow in the neighborhood is owned by a young man who, when I came up, was watering some refractory mules at a pump trough. He paused long enough to summon boss and milk a half gallon into my pail, accepting my dime with a degree of thankfulness, which was quite unnecessary, considering that it was quid pro quo. Tobacco is a more important crop than corn hereabout. He said farmers are rather impatiently waiting for rain to set out the young plants. His only outbuilding is a monster corn crib set high on post,

Starting point is 05:49:49 the airy basement no better than an open shed serving for a stable during the few weeks of severe winter weather. Horses and cows are removed to the main floor. and canvas nailed around the size to keep out the wind. Even this slight protection is not vouchsafed stock by all planters. The majority of them appear to provide only rain shelters, and even these can be of slight avail in a driving storm. Later, in the failing light, W. and I pulled together over to the Cracker Settlement,

Starting point is 05:50:15 seeking drinking water. A stout young man was seated on the end of the ferry barge, talking earnestly with a ferryman's daughter, a not unattractive girl, but pale and thin as these women are apt to be. evidently they are lovers and not ashamed of it for they gave us a friendly smile as we nodded our painter to the barge rail and expressed great interest in pilgrim she being of a pattern new to them we are in a noisy corner of the world over on the indiana bottom a squeaky fiddle is grinding out dance tunes hymns and ballads with charming indifference we thought we detected in a high-pitched annie lorry the voice of the ferryman's daughter there seems too to be a deal of rowing on the river evidently owensboro folk getting back to town from a day in the country and country country folk hying home after a day in the city. The ferryman is in much demand, judging from the frequent ringing of his bell, one on either bank, set between two tall posts, with a rope dangling from

Starting point is 05:51:05 the arm. At early dusk, the cracked bell of the Owensboro Bethel resounded harshly in our ears, as it advertised an evening service for the floating population. And now the wheezy strains of a melodian tell us that, although we stayed away, doubtless others have been attracted thither. The sepacroll roars of passing steamers echo along the wooded shore. The night wind rustles the treetops. Owensboro dogs are much awake, and the electric lamps of the city throw upon our canvas screen the fantastic shadows of leaves and dancing bows. End of Chapter 18. Chapter 19, afloat on the Ohio. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org.

Starting point is 05:51:56 Recording by Timothy Livwright. Chapter 19. Fisherman's Tales Skiff Nomenclature. Green River. Evansville. Henderson.

Starting point is 05:52:11 Audubon and Rafinesk. Floating trade. The Wabash. Green River Toehead, Monday, June 4th. We were shopping. shopping in Owensboro this morning soon after seven o'clock. The business quarter was just stirring into life, and the Negroes, who were lounging about on every hand, were still drowsy, as if they had passed the night there

Starting point is 05:52:39 and were reluctant to be up in doing. There is a pretty courthouse in a green park. The streets are well paved, and the shops clean and bright with their wares, mostly under the awnings on the sidewalk, for people appear to live much out of doors here, and well they may, with the temperature 73 degrees at this early hour in every promise of a scorching day. I wonder if a fisherman could if he tried be exact in his statements. One of them, below Owensboro, who kept us company for a mile or two downstream, declared that at this stage of the water he made $40 and $50 a week. And I reckon I would be content. A few miles farther on, another complained that when the river was falling, the water was so muddy the fish would not bite. And even in the best of seasons,

Starting point is 05:53:38 the fishermen had a hard pull of it. It ain't no business for a decent man. The other day when the river was rising a Cincinnati follower of the Apostles' calling averred that there was no use fishing when the water was coming up. As the variable Ohio is like the ocean tide ever rising or falling, it would seem that the thousands in this valley who make fishing their livelihood must be playing a losing game. There are many beautiful islands on these lower reaches of the river. we followed the narrow channel between little hurricane and the Kentucky shore, a charming run of two or three miles, with both banks a dense tangle of driftwood weeds and vines. Between three-mile island and Indiana is another interesting cut short,

Starting point is 05:54:33 where the shores are undisturbed by the work of the mainstream, and trees and undergrowth come down to the water's edge. The air is quivering with the songs of birds and resonant with sweet smells, while over stumps and dead and fallen trees, grapevines luxuriantly festoon and cluster. Near the pretty group of French islands, two government dredges were their boarding barges, were moored to the Kentucky shore, waiting for coal, we were told, before resuming operations in the planting of a dyke. I took a snapshot at the fleet

Starting point is 05:55:16 and heard one man shot to another, Bill, did you notice they have a photograph gallery aboard? They appear to be a jolly lot, these dredgers, and inclined to take life easily in accordance with the traditions of government employ. We frequently see skiffs hauled upon the beach or moored between two protecting posts to prevent they're being swamped by steamer wakes. The names they bear interest us as betokening perhaps the proclivities of their owners.

Starting point is 05:55:51 Little Joe, little Jim, little Maggie, and like diminutives are common here as upon the towing tugs and steam ferries of broader waters. And now and then we have, by contrast, Zerciers, Eccles, Hercules. Sometimes the skiff is named after its owner's wife or sweetheart as Maggie G, Polly H, or from the Rustic Goddesses, Pomona, Flora, Ceres on the Kentucky shore. We have noted Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, and one Ohio boat was labeled Little Phil.

Starting point is 05:56:32 Literature we found represented today by octave fan it. The only case on record for the Ohio River Cracker is not greatly given to books. Slying claims for its own many of these knockabout craft. You bet. Get there. Go it. Eli. Whoa, Emma. And nondescripts like two doves, poker chip, and game chicken are not infrequent. In these stately solitudes, towns are far between. Enterprise, Indiana, 755 miles, is an unpainted village with a dismal view, back of and around it, wide bottom lands with hills in the far distance. Up and down the river, precipitous banks of clay with willow fringes on that portion of the shore which is not being cut by the impinging current. Scuffle Town, Kentucky, 767 miles is uninviting.

Starting point is 05:57:37 Newburgh, on the edge of a bluff across the river in Indiana, is a ragged little place that has seen better days. But the backward view of Newburgh from below three-mile island made a pretty picture, the whites and reds of the town standing out in sharp relief against the dark background of the hill. Green River, 775 miles, a gentle, rustic stream enters through the wide bottoms of Kentucky. We had difficulty in finding it in the wilderness of willows, might not have succeeded, indeed, had not the red smokestack of a small steamer suddenly appeared above the bushes. Soon the puffing craft debouched upon the Ohio and quickly overtaking us passed down toward, Evansville. Green River towhead, two miles below, claimed us for the night. There is a shanty, midway on the island, and at the lower end the landing of a railway transfer. We have our camp at the

Starting point is 05:58:43 upper end in a bed of spotless white sand, thick-grown to dwarf willows. Entangled driftwood lies about in monster heaps lodged in depressions of the land and against stout tree-trunk. A low bar of gravel connects our home with Green River Island, lying close against the Indiana Bank. Sandflies freely joined us at dinner, and I hear as I write the drone of a solitary mosquito, the first in many days. While upon the bar, at sunset, a score of turkey buzzards held silent counsel, some of them occasionally rising and wheeling about in mid-air, then slowly lighting and stretching their necks, and flapping their wings most solemnly before rejoining the conference. Cypress Bend, Tuesday, 5th.

Starting point is 05:59:36 The temperature had materially fallen during the night, and the morning opened gray and hazy. Evansville, Indiana, 783 miles, made a charming, turner-esque study as her steeples and factory, chimneys developed through the mist. It is a fine, well-built town of some 50,000 inhabitants with a beautiful little post office in the gothic style, a refutation this of the well-worn assertion that there are no creditable government buildings in our small American cities. A railway bridge here crosses the Ohio, numerous sawmills line the bank. Altogether there is business bustle, the like of which we have not seen since leaving Louisville. Henderson, 795 miles, is a substantial Kentucky town of 9,000 souls with large tobacco interests, we are told ranking next to Louisville

Starting point is 06:00:36 in this regard. Through the morning, the mist had been thickening. While we were passing beneath the railway bridge at Henderson, thunder sounded, and the western sky suddenly blackened, pulling rapidly into the town shore shelter was found beneath the overhanging deck of a deserted wharf boat. We had just completed preparations with the rubber blankets and ponchos when the deluge came, but the sheltering deck was not watertight. Soon the rain came pouring in upon us through the uncought cracks, and we were nearly as badly off in our close-smelling quarters as in the open. However, we were a merry party under their.

