"How beautiful is this visible world!
How glorious in its action and itself!"
MANFRED.
"The woods--oh! solemn are the boundless woods
Of the great Western World when day declines,
And louder sounds the roll of distant floods."
HEMANS.
Long before the dawn on the morning succeeding our departure we were
roused from our rest by the hissing of steam and the rattling of
machinery as our boat moved slowly out from beneath the high banks and
lofty sycamores of the river-side, where she had in safety been moored
for the night, to resume her course. Withdrawing the curtain from the
little rectangular window of my stateroom, the dark shadow of the
forest was slumbering in calm magnificence upon the waters; and
glancing upward my eye, the stars were beaming out in silvery
brightness; while all along the eastern horizon, where
"The gray coursers of the morn
Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs
And drive it through the sky,"
{22} rested a broad, low zone of clear heaven, proclaiming the coming
of a glorious dawn. The hated clang of the bell-boy was soon after
heard resounding far and wide in querulous and deafening clamour
throughout the cabins, vexing the dull ear of every drowsy man in the
terrible language of Macbeth's evil conscience, "sleep no more!" In a
very desperation of self-defence I arose. The mists of night had not
yet wholly dispersed, and the rack and fog floated quietly upon the
placid bosom of the stream, or ascended in ragged masses from the
dense foliage upon its banks. All this melted gently away like "the
baseless fabric of a vision," and "the beauteous eye of day" burst
forth in splendour, lighting up a scene of unrivalled loveliness.
Much, very much has been written of "the beautiful Ohio;" the pens of
an hundred tourists have sketched its quiet waters and its venerable
groves; but there is in its noble scenery an ever salient freshness,
which no description, however varied, can exhaust; new beauties leap
forth to the eye of the man of sensibility, and even an humble pen may
not fail to array them in the drapery of their own loveliness. There
are in this beautiful stream features peculiar to itself, which
distinguish it from every other that we have seen or of which we have
read; features which render it truly and emphatically _sui generis_.
It is not "the blue-rushing of the arrowy Rhone," with castled crags
and frowning battlements; it is not the dark-rolling Danube, shadowy
with the legend of departed time, upon whose banks armies have met and
battled; it is not {23} the lordly Hudson, roaming in beauty through
the ever-varying romance of the Catskill Highlands; nor is it the
gentle wave of the soft-flowing Connecticut, seeming almost to sleep
as it glides through the calm, "happy valley" of New-England: but it
is that noble stream, bounding forth, like a young warrior of the
wilderness, in all the joyance of early vigour, from the wild
twin-torrents of the hills; rolling onward through a section of
country the glory of a new world, and over the wooded heights of whose
banks has rushed full many a crimson tide of Indian massacre. Ohio,[8]
"_The River of Blood_," was its fearfully significant name from the
aboriginal native; _La Belle Rivière_ was its euphonious distinction
from the simple Canadian voyageur, whose light pirogue first glided on
its blue bosom. "The Beautiful River!"--it is no misnomer--from its
earliest commencement to the broad _embouchure_ into the turbid
floods of the Mississippi, it unites every combination of scenic
loveliness which even the poet's sublimated fancy could demand.[9] Now
it sweeps along beneath its lofty bluffs in the conscious grandeur of
resistless might; and then its clear, transparent waters glide in
undulating ripples over the shelly bottoms and among the pebbly heaps
of the white-drifted sand-bars, or in the calm magnificence of their
eternal wandering,
"To the gentle woods all night
Sing they a sleepy tune."
From either shore streams of singular beauty and euphonious names come
pouring in their tribute {24} through the deep foliage of the fertile
bottoms; while the swelling, volumed outlines of the banks, piled up
with ponderous verdure rolling and heaving in the river-breeze like
life, recur in such grandeur and softness, and such ever-varying
combinations of beauty, as to destroy every approach to monotonous
effect. From the source of the Ohio to its outlet its waters imbosom
more than an hundred islands, some of such matchless loveliness that
it is worthy of remark that such slight allusion has been made to them
in the numerous pencillings of Ohio scenery. In the fresh, early
summertime, when the deep green of vegetation is in its luxuriance,
they surely constitute the most striking feature of the river. Most of
them are densely wooded to the water's edge; and the wild vines and
underbrush suspended lightly over the waters are mirrored in their
bosom or swept by the current into attitudes most graceful and
picturesque. In some of those stretched-out, endless reaches which are
constantly recurring, they seem bursting up like beautiful _bouquets_
of sprinkled evergreens from the placid stream; rounded and swelling,
as if by the teachings of art, on the blue bosom of the waters. A
cluster of these "isles of light" I well remember, which opened upon
us the eve of the second day of our passage. Two of the group were
exceedingly small, mere points of a deeper shade in the reflecting
azure; while the third, lying between the former, stretched itself far
away in a narrow, well-defined strip of foliage, like a curving gash
in the surface, parallel to the {25} shore; and over the lengthened
vista of the waters gliding between, the giant branches bowed
themselves, and wove their mingled verdure into an immense Gothic
arch, seemingly of interminable extent, but closed at last by a single
speck of crimson skylight beyond. Throughout its whole course the Ohio
is fringed with wooded bluffs; now towering in sublime majesty
hundreds of feet from the bed of the rolling stream, and anon sweeping
inland for miles, and rearing up those eminences so singularly
beautiful, appropriately termed "Ohio hills," while their broad
alluvial plains in the interval betray, by their enormous vegetation,
a fertility exhaustless and unrivalled. Here and there along the green
bluffs is caught a glimpse of the emigrant's low log cabin peeping out
to the eye from the dark foliage, sometimes when miles in the
distance; while the rich maize-fields of the bottoms, the girdled
forest-trees and the lowing kine betray the advance of civilized
existence. But if the scenes of the Ohio are beautiful beneath the
broad glare of the morning sunlight, what shall sketch their
lineaments when the coarser etchings of the picture are mellowed down
by the balmy effulgence of the midnight moon of summer! When her
floods of light are streaming far and wide along the magnificent
forest-tops! When all is still--still! and sky, and earth, and wood,
and stream are hushed as a spirit's breathing! When thought is almost
audible, and memory is busy with the past! When the distant bluffs,
bathed in molten silver, gleam like beacon-lights, and the far-off
vistas of the {26} meandering waters are flashing with the sheen of
their ripples! When you glide through the endless maze, and the bright
islets shift, and vary, and pass away in succession like pictures of
the kaleidoscope before your eye! When imagination is awake and
flinging forth her airy fictions, bodies things unseen, and clothes
reality in loveliness not of earth! When a scene like this is
developed, what shall adequately depict it? Not the pen.
