Produce boats--A dead town--On the Great Bend--Grant's
birthplace--The Little Miami--The genesis of Cincinnati.
Point Pleasant, O., Wednesday, May 23rd.--The river rose three feet
during the night. Steamers go now at full speed, no longer fearing
the bars; and the swash upon shore was so violent that I was more than
once awakened, each time to find the water line creeping nearer
and nearer to the tent door. As we sweep onward to-day, upon an
accelerated current, the fringing willows, whose roots before the
rise were many feet up the slopes of sand and gravel, are gracefully
dipping their boughs in the rushing flood. With the rise, come the
sweepings of the beaches--bits of lumber, fallen trees, barrels,
boxes, 'longshore rubbish of every sort; sometimes it hangs in ragged
rafts, and we steer clear of such, for Pilgrim's progress is greater
than that of these unwelcome companions of the voyage, and we wish no
entangling alliances.
Much tobacco is raised on the rounded, gently-sloping hills below
Maysville. Away up on the acclivities, in sheltered spots near the
fields in which they are to be transplanted, or in fence-corners
in the ever-broadening bottoms, we note white patches of thin cloth
pinned down over the young plants to protect them from untoward
frosts. There are many tobacco warehouses to be seen along the
banks--apparently farmers cooperate in maintaining such; and in
front of each, a roadway leads down to the water's edge, indicating
a steamboat landing. On the town wharves are often seen portly
barrels,--locally, "puncheons,"--filled with the weed, awaiting
shipment by boat; most of the product goes to Louisville, but there
are also large buyers in the smaller Kentucky towns.
Occasionally, to-day, we have seen moored to some rustic landing a
great covered barge, quite of the fashion of the golden age of Ohio
boating. At one end, a room is partitioned off to serve as cabin, and
the sweeps are operated from the roof. These are produce-boats, which
are laden with coarse vegetables and sometimes live stock, and floated
down to Cincinnati or Louisville, and even to St. Louis and New
Orleans. In ante-bellum days, produce-boats were common enough, and
much money was made by speculative buyers who would dispose of their
cargo in the most favorable port, sell the barge, and then return by
rail or steamer; just as, in still earlier days, the keel or flatboat
owner would sell both freight and vessel on the Lower Mississippi,--or
abandon the craft if he could not sell it,--and "hoof it home," as a
contemporary chronicler puts it.
Ripley, Levanna (417 miles), Higginsport (421 miles), Chilo (431
miles), Neville (435 miles), and Point Pleasant (442 miles) are the
Ohio towns to-day; and Dover (417 miles), Augusta (424 miles), and
Foster (435 miles), their rivals on the Kentucky shore. Sawmills and
distilleries are the leading industries, and there are broad paved
wharves; but a listless air pervades them all, as if once they basked
in the light of better days. Foster is rather the shabbiest of the
lot. As I passed through to find the postoffice, at the upper edge of
town, where the hills come down to meet the bottom, I saw that half
of the store buildings still intact were closed, many dwellings and
warehouses were in ruins, and numerous open cellars were grown to
grass and weeds. Few people were in sight, and they loafing at the
corners. The postoffice occupied a vacated store, evidently not swept
these six months past. The youthful master, with chair tilted back
and his feet on an old washstand which did duty as office table, was
listlessly whittling a finger-ring from a peach-stone; but shoving
his feet along, he made room for me to write a postal card which I had
brought for the purpose.
"What is the matter with this town?" I asked, as I scratched away.
"Daid, I reck'n!" and he blew away the peach-stone dust which had
accumulated in the folds of his greasy vest.
"Yes, I see it is dead. What killed it?"
"Oh! just gone daid--sort o' nat'ral daith, I reck'n."
We had a pretty view this morning, three or four miles below Augusta,
from the top of a tree-denuded Kentucky hill, some two hundred and
fifty feet high. Hauling Pilgrim into the willows, we set out over a
low, cultivated bottom, whose edges were being lapped by the rising
river, to the detriment of the springing corn; then scrambling up the
terrace on which the Chesapeake & Ohio railway runs, we crawled under
a barb-wire fence, and ascended through a pasture, our right of way
contested for a moment by a gigantic Berkshire boar, which was
not easily vanquished. When at last we gained the top, by dint of
clambering over rail-fences and up steep slopes bestrewn with mulleins
and boulders, and over patches of freshly-plowed hardscrabble, the
sight was well worth the rough climb. The broad Ohio bottom, opposite,
was thick-dotted with orchard clumps, from which rose the white houses
and barns of small tillers. On the generous slopes of the Kentucky
hills, all corrugated with wooded ravines, were scores of fertile
farmsteads, each with its ample tobacco shed--the better class of
farmers on the hilltops, their buildings often silhouetted against the
western sky, and the meaner sort down low on the river's bank. Through
this pastoral scene, the broad river winds with noble sweep, until,
both above and below, it loses itself in the purple mist of the
distant hills.
