The Passing Show Of 1800
Foreign travelers who have come to the United States have always proved
of great interest to Americans. From Brissot to Arnold Bennett, while in
the country they have been fed and clothed and transported wheresoever
they would go--at the highest prevailing prices. And after they have
left, the records of their sojourn that these travelers have published
have made interesting reading for Americans all over the land. Some of
these trans-Atlantic visitors have been jaundiced, disgruntled, and
contemptuous; others have shown themselves of an open nature, discreet,
conscientious, and fair-minded.
One of the most amiable and clear-headed of such foreign guests was
Francis Baily, later in life president of the Royal Astronomical Society
of Great Britain, but at the time of his American tour a young man of
twenty-two. His journey in 1796-97 gave him a wide experience of stage,
flatboat, and pack-horse travel, and his genial disposition, his
observant eye, and his discriminating criticism, together with his
comments on the commercial features of the towns and regions he visited,
make his record particularly interesting and valuable to the historian.
¹ Using Baily's journal as a guide, therefore, one can today journey
with him across the country and note the passing show as he saw it in
this transitional period.
¹ Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 and 1797
by the late Francis Baily (London, 1856).
Landing at Norfolk, Virginia, Baily was immediately introduced to an
American tavern. Like most travelers, he was surprised to find that
American taverns were "boarding-places," frequented by crowds of "young,
able-bodied men who seemed to be as perfectly at leisure as the loungers
of ancient Europe." In those days of few newspapers, the tavern
everywhere in America was the center of information; in fact, it was a
common practice for travelers in the interior, after signing their names
in the register, to add on the same page any news of local interest
which they brought with them. The tavern habitués, Baily remarks, did
not sit and drink after meals but "wasted" their time at billiards and
cards. The passion for billiards was notorious, and taverns in the most
out-of-the-way places, though they lacked the most ordinary
conveniences, were nevertheless provided with billiard tables. This
custom seems to have been especially true in the South; and it is
significant that the first taxes in Tennessee levied before the
beginning of the nineteenth century were the poll tax and taxes on
billiard tables and studhorses!
From Norfolk Baily passed northward to Baltimore, paying a fare of ten
dollars, and from there he went on to Philadelphia, paying six dollars
more. On the way his stagecoach stuck fast in a bog and the passengers
were compelled to leave it until the next morning. This sixty-mile road
out of Baltimore was evidently one of the worst in the East. Ten years
prior to this date, Brissot, a keen French journalist, mentions the
great ruts in its heavy clay soil, the overturned trees which blocked
the way, and the unexampled skilfulness of the stage drivers. All
travelers in America, though differing on almost every other subject,
invariably praise the ability of these sturdy, weather-beaten American
drivers, their kindness to their horses, and their attention to their
passengers. Harriet Martineau stated that, in her experience, American
drivers as a class were marked by the merciful temper which accompanies
genius, and their perfection in their art, their fertility of resource,
and the gentleness with which they treated female fears and fretfulness,
were exemplary.
In the City of Brotherly Love Baily notes the geniality of the people,
who by many travelers are called aristocratic, and comments on Quaker
opposition to the theater and the inconsequence of the Peale Museum,
which travelers a generation later highly praise. Proceeding to New York
at a cost of six dollars, he is struck by the uncouthness of the public
buildings, churches excepted, the widespread passion for music, dancing,
and the theater, the craze for sleighing, and the promise which the
harbor gave of becoming the finest in America. Not a few travelers in
this early period gave expression to their belief in the future
greatness of New York City. These prophecies, taken in connection with
the investment of eight millions of dollars which New Yorkers made in
toll-roads in the first seven years of this new century, incline one to
believe that the influence of the Erie Canal as a factor in the
development of the city may have been unduly emphasized, great though it
was.
From New York Baily returned to Baltimore and went on to Washington. The
records of all travelers to the site of the new national capital give
much the same picture of the countryside. It was a land worn out by
tobacco culture and variously described as "dried up," "run down," and
"hung out to dry." Even George Washington, at Mount Vernon, was giving
up tobacco culture and was attempting new crops by a system of rotation.
Cotton was being grown in Maryland, but little care was given to its
culture and manufacture. Tobacco was graded in Virginia in accordance
with the rigidity of its inspection at Hanover Court House, Pittsburgh,
Richmond, and Cabin-Point: leaf worth sixteen shillings at Richmond was
worth twenty-one at Hanover Court House; if it was refused at all
places, it was smuggled to the West Indies or consumed in the country.
Meadows were rapidly taking the place of tobacco-fields, for the
planters preferred to clear new land rather than to enrich the old.
