formed may, perhaps, be more than conjectured. They are all composed
of secondary limestone, resting on a substratum of sand,—a singular
formation, but one that is common in this part of America. The sand may
have been gradually dislodged by the action of water; a theory which
the sloping nature of the ground between the cave and the Green river,
only a few hundred yards distant, does not contradict. A gentleman
informed me that he had lately witnessed a similar process. He had
for a long time watched the increase of a small sand bank, that had
been forming in a stream on his own property in the lower part of
Kentucky,—and upon further examination he found, as he expected, that
a cave had been gradually hollowed out by the action of the water
behind it. The whole of this country and the region watered by the
Mississippi, is diluvial, and in many places marine shells and the
fossil remains of marine animals have been found in great abundance.
In the neighbourhood of the cave, there are a great many wild turkeys,
and a tolerable sprinkling of deer, but both were difficult of approach
at that season of the year. I was exceedingly anxious for a shot at a
wild turkey, but committed a great error in loading with ball only; and
although I contrived to get three or four fair shots on the ground,
and on the wing, yet I confess through eagerness to have missed them.
Once I contrived to near a brood, but had the mortification, although
close to them, to hear them rising one by one on the other side of
a thicket; and when I did pull at the last bird, my gun, which was
loaded with shot, missed fire through the badness of the copper cap.
After vainly toiling through the forest in search of a deer, for one
whole August day, I was poacher enough to drop down the Green river
in a canoe, in the vicinity of the cave, at two in the morning, in
order to get a shot at one whilst feeding upon the moss at the bottom
of the river. A light was placed at the head of the boat with a board
behind it. I sat in the middle of the canoe, which was paddled forward
by a man at the stern; both of us being as silent as possible. The
darker the night, the better; the deer stand gazing at the light, till
the canoe almost touches them; they appear as white as a sheep, and
the aim of a Kentucky rifle is usually too true, at any reasonable
distance, to render the death of one of them an uncertainty. But I
was again unfortunate. I had been disappointed in the attendance of an
experienced hunter, whom I had engaged to go with me, and my companion,
who was a novice, allowed three deer that were standing close to
us, but not distinguishable by me among the tall sedge, to run off
untouched by the random shot I sent after them. The back-woodsmen are
excellent marksmen, their rifles are long and heavy, carrying a very
small ball, often not bigger than a large pea. With these a good shot
will alternately hit and miss the head of a squirrel at sixty yards
distance.
I returned to Bell’s tavern with the determination of advising every
travelling friend who visited Kentucky, by no means to leave that state
without having seen the Mammoth cave; and I think that a sportsman,
well provided with dogs, guns, &c., might well spend a week in a very
satisfactory manner by taking up his quarters at Bell’s tavern. When
we had forded the Green river, the coachman addressed a man on the
opposite side, and asked him how his wife was, “Thank ’e, I guess,
she’s smartly unwell this morning,” was the reply.
Louisville is about ninety miles from the cave. For the last twenty,
the road runs along the banks of the Ohio, passing through the most
magnificent forest of beech trees I had ever beheld. There is nothing
remarkable in the appearance of Louisville. It is a large and regularly
built town, containing 11,000 inhabitants. From this place the larger
steam-boats start for New Orleans. Those that come from Pittsburgh are
of smaller dimensions, on account of the shallowness of the water.
The course of the Ohio, from Pittsburgh to Louisville is about 600
miles, and thence, to its confluence with the Mississippi, is nearly
300 more. The length of the Mississippi, from its junction with the
Ohio, is 1200. The falls, or rapids of the Ohio, are immediately below
Louisville, and part of them may be seen from the town.
I had been very desirous of seeing St. Louis and the Missouri;
but the season was too far advanced, and that part of the country
is exceedingly unhealthy during the summer heats. Steam-boats run
thither constantly, in three days, from Louisville. There is also a
land conveyance, which occupies nearly the same time on the journey,
and passes through the great Prairies, in Indiana and Illinois.