We are now upon the Great Bend of the Ohio, beginning at Neville (435
miles) and ending at Harris's Landing (519 miles), with North Bend
(482 miles) at the apex. The bend is itself a series of convolutions,
and our point of view is ever changing, so that we have kaleidoscopic
vistas,--and with each new setting, good-humoredly dispute with each
other, we at the oars, and the others in the stern-sheets, as to which
is the more beautiful, the unfolding or the dissolving view.
Our camp to-night is beside a little hillside torrent on the lower
edge of Point Pleasant. We are well up on the rocky slope; an
abandoned stone-quarry lies back of us, up the hill a bit; and leading
into the village, half a mile away, is a picturesque country road,
overhung with sumacs and honey locusts--overtopped on one side by a
precipitous pasture, and on the other dropping suddenly to a beach
thick-grown to willows, maples, and scrub sycamores.
The Boy and I made an expedition into the town, for milk and water,
but were obliged to climb one of the sharpest ascents hereabout,
before our search was rewarded. A pretty little farmstead it is, up
there on the lofty hill above us, with a wealth of chickens and an
ample dairy, and fat fields and woods gently sloping backward into
the interior. The good farm-wife was surprised that I was willing to
"pack" commodities, so plentiful with her, down so steep a path; but
canoeing pilgrims must not falter at trifles such as this.
Point Pleasant is the birthplace of General Grant. Not every hamlet
has its hero, hereabout. Everyone we met this evening,--seeing we were
strangers, the Boy and I,--told us of this halo which crowns their
home.
* * * * *
Cincinnati, Thursday, May 24th.--During the night there were frequent
heavy downpours, during which the swollen torrent by our side roared
among its boulders right lustily; and occasionally a heavy farm-wagon
crossed the country bridge which spans the ravine just above us, its
rumblings echoing in the quarried glen for all the world like distant
thunder. Before turning in, each built a cairn upon the beach, at the
point which he thought the water might reach by morning. The Boy, more
venturesome than the rest, piled his cairn highest up the slope; and
when daylight revealed the fact that the river, in its four-feet rise,
had crept nearest his goal, there was much juvenile rejoicing.
There is a gray sky, this morning. With a cold headwind on the
starboard quarter, we hug the lee of the Ohio shore. The river is well
up in the willows now. Crowding Pilgrim as closely as we may, within
the narrow belt of unruffled water, our oars are swept by their
bending boughs, which lightly tremble on the surface of the flood. The
numerous rock-cumbered ravines, coursing down the hills or through the
bottom lands, a few days since held but slender streams, or were,
the most of them, wholly dry; but now they are brimming with noisy
currents all flecked with foam--pretty pictures, these yawning
gullies, overhung with cottonwoods and sycamores, with thick
undergrowth of green-brier and wild columbine, and the yellow buds of
the celandine poppy.
The hills are showing better cultivation, as we approach the great
city. The farm-houses are in better style, the market gardens larger,
prosperity more evident. Among the pleasing sights are frequent
farmsteads at the summits of the slopes, with orchards and vineyards,
and gardens and fields, stretching down almost to the river--quite,
indeed, on the Ohio side, but in Kentucky flanked at the base by
the railway terrace. Numerous ferries connect the Kentucky railway
stations with the eastern bank; one, which we saw just above New
Richmond, O. (446 miles), was run by horse power, a weary nag in a
tread-mill above each side-paddle. Although Kentucky has the railway,
there is just here apparent a greater degree of thrift in Ohio--the
towns more numerous, fields and truck-gardens more ample, on the whole
a better class of farm-houses, and frequently, along the country road
which closely skirts the shore, comfortable little broad-balconied
inns, dependent on the trade of fishing and outing parties.
Just below the Newport waterworks are several coal-barge
harbors--mooring-grounds where barges lie in waiting, until hauled off
by tugs to the storage wharves. In the rear of one of these fleets, at
the base of a market garden, we found a sunny nook for lunch--for here
on the Kentucky side the cold wind has full sweep, and we are glad of
shelter when at rest. Across the river is a broad, low bottom given up
to market gardeners, who jealously cultivate down to the water's edge,
leaving the merest fringe of willows to protect their domain. At the
foot of this fertile plain, the Little Miami River (460 miles) pours
its muddy contribution into the Ohio; and beyond this rises the
amphitheater of hills on which Cincinnati (466 miles) is mainly built.
We see but the outskirts here, for two miles below us there is a sharp
bend in the river, and only a dark pall of smoke marks where the city
lies. But these outlying slopes are well dotted with gray and white
groups of settlement, separated by stretches of woodland over which
play changing lights, for cloud masses are sweeping the Ohio hills
while we are still basking in the sun.
