Afloat on the Ohio Part 9

It was early evening when we pa.s.sed Madison, Ind. (553 miles), a fairly-prosperous factory town of about twelve thousand souls. Scores of the inhabitants were out in boats, collecting driftwood; and upon the wharf was a great crowd of people, waiting for an excursion boat which was to return them to Louisville, whence they had come for a day's outing. It was a lifeless, melancholy party, as excursion folk are apt to be at the close of a gala day, and they wearily stared at us as we paddled past.

Just below, on the Kentucky sh.o.r.e, on my usual search for milk and water, I landed at a cl.u.s.ter of rude cottages set in pleasant market gardens. While the others drifted by with Pilgrim, I had a goodly walk before finding milk, for a cow is considered a luxury among these small riverside cultivators; the man who owns one sells milk to his poorer neighbors. Such a nabob was at last found. The animal was called down from the rocky hills, by her barefooted owner, who, lank and malaria-skinned, leaned wearily against the well-curb, while his wife, also guiltless of hose and shoes, milked into my pail direct from the lean and hungry brindle.

By the time the crew were reunited, storm-clouds, thick and black, were fast rising in the west. Scudding down sh.o.r.e for a mile, with oars and paddle aiding the swift current, we failed to find a proper camping-place on the muddy bank of the far-stretching bottom.

Rain-drops were now pattering on our rubber spreads, and it was evident that a blow was coming; but despite this, we bent to the work with renewed vigor, and shot across to the lee sh.o.r.e of Indiana--finally landing in the midst of a heavy shower, and hurriedly pitching tent on a rocky slope at the base of a vertical bank of clay.

Above us, a government beacon shines brightly through the persistent storm, with the keeper's neat little house and garden a hundred yards away. In the tree-tops, up a heavily-forested hill beyond, the wind moans right dismally. In this sheltered nook, we shall be but lulled to sleep with the ceaseless pelting of the rain.

Louisville, Monday, May 28th.--At midnight, the heavens cleared, with a cold north wind; the early morning atmosphere was nipping, and we were glad of the shelter of the tent during breakfast. The river fell eight inches during the night, and on either bank is a muddy strip, which will rapidly widen as the water goes down.

Below us, twenty rods or so, moored to the boulder-strewn sh.o.r.e, was a shanty-boat. In the bustle of landing, last night, we had not noticed this neighbor, and it was pitch-dark before we had time to get our bearings. I think it is the most dilapidated affair we have seen on the river--the frame of the cabin is out of plumb, old clothes serve for sides and flap loudly in the wind; while two little boys, who peered at us through slits in the airy walls, looked fairly miserable with cold.

The proprietor of the craft came up to visit us, while breakfast was being prepared, and remained until we were ready to depart--a tall, slouchy fellow, clothed in shreds and patches; he was in the prime of life, with a depressed nose set in a battered, though not unpleasant countenance. None of our party had ever before seen such garments on a human being--old bits of flannel, frayed strips of bagging-stuff, and other curious odds and ends of fabrics, in all the primitive colors, the whole roughly basted together with sack-thread. He was a philosopher, was this rag-tag-and-bob-tail of a man, a philosopher with some mother-wit about him. For an hour, he sat on his haunches, crouching over our little stove, and following with cat-like care W----'s every movement in the culinary art; she felt she was under the eye of a critic who, though not voicing his opinions, looked as if he knew a thing or two.

As a conversationist, our visitor was fluent to a fault. It required but slight urging to draw him out. His history, and that of his fathers for three generations back, he recited in much detail. He himself had, in his best days, been a sub-contractor in railway construction; but fate had gone against him, and he had fallen to the low estate of a shanty-boatman. His wife had "gone back on him," and he was left with two little boys, whom he proposed to bring up as gentlemen--"yaas, sir-r, gen'lem'n, yew hear me! ef I _is_ only a shanty-boat feller!"

"I thote I'd come to visit uv ye," he had said by way of introduction; "ye're frum a city, ain't yer? Yaas, I jist thote hit. City folks is a more 'com'dat'n' 'n country folks. Why? Waal, yew fellers jist go back 'ere in th' hills away, 'n them thar country folks they'd hardly answer ye, they're thet selfish-like. Give me city folks, I say, fer get'n' long with!"

And then, in a rambling monologue, while chewing a straw, he discussed humanity in general, and the professions in particular. "I ain't got no use fer lawyers--mighty hard show them fellers has, fer get'n' to heaven. As fer doctors--waal, they'll hev hard sledd'n, too; but them fellers has to do piles o' dis'gree'bl' work, they do; I'd jist rather fish fer a liv'n', then be a doctor! Still, sir-r, give me an eddicated man every time, says I. Waal, sir-r, 'n' ye hear me, one o' th' richest fellers right here in Madison, wuz born 'n' riz on a shanty-boat, 'n' no mistake. He jist done pick up his eddication from folks pa.s.s'n' by, jes' as yew fellers is a pa.s.sin', 'n' they might say a few wuds o' information to him. He done git a fine eddication jes' thet way, 'n' they ain't no flies on him, these days, when money-gett'n' is 'roun'. Jes' noth'n' like it, sir-r! Eddication does th' biz!"

