The Big Grave--Washington, and Round Bottom--A lazy man's
Paradise--Captina Creek--George Rogers Clark at Fish
Creek--Southern types.
Near Fishing Creek, Friday, May 11th.--There had been rain during the
night, with fierce wind gusts, but during breakfast the atmosphere
quieted, and we had a genial, semi-cloudy morning.
Off at 8 o'clock, Pilgrim's crew were soon exploring Moundsville.
There are five thousand people in this old, faded, countrified town.
They show you with pride the State Penitentiary of West Virginia, a
solemn-looking pile of dark gray stone, with the feeble battlements
and towers common to American prison architecture. But the chief
feature of the place is the great Indian mound--the "Big Grave" of
early chroniclers. This earthwork is one of the largest now remaining
in the United States, being sixty-eight feet high and a hundred
in diameter at the base, and has for over a century attracted the
attention of travelers and archaeologists.
We found it at the end of a straggling street, on the edge of the
town, a quarter of a mile back from the river. Around the mound has
been left a narrow plat of ground, utilized as a cornfield; and the
stout picket fence which encloses it bears peremptory notice that
admission is forbidden. However, as the proprietor was not easily
accessible, we exercised the privilege of historical pilgrims, and,
letting ourselves in through the gate, picked our way through rows of
corn, and ascended the great cone. It is covered with a heavy growth
of white oaks, some of them three feet in diameter, among which the
path picturesquely zigzags. The summit is fifty-five feet in diameter,
and the center somewhat depressed, like a basin. From the middle of
this basin a shaft some twenty-five feet in diameter has been sunk by
explorers, for a distance of perhaps fifty feet; at one time, a level
tunnel connected the bottom of this shaft with the side of the cone,
but it has been mostly obliterated. A score of years ago, tunnel and
shaft were utilized as the leading attractions of a beer garden--to
such base uses may a great historical landmark descend!
Dickens, who apparently wrote the greater part of his _American Notes_
while suffering from dyspepsia, has a note of appreciation for the
Big Grave: "... the host of Indians who lie buried in a great mound
yonder--so old that mighty oaks and other forest trees have struck
their roots into its earth; and so high that it is a hill, even among
the hills that Nature planted around it. The very river, as though it
shared one's feelings of compassion for the extinct tribes who lived
so pleasantly here, in their blessed ignorance of white existence,
hundreds of years ago, steals out of its way to ripple near this
mound; and there are few places where the Ohio sparkles more brightly
than in the Big Grave Creek."
There is a sharp bend in the river, just below Moundsville, with
Dillon's Bottom stretching long and wide at the apex on the Ohio
shore--flat green fields, dotted with little white farmsteads, each
set low in its apple grove, and a convoluted wall of dark hills
hemming them in along the northern horizon. Then below this comes
Round Bottom, its counterpart on the West Virginia side, and coursing
through it a pretty meadow creek, Butler's Run.
Writes Washington, in 1781, to a correspondent who is thinking of
renting lands in this region: "I have a small tract called the round
bottom containing about 600 Acres, which would also let. It lyes on
the Ohio, opposite to pipe Creek, and a little above Capteening."
Across the half mile of river are the little levels and great slopes
of the Ohio hills, through which breaks this same Pipe Creek; and
hereabout Cresap's band murdered a number of inoffensive Shawanese,
a tragedy which was one of the inciting causes of Lord Dunmore's War
(1774).
We crossed over into Ohio, and pulled up on the gravelly spit at the
mouth of Pipe. While the others were botanizing high on the mountain
side, I went along a beach path toward a group of whitewashed cabins,
intent on replenishing the canteen. Upon opening the gate of one of
them, two grizzly dogs came bounding out, threatening to test the
strength of my corduroy trousers. The proprietor cautiously peered
from a window, and, much to my relief, called off the animals.
Satisfied, apparently, that I was not the visitor he expected, the
fellow lounged out and sat upon the steps, where I joined him. He was
a tall, raw-boned, loose-jointed young man, with a dirty, buttonless
flannel shirt which revealed a hairy breast; upon his trousers hung a
variety of patches, in many stages of grease and decrepitude; a gray
slouch hat shaded his little fishy eyes and hollow, yellow cheeks; and
the snaky ends of his yellow mustache were stiff with accumulations of
dried tobacco juice. His fat, waddling wife, in a greasy black gown,
followed with bare feet, and, arms akimbo, listened in the open door.
