First day on the Ohio--At Logstown.
Beaver River, Monday, May 7th.--We have to-day rowed and paddled under
a cloudless sky, but in the teeth of frequent squalls, with heavy
waves freely dashing their spray upon us. At such times a goodly
current, aided by numerous wing-dams, appears of little avail; for,
when we rested upon our oars, Pilgrim would be unmercifully driven up
stream. Thus it has been an almost continual fight to make progress,
and our five-and-twenty miles represent a hard day's work.
We were overloaded, that was certain; so we stopped at Chartier, three
miles down the river from Pittsburg, and sent on our portly bag of
conventional traveling clothes by express to Cincinnati, where
we intend stopping for a day. This leaves us in our rough boating
costumes for all the smaller towns _en route_. What we may lose in
possible social embarrassments, we gain in lightened cargo.
Here at the mouth of Chartier's Creek was "Chartier's Old Town" of a
century and a third ago; a straggling, unkempt Indian village then,
but at least the banks were lovely, and the rolling distances clothed
with majestic trees. To-day, these creek banks, connected with
numerous iron bridges, are the dumping-ground for cinders, slag,
rubbish of every degree of foulness; the bare hillsides are crowded
with the ugly dwellings of iron-workers; the atmosphere is thick with
smoke.
Washington, one of the greatest land speculators of his time, owned
over 32,000 acres along the Ohio. He held a patent from Lord Dunmore,
dated July 5, 1775, for nearly 3,000 acres lying about the mouth
of this stream. In accordance with the free-and-easy habit of
trans-Alleghany pioneers, ten men squatted on the tract, greatly to
the indignation of the Father of his Country, who in 1784 brought
against them a successful suit for ejectment. Twelve years later, more
familiar with this than with most of his land grants, he sold it to a
friend for $12,000.
Just below Chartier are the picturesque McKee's Rocks, where is the
first riffle in the Ohio. We "take" it with a swoop, the white-capped
waves dancing about us in a miniature rapid. Then we are in the open
country, and for the first time find what the great river is like.
The character of the banks, for some distance below Pittsburg, differs
from that of the Monongahela. The hills are lower, less precipitous,
more graceful. There is a delightful roundness of mass and shade.
Beautiful villas occupy commanding situations on hillsides and
hilltops; we catch glimpses of spires and cupolas, singly or in
groups, peeping above the trees; and now and then a pretty suburban
railway station. The railways upon either bank are built on neat
terraces, and, far from marring the scene, agreeably give life to
it; now and then, three such terraces are to be traced, one above the
other, against the dark background of wood and field--the lower and
upper devoted to rival railway lines, the central one to the common
way. The mouths of the beautiful tributary ravines are crossed either
by graceful iron spans, which frame charming undercut glimpses of
sparkling waterfalls and deep tangles of moss and fern, or by graceful
stone arches draped with vines. There are terraced vineyards, after
the fashion of the Rhineland, and the gentle arts of the florist and
the truck-gardener are much in evidence. The winding river frequently
sweeps at the base of rocky escarpments, but upon one side or the
other there are now invariably bottom lands--narrow on these upper
reaches, but we shall find them gradually widen and lengthen as we
descend. The reaches are from four to seven miles in length, but
these, too, are to lengthen in the middle waters. Islands are
frequent, all day. The largest is Neville's, five miles long and
thickly strewn with villas and market-gardens; still others are but
long sandbars grown to willows, and but temporarily in sight, for the
stage of water is low just now, not over seven feet in the channel.
Emerging from the immediate suburbs of Pittsburg, the fields broaden,
farmsteads are occasionally to be seen nestled in the undulations
of the hills, woodlands become more dense. There are, however, small
rustic towns in plenty; we are seldom out of sight of these.
Climbing a steep clay slope on the left bank, we visited one of
them--Shousetown, fourteen miles below the city. A sad-eyed, shabby
place, with the pipe line for natural gas sprawling hither and yon
upon the surface of the ground, except at the street crossings, where
a few inches of protecting earth have been laid upon it. The tariff
levied by the gas company is ten cents per month for each light, and a
dollar and a half for a cook-stove.
We passed, this afternoon, one of the most interesting historic points
upon the river--the picturesque site of ancient Logstown, upon the
summit of a low, steep ridge on the right bank, just below Economy,
and eighteen miles from Pittsburg. Logstown was a Shawanese village as
early as 1727-30, and already a notable fur-trading post when Conrad
Weiser visited it in 1748. Washington and Gist stopped at "Loggestown"
for five days on their visit to the French at Fort Le Boeuf, and
several famous Indian treaties were signed there. A short distance
below, Anthony Wayne's Western army was encamped during the winter of
1792-93, the place being then styled Legionville. In 1824 George Rapp
founded in the neighborhood a German socialist community, and this
later settlement survives to the present day in the thriving little
rustic town of Economy.
At four o'clock we struck camp on a heavily-willowed shore, at the
apex of the great northern bend of the Ohio (25 miles).[A] Across
the river, on a broad level bottom, are the manufacturing towns of
Rochester and Beaver, divided by the Beaver River; in their rear,
well-rounded hills rise gracefully, checkered with brown fields and
woods in many shades of green, in the midst of which the flowering
white dogwood rears its stately spray. Our sloping willowed
sand-beach, of a hundred feet in width, is thick strewn with
driftwood; back of this a clay bank, eight feet sheer, and a narrow
bottom cut up with small fruit and vegetable patches; the gardeners'
neat frame houses peeping from groves of apple, pear and cherry, upon
the flanking hillsides. A lofty oil-well derrick surmounts the edge of
the terrace a hundred yards below our camp. The bushes and the ground
round about the well are black and slimy with crude petroleum, that
has escaped during the boring process, and the air is heavy with its
odor. We are upon the edge of the far-stretching oil and gas-well
region, and shall soon become familiar enough with such sights and
smells in the neighborhood of our nightly camps.
No sooner had Pilgrim been turned up against a tree to dry, and a
smooth sandy open chosen for the camp, than the proprietor of the soil
appeared--a middling-sized, lanky man, with a red face and a sandy
goatee surmounting a collarless white shirt all bestained with tobacco
juice. He inquired rather sharply concerning us, but when informed of
our innocent errand, and that we should stay with him but the night,
he promptly softened, explaining that the presence of marauding
fishermen and house-boat folk was incompatible with gardening for
profit, and he would have none of them touch upon his shore. As to
us, we were welcome to stop throughout our pleasure, an invitation he
reinforced by sitting upon a stump, whittling vigorously meanwhile,
and glibly gossiping with the Doctor and me for a half-hour, on crop
conditions and the state of the country--"bein' sociable like," he
said, "an' hav'n' nuth'n 'gin you folks, as knows what's what, I kin
see with half a eye!"
[Footnote A: Figures in parentheses, similarly placed throughout the
volume, indicate the meandered river mileage from Pittsburg, according
to the map of the Corps of Engineers, U.S.A., published in 1881. The
actual mileage of the channel is a trifle greater.]