At Washington Baily found that lots to the value of $278,000 had been
sold, although only one-half of the proposed city had been "cleared." It
was to be forty years ere travelers could speak respectfully of what is
now the beautiful city of Washington. In these earlier days, the streets
were mudholes divided by vacant fields and "beautified by trees, swamps,
and cows."
Departing for the West by way of Frederick, Baily, like all travelers,
was intensely interested upon entering the rich limestone region which
stretched from Pennsylvania far down into Virginia. It was occupied in
part by the Pennsylvania Dutch and was so famous for its rich milk that
it was called by many travelers the "Bonnyclabber Country." Most
Englishmen were delighted with this region because they found here the
good old English breed of horses, that is, the English hunter developed
into a stout coach-horse. Of native breeds, Baily found animals of all
degrees of strength and size down to hackneys of fourteen hands, as well
as the "vile dog-horses," or pack-horses, whose faithful service to the
frontier could in no wise be appreciated by a foreigner.
This region of Pennsylvania was as noted for its wagons as for its
horses. It was this wheat-bearing belt that made the common
freight-wagon in its colors of red and blue a national institution. It
was in this region of rich, well-watered land that the maple tree gained
its reputation. Men even prophesied that its delightful sap would prove
a cure for slavery, for, if one family could make fifteen hundred pounds
of maple sugar in a season, eighty thousand families could, at the same
rate, equal the output of cane sugar each year from Santo Domingo!
The traveler at the beginning of the century noticed a change in the
temper of the people as well as a change in the soil when the
Bonnyclabber Country was reached. The time-serving attitude of the good
people of the East now gave place to a "consciousness of independence"
due, Baily remarks, to the fact that each man was self-sufficient and
passed his life "without regard to the smiles and frowns of men in
power." This spirit was handsomely illustrated in the case of one burly
Westerner who was "churched" for fighting. Showing a surly attitude to
the deacon-judges who sat on his case, he was threatened with civil
prosecution and imprisonment. "I don't want freedom," he is said to have
replied, bitterly; "I don't even want to live if I can't knock down a
man who calls me a liar."
Pushing on westward by way of historic Sideling Hill and Bedford to
Statlers, Baily found here a prosperous millstone quarry, which sold its
stones at from fifteen to thirty dollars a pair. Twelve years earlier
Washington had prophesied that the Alleghanies would soon be furnishing
millstones equal to the best English burr. As he crossed the mountains
Baily found that taverns charged the following schedule: breakfast,
eighteen pence; dinner and supper from two shillings to two shillings
and sixpence each. Traversing Laurel Hill, he reached Pittsburgh just at
the time when it was awakening to activity as the trading center of the
West.
In order to descend the Ohio, Baily obtained a flatboat, thirty-six feet
long and twelve feet broad, which drew eighteen inches of water and was
of ten tons burden. On the way downstream, Charleston and Wheeling were
the principal settlements which Baily first noted. Ebenezer Zane, the
founder of Wheeling, had just opened across Ohio the famous landward
route from the Monongahela country to Kentucky, which it entered at
Limestone, the present Maysville. This famous road, passing through
Zanesville, Lancaster, and Chillicothe, though at that time safe only
for men in parties, was a common route to and from Kentucky.
On such inland pathways as this, early travelers came to take for
granted a hospitality not to be found on more frequented thoroughfares.
In this hospitality, roughness and good will, cleanliness and filth,
attempts to ape the style of Eastern towns and habits of the most
primitive kind, were singularly blended. In one instance, the traveler
might be cordially assigned by the landlord to a good position in "the
first rush for a chance at the head of the table"; at the next stopping
place he might be coldly turned away because the proprietor "had the
gout" and his wife the "delicate blue-devils"; farther on, where "soap
was unknown, nothing clean but birds, nothing industrious but pigs, and
nothing happy but squirrels," Daniel Boone's daughter might be seen in
high-heeled shoes, attended by white servants whose wages were a dollar
a week, skirting muddy roads under a ten-dollar bonnet and a six-dollar
parasol. Or, he might emerge from a lonely forest in Ohio or Indiana and
come suddenly upon a party of neighbors at a dreary tavern, enjoying a
corn shucking or a harvest home. Immediately dubbed "Doctor," "Squire,"
or "Colonel" by the hospitable merrymakers, the passer-by would be
informed that he "should drink and lack no good thing." After he had
retired, as likely as not his quarters would be invaded at one or two
o'clock in the morning by the uproarious company, and the best
refreshment of the house would be forced upon him with a hilarity
"created by omnipotent whiskey." Sometimes, however, the traveler would
encounter pitiful instances of loneliness in the wide-spreading forests.
One man in passing a certain isolated cabin was implored by the woman
who inhabited it to rest awhile and talk, since she was, she confessed,
completely overwhelmed by "the lone!"
