USA > Ohio > Allen County > Cairo > On the storied Ohio : an historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo > Part 8
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16
IO
I46
On the Storied Ohio
SCIOTOVILLE, O., Sunday, May 20th .- After breakfast, and settling our modest score, we rejoined the Doctor, and at ten o'clock pulled out again; being bidden good-bye at the land- ing, 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, through- out the night. To-day we have a dark gray sky, with fickle winds. A charming color study, all along our path: the reds and grays and yellows of the high clay-banks which edge the reciprocating bottoms, the browns and yellows of hillside fields, the deep greens of forest verdure, the vivid white of bankside cabins, and, in the background of each new vista, bold headlands veiled in blue. W- and the Boy are in the stern sheets, wrapped in blankets, for there is a smart chill in the air, and we at the oars pull lively for warmth. In our twisting course, sometimes we have a favoring breeze, and the Doctor rears the sail; but it is a brief delight, for the next turn brings the wind in our teeth, and we set to the blades with renewed energy. In the main, we make good time. The sugar-loaf hills, with their
147
A Gypsy Lunch
castellated escarpments, go marching by with stately sweep.
Greenup Court House (334 miles) is a bright little Kentucky county-seat, well-built at the feet of thickly-forested uplands. At the lower end of the village, the Little Sandy enters through a wooded dale, which near the mouth opens into a broad meadow. Not many miles below, is a high sloping beach, picturesquely bestrewn with gigantic boulders which have in ages past rolled down from the hill-tops above. Here, among the rocks, we again set up a rude screen from the still piercing wind; and, each wrapped in a gay blanket, lunch as operatic gypsies might, in a romantic glen, enjoying mightily our steaming chocolate, and the warmth of our friendly stove-for dessert, taking a merry scamper for flowers, over the ragged ascent from whence the boulders came. Everywhere about is the trumpet creeper, but not yet in bloom. The Indian turnip is in blossom here, and so the smaller Solomon's seal, yellow spikes of toad-flax, blue and pink phlox, glossy May apple; high up on the hill- side, the fire pink and wintergreen; and, down by the sandy shore, great beds of blue wild
148
On the Storied Ohio
lupin, and occasionally stately spikes of the familiar moth mullein.
With the temperature falling rapidly, and a drizzling rain taking the starch out of our en- thusiasm, we early sought a camping ground. For miles along here, springs ooze from the base of the high clay bank walling in the wide and rocky Ohio beach, and dry spots are few and far between. We found one, however, a half mile above Little Scioto River (346 miles),* with drift-wood enough to furnish us for years, and the beach thick-strewn with fos- sils of a considerable variety of small bivalves, which latter greatly delighted the Doctor and the Boy, who have brought enough specimens to the tent door to stock a college museum.
Dinner over, the crew hauled Pilgrim under cover, and within prepared for her sailing- master a cosy bed, with the entire ship's stock of sleeping-bags and blankets. W-, the Boy, and I then started off to find quarters in Scio- toville (1,000 inhabitants), which lies just below the river's mouth, here a dozen rods
* Two miles up the Little Scioto, Pine Creek enters. Per- haps a mile and a half up this creek was, in 1771, a Mingo town called Horse Head Bottom, which cuts some figure in border history as a nest of Indian marauders.
149
A Riverside Tavern
wide. Scrambling up the slimy bank, through a maze of thorn trees, brambles, and sycamore scrubs, we gained the fertile bottom above, all luscious with tall grasses bespangled with wild red roses and the showy pentstemon. The country road leading into the village is some distance inland, but at last we found it just beyond a patch of Indian corn waist high, and followed it, through a covered bridge, and down to a little hotel at the lower end of town.
A quaint, old-fashioned house, the Scioto- ville tavern, with an inner gallery looking out into a small garden of peaches, apples, pears, plums, and grapes-a famous grape country this, by the way. In our room, opening from the gallery, is an antique high-post bedstead; everywhere about are similar relics of an early day. In keeping with the air of serene old age, which pervades the hostelry, is the white- haired landlady herself. In well-starched apron, white cap, and gold-rimmed glasses, she benignly sits rocking by the office stove, her feet on the fender, reading Wallace's Prince of India; and looking, for all the world, as if she had just stepped out of some old portrait of-well, of a tavern-keeping Martha Washington.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE SCIOTO, AND THE SHAWANESE-A NIGHT AT ROME-LIMESTONE-KEELS, FLATS, AND BOATMEN OF THE OLDEN TIME.
