USA > Ohio > Allen County > Cairo > On the storied Ohio : an historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo > Part 4
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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 superinten- dent at Mingo, what advantage was gained by having his plant upon the river. He replied:
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On the Storied Ohio
"We can get all the water we want, and we use a great deal of it; and it is convenient to empty our slag upon the banks; but our chief interest here is in the fact that Mingo is a rail- way junction." By rail he gets his coal and ore, and ships away his product. Were the coal to come a considerable distance, the river would be the cheaper road; but it is obtained from neighboring hill mines that are practically owned by the railways. This coal, by the way, costs $1.10 at the shaft mouth, and $1.75 landed at the Mingo works. As for the sewer-pipe, brick, and pottery works, they are along stream because of the great beds of clay exposed by the erosion of the river.
It is fortunate for the stability of these towns, that the Ohio flows along the trans- continental pathway westward, so that the great railway lines may serve them without deflection from their natural course. Had the great stream flowed south instead of west, the industries of the valley doubtless would gradually have been removed to the transverse highways of the new commerce, save where these latter crossed the river, and thus have left scores of once thriving communities mere 'longshore wrecks of their former selves. This
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At Wheeling
is not possible, now. The steamboat traffic may still further waste, until the river is no longer serviceable save as a continental drain- age ditch; but, chiefly because of its railways, the Ohio Valley will continue to be the seat of an industrial population which shall wax fat upon the growth of the nation's needs.
By the middle of the afternoon, we were at Wheeling (91 miles). The town has fifty thousand inhabitants, is substantially built, of a distinctly Southern aspect; well stretched out along the river, but narrow; with gaunt, treeless, gully-washed hills of clay rising ab- ruptly behind, giving the place a most forbid- ding appearance from the water. There are several fine bridges spanning the Ohio; and Wheeling Creek, which empties on the lower edge of town, is crossed by a maze of steel spans and stone arches; the well-paved wharf, sloping upward from the Ohio, is nearly as broad and imposing as that of Pittsburg ;* houseboats are here by the score, some of them
* Upon the Ohio and kindred rivers, the term " wharf" applies to the river beach when graded and paved, ready for the reception of steamers. Such a wharf must not be con- founded with a lake or seaside wharf, a staging projected into the water.
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On the Storied Ohio
the haunts of fishing clubs, as we judge from the names emblazoned on their sides-"Mys- tic Crew," "South Side Club," and the like.
For the first time upon our tour, negroes are abundant upon the streets and lounging along the river front. They vary in color from yellow to inky blackness, and in raiment from the "dude," smart in straw hat, collars and cuffs, and white-frilled shirt with glass-dia- mond pin, to the steamboat roustabout, all slouch and rags, and evil-eyed.
Wheeling Island (300 acres), up to thirty years ago mentioned in travelers' journals as a rare beauty-spot, is to-day thick-set with cot- tages of factory hands and small villas, and commonplace; while smoky Bridgeport, oppo- site on the Ohio side, was from our vantage- point a mere smudge upon the landscape.
Wheeling Creek is famous in Western his- tory. The three Zane brothers, Ebenezer, Jonathan, and Silas, -- typical, old-fashioned names these, bespeaking the God-fearing, Bible-loving, Scotch-Presbyterian stock from which sprang so large a proportion of trans- Alleghany pioneers,-explored this region as early as 1769, built cabins, and made improve- ments-Silas at the forks of the creek, and
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The Siege of Wheeling
Ebenezer and Jonathan at the mouth. Dur- ing 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 trav- eler in those early days has left us in his journal a thankful account of his tarrying here. The Zane stockade developed into Fort Fincastle, in Lord Dunmore's time; then, Fort Henry, during the Revolution; and everyone who knows his Western history at all has read of the three famous sieges of Wheeling (1777, 1781, and 1782), and the daring deeds of its men and women, which help illumine the pages of border annals. Finally, by 1784, the fort at Wheeling, that had never surrendered, was demolished as no longer necessary, for the wall of savage resistance was now pushed far westward. Wheeling had become the western end of a wagon road across the Panhandle, from Redstone, and here were fitted out many flatboat expeditions for the lower Ohio; later,
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On the Storied Ohio
in steamboat days, the shallow water of the upper river caused Wheeling to be in midsum- mer the highest port attainable; and to this day it holds its ground as the upper terminus of several steamboat lines.