Starting point is 06:01:19 with the doctor giving us a touch of brer rabbit and the boy relating a fantastic dream he had had on the towhead last night, while I told him the story of Audubon, whose name will ever be associated with Henderson. The great naturalist was in business at Louisville, early in the century, but in 1812 he failed in this venture and moved to Henderson, where his neighbors thought him a trifle daft. And certainly he was a ne'er-do-well, wandering around the woods with hair hanging down on his shoulders a far-away look in his eyes and communing with the birds. In 1818, the botanist Rafinesk, on the first of his several tramps down the Ohio Valley, he had a favorite saying that the only way for a botanist to travel was to walk, stopped over at Henderson to visit this crazy fellow of whom he had heard.

Starting point is 06:02:17 Rafiensk had a hope that Audubon might buy some of his colored drawings, but when he saw the wonderful pictures which Audubon had made, he acknowledged that his own were inferior, a sore confession for Rafinus, who was an egotist of the first water. Audubon had but humble quarters, for it was hard work in those days for him to keep the wolf from the door. Nevertheless, he entertained the distinguished traveler, whom he himself was destined to far eclipse. One night, a bat flew into Rafienesk's bedroom, and in driving it out he used his host's fine Cremona as a club, thus making kindling wood of it. Two years later, still steeped in poverty, Audubon left Henderson. It was 1826 before he became known to the world of science, when, little of his life was left in which to enjoy the fame at last awarded him we had lunch on henderson island three miles down and for warmth walked briskly about on the strand among the willow clumps it rained again after we had taken our seats in the boat and the head wind which sprang up was not unwelcome for it necessitated a right lively pull to make headway w and the boy and the stern sheets

Starting point is 06:03:44 were not uncomfortable when swathed to the chin in the blankets, which ordinarily serve us as cushions. Ten miles below Henderson was a little fleet of houseboats lying in a thicket of willows along the Indiana beach. We stopped at one of them and bought a small catfish for dinner. The fishermen seemed a happy company in this isolated spot. The women were engaged in household work, but the men were spending the afternoon collected in the cabin of one of one of their number who had recently arrived from Green River. While waiting for the fish to be caught in a live box, I visited with the little band. It was a comfortable room, furnished rather better than the average shore cabin, and the Green Riverman's family of half a dozen were well-kept,

Starting point is 06:04:33 pleasant-faced, and polite. Altogether, it was a much more respectable houseboat company than any we have yet seen on the river. But the fish stories, which that Green River Man tells, with an honest-like, open-eyed sobriety would do credit to Munkhausen. The rain at first spasmodic became at last persistent. Two miles farther down at Cyprus Bend, 806 miles, we ran into an Indiana hill, where on a steep slope of yellow shale, all strewn with rocks, our tent was hurriedly pitched. There was no driving at pegs into the stone, base so we waited down the canvas with round heads and fastened our guise to bushes and boulders as best we might huddled around the little stove under the fly the crew dined sumptuously on course from canned soup down to strawberries for dessert for evansville is a good market does not always we pilgrims fare thus high the resources of rome thieves bethlam herculanium and the other

Starting point is 06:05:44 classic towns with which the ohio's banks are dotted being none of the best some days we are fortunate to have aught in our larder brown's island wednesday sixth this morning's camp-fire was welcome for its warmth the sky has been clear but a sharp cold wind has prevailed throughout the day quite counteracting the sun's rays we noticed towns folks going about in overcoats their hands in their pockets. In the Oxbow curves, the breeze came in turn from every quarter, sometimes dead ahead and again pushing us swiftly on. In seeking the lee shore, Pilgrim pursued a zigzag course, back and forth between the states, now under the brow of towering clay banks, corrugated by the flood and honeycombed by swallows, which in flocks screamed and circled over our heads. again, closely brushing the fringe of willows and sycamores and maples on low-lying shores. Thus did we, for the most part, paddle in placid water, while above us the wind whistled,

Starting point is 06:06:57 and the treetops rustled the blooming elders and tall grasses of the plain, and out in the open river caused white caps to dance right merrily. We met at intervals today, several houseboats, the most of them bearing the inscription prescribed by the new Kentucky license law, which is now being enforced, the essential features of which inscription are the home and name of the owner, and the date at which the license expires. The standard of education among houseboaters is evinced by the legend borne by a trader's craft which we boarded near Slim Island. Life since expires May 24, 1895.

Starting point is 06:07:43 The young woman in charge, a slender creature in a brilliant red calico gown, with blue ribbons at the corsage, had been but recently married to her lord, who was back in the country stirring up trade. She had a few notions of business and allowed us to put our own prices on such articles as we purchased. The stock was a curious medley, a few stapled groceries, bacon, and dried beef, candies, crockery, hardware, tobacco, a small line of patent medicines, in which blood purifiers chiefly prevailed, bitters, ginger beer, and a glass case in which were displayed two or three women's straw hats godily trimmed. The woman said their custom was, to tie up to some convenience sure, and buy little stuff of the farmers, and in that way, trade springs up, and thus become known.

Starting point is 06:08:41 Two or three weeks would exhaust any neighborhood, whereupon they would move on for a dozen miles or so. Late in the autumn, they select a comfortable beach and lie by for the winter. Mount Vernon, Indiana, 819 miles, is on a high, rolling plain with a rather pretty little courthouse set in a park of grass, some good business buildings and huge flowering mills which appear to be the leading industry. Another flowering mill town with the addition of the characteristic Kentucky distillery is Union Town, 833 miles, on the southern shore, a bright, neat little city backed by smooth, picturesque green hills. The feature of the day was the entrance through a dreary stretch of clay banks of the Wabash River.

Starting point is 06:09:32 eight hundred and thirty-eight miles which divides indiana from illinois three hundred and sixty yards wide at the mouth about half the width of the ohio it is the most important of the latter's northern affluence and pours into the main stream a swift rushing body of clear green water which at first boldly pushes over to the heavily willowed kentucky shore the royally mess of the ohio and for several miles exerts a considerable influence and clarification. The lower wall bash, flowing through a soft clay bottom, runs an erratic course and its mouth is a variable location, so that the bounds of Illinois and Indiana hereabout fluctuate east and west, according to the exigencies of the floods. The far-reaching bottom itself, however, is apparently of slight value, giving evidence in the dreary clumps of dead timber of being frequently inundated. An interesting stream is the Wabash from an historical point of view. LaSalle knew of it in 1677

Starting point is 06:10:42 and was planning to prosecute his fur trade over the Maui in the Wabash. But the Iroquois held the portage, and for nearly 40 years thereafter forbade its use by whites. Joliet thought the Wabash was the headwaters of what we know, as the lower Ohio and in his map 1673 styled the latter the Wabash down to its mouth. Vincennes, an old Wabash town, was one of the posts captured so heroically for the Americans by George Rogers Clark during the Revolutionary War. In 1814, there was established at New Harmony also on the Wabash, the communistic seat of the Harmonists, who had moved

Starting point is 06:11:31 thither from Pennsylvania to which, dissatisfied with the West, they returned ten years later. Numerous islands have today beautified the Ohio, despite their inartistic names, diamond and slim, are tipped at head and foot with charming banks and willowed sand, and each center is clothed in a luxurious forest, rimmed by a gravely beach piled high with drift in gnarled roots the hole with startling clearness inversely reflected in the mirror flood wabash island opposite the mouth of the great tributary is an insular woodland several miles in length among the prettiest of these jewels studding our silvery path is the utmost of the little group known as brown's islands on which we are passing the night it was an easy landing on the hard sand and a comfortable carry to a level opening in the Willows where we have a model camp with a great round sycamore block for a table. An Evansville newspaper does duty as a tablecloth and two logs rolled alongside make seats.

