Chapter XIII

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° 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.

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 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.