CHAPTER XIV.
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 coöperate 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.