Starting point is 06:12:43 Four miles below, the smoke of Shawnee Town, 848 miles, rises lazily above the dark level line of woods. While across the river in Kentucky, there is an unbroken forest fringe, without sign of light, as far as the eye can reach. A long glistening bar of sand connects our little island home with the Illinois mainland. Upon it was being held in the long twilight

Starting point is 06:13:09 that evening council of turkey buzzards, which we so often witnessed when in an island camp. Sandpipers went fearlessly about among them, bobbing their little tails with nervous vehemence. Red birds trilled their good nights

Starting point is 06:13:26 in the treetops, and daintily waiting in the sandy shallows, object lessons and patience, were great blue herons, carefully peering for the prey, which never seems to be found. As night closed in upon us, owls dismally hooted in the mainland woods,

Starting point is 06:13:45 buzzards betook themselves to inland roost, herons winged their stately flight to, I know not where, and over on Kentucky shore, could faintly be heard, the barking of dogs at the Little Cracker Farmsteads hid deep in the lowland forest. End Chapter 19 Chapter 20 of Afloat on the Ohio,

Starting point is 06:14:12 An historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff from Redstone to Cairo. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Becky Cook. on the ohio by reuben goldthwaite chapter twenty shawnee town farmhouses on stilts cave and rock and island night half-moon bar thursday june seventh a head-breast prevailed all day strong enough to fan us into a sense of coolness but leaving the water as unruffled as a mill-pond thus did we seem in the vivid reflections of the early morning to be sailing between double lines of shore lovely in their groupings of luxuriant trees and tangled heaps of vine-clad drift it was a hazy mirage-producing atmosphere, the river appearing to melt away in space, and the ever-charming

Starting point is 06:15:03 island heads looming unsupported in mid-air. From the woods the piercing note of locusts filled the air as with ceaseless rattle of pebbles against innumerable window-panes. At a distance, Shawnee Town appears as if built upon higher land than the neighboring bottom, but this proves on approach to be an optical illusion, for the town is walled in by a levee some thirty feet and height, above the top of which loom its chimneys and spires. Shawnee Town, laid out in 1808, soon became an important post on the Lower Ohio, and indeed ranked with Cascassia as one of the principal Illinois towns, although in 1817 it still only contained from 30 to 40 log dwellings.

Starting point is 06:15:42 During the reign of the Ohio River Bargemen, it was notorious as the headquarters of the roughest element in that boisterous class, and frequently the scene of most barbarous outrages. The odious receptacle, says a chronicler of the time, a filth and villainy. In those lively days, which lasted with more or less vigor until about 1830, by which time steamboats had finally overcome popular prejudice and gained the upper hand in river transportation, the people of Shawnee Town were largely dependent on the trade of the saltworks of the neighboring saline reserve. The salt licks, at which in early days the bones of the mammoth were found, as at Big Bone Lick, commenced a few miles below the time.

Starting point is 06:16:21 town and embraced a district of about 90,000 acres. While Illinois was still a territory, these salines were rented by the United States to individuals, but were granted to the new state 1818 in perpetuity. The trade and time decreased with the decadence of river traffic, and Shawnee Town has since had but slow growth, it now being a dreary little place of 3,000 inhabitants, with unmistakable evidences of having long since seen its best days. The farmers upon the wide bottoms that the lower reaches now invariably have their dwellings, corn cribs and tobacco sheds, set upon posts varying from five to ten feet high, according to the surrounding elevation above the normal river level. At present we are, as a rule, hemmed in by banks full thirty or forty

Starting point is 06:17:07 feet in height above the present stage. After a hard climb up the steps which are frequently found cut into the clay, to facilitate access to the river, it is with something akin to awe that we look upon these buildings on stilts, for they bespeak, in times of great flood, a rise in the river of between fifty and sixty feet. Three miles above Saline River, I scrambled up to photograph a farmhouse of this character. In order to get the building within the field of the camera, it was necessary to mount a cobhouse of loose rails, which did duty as a pig pen. A young woman of eighteen or twenty years, attired in a dazzling red calico gown, came out on the front of the balcony to see the operation. And for a touch of life, I held her in talk until the picture was taken.

Starting point is 06:17:52 She was not at all averse to thus posing, and chatted as familiarly as though we were old friends. The water, my model said, came at least once a year to the main floor of the house, some ten feet above the level of the land, and forty feet above the normal river stage. Every few years it rose to the eaves of the story and a half dwelling, when the family would embark in boats, highing off to the black-lying hills, a mile and a half away. an event of this sort seemed quite commonplace to the girl and not at all to be viewed as a calamity as in other houses of the bottom farmers of this district there is no wall-paper no plaster upon the walls and little or nothing else to be injured by water their few household possessions can readily be packed into a scow together with the livestock and behold the family is ready if need be to float away to the ends of the world as a matter of fact if they carry food enough with them in a rain-proof tent their season on the hills is but a prolonged picnic when the water sufficiently subside they float back again to their home the river mud is scraped out of the rooms and the kitchen stove rubbed up a bit and soon everything is again at rights with a fresh layer of alluvial deposit to fertilize the fields

Starting point is 06:19:00 Few of these small farmers own the lands they till. From Pittsburgh down, the great majority of Ohio River planters are but tenants. The ill families that once own the soil are living in the neighboring towns, or in other parts of the country, and renting out their acres to these cultivators. We were told that the rental fee around Owensboro is usually in kind, 14 bushels of good, sellable corn being the rate per acre. In Egypt, as southern Illinois is called, the average rent is for $5 in money, except in years when the water remains long upon the ground

Starting point is 06:19:33 and thus shortens the season. Then the fee is correspondingly reduced. The girl on the balcony averred that in 1893 it amounted to one-third the value of the average yield. The numerous huge stilted corn cribs we see are constructed so that wagons can drive up into them, and after unloading and bins on either side, to send another incline at the far end. Sometimes a portion of the crib is boarded up for a residence, with windows and the little balcony which does double duty as a porch and a landing stage for the boats in time of high water. Scattered about on the level are loosely built sheds of rails for stock, which practically live alfresco, so far as actual storm shelter goes. Usually the flooded bottoms are denuded of trees, save perhaps a narrow fringe along the bank,

Starting point is 06:20:17 and a few dead trunks scattered here and there, while back, a third or half a mile from the river, lies a dense line of force, far beyond which rises the low room of the basin. But just below Saline River, 857 miles, a little lazy stream of few rods width, the hills, now perhaps 80 or 100 feet in height, again approached to the water's edge, and henceforth to the mouth we are to have alternating semi-circular wooded bottoms, and shaley, often palisaded uplands, grown to scrub and vines much in the fashion of some of the middle reaches. A trading-boat was more just with within the saline, where we stop for lunch under a clump of sycamores. The owner obtains butter and eggs from the farmers in exchange for his varied wares, and sells them at a

Starting point is 06:21:02 goodly profit to passing steamers, which will always stop them flagged. Approaching cave in Rock, Illinois, 869 miles, the right bank is for several miles an almost continuous palisade of limestone, thick studded with black and brown flints. In the breaking down of this escarpment, popularly styled battery rocks, numerous caves have been formed, the largest of which gave the place its name. It is a rather low opening into the rock, perhaps 200 feet deep, and the floor some 20 feet above the present level of the river. In times of flood, it is frequently so filled with water that boats enter, and thousands of silly people have, in two or three generations past, carved or painted their names upon the vaulted roof. From this large entrance hall, a chimney-like hole in the roof leads to another chamber, said to be imposing and widely ramified, not unlike a Gothic cathedral, said Ash, an early English

Starting point is 06:21:56 traveler in 1806, who appears to have everywhere in these western wilds sought them marvelous and found it. About 1801, a band of robbers made these inner recesses their home, and frequently sailed thence to rob passing boats, and incidentally to murder the crews. As for the little hamlet of cave and rock nestled in a break in the palisade, a few hundred yards below it was, between 1801 and 1805, the seat of another species of brigandage, a land speculation wherein schemers waxed rich from the confusion engendered by conflicting claims of settlers, the outgrowth of carelessly phrased Indian treaties and overlapping French and English patents. From 1804 to 1810, a congressional committee was engaged in straightening out this weary tangle,

Starting point is 06:22:41 and its decisions ratified by Congress are today the foundation of many land titles in Indiana and Illinois. We are in Camp Tonight upon the Illinois shore, opposite Half Moon Bar, 872 miles, and a mile above Hurricane Island. Towering above us are great sycamores, cypress, maples, and elms, and all about a dense jungle of grasses' vines in monster weeds, the rank horseweed being now some ten feet high, with a stem and inch in diameter, The dead stalks of last year's growth in the broad rolling fields to our rear indicate a possibility of 16 feet, and an apparent desire to out-rival the corn. Cain break, too, is prevalent hereabout with stocks two inches or more thick. The mulberries are reddening, the doctor reports on his return with the boy from a botanizing expedition, and black caps are turning, while Bergamau and Vervain are among the plants newly added to the herbarium.

