CHAPTER VI.
The Big Grave—Washington, and Round Bottom—A lazy man's Paradise—Captina Creek—George Rogers Clark at Fish Creek—Southern types.
Near Fishing Creek, Friday, May 11th.—There had been rain during the night, with fierce wind gusts, but during breakfast the atmosphere quieted, and we had a genial, semi-cloudy morning.
Off at 8 o'clock, Pilgrim's crew were soon exploring Moundsville. There are five thousand people in this old, faded, countrified town. They show you with pride the State Penitentiary of West Virginia, a solemn-looking pile of dark gray stone, with the feeble battlements and towers common to American prison architecture. But the chief feature of the place is the great Indian mound—the "Big Grave" of early chroniclers. This earthwork is one of the largest now remaining in the United States, being sixty-eight feet high and a hundred in diameter at the base, and has for over a century attracted the attention of travelers and archæologists.
We found it at the end of a straggling street, on the edge of the town, a quarter of a mile back from the river. Around the mound has been left a narrow plat of ground, utilized as a cornfield; and the stout picket fence which encloses it bears peremptory notice that admission is forbidden. However, as the proprietor was not easily accessible, we exercised the privilege of historical pilgrims, and, letting ourselves in through the gate, picked our way through rows of corn, and ascended the great cone. It is covered with a heavy growth of white oaks, some of them three feet in diameter, among which the path picturesquely zigzags. The summit is fifty-five feet in diameter, and the center somewhat depressed, like a basin. From the middle of this basin a shaft some twenty-five feet in diameter has been sunk by explorers, for a distance of perhaps fifty feet; at one time, a level tunnel connected the bottom of this shaft with the side of the cone, but it has been mostly obliterated. A score of years ago, tunnel and shaft were utilized as the leading attractions of a beer garden—to such base uses may a great historical landmark descend!
Dickens, who apparently wrote the greater part of his American Notes while suffering from dyspepsia, has a note of appreciation for the Big Grave: "... the host of Indians who lie buried in a great mound yonder—so old that mighty oaks and other forest trees have struck their roots into its earth; and so high that it is a hill, even among the hills that Nature planted around it. The very river, as though it shared one's feelings of compassion for the extinct tribes who lived so pleasantly here, in their blessed ignorance of white existence, hundreds of years ago, steals out of its way to ripple near this mound; and there are few places where the Ohio sparkles more brightly than in the Big Grave Creek."
There is a sharp bend in the river, just below Moundsville, with Dillon's Bottom stretching long and wide at the apex on the Ohio shore—flat green fields, dotted with little white farmsteads, each set low in its apple grove, and a convoluted wall of dark hills hemming them in along the northern horizon. Then below this comes Round Bottom, its counterpart on the West Virginia side, and coursing through it a pretty meadow creek, Butler's Run.
Writes Washington, in 1781, to a correspondent who is thinking of renting lands in this region: "I have a small tract called the round bottom containing about 600 Acres, which would also let. It lyes on the Ohio, opposite to pipe Creek, and a little above Capteening." Across the half mile of river are the little levels and great slopes of the Ohio hills, through which breaks this same Pipe Creek; and hereabout Cresap's band murdered a number of inoffensive Shawanese, a tragedy which was one of the inciting causes of Lord Dunmore's War (1774).
We crossed over into Ohio, and pulled up on the gravelly spit at the mouth of Pipe. While the others were botanizing high on the mountain side, I went along a beach path toward a group of whitewashed cabins, intent on replenishing the canteen. Upon opening the gate of one of them, two grizzly dogs came bounding out, threatening to test the strength of my corduroy trousers. The proprietor cautiously peered from a window, and, much to my relief, called off the animals. Satisfied, apparently, that I was not the visitor he expected, the fellow lounged out and sat upon the steps, where I joined him. He was a tall, raw-boned, loose-jointed young man, with a dirty, buttonless flannel shirt which revealed a hairy breast; upon his trousers hung a variety of patches, in many stages of grease and decrepitude; a gray slouch hat shaded his little fishy eyes and hollow, yellow cheeks; and the snaky ends of his yellow mustache were stiff with accumulations of dried tobacco juice. His fat, waddling wife, in a greasy black gown, followed with bare feet, and, arms akimbo, listened in the open door.