A coal company owns the rocky river front, here and at many places
below, and lets these cabins to the poor-white element, so numerous on
the Ohio's banks. The renter is privileged to cultivate whatever land
he can clear on the rocky, precipitous slopes, which is seldom more
than half an acre to the cabin; and he may, if he can afford a cow,
let her run wild in the scrub. The coal vein, a few rods back of the
house, is only a few inches thick, and poor in quality, but is freely
resorted to by the cotters. He worked whenever he could find a job, my
host said--in the coal mines and quarries, or on the bottom farms, or
the railroad which skirts the bank at his feet.
"But I tell ye, sir, th' _I_talians and Hungarians is spoil'n' this
yere country fur white men; 'n' I do'n' see no prospect for hits be'n'
better till they get shoved out uv 't!" Yet he said that life wasn't
so hard here as it was in some parts he had heard tell of--the climate
was mild, that he "'lowed;" a fellow could go out and get a free
bucket of coal from the hillside "back yon;" he might get all the
"light wood 'n' patchin' stuff" he wanted, from the river drift;
could, when he "hankered after 'em," catch fish off his own front-door
yard; and pick up a dollar now and then at odd jobs, when the rent was
to be paid, or the "ol' woman" wanted a dress, or he a new coat.
This is clearly the lazy man's Paradise. I do not remember to have
heard that the South Sea Islanders, in the ante-missionary days, had
an easier time of it than this. What new fortune will befall my friend
when he gets the Italians and Hungarians "shoved out," and "things
pick up a bit," I cannot conceive.
A pleasing panorama he has from his doorway--across the river, the
fertile fields of Round Bottom, once Washington's; Captina Island,
just below, long and thickly-willowed, dreamily afloat in a glassy
sea, reflecting every change of light; the whole girt about with the
wide uplands of the winding valley, and overhead the march of sunny
clouds.
Captina Creek (108 miles) is not far down on the Ohio bank, and beside
it the little hamlet of Powhattan Point, with the West Virginia hills
thereabout exceptionally high and steep, and wooded to the very top.
Washington, who knew the Ohio well, down to the Great Kanawha, wrote
of this creek in 1770: "A pretty large creek on the west side, called
by Nicholson [his interpreter] Fox-Grape-Vine, by others Captema
creek, on which, eight miles up, is the town called Grape-Vine Town."
Captina village is its white successor. But there were also Indians
at the mouth of the creek; for when George Rogers Clark and his
missionary companion, Jones, two years later camped opposite on the
Virginia shore, they went over to make a morning call on the natives,
who repaid it in the evening, doubtless each time receiving freely
from the white men's bounty.
The next day was Sunday, and the travelers remained in camp, Jones
recording in his journal that he "instructed what Indians came over."
In the course of his prayer, the missionary was particularly impressed
by the attitude of the chief of Grape-Vine Town, named Frank Stephens,
who professed to believe in the Christian God; and he naively writes,
"I was informed that, all the time, the Indians looked very seriously
at me." Jones appears to have been impressed also with the hardness
of the beach, where they camped in the open, doubtless to avoid
surprises: "Instead of feathers, my bed was gravel-stones, by the
river side ... which at first seemed not to suit me, but afterward it
became more natural."
In those days, traveling was beset with difficulties, both ashore
and afloat. Eight years later (spring of 1780), three flatboats
were descending the Ohio, laden with families intending to settle in
Kentucky, when they suffered a common fate, being attacked by Indians
off Captina Creek. Several men and a child were killed, and twenty-one
persons were carried into captivity--among them, Catherine Malott,
a girl in her teens, who subsequently became the wife of that most
notorious of border renegades, Simon Girty.
On the West Virginia shore, not over a third of a mile below Captina
Creek, empties Grave Yard Run, a modest rivulet. It would of itself
not be noticeable amid the crowd of minor creeks and runs, coursing
down to the great river through rugged ravines which corrugate
the banks. But it has a history. Here, late in October or early in
November, 1772, young George Rogers Clark made his first stake west of
the Alleghanies, rudely cultivating a few acres of forest land on what
is now called Cresap's Bottom, surveying for the neighbors, and in
the evenings teaching their children in the little log cabin of his
friend, Yates Conwell, at the mouth of Fish Creek, a few miles below.
