USA > Ohio > Allen County > Cairo > On the storied Ohio : an historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo > Part 11
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Below us, twenty rods or so, moored 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 serve for sides and flap 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 re- mained until we were ready to depart-a tall, slouchy fellow, clothed in shreds and patches; he was in the prime of 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-
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stuff, and other curious odds and ends of fab- rics, 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 move- ment in the culinary art; she felt she was under the eye of a critic who, though not voicing his opinions, looked as if he knew a thing or two.
As a conversationist, our visitor was fluent to a fault. It required but slight urging to draw him out. His history, and that of his fathers for some generations back, he recited in much detail. He himself had, in his best days, been a sub-contractor in railway con- struction; 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 as gentlemen-"yaas, sir-r, gen'lem'n, yew hear me! ef I is only a shanty-boat feller!"
"I thote I'd come to visit uv ye," he had said by way of introduction; "ye're frum a city, ain't yer? Yaas, I jist thote hit. City
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Benefits of Education
folks is a more 'com'dat'n' 'n country folks. Why? Waal, yew fellers jist go back 'ere in th' hills away, 'n them thar country folks they'd hardly answer ye, they're thet selfish- like. Give me city folks, I say, fer get'n' long 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 fer lawyers-mighty hard show them fellers has, fer get'n' to heaven. As fer doctors-waal, they'll hev hard sledd'n, too; but them fellers has to do piles o' dis'gree'bl' work, they do; I'd jist rather fish fer a liv'n', then be a doctor! Still, sir-r, give me an eddi- cated man every time, says I. Waal, sir-r, 'n' ye hear me, one o' th' richest fellers right here in Madison, wuz born 'n' riz on a shanty- boat, 'n' no mistake. He jist done pick up his eddication from folks pass'n' by, jes' as yew fellers is a passin', 'n' they might say a few wuds o' infermation to him. He done git a fine eddication jes' thet way, 'n' they ain't no flies on him, these days, when money-gett'n' is 'roun'. Jes' noth'n' like it, sir-r! Eddica- tion does th' biz!"
An observant man was this philosopher, and
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had studied human nature to some purpose. 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, any- way-the farther back in the hills you get, the worse they are.
He loved to talk about himself and his lowly condition, in contrast with his former glory as a sub-contractor on the railway. When a man was down, he said, he lost all his friends- and, to illustrate this familiar experience, told two stories which he had often read in a book that he owned. They were curious, old-fash- ioned 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 story-teller, 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 sometime he might look us up in that capacity, in our Northern home.
As we approach Louisville to-day, the set- tlements somewhat increase in number, al-
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though none of the villages are of great size; and, especially in Kentucky, they are from ten to twenty miles apart. The fine hills con- tinue close upon our path until a few miles above Louisville, when they recede, leaving on the Kentucky side a broad, flat plain sev- eral miles square, for the city's growth. For the most part, these stony slopes are well wooded with elm, buckeye, maple, ash, oak, locust, hickory, sycamore, cotton-wood, a few cedars, and here and there a catalpa and a pawpaw giving a touch of tropical luxuriance to the hillside forest; while blackberry bushes, bignonia vines, and poison ivy are every- where abundant; otherwise, there is little of interest to the botanist. Redbirds, catbirds, bluebirds, blackbirds, and crows are chatter- ing 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 white- washed 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
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On the Storied Ohio
no imagination can invest with picturesque qualities. Their ragged, unpainted tobacco- sheds are straggling about, over the hills; and here and there a white patch in the corner of a gray field indicates a 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 around, re- minding 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 changed from primeval conditions. Now and then we come across quarries, where stone is slid down great chutes 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
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The Savage State
land-clothes with us in the skiff, from Cincin- nati, took turns under the canvas in effecting what transformation was desirable, prepara- tory to a visit in the city. In the early twi- light we were floating past Towhead 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 captain of the U. S. Life Saving Sta- tion took Pilgrim and her cargo in charge for the night, and by dusk we were bowling over metropolitan pavements en route to the house of our friend-strange contrast, this lap of luxury, to the soldier-like simplicity of our canvas home. We have been roughing it for so long, -less than a month, although it seems a year, -that all these conveniences of civil- ization, these social conventionalities, have to us a sort of foreign air. Thus easily may man descend into the savage state.
CHAPTER XVII.
STORIED LOUISVILLE - RED INDIANS AND WHITE-A NIGHT ON SAND ISLAND-NEW ALBANY-RIVERSIDE HERMITS-THE RIVER FALLING-A DESERTED VILLAGE-AN IDEAL CAMP.