A coal company owns the rocky river front, here and at many places below, and lets these cabins to the poor-white element, so numerous on the Ohio's banks. The renter is privileged to cultivate whatever land he can clear on the rocky, precipitous slopes, which is seldom more than half an acre to the cabin; and he may, if he can afford a cow, let her run wild in the scrub. The coal vein, a few rods back of the house, is only a few inches thick, and poor in quality, but is freely resorted to by the cotters. He worked whenever he could find a job, my host said—in the coal mines and quarries, or on the bottom farms, or the railroad which skirts the bank at his feet.
"But I tell ye, sir, th' Italians and Hungarians is spoil'n' this yere country fur white men; 'n' I do'n' see no prospect for hits be'n' better till they get shoved out uv 't!" Yet he said that life wasn't so hard here as it was in some parts he had heard tell of—the climate was mild, that he "'lowed;" a fellow could go out and get a free bucket of coal from the hillside "back yon;" he might get all the "light wood 'n' patchin' stuff" he wanted, from the river drift; could, when he "hankered after 'em," catch fish off his own front-door yard; and pick up a dollar now and then at odd jobs, when the rent was to be paid, or the "ol' woman" wanted a dress, or he a new coat.
This is clearly the lazy man's Paradise. I do not remember to have heard that the South Sea Islanders, in the ante-missionary days, had an easier time of it than this. What new fortune will befall my friend when he gets the Italians and Hungarians "shoved out," and "things pick up a bit," I cannot conceive.
A pleasing panorama he has from his doorway—across the river, the fertile fields of Round Bottom, once Washington's; Captina Island, just below, long and thickly-willowed, dreamily afloat in a glassy sea, reflecting every change of light; the whole girt about with the wide uplands of the winding valley, and overhead the march of sunny clouds.
Captina Creek (108 miles) is not far down on the Ohio bank, and beside it the little hamlet of Powhattan Point, with the West Virginia hills thereabout exceptionally high and steep, and wooded to the very top. Washington, who knew the Ohio well, down to the Great Kanawha, wrote of this creek in 1770: "A pretty large creek on the west side, called by Nicholson [his interpreter] Fox-Grape-Vine, by others Captema creek, on which, eight miles up, is the town called Grape-Vine Town." Captina village is its white successor. But there were also Indians at the mouth of the creek; for when George Rogers Clark and his missionary companion, Jones, two years later camped opposite on the Virginia shore, they went over to make a morning call on the natives, who repaid it in the evening, doubtless each time receiving freely from the white men's bounty.
The next day was Sunday, and the travelers remained in camp, Jones recording in his journal that he "instructed what Indians came over." In the course of his prayer, the missionary was particularly impressed by the attitude of the chief of Grape-Vine Town, named Frank Stephens, who professed to believe in the Christian God; and he naively writes, "I was informed that, all the time, the Indians looked very seriously at me." Jones appears to have been impressed also with the hardness of the beach, where they camped in the open, doubtless to avoid surprises: "Instead of feathers, my bed was gravel-stones, by the river side ... which at first seemed not to suit me, but afterward it became more natural."
In those days, traveling was beset with difficulties, both ashore and afloat. Eight years later (spring of 1780), three flatboats were descending the Ohio, laden with families intending to settle in Kentucky, when they suffered a common fate, being attacked by Indians off Captina Creek. Several men and a child were killed, and twenty-one persons were carried into captivity—among them, Catherine Malott, a girl in her teens, who subsequently became the wife of that most notorious of border renegades, Simon Girty.