Starting point is 06:23:35 Stewards Island Friday 8th We arose this morning to find the tent as wet from dew and fog as if there had been a shower, and the bushes by the landing were sparkling with great beads of moisture. The bold black head of Hurricane Island stood out with startling distinctness, framed in rolling fog. Through a cloud bank on the horizon, the sun was bursting with the dull glow of burnished copper. By the time of starting the fog had lifted, and the sun swung clear in a steel blue sky. But there is still a soft haze on the land and river, which dreamily closed that. ever-changing vistas, and we seem to float through an enchanted land.

Starting point is 06:24:12 The approach to Elizabeth, Illinois, 877 miles, is picturesque, but of the dry little town of 700 souls, with its rocky, undulating streets, set in a break in the line of palisades, very little is to be seen from the river. Quarrying for paving stones appears to be the chief pursuit of the Elizabethans. At Roseclair, Illinois, a string of shanties three miles below are two idle plants of the Argyle-led and Fluor Spar Mining Companies of Carsville, Kentucky, is another arid hillside hamlet, with striking escarpments stretching above and below for several miles. Mammoth boulders, a dozen or more feet in height, relics doubtless of once formidable cliffs,

Starting point is 06:24:53 here line the riverside. The palisaded hills reappear in Illinois, commencing at Parkinson's landing, a dreary little settlement on a waste of barren, stony slope flanking the perpendicular wall. Just above Golconda Island, 890 miles, on the Illinois side, we were witnessed to a meet of farmers for a squirrel hunt, a favorite amusement in these parts. There were five men upon a side, all carrying guns. As we passed, they were shaking hands preparatory to separating for the Batu. Upon the bank above, in a grove of Cypress, Pawpaw, and Sycamore, their horses were standing unhitched from the poles of the wagons in which they had been driven, and tied to trees,

Starting point is 06:25:34 freeing from boxes set upon the ground. It was pleasant to see that these people who must lead dreary lives upon the malaria-stricken and flood-washed bottoms occasionally take a holiday with a spice of rational adventure in it. Although there is the probability that this squirrel hunt may be followed tonight by a roistering at the village tavern, the losing side paying the score. We reached Stewart's Island, 901 miles at five o'clock, and went into camp upon the landing beach of hard white sand facing Kentucky. The island is two miles long, the owner living in Birds Point Landing, Kentucky just below us, a rather shabby but picturesquely situated little

Starting point is 06:26:12 village at the base of a pretty wooded hills. A hundred and fifty acres of the island are planted to corn, and the owner's laborers, a white overseer and five blacks, are housed a half a mile above us and a rude cabin half hidden in a generous maple grove. The white man soon came down to the strand, riding his mule, and both drink freely from the muddy river. He was a fairly intelligent young fellow, and proud of his mount. No need of lines, he said, for this your mule, you only say yee, and ha, and he done get that every time, sir. Pears to me he just done think it out hisself, like a man would.

Starting point is 06:26:49 It ain't no use trying boss that year mule. He is that ugly when he saw on it, but just pat him on the nick and say so thar Solomon, and there ain't no one but knows how to act better and he. As we were at dinner in the twilight, the five Negroes also came writing down the inkling roadway and picturesque single file, singing snatches of camp meeting songs in that weird minor key, which we are so familiar in Jubilee music. Across the river, a Kentucky darky, riding a mule along the dusky woodland road at the base of the hills, and evidently going home from his work in the fields, was singing at the top of his bent, apparently as a stimulus to

Starting point is 06:27:26 failing courage. Our islanders shouted at him in derision. The shoreman's replies, which lacked not for spice, came clear and sharp across the half-mile of smooth water, and his tormentors quickly ceased chafing. Having all drunk copiously, men and mules resumed their line of march up the bank, and disappeared as they came, still chanting the crude melodies of their people. An hour later we could hear them at the cabin singing John Brown's body and other old friends, with the moon, bright and clear in its first quarter, adding a touch of romance to the scene. End of Chapter 20. Chapter 21 of A Float on the Ohio.

Starting point is 06:28:09 This is Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Timothy Livwright. Chapter 21, the Cumberland and the Tiberland. Tennessee, stately solitudes, old Fort Massick, dead towns in Egypt, the last camp, Cairo. Opposite Metropolis, Illinois, Saturday, June 9th. As we were dressing this morning at half-past five, the echoes were again awakened by the vociferous negro on the Kentucky shore,

Starting point is 06:28:53 who was going out to his work again as noisy as ever. One of our own blousey. One of our own black men walked down the bank, ostensibly to light his pipe at the breakfast fire, but really to satisfy a pardonable curiosity regarding us. The singing brother on the mainland appeared to amuse him, and he paused to listen, saying, That you nigger, he got too loud voice. Then when he had left our camp and regained the top of the bank, he leaned upon his hoe and yelled, Say, nigger, oh there, where you get that mule? Who you hollering at you, brack?

Starting point is 06:29:28 Island nigger was a quick reply. You land nigger, you think you smart? I's so smart. I don't want no living on island with gang boss and not allowed go away. The tuneful darky had evidently here touched a tender spot for our man turned back into the field to his work. And the other kicking the mule into action trotted off to the tune of, There's a meeting here tonight. We went up into the field to see the laborers cultivating quills.

Starting point is 06:29:58 the sun was blazing hot without a breath of air stirring but the great black fellows seemed to mind it not chattering away to themselves like magpies and keeping up their conversation by shouts when separated from each other at the ends of plow-rose a natural levee eight and ten feet high and studded with large tree-willows rims in the island farm like the edge of a basin we were told that this served as a barrier only against the j June fresh, for the regular spring floods invariably swamp the place. But what is left within the bowl, when the outer waters subside, soon leeches through the sandy soil. After passing the pretty shores of Dog Island not far below, the bold, dark headland of Cumberland Island soon bursts upon our view. We follow the narrow eastern channel in order to greet the Cumberland River, nine hundred nine miles which half-way down its island namesake at the woe-begone little village of smithland kentucky empties a generous flood into the ohio the cumberland perhaps a quarter of a mile wide debouches through high clay banks which might readily be melted in the turbulent cross-currents produced by the mingling of the rivers but to avoid this the government engineers have built a wing dam running out from the foot of the cumberland nearly half-way into the main river. This quickly unites the two streams, and the reinforced Ohio is therefore

Starting point is 06:31:31 perceptibly widened. Tramp steamers are numerous on these lower reaches. We have seen perhaps a dozen such today, stopping at the farm landings, as well as at the crude and infrequent hamlets, mere notches of settlement in the wooded lines of shore, doing a small business in chance cargoes and in passengers who flagged them from the bank. A sultry atmosphere has been with us through the day. The glassy surface of the river has, when not lashed into foam by passing boats, dazzled the eyes most painfully. The hills from below Stewart's Island have receded on either side,

Starting point is 06:32:12 generally leaving either low, broad, heavily timbered bottoms, or high clay banks, which stretch back wide plains of yellow and gray cornice. inland frequently inundated but highly productive now and then the encroaching river has remained too long in some belt of forest and we have great clumps of dead trees which spring aloft in stately picturesqueness thickly clad the limb tips with virginia creeper a bit of shaly hillside occasionally abuts upon the river though less frequently than above and often such a spur has lying at its feet a row of half-imersed burpidly carpeted with mosses and with clinging vines the tennessee river nine hundred and eighteen miles the largest of the ohio's tributaries is where it enters about half the width of the latter coming down through a broad forested bottom with several pretty islands off its mouth it presents a pleasing picture here again the government has been obliged to put in costly works to stop the ravages of the mingling torrents in the soft alluvial banks. The Ohio, with the United Waters of the Cumberland and the Tennessee, henceforth flows majestically to the Mississippi,

Starting point is 06:33:31 a full mile wide between her shores. Paducah, 13,000 inhabitants next to Louisville, Kentucky's most important river port, lies on a high plain just below the Tennessee. It is a stirring little city, with the usual large proportion of Negroes and the outdoor business life everywhere met with in the south. Sawmills, iron plants, and shipyards line the bank. At the wharf are large

Starting point is 06:33:58 steamers doing a considerable business up the Cumberland in Tennessee, in between Paducah and Cairo and St. Louis. There is a considerable ferry business to and from the Illinois suburb of Brooklyn. Seven miles below the Tennessee, on the Illinois side, we sought relief from the blazing sun within the mouth of seven-mile creek, which is cut deep, through sloping banks of mud and overhung by great sprawling sycamores. These always interest us from the generosity of their height and girth and from their great variety of colored tones induced by the patchy scaling of the bark, soft grays, buffs, greens, and ivory whites prevailing.