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, to-day, the rounds of the historic places. Much that was to me heretofore foggy in Louisville story was made clear, upon becoming familiar with the setting. The contention is made that La Salle was here at the Falls of the Ohio, during the closing months of 1669; but it was over a century later, under British domination, be- fore a settlement was thought of. Dr. John Connolly entertained a scheme for founding a 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
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Falls of the Ohio
his little band of Virginian volunteers (May, 1778), en route to capture the Northwest for the State of Virginia, he found naught but a savage-haunted wilderness. His log fort 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 consid- erable obstruction to Ohio-River navigation. At an average stage, the descent is but twenty- seven feet in 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 pio- neer boatmen, in descending, to lighten their craft of at least a third of the cargo, and thus pass them down to the foot of the north-side portage (Clarksville, Ind.), 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 to-day, which is operated by the fed- eral government.
The action of the water, hastened by the
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On the Storied Ohio
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 a mill hard by on the main shore. To- day, with a flood of nearly twenty feet above the normal stage of the season, not much of the island is visible, -clumps of willows and sycamores, swayed by the rushing current, giving 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 on 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 rap- idly absorbing all the neighboring territory.
Feeling obliged to make an early start, we concluded to pass 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
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An Aboriginal Tradition
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 in 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 Pon- tiac dwelt upon when organizing his conspir- acy, and King Philip is said to have been inspired by it. But this is no place to discuss the genesis of the tale. Suffice it, that on Sand Island have been discovered great quan- tities of ancient remains. No doubt, in its day, it was an over-filled burying-ground.
Noises, far different from the clash of sav- age arms, are in the air to-night. Far above our heads a great iron bridge crosses the Ohio, some of its piers resting on the island, -a busy combination thoroughfare for steam and elec- tric railways, for pedestrians and for vehicles, plying between New Albany and Portland. The whirr of the trolley, the scream and rum- ble of locomotives, the rattle of wagons; and just above the island head, the burly roar of
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On the Storied Ohio
steamboats signaling the locks, -these are the sounds which are prevalent. Through all this hubbub, electric lamps are flashing, and just now a steamer's search-light 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 o' 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, KY., Wednesday, 30th .- We stopped at New Albany, Ind. (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 uni- forms stood in knots at the street corners.
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.
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Ragged Farmsteads
Salt River, some ten or twelve rods wide, en- ters from the south twenty-one miles below New Albany, between uninteresting high clay banks, with the lazy-looking little village of West Point, Ky., 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 character- istics of the reaches above Louisville are re- sumed-hills and bottoms, sparsely settled with ragged farmsteads, regularly alternating.
At five o'clock we put in at a rocky ledge on the Indiana side, a mile-and-a-half above
Brandenburg. Behind us rises a precipitous hill, tree-clad to the summit. The Doctor found up there a new phlox 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 rag- ged and ill-smelling young shanty-boat men, who are moored hard by, came up to see us, and by our camp-fire to whittle chips and drone about hard times. But at last we tired of their idle gossip, which had in it no ele- ment of the picturesque, and got rid of them by hinting our desire to turn in.
The towns were few to-day, and small.
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On the Storied Ohio
Brandenburg, with eight hundred souls, was the largest-a sleepy, ill-paved, shambling place, with apparently nobody engaged in any serious calling; its chief distinction is an archi- tectural monstrosity, which we were told is the court-house. The little white hamlet of New Amsterdam, Ind. (650 miles), looked trim and bright in the midst of a green thicket. Richardson's Landing, Ky., is a disheveled row of old deserted 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 ex- hausted kodak; but the man of plates had packed up his tent and moved on-I would no doubt find him in Alton, Ind., fifteen miles lower down.
We have had stately, eroded hills, and broad, fertile bottoms, hemming us in all day, and marvelous ox-bows 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
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Malaria-Ridden
rocky, and the homes of shanty-men; but upon the bottoms are whitewashed dwell- ings of frame or log, tenanted by a better class, who sometimes have goodly orchards and ex- tensive corn-cribs. The villages are generally in the deep-cut notches of the hills, where the interior can be conveniently reached by a wagon-road-a country "rumpled like this," they say, for ten or twelve miles back, and then stretching off into level plains of fertility. Now and then, a deserted cabin on the ter- races, -windowless and gaunt, -tells the story of some "cracker" family that malaria has 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 thirty miles, takes a sudden sweep to the southwest, and thencefor- ward we have a rapid current. However, we need still to ply our blades, for there is a stiff head-wind, 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 luncheon-time, to find a sheltered nook amidst a heap of boulders on the Kentucky shore, and to sit on the sun- warmed sand and drink hot tea by the side of
I5
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On the Storied Ohio
a camp-fire, rejoicing in the kindness of Prov- idence.