On the West Virginia shore, not over a third of a mile below Captina Creek, empties Grave Yard Run, a modest rivulet. It would of itself not be noticeable amid the crowd of minor creeks and runs, coursing down to the great river through rugged ravines which corrugate the banks. But it has a history. Here, late in October or early in November, 1772, young George Rogers Clark made his first stake west of the Alleghanies, rudely cultivating a few acres of forest land on what is now called Cresap's Bottom, surveying for the neighbors, and in the evenings teaching their children in the little log cabin of his friend, Yates Conwell, at the mouth of Fish Creek, a few miles below. Fish Creek was in itself famous as one of the sections of the great Indian trail, "The Warrior Branch," which, starting in Tennessee, came northward through Kentucky and Southern Ohio, and, proceeding by way of this creek, crossed over to Dunkard Creek, thence to the mouth of Redstone. Washington stopped at Conwell's in March or April, 1774; but Clark was away from home at the time, and the "Father of his Country" never met the man who has been dubbed the "Washington of the West." Lord Dunmore's War was hatching, and a few months later the Fish Creek surveyor and schoolmaster had entered upon his life work as an Indian fighter.
At Bearsville (126 miles) we first meet a phenomenon common to the Ohio—the edges of the alluvial bottom being higher than the fields back of them, forming a natural levee, above which curiously rise to our view the spires and chimneys of the village. Harris' Journal (1803) made early note of this, and advanced an acceptable theory: "We frequently remarked that the banks are higher at the margin than at a little distance back. I account for it in this manner: Large trees, which are brought down the river by the inundations, are lodged upon the borders of the bank, but cannot be floated far upon the champaign, because obstructed by the growth of wood. Retaining their situation when the waters subside, they obstruct and detain the leaves and mud, which would else recoil into the stream, and thus, in process of time, form a bank higher than the interior flats."
Tied up to Bearsville landing is a gayly painted barge, the home of Price's Floating Opera Company, and in front its towing-steamer, "Troubadour." A steam calliope is part of the visible furniture of the establishment, and its praises as a noise-maker are sung in large type in the handbills which, with numerous colored lithographs of the performers, adorn the shop windows in the neighboring river towns.
Two miles farther down, on a high bank at the mouth of Fishing Creek, lies New Martinsville, West Va. (127 miles), a rather shabby town of fifteen hundred souls. As W—— and I passed up the main street, seeking for a grocery, we noticed that the public hall was being decorated for a dance to come off to-night; and placards advertising the event were everywhere rivaling the gaudy prints of the floating opera.
Meanwhile, a talkative native was interviewing the Doctor, down at the river side. It required some good-natured fencing on the part of our skipper to prevent the Virginian from learning all about our respective families away back to the third generation. He was a short, chubby man, with a Dixie goatee, his flannel shirt negligée, and a wide-brimmed straw hat jauntily set on the back of his head. He was sociable, and sat astride of our beached prow, punctuating his remarks with squirts of tobacco juice, and a bit of lath with which he meditatively tapped the gunwale, the meantime, with some skill, casting pebbles into the water with his bare toes. "Ax'n yer pardon, ma'm!" he said, scrambling from his perch upon W——'s appearance; and then, pushing us off, he bowed with much Southern gallantry, and hat in hand begged we would come again to New Martinsville, and stay longer.
The hills lining these reaches are lower than above, yet graceful in their sweeping lines. Conical mounds sometimes surmount them, relics of the prehistoric time when our Indians held to the curious fashion of building earthworks. We no longer entertain the notion that a separate and a prouder race of wild men than we know erected these tumuli. That pleasant fiction has departed from us; but the works are none the less interesting, now that more is known of their origin.
Two miles below New Martinsville, on the West Virginia shore, we pitch camp, just as the light begins to sink over the Ohio hills. The atmosphere is sweet with the odor of wild grape blossoms, and the willow also is in bloom. Poison ivy, to whose baneful touch fortunately none of us appear susceptible, grows everywhere about. From the farmhouse on the narrow bottom to our rear comes the melodious tinkle-tinkle of cow bells. The operatic calliope is in full blast, at Bearsville, its shrieks and snorts coming down to us through four miles of space, all too plainly borne by the northern breeze; and now and then we hear the squeak of the New Martinsville fiddles. There are no mosquitoes as yet, but burly May-chafers come stupidly dashing against our tent, and the toads are piping merrily.