Starting point is 06:34:41 When sufficiently refreshed in this cool bower, we ventured once more into the fierce light of the open river and two miles below shot into the broader and more, inviting Masick Creek. 928 miles, just as of old George Rogers Clark did with his little flotilla went en route to capture Cascascia. Clark in his journal written long after the event said that this creek is a mile above Fort Massick. His memory failed him. As a matter of fact, the steep low hill of iron-stained gravel and clay on which the old stronghold was built is but 200 yards below. Footnote A. The French commander who in October 1758 evacuated and burned Fort Duquesne

Starting point is 06:35:28 on the approach of the English Army under General Forbes dropped down the Ohio for nearly a thousand miles and built, quote, a fort on the beautiful eminence on the north bank of the river, end quote. But there was a fortified post on this hillock at a much earlier date, about 1711, erected as a headquarter for missionaries and to guard French fur traders from marauding Cherokees. And Pownell's map notes one here in 1751. This fort of 1758 was, but an enlarged addition of the old. The new stronghold, with a garrison of a hundred men, was the last built by the French upon the Ohio,

Starting point is 06:36:10 and it was occupied by them until they evacuated the country in 1763. England does not appear to have made any attempt to repair and occupy the works then destroyed by the french although urged to do so by her military agents in the west had they held fort mack no doubt clark's expedition to capture the northwest for the americans might easily have been nipped in the bud as it was the old fortress was a ruin when he reposed on the banks of the creek at its feet when in seventeen ninety three to seventeen ninety four the french agent genet was fomenting his scheme for capturing louisiana and florida from spain by the aid of western filibusters old fort massac was thought of as a rallying point and a base of supplies but st clair's proclamation of march twenty fourth seventeen ninety four ordering general wayne to restore and garrison the place for the purpose of preventing the proposed expedition from passing down the river ended the conspiracy and jeanne left the country a year later spain who had at intervals sought to detach the westerners from the union and ally them with her interests beyond the mississippi renewed her attempts at corrupting the kentuckians and gained to her cause no less a man than george roger Clark himself. Among other designs, Fort Massick was to be captured by the adventurers,

Starting point is 06:37:44 whom Spain was to supply with the sinews of war. There was much mysterious correspondence between the latter's corruption agent Thomas Power and the American General Wilkinson at Detroit, but finally, power in disguise, was sent out of the country under guard by way of Fort Massick, and his escape into spanish territory practically ended this interesting episode in western history the fort was occupied as a military post by our government until the close of the war of eighteen twelve to eighteen fifteen what we see today are the ruins of the establishment then abandoned no doubt the face of this rugged promontory of gravel has within a century suffered much from floods but the remains of the earthwork on the crest of the cliff some 50 feet above the present river stage are still easily traceable throughout. The fort was about 40 yards square with a bastion at each corner. There are the remains of an unstoned well near the center. The ditch surrounding the earthwork is still some two and a half or three feet below the surrounding

Starting point is 06:38:56 level, and the breastwork about two feet above the inner level. No doubt, Palisades once surmounted the work and were relied upon as the chief protection from assault the grounds a pleasant grassy grove several acres in extent are now enclosed by a rail fence and neatly maintained as a public park by the little city of metropolis which lies not far below it was a commanding view of land and river which was enjoyed by the garrison of old fort masick upstream there is a straight stretch of eleven miles to the mouth of the tennessee both up and down the shore lines are under full survey until they melt away in the distance no enemy could well surprise the holders of this key to the lower ohio our camp is on the sandy beach opposite metropolis and two hundred yards below the kentucky end of the ferry behind us lies a deep forest with sycamores six and eight feet in diameter a country road curving off through the woods to the sparse rustic settlement lying some two miles in the interior on higher ground than this wooded bottom which is annually overflowed now and then the blustering little steam ferry comes across to land kentucky farm folk and their mules going home from a saturday's shopping in metropolis occasionally a fisherman passes lagging on his oars to scan us in our

Starting point is 06:40:26 quarters, and from one of them we purchased a fish. As the still cool night crept on, Metropolis was a stir. Across the mile of intervening water darted tremulous shafts of light. We heard voices singing and laughing, a fiddle in its highest notes, the puffing of a stationary engine, and the bay in yelp of countless dogs. Later, a packet swooped down with smothered roar and threw its electric searchlight on the city wharf, revealing a crowd of Negroes gathered there, like moths in the radiance of a candle. There were gay shouts and a mad scampering. We could see it all, as plainly as if in ordinary light, had been but a third of the distance. And then the roused about struck up a weird song as they ran out the gangplank, and

Starting point is 06:41:15 laden with boxes and bales, began swarming ashore, like a procession of black ants carrying pupa cases. Mountain City towhead, Sunday, 10th. during the night burglarous pigs would have raided our larder but the crash of a falling kettle wakened us suddenly as did geese the ancient romans the doctor and i sallied forth in our pajamas with clods of clay in hand to send the enemy flying back into the forest snorting and squealing with baffled rage we were afloat at half-past seven under an unclouded sky with the sun sharply reflected from the smooth surface of the river and the temperature rapidly mounting the ford-mastic ridge extends down stream as far as mound city but soon degenerates into a ridge of clay varying in height from twenty-five to fifty feet above the water level upon the low-lying bottom of the kentucky shore is still an interminable dark line of forests the settlements are meagre and now wholly in illinois for instance joppa nine hundred and thirty-six miles a row of a half-dermin-half dozen unpainted dilapidated buildings chiefly stores and abandoned warehouses bespeaking a river traffic of the olden time that has gone to decay a hot dreary baking spot this joppa as it lies sprawling upon the clay ridge flanked by a low wide gravel beach on which gaunt bell-ringing cows are wandering eating the leaves of fallen trees for lack of better pasturage

Starting point is 06:42:54 our pilot map of sixty years ago records the presence of wilkinsonville nine hundred forty two miles on the site of old fort wilkinson of the war of eighteen twelve to fifteen but no one along the banks appears to have ever heard of it however after much searching we found the place for ourselves on an eminence of fifty feet with two or three farm-houses as the sole relics of the old establishment caledonia holmsted post-office nine miles down consists of several large buildings and a hill set well back from the river mounds city nine hundred and fifty nine miles the america of our time warm map in whose outskirts we are camped to-night as a busy town with furniture factories lumber mills shipyards and a railway transfer below that stretches the vast extent of swamp and low woodland on which cairo nine hundred sixty seven miles has with infinite panesman built like brave little holland holding her own against the flood solely by virtue of her encircling dyke houseboats have been few to-day and they of the shanty order and generally stranded high upon the beach one sees now and then on the illinois ridge the cheap log or frame house of a cracker the very picture of desolate despair but on the kentucky shore are few signs of life for the bottom lies so low that it is frequently inundated and settlement adventures no nearer than two or three miles from the riverside a fisherman comes occasionally into view upon this wide expansive wood and water and clay banks sometimes we hail him in passing always getting a respectful answer but a stare of innocent curiosity

Starting point is 06:44:47 our last home upon the ohio is facing the kentucky shore on the cleanly sand beach of mound city towhead a small island which in times of high water is but by a bar the tent has screened in a willow clump just below us on higher ground sycamores soar heavenward gaily festooned with vines hiding from us mound city in the illinois mainland across the river a kentucky negro is singing in the gloaming but it is over a mile away and while the tune is plain the words are lost children's voices and the bay of hounds come wafted to us from the northern shore a steamer's wake rolls along our island's strand dangerously near the campfire. The river is still falling, however, and we no longer fear the encroachments of the flood. The doctor and I found a secluded nook where in the moonlight we took our final plunge. It is sad this bidding goodbye to the stream which has floated us so merrily for a thousand miles from the mountains down to the plain. We elders linger long by the last campfire to talk and fond reminiscence of the six weeks afloat,