Below Wheeling are several miles of factory towns nestled by the strand, and numerous coal tipples, with their begrimed villages. Fishermen have been frequent to-day, in houseboats of high and low degree, and in land camps composed of tents and board shan- ties, with rows of seines and tarred pound-nets stretched in the sun to dry; tow-headed chil- dren abound, almost as nude as the pigs and dogs and chickens amongst which they waddle and roll; women-folk busy themselves with the multifarious cares of home-keeping, while their lords are in shady nooks mending nets, or listlessly examining traut lines which ap- pear 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 (10I 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,
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A Threatened Storm
with wind gusts. Level fields stretch back of us for a quarter of a mile, to the hills which bound the bottom; at our front door majes- tically rolls the growing river, perhaps a third of a mile in width, black with the reflection of the sky, and wrinkled now and then with squalls which scurry over its bubbling surface. *
The storm does not break, but the bending tree-tops crone, and toads innumerable rend the air with their screaming whistles. We had great ado, during the cooking of dinner, to prevent them from hopping into our little stove, as it gleamed brightly in the early dusk; and have adopted special precautions to keep them from the tent, as they jump about in the tall grass, appeasing their insectivorous ap- petites.
* It was in this neighborhood, a mile or two above our camp, where the bottom is narrower, that Capt. William Foreman and twenty other Virginia militiamen were killed in an Indian ambuscade, Sept. 27, 1777. An inscribed stone monument was erected on the spot in 1835, but we could not find it.
CHAPTER VI.
THE BIG GRAVE-WASHINGTON, AND ROUND BOTTOM-A LAZY MAN'S PARADISE-CAP- TINA CREEK-GEORGE ROGERS CLARK AT FISH CREEK-SOUTHERN TYPES.
NEAR FISHING CREEK, Friday, May 11th. -There had been rain during the night, with fierce wind gusts, but during breakfast the atmosphere quieted, and we had a genial, semi-cloudy morning.
Off at 8 o'clock, Pilgrim's crew were soon exploring Moundsville. There are five thou- sand people in this old, faded, countrified town. They show you with pride the State Penitentiary of West Virginia, a solemn-look- ing pile of dark gray stone, with the feeble battlements and towers common to American prison architecture. But the chief feature of the place is the great Indian mound-the " Big Grave" of early chroniclers. This earthwork is one of the largest now remaining in the United States, being sixty-eight feet high and
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The Big Grave
a hundred in diameter at the base, and has for over a century attracted the attention of trav- elers and archæologists.
We found it at the end of a straggling street, on the edge of the town, a quarter of a mile back from the river. Around the mound has been left a narrow plat of ground, utilized as a cornfield; and the stout picket fence which encloses it bears peremptory notice that ad- mission is forbidden. However, as the pro- prietor 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 diam- eter, among which the path picturesquely ascends. The summit is fifty-five feet in diam- eter, and the center somewhat depressed, like a basin. From the middle of this basin a shaft some twenty-five feet in diameter has been sunk by explorers, for a distance of per- haps fifty feet; at one time, a level tunnel connected the bottom of this shaft with the side of the cone, but it has been mostly oblit- erated. A score of years ago, tunnel and shaft were utilized as the leading attractions of a
5
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On the Storied Ohio
beer garden-to such base uses may a great historical landmark descend!
Dickens, who apparently wrote the greater part of his American Notes while suffering from dyspepsia, has a note of appreciation for the Big Grave: " ... the host of Indians who lie buried in a great mound yonder-so old that mighty oaks and other forest trees have struck their roots into its earth; and so high that it is a hill, even among the hills that Nature planted around it. The very river, as though it shared one's feelings of compassion for the extinct tribes who lived so pleasantly here, in their blessed ignorance of white existence, hundreds of years ago, steals out of its way to ripple near this mound; and there are few places where the Ohio sparkles more brightly than in the Big Grave Creek."