Such, such is the beautiful Ohio in the soft days of early summer; and
though hackneyed may be the theme of its loveliness, yet, as the dying
glories of a Western sunset flung over the landscape the mellow
tenderness of its parting smile, "fading, still fading, as the day was
declining," till night's dusky mantle had wrapped the "woods on shore"
and the quiet stream from the eye, I could not, even at the hazard of
triteness, resist an inclination to fling upon the sheet a few hurried
lineaments of Nature's beautiful creations.
There is not a stream upon the continent which, for the same distance,
rolls onward so calmly, and smoothly, and peacefully as the Ohio.
Danger rarely visits its tranquil bosom, except from the storms of
heaven or the reckless folly of man, and hardly a river in the world
can vie with it in safety, utility, or beauty. Though subject to rapid
and great elevations and depressions, its current is generally
uniform, never furious. The forest-trees which skirt its banks are the
largest in North America, while the variety is endless; several
sycamores were pointed out to us upon the shores from thirty to fifty
feet in circumference. Its alluvial {27} bottoms are broad, deep, and
exhaustlessly fertile; its bluffs are often from three to four hundred
feet in height; its breadth varies from one mile to three, and its
navigation, since the improvements commenced, under the authority of
Congress, by the enterprising Shreve, has become safe and easy.[10]
The classification of obstructions is the following: _snags_, trees
anchored by their roots; fragments of trees of various forms and
magnitude; _wreck-heaps_, consisting of several of these stumps, and
logs, and branches of trees lodged in one place; _rocks_, which have
rolled from the cliffs, and varying from ten to one hundred cubic feet
in size; and _sunken boats_, principally flat-boats laden with coal.
The last remains one of the most serious obstacles to the navigation
of the Ohio. Many steamers have been damaged by striking the wrecks of
the _Baltimore_, the _Roanoke_, the _William Hulburt_,[11] and other
craft, which were themselves snagged; while keel and flat-boats
without number have been lost from the same cause.[12] Several
thousands of the obstacles mentioned have been removed since
improvements were commenced, and accidents from this cause are now
less frequent. Some of the snags torn up from the bed of the stream,
where they have probably for ages been buried, are said to have
exceeded a diameter of six feet at the root, and were upward of an
hundred feet in length. The removal of these obstructions on the Ohio
presents a difficulty and expense not encountered upon the
Mississippi. In the latter stream, the root of the snag, when
eradicated, is deposited in some deep {28} pool or bayou along the
banks, and immediately imbeds itself in alluvial deposite; but on the
Ohio, owing to the nature of its banks in most of its course, there is
no opportunity for such a disposal, and the boatmen are forced to
blast the logs with gunpowder to prevent them from again forming
obstructions. The cutting down and clearing away of all leaning and
falling trees from the banks constitutes an essential feature in the
scheme of improvement; since the facts are well ascertained that trees
seldom plant themselves far from the spot where they fall; and that,
when once under the power of the current, they seldom anchor
themselves and form snags. The policy of removing the leaning and
fallen trees is, therefore, palpable, since, when this is once
thoroughly accomplished, no material for subsequent formation can
exist. The construction of stone dams, by which to concentrate into a
single channel all the waters of the river, where they are divided by
islands, or from other causes are spread over a broad extent, is
another operation now in execution. The dams at "Brown's Island,"[13]
the shoalest point on the Ohio, have been so eminently successful as
fully to establish the efficiency of the plan. Several other works of
a similar character are proposed; a full survey of the stream,
hydrographical and topographical, is recommended; and, when all
improvements are completed, it is believed that the navigation of the
"beautiful Ohio" will answer every purpose of commerce and the
traveller, from its source to its mouth, at the lowest stages of the
water.
_Ohio River._