Storied Louisville--Red Indians and white--A night on Sand
Island--New Albany--Riverside hermits--The river falling--A
deserted village--An ideal camp.
Sand Island, Tuesday, May 29th.--Our Louisville host is the best
living authority on the annals of his town. It was a delight and an
inspiration to go with him, to-day, the rounds of the historic places.
Much that was to me heretofore foggy in Louisville story was made
clear, upon becoming familiar with the setting. The contention is made
that La Salle was here at the Falls of the Ohio, during the closing
months of 1669; but it was over a century later, under British
domination, before a settlement was thought of. Dr. John Connolly
entertained a scheme for founding a town at the Falls, but Lord
Dunmore's War (1774), and the Revolution quickly following, combined
to put an end to it; so that when George Rogers Clark arrived on the
scene with his little band of Virginian volunteers (May, 1778), en
route to capture the Northwest for the State of Virginia, he found
naught but a savage-haunted wilderness. His log fort on Corn Island,
in the midst of the rapids, served as a base of military operations,
and was the nucleus of American settlement, although later the
inhabitants moved to the mainland, and founded Louisville.
The falls at Louisville are the only considerable obstruction to
Ohio-River navigation. At an average stage, the descent is but
twenty-seven feet in two-and-a-half miles; in high flood, the rapids
degenerate into merely swift water, without danger to descending
craft. At ordinary height, it was the custom of pioneer boatmen, in
descending, to lighten their craft of at least a third of the
cargo, and thus pass them down to the foot of the north-side portage
(Clarksville, Ind.), which is three-quarters of a mile in length;
going up, lightened boats were towed against the stream. With the
advent of larger craft, a canal with locks became necessary--the
Louisville and Portland Canal of to-day, which is operated by the
general government.
The action of the water, hastened by the destruction of trees whose
roots originally bound the loose soil, has greatly worn the islands
in the rapids. Little is now left of historic Corn Island, and that
little is, at low water, being blasted and ground into cement by a
mill hard by on the main shore. To-day, with a flood of nearly twenty
feet above the normal stage of the season, not much of the island
is visible,--clumps of willows and sycamores, swayed by the rushing
current, giving a general idea of the contour. Goose Island, although
much smaller than in Clark's day, is a considerable tract of wooded
land, with a rock foundation. Clark was once its owner, his home being
opposite on the Indiana shore, where he had a fine view of the river,
the rapids, and the several islands. As for Clarksville, somewhat
lower down, and back from the river a half mile, it is now but a
cluster of dwellings on the outskirts of New Albany, a manufacturing
town which is rapidly absorbing all the neighboring territory.
Feeling obliged to make an early start, we concluded to pass the night
just below the canal on Sand Island, lying between New Albany and
Louisville's noisy manufacturing suburb, Portland. An historic spot is
this insular home of ours. At the treaty of Fort Charlotte, Cornstalk
told Lord Dunmore the legend familiar among Ohio River savages--that
here, in ages past, occurred the last great battle between the white
and the red Indians. It is one of the puzzles of the antiquarians,
this tradition that white Indians once lived in the land, but were
swept away by the reds; Cornstalk had used it to spur his followers
to mighty deeds, it was a precedent which Pontiac dwelt upon when
organizing his conspiracy, and King Philip is said to have been
inspired by it. But this is no place to discuss the genesis of the
tale. Suffice it, that on Sand Island have been discovered great
quantities of ancient remains. No doubt, in its day, it was an
over-filled burying-ground.
Noises, far different from the clash of savage arms, are in the air
to-night. Far above our heads a great iron bridge crosses the
Ohio, some of its piers resting on the island,--a busy combination
thoroughfare for steam and electric railways, for pedestrians and for
vehicles, plying between New Albany and Portland. The whirr of the
trolley, the scream and rumble of locomotives, the rattle of wagons;
and just above the island head, the burly roar of steamboats signaling
the locks,--these are the sounds which are prevalent. Through all
this hubbub, electric lamps are flashing, and just now a steamer's
search-light swept our island shore, lingering for a moment upon the
little camp, doubtless while the pilot satisfied his curiosity. Let us
hope that savage warriors never o' nights walk the earth above their
graves; for such scenes as this might well cause those whose bones lie
here to doubt their senses.
* * * * *
Near Brandenburg, Ky., Wednesday, 30th.--We stopped at New Albany,
Ind. (603 miles), this morning, to stock the larder and to forward our
shore-clothes by express to Cairo. It is a neat and busy manufacturing
town, with an excellent public market. A gala aspect was prevalent,
for it is Memorial Day; the shops and principal buildings were gay
with bunting, and men in Grand Army uniforms stood in knots at the
street corners.