There is a sharp bend in the river, just below Moundsville, with Dillon's Bottom stretching long and wide at the apex on the Ohio shore-flat green fields, dotted with little white farmsteads, each set low in its apple grove, and a convoluted wall of dark hills hemming them in along the northern horizon. Then below this comes Round Bottom, its counterpart on the West Virginia side, and
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Round Bottom
coursing through it a pretty meadow creek, Butler's Run.
Writes Washington, in 1781, to a corre- spondent who is thinking of renting lands in this region: " I have a small tract called the round bottom containing about 600 Acres, which would also let. It lyes on the Ohio, opposite to pipe Creek, and a little above Cap- teening." Across the half mile of river are the little levels and great slopes of the Ohio hills, through which breaks this same Pipe Creek; and hereabout Cresap's band murdered a number of inoffensive Shawanese, a tragedy which was one of the inciting causes of Lord Dunmore's War (1774).
We crossed over into Ohio, and pulled up on the gravelly spit at the mouth of Pipe. While the others were botanizing high on the mountain side, I went along a beach path toward a group of whitewashed cabins, intent on replenishing the canteen. Upon opening the gate of one of them, two grizzly dogs came bounding out, threatening to test the strength of my corduroy trousers. The proprietor cau- tiously peered from a window, and, much to my relief, called off the animals. Satisfied, apparently, that I was not the visitor he ex-
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On the Storied Ohio
pected, the fellow lounged out and sat upon the steps, where I joined him. He was a tall, raw-boned, loose-jointed young man, with a dirty, buttonless flannel shirt which revealed a hairy breast; upon his trousers hung a variety of patches, in many stages of grease and de- crepitude; a gray slouch hat shaded his little fishy eyes and hollow, yellow cheeks; and the snaky ends of his yellow mustache were stiff with accumulations of dried tobacco juice. His fat, waddling wife, in a greasy black gown, followed with bare feet, and, arms akimbo, listened in the open door.
A coal company owns the rocky river front, here and at many places below, and lets these cabins to the poor-white element, so numerous on the Ohio's banks. The renter is privileged to cultivate whatever land he can clear on the rocky, precipitous slopes, which is seldom more than half an acre to the cabin; and he may, if he can afford a cow, let her run wild in the scrub. The coal vein, a few rods back of the house, is only a few inches thick, and poor in quality, but is freely resorted to by the cotters. He worked whenever he could find a job, my host said-in the coal mines and
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A Lazy Man's Paradise
quarries, or on the bottom farms, or the rail- road which skirts the bank at his feet.
"But I tell ye, sir, th' Italians and Hun- garians is spoil'n' this yere country fur white men; 'n' I do'n' see no prospect for hits be'n' better till they get shoved out uv 't!" Yet he said that life wasn't so hard here as it was in some parts he had heard tell of-the climate was mild, that he "'lowed;" a fellow could go out and get a free bucket of coal from the hill- side "back yon;" he might get all the "light wood 'n' patchin' stuff" he wanted, from the river drift; could, when he "hankered after 'em," catch fish off his own front-door yard; and pick up a dollar now and then at odd jobs, when the rent was to be paid, or the "ol' woman " wanted a dress, or he a new coat.
This is clearly the lazy man's Paradise. I do not remember to have heard that the South Sea Islanders, in the ante-missionary days, had an easier time of it than this. What new fortune will befall my friend when he gets the Italians and Hungarians "shoved out," and "things pick up a bit," I cannot conceive.
A pleasing panorama he has from his door- way-across the river, the fertile fields of Round Bottom, once Washington's; Captina
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On the Storied Ohio
Island, just below, long and thickly-willowed, dreamily afloat in a glassy sea, reflecting every change of light; the whole girt about with the wide uplands of the winding valley, and over- head the march of sunny clouds.