ROME, O., Monday, May 21st .- At inter- vals through the night, rain fell, and the temp- erature was but 46° at sunrise. However, by the time we were afloat, the sun was fit- fully 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 else- where over this gentle landscape of wooded amphitheatres, broad green meadows, rocky escarpments, and many-colored fields, light and shade gayly chased each other. Never were the vistas of the widening river more beautiful than to-day.
There are saw-mill and fire-brick industries in the little towns, which would be shabby enough in the full glare of day. But they are all glorified in this changing light, which
150
151
Shannoah Town
brings out the rich yellows and reds in sharp relief against the gloomy background of the hills, and mellows into loveliness the soft grays of unpainted wood.
At the mouth of the Scioto (354 miles), is Portsmouth, O. (15,000 inhabitants), a well- built, substantial town, with good shops. It lies on a hill-backed terrace some forty feet above the level of the neighboring bottoms, which give evidence of being victims of the high floods periodically covering the low lands about the junction of the rivers. Just across the Scioto is Alexandria, and on the Kentucky side of the Ohio can be seen the white hamlet of Springville, at the feet of the dentated hills which here closely approach the river.
The country about the mouth of the Scioto has long figured in Western annals. Being a favorite rendezvous for the Shawanese, it nat- urally became a resort for French and Eng- lish fur-traders. The principal part of the first Shawanese village-Shannoah Town, in the old journals-was below the Scioto's mouth, on the site of Alexandria; it was the chief town of this considerable tribe, and here Gist was warned back, when in March, 1751, he ventured thus far while inspecting lands for
152
On the Storied Ohio
the Ohio Company. Two years later, there was a great-perhaps an unprecedented-flood in the Ohio, the water rising fifty feet above the ordinary level, and destroying the larger part of the Shawanese village. Some of the Indians moved to the Little Miami, and others up the Scioto, where they built, successively, Old and New Chillicothe; but the majority remained, and rebuilt their town on the higher land north of the Scioto, where Portsmouth now stands. An outlying band had had, from before Gist's day, a small town across the Ohio, the site of Springville; and it was here that George Croghan had his stone trading house, which was doubtless, after the manner of the times, a frontier fortress. In the French and Indian war (1758), the Shawanese, tiring of continual conflict, withdrew from their Ohio River settlements to Old (or Up- per) Chillicothe, and thus closed the once im- portant fur-trade at the mouth of the Scioto.
It was while the Indian town at Portsmouth was still new (1755), that a party of Shawan- ese brought here a Mrs. Mary Ingles, whom they had captured while upon a scalping foray into Southwestern Virginia. The story of the remarkable escape of this woman, at Big
153
A Thrilling Escape
Bone Lick, of her long and terrible flight through the wilderness along the southern bank of the Ohio and up the Great Kanawha Valley, and her final return to home and kin- dred, who viewed her as one delivered from the grave, is one of the most thrilling in West- ern 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 eighteenth century, were a con- tinual source of alarm to those whose busi- ness led them to follow this otherwise inviting highway to the continental interior. Flat- boats bearing traders, immigrants, and trav- elers were frequently waylaid by the savages, who exhausted a fertile ingenuity in luring their victims to an ambuscade ashore; and, when not successful in this, would in narrow channels, or when the current swept the craft near land, subject the voyagers to a fierce fus- ilade of bullets, against which even stout plank barricades proved of small avail.
* See Shaler's Kentucky (Amer. Commonwealth series), Collins's History of Kentucky, and Hale's Trans-Alleghany Pioneers. Shaler gives the date as 1756; but Hale, a descend- ant of Mrs. Ingles, makes it 1755.
154
On the Storied Ohio
Vanceburgh, Ky. (375 miles), is a little town at the bottom of a pretty amphitheatre of hills. There was a floating photographer there, as we passed, with a gang-plank run out to the shore, and framed specimens of his work hung along the town side of his ample barge. Men with teams were getting wagon- loads of sand from the beach, for building purposes. And, a mile or two down, a float- ing saw and planing-mill-the "Clipper," which we had seen before, up river-was busied upon logs which were being rolled down the beach from the bank above. There are several such mills upon the river, all seem- ingly occupied with "tramp work," for there is a deal of logging carried on, in a small and careful way, by farmers living on these wooded hills.