The broad, fertile plain on both sides of the river, upon which
Louisville and New Albany are the principal towns, extends for eight
or nine miles below the rapids. The first hills to approach the stream
are those in Indiana. Salt River, some ten or twelve rods wide,
enters from the south twenty-one miles below New Albany, between
uninteresting high clay banks, with the lazy-looking little village
of West Point, Ky., occupying a small rise of ground just below
the mouth. The Kentucky hills come close to the bank, a mile or two
farther down, and then the familiar characteristics of the reaches
above Louisville are resumed--hills and bottoms, sparsely settled with
ragged farmsteads, regularly alternating.
At five o'clock we put in at a rocky ledge on the Indiana side, a
mile-and-a-half above Brandenburg. Behind us rises a precipitous hill,
tree-clad to the summit. The Doctor found up there a new phlox and
a pretty pink stone-crop, to add to our herbarium, while here as
elsewhere the bignonia grows profusely in every crevice of the rock.
At dark, two ragged and ill-smelling young shanty-boat men, who are
moored hard by, came up to see us, and by our camp-fire to whittle
chips and drone about hard times. But at last we tired of their idle
gossip, which had in it no element of the picturesque, and got rid of
them by hinting our desire to turn in.
The towns were few to-day, and small. Brandenburg, with eight hundred
souls, was the largest--a sleepy, ill-paved, shambling place,
with apparently nobody engaged in any serious calling; its chief
distinction is an architectural monstrosity, which we were told is
the court-house. The little white hamlet of New Amsterdam, Ind.
(650 miles), looked trim and bright in the midst of a green thicket.
Richardson's Landing, Ky., is a disheveled row of old deserted houses,
once used by lime-burners, with a great barge wrecked upon the beach.
At the small, characterless Indiana village of Leavenworth (658
miles), I sought a traveling photographer, of whom I had been told at
Brandenburg. My quest was for a dark-room where I might recharge my
exhausted kodak; but the man of plates had packed up his tent and
moved on--I would no doubt find him in Alton, Ind., fifteen miles
lower down.
We have had stately, eroded hills, and broad, fertile bottoms, hemming
us in all day, and marvelous ox-bows in the erratic stream. The
hillsides are heavily wooded, sometimes the slopes coming straight
down to the stony beach, without intervening terrace; where there are
such terraces, they are narrow and rocky, and the homes of shanty-men;
but upon the bottoms are whitewashed dwellings of frame or log,
tenanted by a better class, who sometimes have goodly orchards and
extensive corn-cribs. The villages are generally in the deep-cut
notches of the hills, where the interior can be conveniently reached
by a wagon-road--a country "rumpled like this," they say, for ten
or twelve miles back, and then stretching off into level plains of
fertility. Now and then, a deserted cabin on the terraces,--windowless
and gaunt,--tells the story of some "cracker" family that malaria had
killed off, or that has "pulled up stakes" and gone to seek a better
land.
At Leavenworth, the river, which has been flowing northwest for thirty
miles, takes a sudden sweep to the southwest, and thenceforward we
have a rapid current. However, we need still to ply our blades, for
there is a stiff head-wind, with an eager nip in it, to escape which
we seek the lee as often as may be, and bask in the undisturbed
sunlight. Right glad we were, at luncheon-time, to find a sheltered
nook amidst a heap of boulders on the Kentucky shore, and to sit on
the sun-warmed sand and drink hot tea by the side of a camp-fire,
rejoicing in the kindness of Providence.
There are few houseboats, since leaving Louisville; to-day we have
seen but three or four--one of them merrily going up stream, under
full sail. Islands, too, are few--the Upper and Lower Blue River, a
pretty pair, being the first we have met since Sunday. The water is
falling, it now being three or four feet below the stage of a few days
since, as can readily be seen from the broad dado of mud left on
the leaves of willows and sycamores; while the drift, recently
an ever-present feature of the current, is rapidly lodging in the
branches of the willows and piling up against the sand-spits; and
scrawling snags and bobbing sawyers are catching on the bars, and
being held for the next "fresh."
There is little life along shore, in these lower waters. There are two
lines of ever-widening, willowed beach of rock and sand or mud; above
them, perpendicular walls of clay, which edge either rocky terraces
backed by grand sweeps of convoluted hills,--sometimes wooded to the
top, and sometimes eroded into palisades,--or wide-stretching bottoms
given over to small farms or maybe dense tangles of forest.
In the midst of this world of shade, nestle the whitewashed cabins
of the small tillers; but though they swarm with children, it is not
often that the inhabitants appear by the riverside. We catch a glimpse
of them when landing on our petty errands, we now and then see a
houseboater at his nets, and in the villages a few lackadaisical folk
are lounging by the wharf; but as a rule, in these closing days of
our pilgrimage, we glide through what is almost a solitude. The
imagination has not to go far afield, to rehabilitate the river as it
appeared to the earliest voyagers.
Late in the afternoon, as usual wishing water and milk, we put ashore
in Indiana, where a rustic landing indicated a settlement of some
sort, although our view was confined to a pretty, wooded bank, and an
unpainted warehouse at the top of the path. It was a fertile bottom,
a half-mile wide, and stretching a mile or two along the river. Three
neat houses, one of them of logs, constituted the village, and all
about were grain-fields rippled into waves by the northwest breeze.