Captina Creek (108 miles) is not far down on the Ohio bank, and beside it the little hamlet of Powhattan Point, with the West Virginia hills thereabout exceptionally high and steep, and wooded to the very top. Wash- ington, who knew the Ohio well, down to the Great Kanawha, wrote of this creek in 1770: "A pretty large creek on the west side, called by Nicholson [his interpreter] Fox-Grape-Vine, by others Captema creek, on which, eight miles up, is the town called Grape-Vine Town." Captina village is its white successor. But there were also Indians at the mouth of the creek; for when George Rogers Clark and his missionary companion, Jones, two years later camped opposite oncthe Virginia shore, they went over to make a morning call on the na- tives, 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 jour-
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Running the Gauntlet
nal that he "instructed what Indians came over." In the course of his prayer, the mis- sionary was particularly impressed by the atti- tude of the chief of Grape-Vine Town, named Frank Stephens, who professed to believe in the Christian God; and he naively writes, "I was informed that, all the time, the Indians looked very seriously at me." Jones appears to have been impressed also with the hardness of the beach, where they camped in the open, doubtless to avoid surprises: "Instead of feathers, my bed was gravel-stones, by the river side which at first seemed not to suit me, but afterward it became more natural."
In those days, traveling was beset with diffi- culties, both ashore and afloat. Eight years later (spring of 1780), three flatboats were descending the Ohio, laden with families in- tending to settle in Kentucky, when they suf- fered a common fate, being attacked by Indians off Captina Creek. Several men and a child were killed, and twenty-one persons were car- ried into captivity-among them, Catherine Malott, a girl in her teens, who subsequently became the wife of that most notorious of bor- der renegades, Simon Girty.
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On the Storied Ohio
On the West Virginia shore, not over a third of a mile below Captina Creek, empties Grave Yard Run, a modest rivulet. £ It would of itself not be noticeable amid the crowd of minor creeks and runs, coursing down to the great river through rugged ravines which corrugate the banks. But it has a history. Here, late in October or early in November, 1772, young George Rogers Clark made his first stake west of the Alleghanies, rudely cultivating a few acres of forest land on what is now called Cresap's Bottom, surveying for the neighbors, and in the evenings teaching their children in the little log cabin of his friend, Yates Con- well, at the mouth of Fish Creek, a few miles below. Fish Creek was in itself famous as one of the sections of the great Indian trail, "The Warrior Branch," which, starting in Tennessee, came northward through Kentucky and Southern Ohio, and, proceeding by way of this creek, crossed over to Dunkard Creek, thence to the mouth of Redstone. Wash- ington stopped at Conwell's in March or April, 1774; but Clark was away from home at the time, and the "Father of his Country" never met the man who has been dubbed the "Wash- ington of the West." Lord Dunmore's War
Floating Opera 73
was hatching, and a few months later the Fish Creek surveyor and schoolmaster had entered upon his life work as an Indian fighter.
At Bearsville (126 miles) we first meet a phenomenon common to the Ohio-the edges of the alluvial bottom being higher than the fields back of them, forming a natural levee, above which curiously rise to our view the spires and chimneys of the village. Harris' Journal (1803) made early note of this, and advanced an acceptable theory: "We fre- quently 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 inun- dations, are lodged upon the borders of the bank, but cannot be floated far upon the champaign, because obstructed by the growth of wood. Retaining their situation when the waters subside, they obstruct and detain the leaves and mud, which would else recoil into the stream, and thus, in process of time, form a bank higher than the interior flats."
Tied up to Bearsville landing is a gayly painted barge, the home of Price's Floating Opera Company, and in front its towing- steamer, "Troubadour." A steam calliope is
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On the Storied Ohio
part of the visible furniture of the establish- ment, and its praises as a noise-maker are sung in large type in the handbills which, with numerous colored lithographs of the perform- ers, 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 Martins- ville, West Va. (127 miles), a rather shabby town of fifteen hundred souls. As W- and I passed up the main street, seeking for a grocery, we noticed that the public hall was being decorated for a dance to come off to- night; and placards advertising the event were everywhere rivaling the gaudy prints of the floating opera.