Vanceburgh was for the time bathed in sunlight; but, as we continued on our way, a heavy rain-cloud came creeping up over the dark Ohio hills, and, descending, cut off our view, at last lustily pelting us as we sat en- cased in rubber. We had been in our pon- chos most of the day, as much for warmth as for shelter; for there was an all-pervading chill, which the fickle sun, breaking its early
155
Cistern Water
promise, had failed to dissipate. Thus, amid showers alternating with sunbeams, we pro- ceeded unto Rome (381 miles). An Ohio village, this Rome, and so fallen from its once proud estate that its postoffice no longer bears the name-it is simply "Stout's," if, in these degenerate days, you would send a letter hither.
It was smartly raining, when we put in on the stony beach above Rome. The tent went up in a hurry, and under it the cargo; but by the time all was housed the sun gushed out again, and, stretching a line, we soon had our bedding hung to dry. It is a charming situa- tion; in this melting atmosphere, we have perhaps the most striking effects of cloud, hill, bottom, islands, and glancing river, which have yet been vouchsafed us.
The Romans, like most rural folk along the river below Wheeling, chiefly drink cistern water. Earlier in our pilgrimage, we stoutly declined to patronize these rain-water reser- voirs, 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 oc- casions when the latter can be found at vil-
156
On the Storied Ohio
lages or farm-houses. But there are cisterns and cisterns-foul holes like that at Rosebud, others that are neatness itself, with all man- ner of grades between. As for river water, ever yellow with clay, and thick as to motes, much of it is used in the country parts. This morning, a bevy of negroes came down the bank from a Kentucky field; and each in turn, creeping out on a drift log,-for the ground is usually muddy a few feet up from the water's edge,-lay flat on his stomach and drank greedily from the roily mess.
At dusk, there was again a damp chill, and for the third time we left the Doctor to keep bachelor's hall upon the beach. It was rain- ing smartly by the time the tavern was reached, nearly a mile down the bank. Our advent caused a rare scurrying to and fro, for two commercial "drummers," who were to depart by the early morning boat, occupied the "reg'lar spar' room," the landlady informed us, and a bit of a cubby-hole off the back stairs had to be arranged for us. Guests are rari- ties, at the hostelry in Rome.
NEAR RIPLEY, O., Tuesday, May 22nd. - There was an inch of snow last night, on the
I57
The Rival Banks
hills about, and a morning Cincinnati paper records a heavy fall in the Pennsylvania mountains. The storm is general, and the river rose two feet over night. When we set off, in mid-morning, it was raining heavily; but in less than an hour the clouds broke, and the rest of the day has been an alternation of chilling showers and bursts of warm sunshine, with the same succession of alluring vistas, over which play broad bands of changing light and shade, and overhead the storm clouds torn and tossed in the upper currents.
Our landlord at Rome asserted at breakfast that Kentucky was fifty years behind the Ohio side, in improvements of every sort. Thus far, we have not ourselves noticed differences of that degree. Doubtless before the late civil war,-all the ante-bellum travelers agree in this, -when the blight of slavery was resting on Virginia and Kentucky, the south shore of the Ohio was as another country; but to-day, so far as we can ascertain from a surface view, the little villages on either side are equally dingy and woe-begone, and large Southern towns like Wheeling, Parkersburg, Point Pleasant, and Maysville are very nearly an offset to Steubenville, Marietta, Pomeroy,
158
On the Storied Ohio
Ironton, and Portsmouth. North-shore towns of wealth and prominence are more numerous than on the Dixie bank, and are as a rule larger and somewhat better kept, with the negro element less conspicuous; but to say that the difference is anywhere near as marked as the landlord averred, or as my own previous reading on the subject led me to expect, is grossly to exaggerate.
After leaving Manchester, O. (394 miles), with a beautiful island at its door, there are spasmodic evidences of the nearness of a great city market. A large proportion of the hills are completely denuded of their timber, and patched with rectangular fields of green, brown, and yellow; upon the bottoms there are frequent truck farms; now and then are stone quarries upon the banks, with capacious barges moored in front; and upon one or two rocky ledges were stone-crushers, getting out material for concrete pavements. When we ask the bargemen, in passing, whither their loads are destined, the invariable reply is, "The city"-meaning Cincinnati, still seventy miles away.