An observant man was this philosopher, and had studied human nature to some purpose. He described the condition of the poor farmers along the river, as being pitiful; they had no money to hire help, and were an odd lot, anyway--the farther back in the hills you get, the worse they are.

He loved to talk about himself and his lowly condition, in contrast with his former glory as a sub-contractor on the railway. When a man was down, he said, he lost all his friends--and, to ill.u.s.trate this familiar phase of life, told two stories which he had often read in a book that he owned. They were curious, old-fashioned tales of feudal days, evidently written in a former century,--he did not know the t.i.tle of the volume,--and he related them in what evidently were the actual words of the author: a curious recitation, in the pedantic literary style of the ancient story-teller, but in the dialect of an Ohio-river "cracker." His greatest ambition, he told us, was to own a floating sawmill; although he carefully inquired about the laws regulating peddlers in our State, and intimated that sometime he might look us up in that capacity, in our Northern home.

As we approach Louisville to-day, the settlements somewhat increase in number, although none of the villages are of great size; and, especially in Kentucky, they are from ten to twenty miles apart.

The fine hills continue close upon our path until a few miles above Louisville, when they recede, leaving on the Kentucky side a broad, flat plain several miles square, for the city's growth. For the most part, these stony slopes are well wooded with elm, buckeye, maple, ash, oak, locust, hickory, sycamore, cotton-wood, a few cedars, and here and there a catalpa and a pawpaw giving a touch of tropical luxuriance to the hillside forest; while blackberry bushes, bignonia vines, and poison ivy, are everywhere abundant; otherwise, there is little of interest to the botanist. Redbirds, catbirds, bluebirds, blackbirds, and crows are chattering noisily in the trees, and turkey-buzzards everywhere swirl and swoop in mid-air.

The narrow little bottoms are sandy; and on lowland as well as highland there is much poor, rock-bewitched soil. The little whitewashed farmsteads look pretty enough in the morning haze, lying half hid in forest clumps; but upon approach they invariably prove unkempt and dirty, and swarming with shiftless, barefooted, unhealthy folk, whom no imagination can invest with picturesque qualities. Their ragged, unpainted tobacco-sheds are straggling about, over the hills; and here and there a white patch in the corner of a gray field indicates a nursery of tobacco plants, soon to be transplanted into ampler soil.

It is not uncommon to find upon a hillside a freshly-built log-cabin, set in the midst of a clearing, with bristling stumps all around, reminding one of the homes of new settlers on the far-away logging-streams of Northern Wisconsin or Minnesota; the resemblance is the closer, for such notches cut in the edge of the Indiana and Kentucky wilderness are often found after a row of many miles through a winding forest solitude apparently but little changed from primeval conditions. Now and then we come across quarries, where stone is slid down great chutes to barges which lie moored by the rocky bank; and frequently is the stream lined with great boulders, which stand knee-deep in the flood that eddies and gurgles around them.

On the upper edge of the great Louisville plain, we pitched tent in the middle of the afternoon; and, having brought our bag of land-clothes with us in the skiff, from Cincinnati, took turns under the canvas in effecting what transformation was desirable, preparatory to a visit in the city. In the early twilight we were floating past Towhead Island, with its almost solid flank of houseboats, threading our way through a little fleet of pleasure yachts, and at last shooting into the snug harbor of the Boat Club. The good-natured captain of the U. S. Life Saving Station took Pilgrim and her cargo in charge for the night, and by dusk we were bowling over metropolitan pavements _en route_ to the house of our friend--strange contrast, this lap of luxury, to the soldier-like simplicity of our canvas home.

We have been roughing it for so long,--less than a month, although it seems a year,--that all these conveniences of civilization, these social conventionalities, have to us a sort of foreign air. Thus easily may man descend into the savage state.

CHAPTER XVII.

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 pa.s.s 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 ca.n.a.l with locks became necessary--the Louisville and Portland Ca.n.a.l 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 pa.s.s the night just below the ca.n.a.l 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 quant.i.ties 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.e-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 princ.i.p.al 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 princ.i.p.al 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, spa.r.s.ely 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 n.o.body 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 cla.s.s, 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 ash.o.r.e 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, const.i.tuted 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 gra.s.s. 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, gra.s.sy 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 hoa.r.s.e bellow of a pa.s.sing packet, with its legacy of boisterous wake.