Fish Creek was in itself famous as one of the sections of the great
Indian trail, "The Warrior Branch," which, starting in Tennessee, came
northward through Kentucky and Southern Ohio, and, proceeding by way
of this creek, crossed over to Dunkard Creek, thence to the mouth of
Redstone. Washington stopped at Conwell's in March or April, 1774; but
Clark was away from home at the time, and the "Father of his Country"
never met the man who has been dubbed the "Washington of the West."
Lord Dunmore's War was hatching, and a few months later the Fish Creek
surveyor and schoolmaster had entered upon his life work as an Indian
fighter.
At Bearsville (126 miles) we first meet a phenomenon common to the
Ohio--the edges of the alluvial bottom being higher than the fields
back of them, forming a natural levee, above which curiously rise to
our view the spires and chimneys of the village. Harris' _Journal_
(1803) made early note of this, and advanced an acceptable theory: "We
frequently remarked that the banks are higher at the margin than at
a little distance back. I account for it in this manner: Large trees,
which are brought down the river by the inundations, are lodged upon
the borders of the bank, but cannot be floated far upon the champaign,
because obstructed by the growth of wood. Retaining their situation
when the waters subside, they obstruct and detain the leaves and mud,
which would else recoil into the stream, and thus, in process of time,
form a bank higher than the interior flats."
Tied up to Bearsville landing is a gayly painted barge, the home
of Price's Floating Opera Company, and in front its towing-steamer,
"Troubadour." A steam calliope is part of the visible furniture of the
establishment, and its praises as a noise-maker are sung in large
type in the handbills which, with numerous colored lithographs of the
performers, adorn the shop windows in the neighboring river towns.
Two miles farther down, on a high bank at the mouth of Fishing Creek,
lies New Martinsville, West Va. (127 miles), a rather shabby town
of fifteen hundred souls. As W---- and I passed up the main street,
seeking for a grocery, we noticed that the public hall was being
decorated for a dance to come off to-night; and placards advertising
the event were everywhere rivaling the gaudy prints of the floating
opera.
Meanwhile, a talkative native was interviewing the Doctor, down at the
river side. It required some good-natured fencing on the part of
our skipper to prevent the Virginian from learning all about our
respective families away back to the third generation. He was a short,
chubby man, with a Dixie goatee, his flannel shirt negligee, and a
wide-brimmed straw hat jauntily set on the back of his head. He was
sociable, and sat astride of our beached prow, punctuating his
remarks with squirts of tobacco juice, and a bit of lath with which
he meditatively tapped the gunwale, the meantime, with some skill,
casting pebbles into the water with his bare toes. "Ax'n yer pardon,
ma'm!" he said, scrambling from his perch upon W----'s appearance; and
then, pushing us off, he bowed with much Southern gallantry, and
hat in hand begged we would come again to New Martinsville, and stay
longer.
The hills lining these reaches are lower than above, yet graceful in
their sweeping lines. Conical mounds sometimes surmount them, relics
of the prehistoric time when our Indians held to the curious fashion
of building earthworks. We no longer entertain the notion that a
separate and a prouder race of wild men than we know erected these
tumuli. That pleasant fiction has departed from us; but the works are
none the less interesting, now that more is known of their origin.
Two miles below New Martinsville, on the West Virginia shore, we
pitch camp, just as the light begins to sink over the Ohio hills.
The atmosphere is sweet with the odor of wild grape blossoms, and
the willow also is in bloom. Poison ivy, to whose baneful touch
fortunately none of us appear susceptible, grows everywhere about.
From the farmhouse on the narrow bottom to our rear comes the
melodious tinkle-tinkle of cow bells. The operatic calliope is in full
blast, at Bearsville, its shrieks and snorts coming down to us through
four miles of space, all too plainly borne by the northern breeze; and
now and then we hear the squeak of the New Martinsville fiddles. There
are no mosquitoes as yet, but burly May-chafers come stupidly dashing
against our tent, and the toads are piping merrily.