The Scioto, and the Shawanese--A night at
Rome--Limestone--Keels, flats, and boatmen of the olden time.
Rome, O., Monday, May 21st.--At intervals through the night, rain
fell, and the temperature was but 46 deg. at sunrise. However, by the
time we were afloat, the sun was fitfully gleaming through masses of
gray cloud, for a time giving promise of a warmer day. Dark shadows
rested on the romantic ravines, and on the deep hollows of the hills;
but elsewhere over this gentle landscape of wooded amphitheatres,
broad green meadows, rocky escarpments, and many-colored fields,
light and shade gayly chased each other. Never were the vistas of the
widening river more beautiful than to-day.
There are saw-mill and fire-brick industries in the little towns,
which would be shabby enough in the full glare of day. But they
are all glorified in this changing light, which brings out the rich
yellows and reds in sharp relief against the gloomy background of the
hills, and mellows into loveliness the soft grays of unpainted wood.
At the mouth of the Scioto (354 miles), is Portsmouth, O. (15,000
inhabitants), a well-built, substantial town, with good shops. It
lies on a hill-backed terrace some forty feet above the level of the
neighboring bottoms, which give evidence of being victims of the high
floods periodically covering the low lands about the junction of the
rivers. Just across the Scioto is Alexandria, and on the Kentucky side
of the Ohio can be seen the white hamlet of Springville, at the feet
of the dentated hills which here closely approach the river.
The country about the mouth of the Scioto has long figured in Western
annals. Being a favorite rendezvous for the Shawanese, it naturally
became a resort for French and English fur-traders. The principal
part of the first Shawanese village--Shannoah Town, in the old
journals--was below the Scioto's mouth, on the site of Alexandria;
it was the chief town of this considerable tribe, and here Gist
was warned back, when in March, 1751, he ventured thus far while
inspecting lands for the Ohio Company. Two years later, there was a
great--perhaps an unprecedented--flood in the Ohio, the water rising
fifty feet above the ordinary level, and destroying the larger part of
the Shawanese village. Some of the Indians moved to the Little Miami,
and others up the Scioto, where they built, successively, Old and New
Chillicothe; but the majority remained, and rebuilt their town on
the higher land north of the Scioto, where Portsmouth now stands. An
outlying band had had, from before Gist's day, a small town across the
Ohio, the site of Springville; and it was here that George Croghan had
his stone trading house, which was doubtless, after the manner of the
times, a frontier fortress. In the French and Indian war (1758), the
Shawanese, tiring of continual conflict, withdrew from their Ohio
River settlements to Old (or Upper) Chillicothe, and thus closed the
once important fur-trade at the mouth of the Scioto. It was while
the Indian town at Portsmouth was still new (1755), that a party of
Shawanese brought here a Mrs. Mary Inglis, whom they had captured
while upon a scalping foray into Southwestern Virginia. The story of
the remarkable escape of this woman, at Big Bone Lick, of her long and
terrible flight through the wilderness along the southern bank of the
Ohio and up the Great Kanawha Valley, and her final return to home and
kindred, who viewed her as one delivered from the grave, is one of the
most thrilling in Western history.[A]
Although the Shawanese had removed from their villages on the Ohio,
they still lived in new towns in the north, within easy striking
distance of the great river; and, until the close of the eighteenth
century, were a continual source of alarm to those whose business
led them to follow this otherwise inviting highway to the continental
interior. Flatboats bearing traders, immigrants, and travelers were
frequently waylaid by the savages, who exhausted a fertile ingenuity
in luring their victims to an ambuscade ashore; and, when not
successful in this, would in narrow channels, or when the current
swept the craft near land, subject the voyagers to a fierce fusilade
of bullets, against which even stout plank barricades proved of small
avail.
Vanceburgh, Ky. (375 miles), is a little town at the bottom of a
pretty amphitheatre of hills. There was a floating photographer there,
as we passed, with a gang-plank run out to the shore, and framed
specimens of his work hung along the town side of his ample barge.
Men with teams were getting wagon-loads of sand from the beach,
for building purposes. And, a mile or two down, a floating saw and
planing-mill--the "Clipper," which we had seen before, up river--was
busied upon logs which were being rolled down the beach from the bank
above. There are several such mills upon the river, all seemingly
occupied with "tramp work," for there is a deal of logging carried on,
in a small and careful way, by farmers living on these wooded hills.