Meanwhile, a talkative native was inter- viewing the Doctor, down at the river side. It required some good-natured fencing on the part of our skipper to prevent the Virginian from learning all about our respective families away back to the third generation. He was a short, chubby man, with a Dixie goatee, his flannel shirt negligée, and a wide-brimmed straw hat jauntily set on the back of his head. He was sociable, and sat astride of our beached prow, punctuating his remarks with squirts of
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Indian Mounds
tobacco juice, and a bit of lath with which he meditatively tapped the gunwale; the mean- time, with some skill, casting pebbles into the water with his bare toes. " Ax'n yer pardon, ma'm!" he said, scrambling from his perch upon W-'s appearance; and then, pushing us off, he bowed with much Southern gallantry, and hat in hand begged we would come again to New Martinsville, and stay longer.
The hills lining these reaches are lower than above, yet graceful in their sweeping lines. Conical mounds sometimes surmount them, relics of the prehistoric time when our Indians held to the curious fashion of building earth- works. We no longer entertain the notion that a separate and a prouder race of wild men than we know erected these tumuli. That pleasant fiction has departed from us; but the works are none the less interesting, now that more is known of their origin.
Two miles below New Martinsville, on the West Virginia shore, we pitch camp, just as the light begins to sink over the Ohio hills. The atmosphere is sweet with the odor of wild grape blossoms, and the willow also is in bloom. Poison ivy, to whose baneful touch fortunately none of us appear susceptible, grows
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On the Storied Ohio
everywhere about. From the farmhouse on the narrow bottom to our rear comes the me- lodious tinkle-tinkle of cow bells. The oper- atic calliope is in full blast, at Bearsville, its shrieks and snorts coming down to us through four miles of space, all too plainly borne by the northern breeze; and now and then we hear the squeak of the New Martinsville fiddles. There are no mosquitoes as yet, but burly May- chafers come stupidly dashing against our tent, and the toads are piping merrily.
CHAPTER VII.
IN DIXIE-OIL AND NATURAL GAS, AT WIT- TEN'S BOTTOM-THE LONG REACH-PHO- TOGRAPHING CRACKERS-VISITORS IN CAMP.
ABOVE MARIETTA, Saturday, May 12th .- Since the middle of yesterday afternoon we have been in Dixie, -- that is, when we are on the West Virginia shore. The famous Mason and Dixon Line (lat. 39° 43' 26") touches the Ohio at the mouth of Proctor's Run (1211/2 miles).
There was a heavy fog this morning, on land and river. But through shifting rifts made by the morning breeze, we had kaleido- scopic, cloud-framed pictures of the dark, jut- ting headlands which hem us in; of little white cabins clustered by the country road which on either bank crawls along narrow terraces be- tween overtopping steeps and sprawling beach, or winds through fertile bottoms, according to whether the river approaches or recedes from its inclosing bluffs; of hillside fields, tipped at
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On the Storied Ohio
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, tow- ering derricks of oil and natural gas wells- Witten's Bottom on the right, with its abutting hills; the West Virginia woods across the river, and the maple-strewn island between, all cov- ered with scaffolds. The country looks like a rumpled fox-and-geese board, with pegs stuck all over it. A mile and a half below lies Sis- tersville, W. Va., the emporium of this greasy neighborhood-great red oil-tanks and smoky refineries its chiefest glory; crude and raw, like the product it handles. We landed at Wit- ten's Bottom,-W-, the Boy, and I, -- while the Doctor, philosophically preferring to take the oily elephant for granted, piloted Pilgrim to the rendezvous a mile below.
Oil was "struck" here two or three years ago, and now within a distance of a few miles there are hundreds of wells-"two hun'rd in this yere gravel alone, sir!" I was told by a
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Among the Oil Wells
red-headed man in a red shirt, who lived with his numerous family in a twelve-feet-square box at the rear of a pumping engine. An en- gine 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 ver- tical 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 cor- ner of the earth, when the unassisted temper- ature is in the eighties. It is a bewildering scene, with all these derricks thickly scattered around, engines noisily puffing, walking-beams forever rearing and plunging, the country cob- webbed with tumbling-rods and pipe lines, the shanties of the operatives with their rude lamp- posts, and the face of Nature so besmeared with the crude output of the wells that every twig and leaf is thick with grease.
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