The first house, a quarter of a mile inland, I reached by a country
roadway; it proved to be the postoffice of Point Sandy. Chickens
clucked around me, a spaniel came fawning for attention, a tethered
cow mooed plaintively, but no human being was visible. At last I
discovered a penciled notice pinned to the horse-block, to the effect
that the postmaster had gone into Alton (five miles distant) for the
day; and should William Askins call in his absence, the said Askins
was to remember that he promised to call yesterday, but never came;
and now would he be kind enough to come without fail to-morrow before
sundown, or the postmaster would be obliged to write that letter they
had spoken about. It was quite evident that Askins had not called; for
he surely would not have left that mysterious notice sticking there,
for all Point Sandy to read and gossip over. It is to be hoped that
there will be no bloodshed over this affair; across the way, in
Kentucky, there would be no doubt as to the outcome.
I looked at Boss, and wondered whether in Indiana it were felony to
milk another man's cow in his absence, with no ginger jar at hand,
into which to drop a compensatory dime. Then I saw that she was dry,
and concluded that to attempt it might be thought a violation of
ethics. The postmaster's well, too, proved to be a cistern,--pardon
the Hibernicism,--and so I went farther.
The other frame house also turned out to be deserted, but evidently
only for the day, for the lilac bushes in the front yard were hung
with men's flannel shirts drying in the sun. A buck goat came bleating
toward me, with many a flourish of his horns, from which it was plain
to be seen why the family wash was not spread upon the grass. From
here I followed a narrow path through a wheat-field, the grain up to
my shoulders, toward the log dwelling. A mangy little cur disputed my
right to knock at the door; but, flourishing my two tin pails at him,
he flew yelping to take refuge in the hen-coop. To my summons at the
portal, there came no response, save the mewing of the cat within. It
was clear that the people of Point Sandy were not at home, to-day.
I would have retreated to the boat, but, chancing to glance up at the
overhanging hills which edge in the bottom, saw two men sitting on a
boulder in front of a rude log hut on the brink of a cliff,
curiously watching my movements on the plain. Thankful, now, that the
postmaster's cow had gone dry, and that these observant mountaineers
had not had an opportunity to misinterpret my conduct, I at once
hurried toward the hill, hopeful that at the top some bovine might be
housed, whose product could lawfully be acquired. But after a long
and laborious climb, over shifting stones and ragged ledges, I was met
with the discouraging information that the only cow in these parts
was Hawkins' cow, and Hawkins was the postmaster,--"down yon, whar yew
were a-read'n' th' notices on th' hoss-block." Neither had they any
water, up there on the cliff-top--"don' use very much, stranger; 'n'
what we do, we done git at Smithfield's, in th' log-house down yon,
'n' I reck'n their cistern's done gone dry, anyhow!"
"But what is the matter down there?" I asked of the old man,--they
were father and son, this lounging pair who thus loftily sat in
judgment on the little world at their feet; "why are all the folks
away from home?"
He looked surprised, and took a fresh chew while cogitating on my
alarming ignorance of Point Sandy affairs: "Why, ain' ye heared? I
thote ev'ry feller on th' river knew thet yere--why, ol' Hawkins, his
wife's brother's buried in Alton to-day, 'n' th' neighbors done gwine
t' th' fun'ral. Whar your shanty-boat been beached, thet ye ain'
heared thet yere?"
As the sun neared the horizon, we tried other places below, with no
better success; and two miles above Alton, Ind. (673 miles), struck
camp at sundown, without milk for our coffee--for water, being obliged
to settle and boil the roily element which bears us onward through the
lengthening days. Were there no hardships, this would be no pilgrimage
worthy of the name. We are out, philosophically to take the world as
it is; he who is not content to do so, had best not stir from home.
But our camping-place, to-night, is ideal. We are upon a narrow,
grassy ledge; below us, the sloping beach astrewn with jagged rocks;
behind us rises steeply a grand hillside forest, in which lie, mantled
with moss and lichens, and deep buried in undergrowth, boulders as
large as a "cracker's" hut; romantic glens abound, and a little run
comes noisily down a ravine hard by,--it is a witching back-door,
filled with surprises at every turn. Beeches, elms, maples, lindens,
pawpaws, tulip trees, here attain a monster growth,--with grape-vines,
their fruit now set, hanging in great festoons from the branches; and
all about, are the flowers which thrive best in shady solitudes--wild
licorice, a small green-brier, and, although not yet in bloom, the
sessile trillium. We are thoroughly isolated; a half-mile above us,
faintly gleams a government beacon, and we noticed on landing that
three-quarters of a mile below is a small cabin flanking the
hill. Naught disturbs our quiet, save the calls of the birds at
roosting-time, and now and then the hoarse bellow of a passing packet,
with its legacy of boisterous wake.