Every traveler has remarked upon the yellow pallor of the first
inhabitants of the western forests and doubtless correctly attributed
this sickly appearance to the effects of malaria and miasma. The psychic
influences of the forest wilderness also weighed heavily upon the
spirits of the settlers, although, as Baily notes, it was the newcomers
who felt the depression to an exaggerated degree. As he says:
It is a feeling of confinement, which begins to damp the spirits, from
this complete exclusion of distant objects. To travel day after day,
among trees of a hundred feet high, is oppressive to a degree which
those cannot conceive who have not experienced it; and it must depress
the spirits of the solitary settler to pass years in this state. His
visible horizon extends no farther than the tops of the trees which
bound his plantation--perhaps five hundred yards. Upwards he sees the
sun, and sky, and stars, but around him an eternal forest, from which he
can never hope to emerge:--not so in a thickly settled district; he
cannot there enjoy any freedom of prospect, yet there is variety, and
some scope for the imprisoned vision. In a hilly country a little more
range of view may occasionally be obtained; and a river is a stream of
light as well as of water, which feasts the eye with a delight
inconceivable to the inhabitants of open countries.
In direct contradiction to this longing for society was the passion
which the first generation of pioneers had for the wilderness. When the
population of one settlement became too thick, they were seized by an
irresistible impulse to "follow the migration," as the expression went.
The easy independence of the first hunter-agriculturalist was upset by
the advance of immigration. His range was curtailed, his freedom
limited. His very breath seems to have become difficult. So he sold out
at a phenomenal profit, put out his fire, shouldered his gun, called his
dog, and set off again in search of the solitude he craved.
Severe winter weather overtook Baily as he descended the Ohio River,
until below Grave Creek floating ice wrecked his boat and drove him
ashore. Here in the primeval forest, far from "Merrie England," Baily
spent the Christmas of 1796 in building a new flatboat. This task
completed, he resumed his journey. Passing Marietta, where the bad
condition of the winter roads prevented a visit to a famous Indian
mound, he reached Limestone. In due time he sighted Columbia, the
metropolis of the Miami country. According to Baily, the sale of
European goods in this part of the Ohio Valley netted the importers a
hundred per cent. Prices varied with the ease of navigation. When ice
blocked the Ohio the price of flour went up until it was eight dollars a
barrel; whiskey was a dollar a gallon; potatoes, a dollar a bushel; and
bacon, twelve cents a pound. At these prices, the total produce which
went by Fort Massac in the early months of 1800 would have been worth on
the Ohio River upwards of two hundred thousand dollars! In the preceding
summer Baily quoted flour at Norfolk as selling at sixty-three shillings
a barrel of 196 pounds, or double the price it was bringing on the
ice-gorged Ohio. It is by such comparisons that we get some inkling of
the value of western produce and of the rates in western trade.
After a short stay at Cincinnati, Baily set out for the South on an
"Orleans boat" loaded with four hundred barrels of flour. At the mouth
of Pigeon Creek he noted the famous path to "Post St. Vincent's"
(Vincennes), over which he saw emigrants driving cattle to that ancient
town on the Wabash. At Fort Massac he met Captain Zebulon M. Pike, whose
tact in dealing with intoxicated Indians he commended. At New Madrid
Baily made a stay of some days. This settlement, consisting of some two
hundred and fifty houses, was in the possession of Spain. It was within
the province of Louisiana, soon to be ceded to Napoleon. New Orleans
supplied this district with merchandise, but smuggling from the United
States was connived at by the Spanish officials.
From New Madrid Baily proceeded to Natchez, which then contained about
eighty-five houses. The town did not boast a tavern, but, as was true of
other places in the interior, this lack was made up for by the
hospitality of its inhabitants. Rice and tobacco were being grown, Baily
notes, and Georgian cotton was being raised in the neighborhood. Several
jennies were already at work, and their owners received a royalty of
one-eighth of the product. The cotton was sent to New Orleans, where it
usually sold for twenty dollars a hundred weight. From Natchez to New
Orleans the charge for transportation by flatboat was a dollar and a
half a bag. The bags contained from one hundred and fifty to two hundred
and fifty pounds, and each flatboat carried about two hundred and fifty
bags. Baily adds two items to the story of the development of the
mechanical operation of watercraft. He tells us that in the fall of 1796
a party of "Dutchmen," in the Pittsburgh region, fashioned a boat with
side paddle wheels which were turned by a treadmill worked by eight
horses under the deck. This strange boat, which passed Baily when he was
wrecked on the Ohio near Grave Creek, appeared "to go with prodigious
swiftness." Baily does not state how much business the boat did on its
downward trip to New Orleans but contents himself with remarking that
the owners expected the return trip to prove very profitable. When he
met the boat on its upward voyage at Natchez, it had covered three
hundred miles in six days. It was, however, not loaded, "so little
occasion was there for a vessel of this kind." As this run between New
Orleans and Natchez came to be one of the most profitable in the United
States in the early days of steamboating, less than fifteen years later,
the experience of these "Flying Dutchmen" affords a very pretty proof
that something more than a means of transportation is needed to create
commerce. The owners abandoned their craft at Natchez in disgust and
returned home across country, wiser and poorer.