Wild turkeys are there very plentiful; quails and Prairie-hens are
frequently to be seen from the road in great abundance; and I would
strongly recommend any traveller who is fond of shooting, and who will
put up with very indifferent accommodation, to proceed for about one
hundred miles, or even less, by this road, into the Prairies, for the
purpose of shooting. It must, however, be added, that he will probably
kill much more than he can either eat or carry away.
That there is a great quantity of game in some parts of America is
indisputable; but it is equally so, that it is fast decreasing in
others. Unless some attention be paid to preserving, deer will become
extremely scarce, except in the unsettled country; and the breed of
wild turkeys will be extinct, as they are not found much to the west of
the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Go where you will, you are told
there is plenty of game of some kind; but the sportsman who relies on
this information at this season of the year, while the trees are yet
thick with foliage, will be surely disappointed. I have occasionally
stayed for a day at different places, where I had been induced to
believe that I should find some sport; but I seldom found any game,
although I always took with me some person well acquainted with the
woods. The want of dogs must certainly be taken into consideration.
The inhabitants of Kentucky may be called the Gasçons of America.
They have a humorous, good-natured, boasting, boisterous peculiarity
of language and manner, by which they are known in all parts of the
Union. To a stranger, they are courteous and hospitable; but amongst
themselves, they quarrel and fight, like the Irish, for fun; or merely
to see which is the best man, without any provocation; and they evince
great partiality for their own state—which they familiarly denominate
“Old Kentuck,”—perhaps more than the inhabitants of any other in the
Union.
Kentucky was originally used by the Indians as a hunting-field, and for
no other purpose. The neighbouring nations agreed never to build upon
it.
From Louisville, I proceeded in a steam-boat to Cincinnati, in
eighteen hours. About forty miles on this side of the town, we passed
the mouth of the stream, so well known by the name of the “Big Bone
Lick,” on account of the number of the bones of the mammoth and other
animals that have been frequently dug up in its vicinity. There is a
sulphur-spring, and a house for the accommodation of visitors. Our
distinguished countryman, Mr. Bullock, whom I saw at Cincinnati, had
been lately residing on the spot for three months, and had had twenty
men constantly employed in digging. He had discovered, amongst other
animals, the bones of a smaller and distinct species of migalonyx;
an animal having partly the generic character of the armadillo, and
partly that of the sloth, and nearly equalling the rhinoceros in size.
But the most remarkable remains were those of a young colt, and a
gigantic horse, that could not have been less than twenty-four hands
high. Unfortunately, however, for the advancement of science, they were
all destroyed by a fire, which took place about three weeks before
my arrival. The fossil remains of about thirty animals, now supposed
to be extinct, have been found at the Big Bone Lick; and Mr. Bullock
conjectures that there are no more remaining. That the animals did
not perish on the spot, but were carried and deposited by the mighty
torrent, which it is evident once swept over the face of the country,
is probable, from the circumstance of marine shells, plants, and
fossil substances having been found, not only mixed with the bones,
but adhering to them, and tightly wedged into the cavities of the
skulls—“those holes where eyes did once inhabit,” were often stopped up
by shells or pieces of coral, forcibly crammed into them.
From the Big Bone to the Blue Lick, a distance of about sixty miles,
there is a buffalo-path. Those animals existed in great numbers in this
part of the country, within the memory of many individuals now living.