Starting point is 06:45:58 while the boy no doubt dreams peacefully of houseboats and fishermen, of gigantic bridges and flashing steel plants, of coal mines and oil wells, of pioneers and Indians and all that, of six weeks of kaleidoscopic sensations at an age when the mind is keenly active and the heart open to impressions which can never be dimmed so long as his little life shall last, cairo monday eleventh at our island camp last night we were but nine miles from the mouth of the ohio a distance which could easily have been made before sundown but we preferred to reach our destination in the morning the better to arrange for railway transportation hence our agreeable pause upon the towhead before embarking for the last run this morning we made a neat heap on the beach of such of our stores edible and wearable as had been requisite to the trip but were not worth the cost of sending home feeling confident that some passing fishermen would soon be tempted ashore to inspect this curious landmark and yet might be troubled by nice scruples as to the policy of appropriating the find we conspicuously labeled it

Starting point is 06:47:12 abandoned by the owners the finder is welcome to the lot quickly passing mound city now bustling with life pilgrim closely skirted the monotonous clay banks of illinois swept rapidly under the monster railway bridge which stalks high above the flood and loses itself over the tree-tops of the kentucky bottom and at a quarter past eight o'clock was pulled up at cairo with the mississippi and plain sight over there through the opening in the forest in another hour or two she will be housed in a box-car and we her crew having again donned the garb of landsmen will be speeding toward our northern home this pilgrimage but a-mour-mour. memory. Such a memory, as we dropped below the toe-head the boy for once silent, wistfully gazed astern. When at last Pilgrim had been hauled upon the railway levy, and the doctor and I had gone to summon the shipping clerk, the lad looked pleading into W's face. In tones half-choked with tears, he expressed the sentiment of all. Mother, is it really ended? Why can't we go back to Brownsville and do it all over again? Footnote A. In the evening of the evening of of the same day i ran my boats into a small creek about one mile above the old fort missick reposed ourselves for the night and in the morning took a route to the northwest clark's letter to mason end chapter twenty one

Starting point is 06:48:38 appendix a historical outline of ohio valley settlement englishmen had no sooner set foot upon our continent than they began to penetrate inland with the hope of soon reaching the western o'clock ocean, which the coast savages, almost as ignorant of the geography of the interior as the Europeans themselves, declared, lay just beyond the mountains. In 1586 we find Ralph Lane, governor of Raleigh's ill-fated colony, leading his men up the Roanoke River for a hundred miles, only to turn back disheartened at the rapids and falls, which necessitated frequent portages through the forest jungles. Twenty years later, 16006, Christopher Newport and the redoubtable John Smith of Jamestown

Starting point is 06:49:29 ascended the James as far as the falls, now Richmond, Virginia. And Newport himself, the following year, succeeded in reaching a point 40 miles beyond, but here again was appalled by the difficulties and returned. There was, after this, a deal of brave talk about scaling the mountains, But nothing further was done until 1650 when Edward Bland and Edward Pennant again tried the Roanoke, though without penetrating the wilderness far beyond Lane's turning point.

Starting point is 06:50:00 It is recorded that in 1669, John Lederer, an adventurous German surgeon, commissioned as an explorer by Governor Berkeley, ascended to the summit of the Blue Ridge in Madison County, Virginia. but although he was once more on the spot the following season with a goodly company of horsemen and indians and had a bird's-eye view of the over-mountain country he does not appear to have descended into the world of the woodland which lay stretched between him and the setting sun it seems to be well established that the very next year sixteen seventy one party under abraham wood one of governor berkeley's major generals penetrated as far as the great falls of the great cannawa only eighty miles from the ohio doubtless the first english exploration of waters flowing into the latter river the great canoa was by wood himself called new river but the geographers of the time styled at woods the last title was finally dropped the stream above the mouth of the gauly is however still known as new the several adventurers had now demonstrated that while the waters beyond the mountains were not the western ocean they possibly led to such a sea and it came to be recognized too that the continent was not as narrow as had up to this time been supposed meanwhile the french of canada were casting eager eyes toward the ohio as a gateway to the continental interior but the french of canada were casting eager eyes toward the ohio as a gateway to the continental interior but the french hating Iroquois held fast the upper waters of the Mohawk, Delaware, and Susquehanna, and the long but narrow watershed sloping northerly to the Great Lakes, so that the western Ohio was for many

Starting point is 06:51:45 years sealed to New France. An important factor in American history this, for it left the Great Valley practically free from whites, while the English settlements were strengthening on the seaboard. When at last the French were ready aggressively to enter upon the coveted field they had in the English colonists formidable and finally successful rivals. It is believed by many, and the theory is not unreasonable, that the great French fur trader and explorer LaSalle was at the falls of the Ohio site of Louisville, quote, in the autumn or early winter of 1669, end quote, how he got there is another question. Some antiquarians believe that he reached the Allegheny by way of the Chautauqua portage and descended the Ohio to the falls. Others that he ascended the Maumee from Lake Erie, and descending the Wabash thus discovered the Ohio.

Starting point is 06:52:44 It was reserved for the geographer Franklin to give in his map of 1688 the first fairly accurate idea of the Ohio's path, and father henepin's large map of sixteen ninety seven showed that much had meanwhile been learned about the river no doubt by this time the great waterway was well known to many of the most adventurous french and english fur traders possibly better to the latter than to the former Unfortunately, these men left few records behind them by which to trace their discoveries. As early as 1684, we incidentally hear of the Ohio as a principal route for the Iroquois, who brought Peltries, quote, from the direction of the Illinois, end quote, to the English at Albany and the French at Quebec. Two years after this, ten English trading canoes loaded with goods were seen on Lake Erie by French agents, who, in great alarm, wrote home to Quebec about them.

Starting point is 06:53:44 Rights de non-ville to Saint-Anonle, quote, I consider it a matter of importance to preclude the English from this trade, as they doubtless would entirely ruin ours, as well by the cheaper bargains they would give the Indians, as by the attracting to themselves the French of our colony who are in the habit of resorting to the woods, end quote. Herein lay the gist of the whole matter,

Starting point is 06:54:09 The legalized monopoly granted to the great fur trade companies of New France, with the official corruption necessary to create and perpetuate that monopoly, made the French trade an expensive business. Consequently, goods were deared. On the other hand, the trade of the English was untrammeled, and a lively competition lowered prices. The French cajoled the Indians and fraternized with them in their camps, whereas the English despised the savages and made little attempt to disguise their sentiments. The French, while claiming all the country west of the Alleghenies, cared little for agricultural colonization. They would keep the wilderness intact, for the fostering of wild animals upon the trade and whose furs depended the welfare of New France. And this, too, was the policy of the savage. By English statesmen at home, our continental

Starting point is 06:55:01 interior was also chiefly prized for its forest trade, which yielded rich returns for the merchant adventurers of London. The policies of the English colonists and of their general government were ever clashing. The latter looked upon the Indian trade as an entering wedge. They thought, thought of the west as a place for growth. Close upon the heels of the path-breaking trader went the cattle-raiser and following him the agricultural settler looking for cheap, fresh, and broader lands. No edicts of the Board of Trade could repress these backwoodsmen. Savages could and did beat them back for a time, but the annals of the border are lurid with bloody struggle of the borderers for a clearing in the western forest. The greater part of them were

Starting point is 06:55:49 Scotch Irish from Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, a hearty race who knew not defeat. Steadily, they pushed back the rampart of savagery and won the Ohio Valley for civilization. The Indian early recognized the land-grabbing temper of the English and felt that a struggle to the death was impending. The French browbeat their savage allies and easily inflaming their passions kept the body of them almost continually at war with the English. The Iroquois accepted, not because the latter were English lovers, or did not understand the aim of English colonization, but because the earliest French had won their undying enmity.