Baily also noted that a Dr. Waters of New Madrid built a schooner "some
few years since" at the head of the Ohio and navigated it down the Ohio
and Mississippi and around to Philadelphia, "where it is now employed in
the commerce of the United States." It is thus apparent, solely from
this traveler's record, that an ocean-going vessel and a
side-paddle-wheel boat had been seen on the Western Waters of the United
States at least four years before the nineteenth century arrived.
Baily finally reached New Orleans. The city then contained about a
thousand houses and was not only the market for the produce of the river
plantations but also the center of an extensive Indian trade. The goods
for this trade were packed in little barrels which were carried into the
interior on pack-horses, three barrels to a horse. The traders traveled
for hundreds of miles through the woods, bartering with the Indians on
the way and receiving, in exchange for their goods, bear and deer skins,
beaver furs, and wild ponies which had been caught by lariat in the
neighboring Apalousa country.
Baily had intended to return to New York by sea, but on his arrival at
New Orleans he was unable to find a ship sailing to New York. He
therefore decided to proceed northward by way of the long and dangerous
Natchez Trace and the Tennessee Path. Though few Europeans had made this
laborious journey before 1800, the Natchez Trace had been for many years
the land route of thousands of returning rivermen who had descended the
Mississippi in flatboat and barge. In practically all cases these men
carried with them the proceeds of their investment, and, as on every
thoroughfare in the world traveled by those returning from market, so
here, too, highwaymen and desperadoes, red and white, built their lairs
and lay in wait. Some of the most revolting crimes of the American
frontier were committed on these northward pathways and their branches.
Joining a party bound for Natchez, a hundred and fifty miles distant
overland, Baily proceeded to Lake Pontchartrain and thence "north by
west through the woods," by way of the ford of the Tangipahoa, Cooper's
Plantation, Tickfaw River, Amite River, and the "Hurricane" (the path of
a tornado) to the beginning of the Apalousa country. This tangled region
of stunted growth was reputed to be seven miles in width from "shore to
shore" and three hundred miles in length. It took the party half a day
to reach the opposite "shore," and they had to quench their thirst on
the way with dew.
At Natchez, Baily organized a party which included the five "Dutchmen"
whose horse boat had proved a failure. For their twenty-one days'
journey to Nashville the party laid in the following provisions: 15
pounds of biscuit, 6 pounds of flour, 12 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of
dried beef, 3 pounds of rice, 1½ pounds of coffee, 4 pounds of sugar,
and a quantity of pounded corn, such as the Indians used on all their
journeys. After celebrating the Fourth of July, 1797, with "all the
inhabitants who were hostile to the Spanish Government," and bribing the
baker at the Spanish fort to bake them a quarter of a hundredweight of
bread, the party started on their northward journey.
They reached without incident the famous Grindstone Ford of Bayou
Pierre, where crayfishes had destroyed a pioneer dam. Beyond, at the
forks of the path where the Choctaw Trail bore off to the east the party
pursued the alternate Chickasaw Trail by Indian guidance, and soon noted
the change in the character of the soil from black loam to sandy gravel,
which indicated that they had reached the Piedmont region. Indian
marauders stole one horse from the camp, and three of the party fell
ill. The others, pressed for food, were compelled to leave the sick men
in an improvised camp and to hasten on, promising to send to their aid
the first Indian they should meet "who understood herbs." After
appalling hardships, they crossed the Tennessee and entered the
Nashville country, where the roads were good enough for coaches, for
they met two on the way. Thence Baily proceeded to Knoxville, seeing, as
he went, droves of cattle bound for the settlements of west Tennessee.
With his arrival at Knoxville, his journal ends abruptly; but from other
sources we learn that he sailed from New York on his return to England
in January, 1798. His interesting record, however, remained unpublished
until after his death in 1844.
Not only to Francis Baily but to scores of other travelers, even those
of unfriendly eyes, do modern readers owe a debt of gratitude. These men
have preserved a multitude of pictures and a wealth of data which would
otherwise have been lost. The men of America in those days were writing
the story of their deeds not on parchment or paper but on the virgin
soil of the wilderness. But though the stage driver, the tavern keeper,
and the burly riverman left no description of the life of their highways
and their commerce, these visitors from other lands have bequeathed to
us their thousands of pages full of the enterprising life of these
pioneer days in the history of American commerce.