Limestone Creek (405 miles) occupies a large space in Western story, for so insignificant
I59
Limestone Creek
a stream. It is now not over a rod in width, and at no season can it be over two or three. One finds it with difficulty along the mill- strewn shore of Maysville, Ky., the modern outgrowth of the Limestone village of pioneer days. Limestone, settled four years before Marietta or Cincinnati, was long Kentucky's chief port of entry on the Ohio; immigrants to the new state, who came down the Ohio, almost invariably booked for this point, thence taking stage to Lexington, and travelers in the early day seldom passed it by unvisited. But years before there was any settlement here, the valley of Limestone Creek, which comes gently down from low-lying hills, was regarded as a convenient doorway into Kentucky. When (1776) George Rogers Clark was com- ing down the river from Pittsburg, with pow- der given by Patrick Henry, then governor of Virginia, for the defence of Kentucky settlers from British-incited savages, he was chased by the latter, and, putting into this creek, hastily buried the precious cargo on its banks. From here it was cautiously taken overland to the little forts, by relays of pioneers, through a gauntlet of murderous fire.
About twenty-five miles from Limestone,
160
On the Storied Ohio
too, was another attraction of the early time, - the great Blue Lick sulphur spring; here, in a valley surrounded by wooded hills, formerly congregated great herds of buffalo and deer, which licked the salty earth, and hunters soon learned that this was a royal ground for game. The Battle of the Blue Lick (1782) will ever be famous in the annals of Kentucky.
The Ohio was a mighty waterway into the continental interior, in the olden days of Lime- stone. Its only compeer was the so-called "Wilderness Road," overland through Cum- berland Gap-the successor of "Boone's trail," just as Braddock's Road was the outgrowth of "Nemacolin's path." Until several years after the Revolutionary War, the country north of the Ohio was still Indian land, and settlement was restricted to the region south of the river; so that practically all West-going roads from the coast colonies centered either on Fort Pitt or Redstone, or on Cumberland Gap. On the out-going trip, the Wilderness Road was the more toilsome of the two, but it was safer, for the Ohio's banks were beset with thieving and often murdering savages. In returning east, many who had descended the river pre- ferred going overland through the Gap, to
161
Two Routes Westward
painfully pulling up stream through the shal- lows, with the danger of Indians many times greater than when gliding down the deep cur- rent. The distance over the two routes from Philadelphia, was nearly equal, when the wind- ings of the river were taken into account; but the Carolinians and the Georgians found Boone's Wilderness Road the shorter of the two, in their migrations to the promised land of "Ol' Kaintuck." And we should not over- look the fact, that of much importance was still a third route, up the James and down the Great Kanawha; a route whose advantage to Virginia, Washington early saw, and tried in vain to have improved by a canal connecting the two rivers. *
Even before the opening of the Revolution, the Ohio was the path of a considerable emi- gration. We have seen Washington going down to the Great Kanawha with his survey- ing party, in 1770, and finding that settlers were hurrying into the country for a hundred miles below Fort Pitt. By the close of the Revolution, the Ohio was a familiar stream. Pittsburg, from a small trading hamlet and
* See ante, p. 126.
II
162
On the Storied Ohio
fording-place, had grown by 1785 to have a thousand inhabitants, chiefly supported by boat-building and the Kentucky carrying trade; and boat-yards were common up both the Monongahela and the Youghiogheny, for a distance of sixty miles. Nevertheless, it was not until 1792 that there were regular conven- iences for carrying passengers and freight down the Ohio; the emigrant or trader, on arrival at Pittsburg or Redstone, had generally to wait until he could either charter a boat or have one built for him, although sometimes he found a chance "passenger flat " going down. * 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 sin- gular, whimsical, and amusing spectacle of the varieties of water-craft, of all shapes and structures." These, Flint, who knew the
* Palmer (1817) paid five dollars for his passage from Pitts- burg to Cincinnati (465 miles), without food, and fifty cents per hundred pounds for freight to Marietta. Imlay (1792) says the rate in his time from Pittsburg to Limestone was twenty-five cents per hundred. In 1803, Harris paid four dollars-and-a-half per hundred for freight, by wagon from Baltimore to Pittsburg.