Starting point is 06:56:32 Amidst all this weary strife, the Indian, a born traitor who dearly loved a bargain, never failed to recognize that the goods of his French friends were dear, and those of his enemies the English were cheap. we find frequent evidences that for a hundred years the tribesmen of the upper lakes carried on an illicit trade with the hated english whenever the usually wary french were thought to be napping it is certain that english forest traders were upon the ohio in the year seventeen hundred in seventeen fifteen the year before governor spotswood of virginia quote with much feasting and parade end quote made his famous expedition over the blue ridge there was a complete that traders from Carolina had reached the villages on the Wabash and were poaching on the French preserves. French military officers built little log stockades along that stream and tried in vain to induce the Indians of the valley to remove St. Joseph's River out of the sphere of English

Starting point is 06:57:34 influence. Everywhere did French traders meet English competitors who were not to be frightened by orders to move off the field. New France, therefore, determined to connect Canada and Louisiana, by a chain of forts throughout the length of the Mississippi basin, which could not only secure untrammeled communication between these far-separated colonies, but aid in maintaining French supremacy throughout the region. Yet in 1725, we still hear of, quote, the English from Carolina, end quote, busily trading with the Miami's under the very shadow of the guns of Fort Witton,

Starting point is 06:58:09 near Lafayette, Indiana, and the French still vainly scolding thereat. What was going on of? upon the Wabash was true elsewhere in the Ohio Basin as far south as the creek towns on the sources of the Tennessee. About this time, Pennsylvania and Virginia began to exhibit interest in their own overlapping claims to lands in the country northwest of the Ohio. These colonies were now settled close to the base of the mountains, and there was heard a popular clamor for pastors knew. French ownership of the over-mountain region was denied, and in 1720, Pennsylvania, quote, viewed with alarm the encroachments of the French, end quote.

Starting point is 06:58:51 The issue was now joined. Both sides claimed the field, but, as usual, the contest was at first among the rival forest traders. In the Virginia and Pennsylvania capitals, the Transmontane country was still a misty region. In 1729, Colonel William Bird, an authority on things Virginian, was able to write that nothing was then known in that colony of the sources of the Potomac, Roanoke, and Shenandoah. It was not until 1736 that Colonel William Mayo, in laying out the boundaries of Lord Fairfax's generous estate, discovered in the Alleghenies the headspring of the Potomac, where ten years later was planted the famous Fairfax Stone, the southwest point of the boundary between Virginia and Maryland. That very same year, 1746,

Starting point is 06:59:41 Mr. de Léry, chief engineer of New France, went with a detachment of troops from Lake Erie to Chautauqua Lake, and proceeded thence by Canawango Creek in Allegheny River to the Ohio, which he carefully surveyed down to the mouth of the Great Miami. Affairs moved slowly in those days. New France was corrupt and weak, and the English colonists, unaided by the home government, were not strong. For many years, nothing of importance came out of this rivalry of French and English in the Ohio Valley, save the petty quarrels of fur traders and the occasional adventure of some Englishmen taken prisoner by Indians in a border foray and carried far into the wilderness to meet with experiences the horror of which, as preserved in their published narratives to this day,

Starting point is 07:00:30 causes the blood of the reader to curdle. Now and then there were voluntary adventurers into these strange lands. Such were, John Howard, John Peter Salling, and two other Virginians, who the story goes, went overland, 1740 or 1741, under commission of their inquisitive governor to explore the country to the Mississippi. They went down coal and woods rivers to the Ohio, which in Soling's journal is called the Allegheny. Finally, a party of French, Negroes, and Indians took them prisoners and carried them to New Orleans, where on meager fair they were held in prison for eighteen months. They escaped at last and had many curious adventures by land and sea until they reached home,

Starting point is 07:01:17 from which they had been absent two years and three months. There are now few countries on the globe where a party of travelers could meet with adventures such as these. At last the plot thickened. The tragedy was hastened to a close. France now formally asserted her right to all countries drained. by streams emptying into the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi. This vast empire would have extended from the comb of the Rockies on the West, discovered in 1743 by the brothers of La Verandrie to the crest of the Appalachians on the east, thus including the western part of New York and New England.

Starting point is 07:01:57 The narrow strip of the Atlantic coast alone would have been left to the domination of Great Britain. The demand by France, if exceeded to, meant the death. blow to English colonization on the American mainland, and yet it was made not without reason. French explorers, missionaries, and fur traders had, with great enterprise and fortitude, swarmed over the entire region, carrying the flag, the religion, and the commerce of France into the farthest forest wilds, while the colonists of their rival, busy and solidly welding their industrial commonwealths, had as yet scarcely peeped over the Allegheny barrier. It was asserted on behalf of Great Britain that the charters of her coast colonies carried their bounds far into the west.

Starting point is 07:02:44 Further, that as by the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, France had acknowledged the suzerainty of the British king over the Iroquois Confederacy, the English were entitled to all lands conquered by those Indians, whose war paths had extended from the Ottawa River on the north to the Carolinas on the south, and whose forays reached alike to the Mississippi and to New England. In this view was made in 1744, the famous treaty at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, whereat the Iroquois, impelled by rum and presents, pretended to give to the English entire control of the Ohio Valley, under the claim that the former had in various encounters conquered the Shawanese of that region,

Starting point is 07:03:31 and were therefore entitled to it. it is obvious that a country occasionally raided by marauding bands of savages whose homes are far away cannot properly be considered theirs by conquest meanwhile both sides were preparing to occupy and hold the contested field new france already had a weak chain of waterside forts and commercial stations the rendezvous of fur traders priests travelers and friendly indians extending with long intervening stretches of savage haunted wilderness through the heart of the continent from lower Canada to her outlying post of New Orleans. It is not necessary here to enter into the details of the ensuing French and Indian War, the story of which Parkman has told us so well. Suffice it briefly to mention a few only of its features, so far as they affect the Ohio itself. The Iroquois, although concluding with the English this Treaty of Lancaster,

Starting point is 07:04:31 quote, on which as a cornerstone lay the claim of the colonists to the West, end quote, were by this time, as the result of wily French diplomacy, growing suspicious of their English protectors. At the same time, having on several occasions been severely punished by the French, they were less rancorous in their opposition to New France. For this reason, just as the English were getting ready to make good their claim to the Ohio by actual colonization, the Iroquois began to let in the French at the back door. In 1749, Galassiannier, then governor of New France, dispatched to the Great Valley a party of soldiers under Sailoron de Bienville,

Starting point is 07:05:12 with directions to conduct a thorough exploration, to bury at the mouths of principal streams, lead plates graven with the French claim, accustomed of those days, and to drive out English traders. Sileron proceeded over the Lake Chautauqua route, from Lake Erie to the Allegheny River, and thence down the Ohio to the Miami, returning to Lake Erie over the old Maumee portage. English traders who could not be driven out were found swarming into the country, and his report was discouraging. The French realized that they could not maintain connection

Starting point is 07:05:48 between New Orleans and their settlements on the St. Lawrence if driven from the Ohio Valley. The government sent home a plea for the shipment of 10,000 French peasants to settle the region, But the government at Paris was just then as indifferent to New France, as was King George to his colonies, and the settlers were not sent. Meanwhile, the English were not idle. The first settlement they made west of the mountains was on New River, a branch of the Canawa, 1748. In the same season, several adventurous Virginians hunted and made land claims in Kentucky and Tennessee. Before the close of the following year, 1749, there had been formed, for fur trading and colonizing purposes, the Ohio Company, composed of wealthy Virginians, among whom were two brothers of Washington. King George granted the company 500,000 acres, south of and along the Ohio River, on which they were

Starting point is 07:06:46 to plant 100 families and build and maintain a fort. As a base of supplies, they built a fortified trading house at Will's Creek, now Cumberland, Maryland, near the head of the Potomac and developed a trail, Nemakolan's path, 60 miles long, across the Laurel Hills to the mouth of Redstone Creek on the Mononogahela, where was built another stockade, 1752. Christopher Gist, a famous backwoodsman, was sent 1750, the year after Celeron's expedition, to explore the country as far down as the falls of the Ohio and select lands for the new company. Gist's favorable report greatly stimulated interest in the western country. In his travels, he met many Scotch-Irish fur traders who had passed into the west through the mountain valleys of

Starting point is 07:07:37 Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. His negotiations with the natives were of great value to the English cause. It was seen by English and French alike that an immense advantage would accrue to the nation first in possession of what is now the site of Pittsburgh, the meeting place, of the Mononagahela and Allegheny rivers to form the Ohio, the, quote, forks of the Ohio, end quote, as it was then called. In the spring of 1753, a French force occupied the new 15-mile portage route between Presk Isle, Erie, Pennsylvania, and French Creek, a tributary of the Allegheny. On the banks of French Creek, they built Fort Le Biff, a stout log stockade. It had been planned to erect another fort at the forks of