Vanceburgh was for the time bathed in sunlight; but, as we continued
on our way, a heavy rain-cloud came creeping up over the dark Ohio
hills, and, descending, cut off our view, at last lustily pelting us
as we sat encased in rubber. We had been in our ponchos most of the
day, as much for warmth as for shelter; for there was an all-pervading
chill, which the fickle sun, breaking its early promise, had failed to
dissipate. Thus, amid showers alternating with sunbeams, we proceeded
unto Rome (381 miles). An Ohio village, this Rome, and so fallen from
its once proud estate that its postoffice no longer bears the name--it
is simply "Stout's," if, in these degenerate days, you would send a
letter hither.
It was smartly raining, when we put in on the stony beach above Rome.
The tent went up in a hurry, and under it the cargo; but by the time
all was housed the sun gushed out again, and, stretching a line, we
soon had our bedding hung to dry. It is a charming situation; in
this melting atmosphere, we have perhaps the most striking effects of
cloud, hill, bottom, islands, and glancing river, which have yet been
vouchsafed us.
The Romans, like most rural folk along the river below Wheeling,
chiefly drink cistern water. Earlier in our pilgrimage, we stoutly
declined to patronize these rain-water reservoirs, and I would daily
go far afield in search of a well; but lately, necessity has driven
us to accept the cistern, and often we find it even preferable to the
well, on those rare occasions when the latter can be found at villages
or farm-houses. But there are cisterns and cisterns--foul holes like
that at Rosebud, others that are neatness itself, with all manner of
grades between. As for river water, ever yellow with clay, and thick
as to motes, much of it is used in the country parts. This morning, a
bevy of negroes came down the bank from a Kentucky field; and each in
turn, creeping out on a drift log,--for the ground is usually muddy a
few feet up from the water's edge,--lay flat on his stomach and drank
greedily from the roily mess.
At dusk, there was again a damp chill, and for the third time we left
the Doctor to keep bachelor's hall upon the beach. It was raining
smartly by the time the tavern was reached, nearly a mile down
the bank. Our advent caused a rare scurrying to and fro, for two
commercial "drummers," who were to depart by the early morning boat,
occupied the "reg'lar spar' room," the landlady informed us, and a bit
of a cubby-hole off the back stairs had to be arranged for us. Guests
are rarities, at the hostelry in Rome.
* * * * *
Near Ripley, O., Tuesday, May 22nd.--There was an inch of snow last
night, on the hills about, and a morning Cincinnati paper records a
heavy fall in the Pennsylvania mountains. The storm is general, and
the river rose two feet over night. When we set off, in mid-morning,
it was raining heavily; but in less than an hour the clouds broke, and
the rest of the day has been an alternation of chilling showers and
bursts of warm sunshine, with the same succession, of alluring vistas,
over which play broad bands of changing light and shade, and overhead
the storm clouds torn and tossed in the upper currents.
Our landlord at Rome asserted at breakfast that Kentucky was fifty
years behind the Ohio side, in improvements of every sort. Thus far,
we have not ourselves noticed differences of that degree. Doubtless
before the late civil war,--all the ante-bellum travelers agree
in this,--when the blight of slavery was resting on Virginia and
Kentucky, the south shore of the Ohio was as another country; but
to-day, so far as we can ascertain from a surface view, the little
villages on either side are equally dingy and woe-begone, and large
Southern towns like Wheeling, Parkersburg, Point Pleasant, and
Maysville are very nearly an offset to Steubenville, Marietta,
Pomeroy, Ironton, and Portsmouth. North-shore towns of wealth and
prominence are more numerous than on the Dixie bank, and are as a
rule larger and somewhat better kept, with the negro element less
conspicuous; but to say that the difference is anywhere near as marked
as the landlord averred, or as my own previous reading on the subject
led me to expect, is grossly to exaggerate.
After leaving Manchester, O. (394 miles), with a beautiful island at
its door, there are spasmodic evidences of the nearness of a great
city market. A large proportion of the hills are completely denuded of
their timber, and patched with rectangular fields of green, brown, and
yellow; upon the bottoms there are frequent truck farms; now and then
are stone quarries upon the banks, with capacious barges moored in
front; and upon one or two rocky ledges were stone-crushers, getting
out material for concrete pavements. When we ask the bargemen, in
passing, whither their loads are destined, the invariable reply is,
"The city"--meaning Cincinnati, still seventy miles away.