They passed from one favourite spring to the other in vast herds,
always pursuing the same path, seldom turning to the right or left, and
overturning very young trees, or any slight obstacle that might occur
in their line of march. They have, however, long been killed off from
the eastern side of the Ohio, and Mississippi; not being seen nearer
than within fifty miles of St. Louis. They are found in innumerable
herds in the widely extended plains of the Missouri, and towards the
region of the rocky mountains. The Indians kill a great many of them,
for the sake of their skins, which sell in Philadelphia at four dollars
a piece, while that of a bear may be purchased for three. They are so
numerous, that this traffic occasions no perceptible difference in the
size of the herds. An Indian will drive an arrow so hard that the point
will appear on the other side of the buffalo. At certain seasons of
the year, their tramping and bellowing may be heard at a vast distance
on the plains, by putting the ear to the ground; and in this way, if
heard in the morning, incredible as it may appear, it will sometimes
be evening before the hunters can come up with them. The bonassus,
exhibited some years ago in London, was merely the common American
buffalo; which is, strictly speaking, the bison, or animal with the
hump, and not the buffalo. The bison is found of different sizes and
under different names in Africa, in Asia, in the island of Madagascar,
and on the Malabar coast; and exists, as we have seen, in immense
numbers in North America; and it will associate with, and breed with
tame cattle: but the real buffalo, which has no hump on the shoulder,
is not found in the New Continent, but is common in India, and in
Africa, near the Cape. I have also seen them in the Pontine marshes,
where they are used for agricultural purposes. A marked difference
between the buffalo and the bison, from the different varieties of
which, it is supposed, that our domestic animals have descended, is to
be observed in the fact of the tame cattle refusing to breed with the
buffalo, and in the period of gestation in that animal being extended
to a whole year.
The navigation of the Ohio and the Mississippi, is often rendered
dangerous by the trunks of trees, or snags, as they are called, which,
in floating down the stream, get entangled and stick fast in the mud at
the bottom; presenting a most formidable, and frequently unseen point
near the surface of the water. Our steamer ran upon one of them, but
was soon got off again by means of a long spar of wood that was dropped
into the water, and then used as a lever, with the side of the boat
for a fulcrum, by means of a rope wound about the capstan and fastened
to the top of the spar. In the midst of the confusion, an American
stepped up to me, and said, “Stranger, I guess we’re in a bad fix!”
To be in a good or a bad fix is an expression very commonly made use
of in cases of dilemma. Speaking of a man placed in the stocks, for
instance, a common American would remark, that he was in a “bad fix,”
without the least fear of committing a pun, even at Philadelphia,
where the disease is very prevalent. The American error is detected in
the formal and decided accentuation of particular syllables in several
common words, and in the laughable misuse of many others; and not in
any mispronunciation of the language, generally. The word Engine,
for instance, is pronounced Engīne; favourite, favourīte; European,
Eurōpĕan, &c. A patois, or provincial dialect, such as is heard in the
more distant counties in England, is unknown amongst the natives of the
United States; and the similarity of language to be heard in every part
of the Union that I visited, could not but attract my attention as an
Englishman. To travel by the mail, for two or three hundred miles, and
to sit beside a coachman who spoke as good English as the one with whom
I first started, had certainly, at least I thought so, the effect of
shortening the distance.