Starting point is 07:08:25 the Ohio, 120 miles below, but disease in the camp prevented the completion of the scheme. What followed is familiar to all who have taken any interest whatever in Western history. In November, Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia sent one of his major generals, young George Washington, with Gist as a companion, to remonstrate with the French at Leboeuf for occupying land, quote, so notoriously known to be the property of the crown of Great Britain, end quote. The French politely turned the messengers back. In the following April, 1754, Washington set out with a small command by the way of Will's Creek to forcibly occupy the forks. His advance party were building a fort there when the French appeared and easily drove them off, then followed

Starting point is 07:09:16 Washington's defeat at Great Meadows July 4th. The French were in a fort. The French were in now supreme at their new Fort Duques. The following year, General Braddock set out from Virginia also by Nemecolin's path, but on that fateful 9th of July fell in the slaughter pen which had been set for him at Turtle Creek by the Indians of the Upper Lakes under the leadership of a French fur trader from far off Wisconsin. From the time of Braddock's defeat until the close of the war, French traders with savage allies poured the vials of their wrath upon the encroaching settlements of the english backwoodsman nemocholan's path now known as braddock's road made for the indians of ohio an easy pathway to the english borders of pennsylvania virginia and maryland in the parallel valleys of the alleghanyes was waged a partisan warfare which in bitterness has probably not had its equal in all the long history of the efforts of expanding civilization to beat down the encircling walls of barbarism. In 1758, Canada was attacked by several English expeditions, the most of which were successful. One of these was headed by General John Forbes and directed against

Starting point is 07:10:31 Fort Duquesne. After a remarkable forest march, overcoming mighty obstacles, Forbes arrived at his destination to find that the French had blown up the fortifications, some of the troops retreating to like Erie and others to rehabilitate Ford Massac on the lower, Ohio. Thus, England gained possession of the valley. New France had been cut in twain. The English Fort Pitt commanded the forks of the Ohio, and French rule in America was now doomed. The fall of Quebec soon followed, 1759, then of Montreal, 1760, and in 1763, was signed the Treaty of Paris by which England obtained possession of all the territory east of the Mississippi River, except the city of New Orleans and a small outlying district. In order to please

Starting point is 07:11:21 the savages of the interior and to cultivate the fur trade, perhaps also to act as a check upon the westward growth of the two ambitious coast colonies, George III took early occasion to command his loving subjects in America not to purchase or settle lands beyond the mountains, quote, without our especial leave and license, end quote. It is needless to to say that this injunction was not obeyed. The expansion of the English colonies in America was irresistible. The Great West was theirs, and they proceeded in due time to occupy it. Long before the close of the French and Indian War,

Starting point is 07:11:59 English colonists, whom we will now, for convenience, call Americans, had made agricultural settlements in the Ohio Basin. As early as 1752, as we have seen, the Redstone Fort was built. In 1753, the French forces on retiring from Great Meadows burned several log cabins on the Mononogahela. The interesting story of the colonizing of the Redstone District at the western end of Braddock's Road has been outlined in Chapter 1 of the text, and it has been shown in the course of the narrative of the pilgrimage how other districts were slowly settled in the face of savage opposition. Although driven back in numerous Indian wars, these American borderers had come to the Ohio Valley to stay. We have seen the early attempt of the Ohio Company to settle the valley. Its agents blazed

Starting point is 07:12:49 the way, but the French and Indian War and the revolution soon followed, tended to discourage the aspirations of the adventurers and the organization finally lapsed. Western land speculators were as active in those days as now, and Washington was chief among them. We find him first interested in the valley, through broad acres acquired on land grants issued for military services in the French Indian War. Revolutionary bounty claims made him a still larger landholder on Western waters. And to the close of the century, he was actively interested in schemes to develop the region. We are not in the habit of so regarding him, but both by frequent personal presence in the Ohio Valley and extensive interests at stake there, the father of his country was the most conspicuous

Starting point is 07:13:37 of Western pioneers. Dearly did Washington love the West, which he knew so well. When the revolutionary cause looked dark, and it seemed possible that England might seize the coast settlements, he is said to have cried, quote, we will retire beyond the mountains and be free, end quote, and in his declining years, he seemed to regret that he was too old to join his former comrades of the camp in their colony at Marietta. As early as 1754, Franklin and his famous Albany plan of union for the colonies had a device for establishing new states in the west, upon lands, purchase from the Indians. In 1773, he displayed interest in the wallpole plan for another colony, variously called Pizzlvania, Vandalia, and New Barataria, with its proposed capital at the mouth of

Starting point is 07:14:27 the great Canawa. There were two, several other Western colonial schemes, among them the Henderson Colley of Transylvania between the Cumberland and the Tennessee, the seat which was Boonsboro. Readers of Roosevelt well know its brief but brilliant career, intimately connected with the development of Tennessee and Kentucky. But the most of these hopeful enterprises came to grief with the political secession of the colonies, and when the Coast states ceded their western land claims to the new general government and the ordinance of 1787 provided for the organization of the territory northwest of the River, Ohio, there was no room for further enterprises of this character. Footnote A. The story of the Ohio is the story of the West. With the close of the revolution came a rush of

Starting point is 07:15:18 travel down the Great River. It was more or less checked by border warfare, which lasted until 1794, but in that year Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers broke the backbone of savagery east of the Mississippi. The Tecumse uprising 1812 to 13 came too late seriously to affect the dwellers on the Ohio. There were two great over-mountain highways thither, one of them being Braddock's road with Redstone, now Brownsville, Pennsylvania, and Pittsburgh as its termine. The other was Boone's Old Trail, or Cumberland Gap. With the latter, this sketch has naught to do. By the close of the revolution, Pittsburgh, and Gist's but a squalid Indian village and a fording place was still only, quote, a distant outpost, merely a foothold in the far west, end quote. By 1785, there were a thousand people there, chiefly engaged in the fur trade, and in forwarding emigrants and goods to the rapidly growing settlements on the middle and lower reaches of the river. The population had doubled by 1803. By 1812, there was to be seen here just the sort of bustling, vicious frontier.

Starting point is 07:16:31 town with battlement fronts and ragged streets which buffalo and then detroit became in after years. Cincinnati and Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City had still later each in turn their share of this experience, and not many years ago, Bismarck, Omaha, and Leadville. From Philadelphia and Baltimore and Richmond there were running to Pittsburgh or Redstone regular lines of stages for the better class of passengers. Freight wagons laden with immense bales of goods were to be seen in great caravans which frequently were stalled in the mud of the mountain roads. Immigrants from all parts of the eastern states and many countries of Europe often toiled painfully on foot over these excrable highways with their bundles on their backs or following

Starting point is 07:17:17 scrawny cattle harness to makeshift vehicles, and now and then came a well-to-do equestrian with his pack horses, generally an Englishman, who was out to see the country and upon his return to write a book about it. at pittsburg in points on the alleghany yoi henny and manonagah gila were boat-building yards which turned out to order a curious medley of craft arcs flat and keel-boats barges pea-rogues and schooners of every design conceivable to fertile brain upon these travellers took passage for the then far west down the swift rolling ohio there have descended to us a swarm of published journals by english and americans alike giving pictures more or less graphic of the men and manners of the frontier none is without interest even if in its pages the priggish author but unconsciously shows himself and fails to hold the mirror up to the rest of nature With the introduction of steamboats, the first was in 1811, but they were slow to gain headway against popular prejudice, the old river life, with its picturesque but rowdy boatmen, its unwieldy flats and keels and arcs, began to pass away, and water traffic to approach the prosaic stage.

Starting point is 07:18:30 The crossing of the mountains by the railway did away with the boisterous freighters, the stages, and the coaching taverns, and when at last the river became paralleled by the Iron Way, glory of the steamboat epic itself faded. Riverside towns adjusted themselves to the new highways of commerce, new centers arose, and sidetracked ports fell into decay. Footnote A. C. Turner's Western State Making in the Revolutionary Era in American History Review, Volume 1. Also, Alden's New Governments West of the Alleghenies, Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, History Series, Volume 2. End of Appendix A.

Classic Audiobook Collection - Afloat on the Ohio by Reuben Gold Thwaites ~ Full Audiobook [history]

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