Above us, crowning the Kentucky ascents, or nestled on their wooded
shoulders, are many beautiful villas, evidently the homes of the
ultra-wealthy. Close at hand we have the pleasant chink-chink of
caulking hammers, for barges are built and repaired in this snug
harbor. Now and then a river tug comes, with noisy bluster of smoke
and steam, and amid much tightening and slackening of rope, and
wild profanity, takes captive a laden barge,--as a cowboy might a
refractory steer in the midst of a herd,--and hauls it off to be
disgorged down stream. And just as we conclude our lunch, German
women come with hoes to practice the gentle art of horticulture--a
characteristic conglomeration, in the heart of our busy West; the
millionaire on the hill-top, the tiller on the slope, shipwright on
the beach, and grimy Commerce master of the flood.
Setting afloat on a boiling current, thick with driftwood, we soon
were coursing between city-lined shores--on the Kentucky side, Newport
and Covington, respectively above and below Licking River; and in an
hour were making our way through the labyrinth of steamers thickly
moored with their noses to land, and cautiously creeping around to a
quiet spot at the stern of a giant wharf-boat--no slight task this,
with the river "on the jump," and a false move liable to swamp us if
we strike an obstruction at full gait. No doubt we all breathed freer
when Pilgrim, too, was beached,--although it be only confessed in
the privacy of the log. With her and her cargo safely stored in
the wharf-boat, we sought a hotel, and, regaining our bag of
clothing,--shipped ahead of us from McKee's Rocks,--donned urban
attire for an inspection of the city.
And a noble city it is, that has grown out of the two block-houses
which George Rogers Clark planted here in 1780, on his raid against
the Indians of Chillicothe. In 1788, John Cleves Symmes, the first
United States judge of the Northwest Territory, purchased from
Congress a million acres of land, lying on the Ohio between the two
Miami Rivers. Matthias Denman bought from him a square mile at the
eastern end of the grant, "on a most delightful high bank" opposite
the Licking, and--on a cash valuation for the land, of two hundred
dollars--took in with him as partners Robert Patterson and John
Filson. Filson was a schoolmaster, had written the first history of
Kentucky, and seems to have enjoyed much local distinction. To him was
entrusted the task of inventing a name for the settlement which the
company proposed to plant here. The outcome was "Losantiville," a
pedagogical hash of Greek, Latin, and French: _L_, for Licking; _os_,
mouth; _anti_, opposite; _ville_, city--Licking-opposite-City, or
City-opposite-Licking, whichever is preferred. This was in August.
The Fates work quickly, for in October poor Filson was scalped by the
Indians in the neighborhood of the Big Miami, before a settler had yet
been enticed to Losantiville. But the survivors knew how to "boom" a
town; lots were given away by lottery to intending actual settlers;
and in a few months Symmes was able to write that "It populates
considerably."
A few weeks previous to the planting of Losantiville, a party of men
from Redstone had settled Columbia, at the mouth of the Little Miami,
about where the suburb of California now is; and, a few weeks later, a
third colony was started by Symmes himself at North Bend, near the
Big Miami, at the western extremity of his grant; and this, the judge
wished to make the capital of the new Northwest Territory. At first,
it was a race between these three colonies. A few miles below North
Bend, Fort Finney had been built in 1785-86, hence the Bend had at
first the start; but a high flood dampened its prospects, the troops
were withdrawn from this neighborhood to Louisville, and in the
winter of 1789-90 Fort Washington was built at Losantiville by General
Harmar. The neighborhood of the new fortress became, in the ensuing
Indian war, the center of the district.
To Losantiville, with its fort, came Arthur St. Clair, the new
governor of the Northwest Territory (January, 1790); and, making his
headquarters here, laid violent hands on Filson's invention, at
once changing the name to Cincinnati, in honor of the Society of the
Cincinnati, of which the new official was a prominent member--"so
that," Symmes sorrowfully writes, "Losantiville will become extinct."
Five years of Indian campaigning followed, the features of which were
the crushing defeats of Harmar and St. Clair, and the final victory
of Mad Anthony Wayne at Fallen Timbers. It was not until the Treaty
of Greenville (1795), the result of Wayne's brilliant dash into the
wilderness, that the Revolutionary War may properly be said to have
ended in the West.
Those were stirring times on the Ohio, both ashore and afloat; but,
amidst them all, Cincinnati grew apace. Ellicott, in 1796, speaks of
it as "a very respectable place," and in 1814, Flint found it the
only port that could be called a town, from Steubenville to Natchez,
a distance of fifteen hundred miles; in 1825 he reports it greatly
grown, and crowded with immigrants from Europe and from our own
Eastern states. The impetus thus early gained has never lessened, and
Cincinnati is to-day one of the best built and most substantial cities
in the Union.