The education of the poorer classes is very much attended to, excepting
perhaps, in the more western states, where the inhabitants think they
can get on just as well without it. In the Atlantic states, there is
not one person in five hundred (I am speaking of native Americans),
that cannot read and write. The mail would often stop opposite a
solitary log-house, in the midst of the thickest forest, and throw
down a newspaper, which was immediately picked up, and spelled over
with the greatest avidity. Most of the back-woodsmen can talk with all
reasonable correctness of the state of Europe generally, but the reform
bills in England, and the Liverpool rail-road, were always amongst the
most prominent subjects of eager inquiry. An Englishman cannot travel a
mile in a stage coach in the United States, without being asked whether
he has been on the Liverpool rail-road. In Europe, and in France
particularly, it is, “Have you seen de tunnel under de Thames?” It is
the usefulness in forwarding the prosperity of a country that suggests
the American query: whilst with the Frenchman, the use is entirely out
of the question; he thinks merely of the magnitude and the novelty of
the undertaking, and never fails to remark, that the engineer was a
native of France. A great proportion of the inhabitants of the eastern
states are Dutch and German. They are very numerous in different parts
of Pennsylvania, where they have the character of being good and
industrious farmers; but in other respects, they are very ignorant and
opinionated, refusing the education that is offered to them gratis for
their children, who are, of course, far behind the young Americans in
intelligence. I have often, when passing through the forest, stopped
to ask a cottager’s child of what country he was. A very frequent
answer was, “Please, sir, father’s an Irishman, and mother’s Dutch;”
and “I was raised here!” The latter expression is very commonly used
when the place of nativity is inquired after. I have been frequently
addressed with, Where were you raised, stranger? I guess you’re from
the old country? There are about half-a-dozen words in constant
use, to which an English ear is unaccustomed, in the sense they are
meant to convey, such as—“to fix, to locate, to guess, to expect, to
calkilate, &c.” The verb “to fix,” has perhaps as many significations
as any word in the Chinese language. If anything is to be done, made,
mixed, mended, bespoken, hired, ordered, arranged, procured, finished,
lent, or given, it would very probably be designated by the verb “to
fix.” The tailor or bootmaker who is receiving your instructions, the
barkeeper who is concocting for you a glass of mint-julep, promise
alike to fix you, that is, to hit your taste exactly. A lady’s hair is
sometimes said to be fixed, instead of dressed; and were I to give my
coat or my boots to a servant to be brushed, and to tell him merely
“to fix” them for me, he would perfectly understand what he had to do.
There is a marked peculiarity in the word “clever.” In America, a man
or woman may be very clever without possessing one grain of talent. The
epithet is applied almost exclusively to a person of an amiable and
obliging disposition. Mr. A. is a man of no talent! no! but then he is
a very clever man! According to their meaning, Buonaparte was terribly
stupid, and Lord North was a very clever fellow indeed.
To say nothing of their oaths, their expressions are sometimes
highly amusing. I have heard a horse described as a “raal smasher
at trotting,” and a highway robbery considered as a “pretty middling
tough piece of business;” with a vast number more of the same kind. I
beg it may be understood, that I mean these remarks to apply chiefly
to the middle and lower classes of Americans: the language of every
one is perfectly intelligible, and as I have before remarked, there
is no patois: I think it should rather be called a “slang.” There is
also much less of the nasal twang than I had been taught to expect in
American parley. Still I was informed, that many Americans when they
hear a man talk, will instantly mention with certainty the country
in which he has been long resident, being able to detect some words,
accents, or expressions peculiar to each state. The English language
does not contain words enough for them. The word congressional is
a fair coinage from “Congress,” like the word parliamentary from
parliament. But a member of congress is said to be deputized; and a
person in danger, to be jeopardized. I remember that about two years
ago being in the Jardin des Plantes, I was nearly “cameleopardized”
by the giraffe that kicked at me. In New York I observed that a
gunmaker had put up over his door, “Flint and steel guns altered
and percussionized.” Although the meaning of all this is perfectly
understood, still it is American, not English; and although the English
language be in use, yet the very un-English construction and distorted
meaning of many sentences, render it so different from the language
spoken in good society in England, that I do not think it can safely
be dignified with the name of good English. But the English spoken in
the first circles in all the larger cities of the Union, is usually
very good: so that between the language of the English and the American
gentleman, the difference is exceedingly slight; but still there is a
difference here and there, by which I think any person of observation,
who had been in the United States, could decide upon the country of the
speaker, unless of course he had resided in England. I should however
add, that I have in a few instances met with gentlemen whose language
and pronunciation would have deceived any one.
At Baltimore whilst taking a sketch, I told a drunken ill-favoured old
nigger, that I would take his picture. He accordingly placed himself
in attitude, and I soon hit him off with the camera-lucida. He was
very much pleased, and showed the picture to his coloured friends, the
slaves, who were working near me. He soon returned with an old black
as ugly as himself, and said, that this man wished to have his “title”
taken too.