Early Water Craft 163
river well, separates into seven classes: (1) "Stately barges," the size of an Atlantic schooner, with "a raised and outlandish-look- ing deck;" one of these required a crew of twenty-five to work it up stream. (2) Keel- boats-long, slender, and graceful in form, carrying from fifteen to thirty tons, easily pro- pelled over the shallows, and much used in low water, and in hunting trips to Missouri, Arkansas, and the Red River country. (3)
Kentucky flats (or "broad-horns"), "a species of ark, very nearly resembling a New England pig-stye;" these were from forty to a hundred feet in length, fifteen feet in beam, and car- ried from twenty to seventy tons. Some of these flats were not unlike the house-boats of to-day. " It is no uncommon spectacle to see a large family, old and young, servants, cattle, hogs, horses, sheep, fowls, and animals of all kinds," all embarked on one such bottom. (4) Covered "sleds," ferry-flats, or Alleghany skiffs, carrying from eight to twelve tons. (5)
Pirogues, of from two to four tons burthen, "sometimes hollowed from one big tree, or the trunks of two trees united, and a plank rim fitted to the upper part." (6) Common skiffs and dug-outs. (7) "Monstrous anom-
164
On the Storied Ohio
alies," not classifiable, and often whimsical in design. To these might be added the "float- ing shops or stores, with a small flag out to indi- cate their character," so frequently seen by Palmer (1817), and thriftily surviving unto this day, minus the flag. And Hall (1828) speaks of a flat-bottomed row-boat, "twelve feet long, with high sides and roof," carrying an aged couple down the river, they cared not where, so long as they could find a comfortable home in the West, for their declining and now childless years.
The first four classes here enumerated, were allowed to drift down stream with the current, being steered by long sweeps hung on pivots. The average speed was about three miles an hour, but the distances made were consider- able, from the fact that in the earliest days they were, from fear of Indians, usually kept on the move through day and night,-the crew taking turns at the sweeps, that the craft might not be hung up on shore or entangled in the numerous snags and sawyers. In going up stream, the sweeps served as oars, and in the shallows long pushing-poles were used.
As for the boatmen who professionally pro- pelled the keels and flats of the Ohio, they
165
The Flatboatmen
were a class unto themselves-"half horse, half alligator," a contemporary styled them. Rough fellows, much given to fighting, and drunkenness, and ribaldry, with a genius for coarse drollery and stinging repartee. The river towns suffered sadly at the hands of this lawless, dissolute element. Each boat carried from thirty to forty boatmen, and a number of such boats frequently traveled in company. After the Indian scare was over, they generally stopped over night in the settlements, and the arrival of a squadron was certain to be fol- lowed by a disturbance akin to those so familiar a few years ago in our Southwest, when the cowboys would undertake to "paint a town red." The boatmen were reckless of life, limb, and reputation, and were often more numerous than those of the villagers who cared to enforce the laws; while there was always present an element which abetted and throve on the vice of the river-men. The result was that mischief, debauchery, and outrage ran riot, and in the inevitable fights the citizens were generally beaten.
The introduction of steamboats (1814) soon effected a revolution. A steamer could carry ten times as much as a barge, could go five
166
On the Storied Ohio
times as fast, and required fewer men; it trav- eled at night, quickly passing from one port to another, pausing only to discharge or re- ceive cargo; its owners and officers were men of character and responsibility, with much wealth in their charge, and insisted on disci- pline and correct deportment. The flatboat and the keel-boat were soon laid up to rot on the banks; and the boatmen either became respectable steamboat hands and farmers, or went into the Far West, where wild life was still possible.
Shipment on the river, in the flatboat days, was only during the spring and autumnal floods; although an occasional summer rise, such as we are now getting, would cause a general activity. In the autumn of 1818, Hall reports that three millions of dollars' worth of merchandise were lying on the shores of the Monongahela, waiting for a rise of water to float them to their destination. "The Western merchants were lounging discontent- edly about the streets of Pittsburg, or moping idly in its taverns, like the victims of an ague." The steamers did something to alleviate this condition of affairs; but it was not until the coming of railways, to carry goods quickly and
-
167
A Gretna Green
cheaply across country to deep-water ports like Wheeling, that permanent relief was felt.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.