Limestone Creek (405 miles) occupies a large space in Western story,
for so insignificant a stream. It is now not over a rod in width, and
at no season can it be over two or three. One finds it with difficulty
along the mill-strewn shore of Maysville, Ky., the modern outgrowth of
the Limestone village of pioneer days. Limestone, settled four years
before Marietta or Cincinnati, was long Kentucky's chief port of entry
on the Ohio; immigrants to the new state, who came down the Ohio,
almost invariably booked for this point, thence taking stage to
Lexington, and travelers in the early day seldom passed it by
unvisited. But years before there was any settlement here, the valley
of Limestone Creek, which comes gently down from low-lying hills, was
regarded as a convenient doorway into Kentucky. When (1776) George
Rogers Clark was coming down the river from Pittsburg, with powder
given by Patrick Henry, then governor of Virginia, for the defence of
Kentucky settlers from British-incited savages, he was chased by the
latter, and, putting into this creek, hastily buried the precious
cargo on its banks. From here it was cautiously taken overland to the
little forts, by relays of pioneers, through a gauntlet of murderous
fire.
About twenty-five miles from Limestone, too, was another attraction of
the early time,--the great Blue Lick sulphur spring; here, in a
valley surrounded by wooded hills, formerly congregated great herds
of buffalo and deer, which licked the salty earth, and hunters soon
learned that this was a royal ground for game. The Battle of the Blue
Lick (1782) will ever be famous in the annals of Kentucky.
The Ohio was a mighty waterway into the continental interior, in
the olden days of Limestone. Its only compeer was the so-called
"Wilderness Road," overland through Cumberland Gap--the successor
of "Boone's trail," just as Braddock's Road was the outgrowth of
"Nemacolin's path." Until several years after the Revolutionary War,
the country north of the Ohio was still Indian land, and settlement
was restricted to the region south of the river; so that practically
all West-going roads from the coast colonies centered either on Fort
Pitt or Redstone, or on Cumberland Gap. On the out-going trip, the
Wilderness Road was the more toilsome of the two, but it was safer,
for the Ohio's banks were beset with thieving and often murdering
savages. In returning east, many who had descended the river preferred
going overland through the Gap, to painfully pulling up stream through
the shallows, with the danger of Indians many times greater than when
gliding down the deep current. The distance over the two routes from
Philadelphia, was nearly equal, when the windings of the river were
taken into account; but the Carolinians and the Georgians found
Boone's Wilderness Road the shorter of the two, in their migrations
to the promised land of "Ol' Kaintuck." And we should not overlook the
fact, that of much importance was still a third route, up the James
and down the Great Kanawha; a route whose advantage to Virginia,
Washington early saw, and tried in vain to have improved by a canal
connecting the two rivers.[B]
Even before the opening of the Revolution, the Ohio was the path of
a considerable emigration. We have seen Washington going down to the
Great Kanawha with his surveying party, in 1770, and finding that
settlers were hurrying into the country for a hundred miles below Fort
Pitt. By the close of the Revolution, the Ohio was a familiar stream.
Pittsburg, from a small trading hamlet and fording-place, had grown
by 1785 to have a thousand inhabitants, chiefly supported by
boat-building and the Kentucky carrying trade; and boat-yards were
common up both the Monongahela and the Youghiogheny, for a distance
of sixty miles. Nevertheless, it was not until 1792 that there were
regular conveniences for carrying passengers and freight down the
Ohio; the emigrant or trader, on arrival at Pittsburg or Redstone,
had generally to wait until he could either charter a boat or have one
built for him, although sometimes he found a chance "passenger flat"
going down.[C] This difficulty in securing river transportation was
one of the reasons why the majority chose the Wilderness Road.
"The first thing that strikes a stranger from the Atlantic," says
Flint (1814), "is the singular, whimsical, and amusing spectacle of
the varieties of water-craft, of all shapes and structures." These,
Flint, who knew the river well, separates into seven classes: (1)
"Stately barges," the size of an Atlantic schooner, with "a raised and
outlandish-looking deck;" one of these required a crew of twenty-five
to work it up stream. (2) Keel-boats--long, slender, and graceful in
form, carrying from fifteen to thirty tons, easily propelled over
the shallows, and much used in low water, and in hunting trips to
Missouri, Arkansas, and the Red River country. (3) Kentucky flats
(or "broad-horns"), "a species of ark, very nearly resembling a New
England pig-stye;" these were from forty to a hundred feet in length,
fifteen feet in beam, and carried from twenty to seventy tons. Some
of these flats were not unlike the house-boats of to-day. "It is no
uncommon spectacle to see a large family, old and young, servants,
cattle, hogs, horses, sheep, fowls, and animals of all kinds," all
embarked on one such bottom. (4) Covered "sleds," ferry-flats, or
Alleghany skiffs, carrying from eight to twelve tons. (5) Pirogues, of
from two to four tons burthen, "sometimes hollowed from one big tree,
or the trunks of two trees united, and a plank rim fitted to the upper
part." (6) Common skiffs and dug-outs. (7) "Monstrous anomalies," not
classifiable, and often whimsical in design. To these might be added
the "floating shops or stores, with a small flag out to indicate
their character," so frequently seen by Palmer (1817), and thriftily
surviving unto this day, minus the flag. And Hall (1828) speaks of a
flat-bottomed row-boat, "twelve feet long, with high sides and roof,"
carrying an aged couple down the river, they cared not where, so long
as they could find a comfortable home in the West, for their declining
and now childless years.