There are few houseboats, since leaving Louisville; to-day we have seen but three or four-one of them merrily going up stream, 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, as can readily be seen from the broad dado of mud left on the leaves of willows and syca- mores; while the drift, recently an ever-pres- ent 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 along shore, in these lower waters. There are two lines of ever-widen- ing, willowed beach of rock and sand or mud; above them, perpendicular walls of clay, which edge either rocky terraces backed by grand sweeps of convoluted hills, -sometimes wooded to the top, and sometimes eroded into pal- isades, -or wide-stretching bottoms given over to small farms or maybe dense tangles of forest.
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Point Sandy
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 river- side. We catch a glimpse of them when landing on our petty errands, we now and 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. The imagination has not far to go afield, to rehabilitate the river as it appeared to the earliest voyagers.
Late in the afternoon, as usual wishing water and milk, we put ashore 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 stretch- ing a mile or two along the river. Three neat houses, one of them of logs, constituted the village, 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 postoffice of Point Sandy. Chickens
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On the Storied Ohio
clucked around me, a spaniel came fawning for attention, a tethered cow mooed plain- tively, but no human being was visible. At last I discovered a penciled notice pinned to the horse-block, to the effect that the post- master had gone into Alton (five miles distant) for the day; and should William Askins call in his absence, the said Askins was to remem- ber that he promised to call yesterday, but never came; and now would he be kind enough to come without fail to-morrow before sun- down, 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 myste- rious notice sticking there, for all Point Sandy 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 con- cluded that to attempt it might be thought a violation of ethics. The postmaster's well,
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The Deserted Village
too, proved to be a cistern, -pardon the Hi- bernicism, -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. A buck goat came bleating 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 cur disputed 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 sum- mons 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, to-day.
I would have retreated to the boat, but, chancing to glance up at the overhanging hills which edge in the bottom, saw two men sit- ting on a boulder in front of a rude log hut on the brink of a cliff, curiously watching my movements on the plain. Thankful, now, that the postmaster's cow had gone dry, and
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On the Storied Ohio
that these observant mountaineers had not had an opportunity to misinterpret my con- duct, I at once hurried toward the hill, hope- ful that at the top some bovine might be housed, whose product could lawfully be ac- quired. But after a long and laborious climb, over shifting stones and ragged ledges, I was met with the discouraging information that the only cow in these parts was Hawkins' cow, and Hawkins was the postmaster,- " down yon, whar yew were a-read'n' th' no- tices on th' hoss-block." Neither had they any water, up there on the cliff-top-" don' use very much, stranger; 'n' what we do, we done git at Smithfield's, in th' log-house down yon, 'n' I reck'n their cistern's done gone dry, any- how!"
"But what is the matter down there?" I asked of the old man, -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' ye heared? I thote ev'ry feller on th' river knew thet yere-why, ol' Hawkins, his wife's brother's
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The World as It Is
buried in Alton to-day, 'n' th' neighbors done gwine t' th' fun'ral. Whar your shanty-boat been beached, thet ye ain' heared thet yere?"
As the sun neared the horizon, we tried other places below, with no better success; and two miles above Alton, Ind. (673 miles), struck camp at sundown, without milk for our coffee-for water, being obliged to settle and boil the roily 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, philosoph- ically to take the world as it is; he who is not content to do so, had best not stir from home.
But our camping-place, to-night, is ideal. We are upon a narrow, grassy ledge; below us, the sloping beach astrewn with jagged rocks; behind us rises steeply a grand hillside forest, in which lie, mantled with moss and lichens, and deep buried in undergrowth, boul- ders 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. Beeches, elms, maples, lindens, pawpaws, tulip trees, here attain a monster growth,- with grape-vines, their fruit now set, hanging
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On the Storied Ohio
in great festoons from the branches; and all about, are the flowers which thrive best in shady solitudes-wild licorice, a small green- brier, and, although not yet in bloom, the sessile trillium. We are thoroughly isolated; a half-mile above us, faintly gleams a govern- ment beacon, and we noticed on landing that three-quarters of a mile below is a small cabin flanking the hill. Naught 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.
CHAPTER XVIII.
VILLAGE LIFE-A TRAVELING PHOTOGRAPHER -ON A COUNTRY ROAD-STUDIES IN COLOR- AGAIN AMONG COLLIERS-IN SWEET CON- TENT-A FERRY ROMANCE.
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