We arrived at Cincinnati, the emporium of commerce, and the largest
city in Western America, containing 30,000 inhabitants, and thirty
different places of worship. In appearance it differs from most of the
larger towns in the United States, on account of the great improvement
that has taken place in the colour of the houses, which, instead of
being of the usual bright staring red, are frequently of a white
grey, or a yellowish tint, and display a great deal of taste, and
just ornament. The public buildings are not large, but very neat and
classical; I admired the second Presbyterian church, which is a very
pretty specimen of the Doric. The streets are handsome, and the shops
have a very fashionable air. The principal trade of Cincinnati is in
provisions. Immense quantities of corn and grain are sent down the Ohio
and the Mississippi to New Orleans. Part of it is consumed by the sugar
planters, who are supposed to grow no corn, and part is sent coastwise
to Mobile, or exported to the Havannah and the West Indies generally.
In the United States, the word “corn” is applied exclusively to the
Indian corn or maize, other grain is specified by name as in England.
The quantity of flour received in 1831 at New Orleans, amounted to
370,000 barrels, about 150,000 barrels more than had been received in
any former year. A great quantity of flour had also been shipped to
England, but it is very often soured by the warmth of the water in the
Gulf of Mexico. In 1828, the quantity of sugar produced at New Orleans
was 88,878 hogsheads of 1000 pounds each, and in 1827, the number of
sugar plantations was seven hundred, in which an aggregate capital of
45,000,000 of dollars was invested.
Cincinnati has displayed more wisdom than her opposite neighbour in
Kentucky. A speculative system of banking was carried on about the same
time, and was attended with the same results as those I have before
noticed when speaking of that state. Credit was not to be obtained,
commerce was at an end, and grass was growing in the streets of
Cincinnati. But the judicature, with equal justice and determination,
immediately enforced by its decisions the resumption of cash payments.
Many of the leading families in the place were, of course, ruined, and
at present there are not above five or six persons in Cincinnati, who
have been able to regain their former eminence as men of business.
But it was a sacrifice of individuals for the good of the community,
and fortune only deserted the speculators in order to attend upon the
capitalists, who quickly made their appearance from the eastern states,
and have raised the city to its present pitch of prosperity.
Cincinnati professes to have two excellent inns, both of which give
promise of every comfort: the table was very good, but my rest was
destroyed, not merely disturbed, by the worst of vermin. A clean bed,
be it but of straw, is a _sine quâ non_ with an English traveller;
and as I did not feel perfectly well after breathing the unhealthy
fogs of the Ohio, I had consoled myself with the idea of a comfortable
sleep for that night at least. But I was wofully disappointed, being
nearly in a fever; and when I was permitted to close my eyes for a few
minutes, I dreamed of the most unconnected subjects,—bullfrogs, and
universal suffrage, for instance.
I started by the mail, in order to cross the country to Lake Erie.
Before we were out of the town, the near leader became unmanageable,
and the coach was overturned in the open street. I was on the box, and
expected to be kicked to pieces, as I fell close to the horses; but
providentially they all four galloped off with the two front wheels,
and no one was hurt. It was scarcely day-light—no one was up—the
coachman went after the horses, and it fell to my lot to deliver the
coach of her nine inside passengers, who scrambled out one by one
through the window, guessing and ‘calkilating’ the whole time.
By the evening, we had reached the Yellow Springs; a fashionable
watering place, taking its name from the colour imparted to the rocks
by the water, which is chalybeate. A large boarding house for the
accommodation of visitors is the only building of consequence in the
neighbourhood.
At Centreville, about twenty miles from the springs, is, or rather was,
for it has been partly destroyed, a remarkably fine Indian fort; being
a deep ditch lying between two raised banks, and inclosing a space of
three quarters of a mile in circumference, on which the town is built.
On the outside is a large mound, which had been lately opened, and was
found to contain a number of human bones.