The first four classes here enumerated, were allowed to drift down
stream with the current, being steered by long sweeps hung on pivots.
The average speed was about three miles an hour, but the distances
made were considerable, from the fact that in the earliest days they
were, from fear of Indians, usually kept on the move through day and
night,--the crew taking turns at the sweeps, that the craft might not
be hung up on shore or entangled in the numerous snags and sawyers. In
going up stream, the sweeps served as oars, and in the shallows long
pushing-poles were used.
As for the boatmen who professionally propelled the keels and flats
of the Ohio, they were a class unto themselves--"half horse, half
alligator," a contemporary styled them. Rough fellows, much given
to fighting, and drunkenness, and ribaldry, with a genius for coarse
drollery and stinging repartee. The river towns suffered sadly at
the hands of this lawless, dissolute element. Each boat carried
from thirty to forty boatmen, and a number of such boats frequently
traveled in company. After the Indian scare was over, they generally
stopped over night in the settlements, and the arrival of a squadron
was certain to be followed by a disturbance akin to those so familiar
a few years ago in our Southwest, when the cowboys would undertake
to "paint a town red." The boatmen were reckless of life, limb, and
reputation, and were often more numerous than those of the villagers
who cared to enforce the laws; while there was always present an
element which abetted and throve on the vice of the river-men. The
result was that mischief, debauchery, and outrage ran riot, and in the
inevitable fights the citizens were generally beaten.
The introduction of steamboats (1814) soon effected a revolution. A
steamer could carry ten times as much as a barge, could go five times
as fast, and required fewer men; it traveled at night, quickly passing
from one port to another, pausing only to discharge or receive cargo;
its owners and officers were men of character and responsibility, with
much wealth in their charge, and insisted on discipline and correct
deportment. The flatboat and the keel-boat were soon laid up to rot on
the banks; and the boatmen either became respectable steamboat hands
and farmers, or went into the Far West, where wild life was still
possible.
Shipment on the river, in the flatboat days, was only during the
spring and autumnal floods; although an occasional summer rise, such
as we are now getting, would cause a general activity. In the autumn
of 1818, Hall reports that three millions of dollars' worth of
merchandise were lying on the shores of the Monongahela, waiting for
a rise of water to float them to their destination. "The Western
merchants were lounging discontentedly about the streets of Pittsburg,
or moping idly in its taverns, like the victims of an ague." The
steamers did something to alleviate this condition of affairs; but
it was not until the coming of railways, to carry goods quickly
and cheaply across country to deep-water ports like Wheeling, that
permanent relief was felt.
But what of the Maysville of to-day? It extends on both sides of
Limestone Creek for about two miles along the Kentucky shore, at no
point apparently over five squares wide, and for the most part but
two or three; for back of it forested hills rise sharply. There is a
variety of industries, the business quarter is substantially built,
and there are numerous comfortable homes with pretty lawns.
On the opposite shore is Aberdeen, where Kentucky swains and lasses,
who for one reason or another fail to get a license at home, find
marriage made easy--a peaceful, pleasant, white village, with trees
a-plenty, and romantic hills shutting out the north wind.
We are camped to-night on a picturesque sand-slope, at the foot of
a willow-edged bottom, and some seven feet above the river level. We
need to perch high, for the storm has been general through the basin,
and the Ohio is rising steadily.
[Footnote A: See Shaler's _Kentucky_ (Amer. Commonwealth series),
Collins's _History of Kentucky_, and Hale's _Trans-Alleghany
Pioneers_. Shaler gives the date as 1756; but Hale, a specialist in
border annals, makes it 1755.]
[Footnote B: See _ante_, p. 126.]
[Footnote C: Palmer (1817) paid five dollars for his passage from
Pittsburg to Cincinnati (465 miles), without food, and fifty cents per
hundred pounds for freight to Marietta. Imlay (1792) says the rate
in his time from Pittsburg to Limestone was twenty-five cents per
hundred. In 1803, Harris paid four dollars-and-a-half per hundred for
freight, by wagon from Baltimore to Pittsburg.]