Edward Eggleston's Favorite Spring at Vevay
A STEAMBOAT'S paddles churned the Ohio backwater as she strove to make a landing at Vevay, coming down.
Everybody on ships and on shore rushed for places to get a view of her. Plainly her name showed on her sides, the New Orleans. A queer little vessel was she. Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steam-engine, had himself designed and built her. She was the second steam craft in the whole wide world, and the first on Western waters.
Several others had been set afloat in the four years since she had made her initial trip, but she was still certain to have a crowd of cheering admirers whenever she chose to show off her great accomplishment of going up-stream against the current.
For two months he had been a river-traveler, and, therefore, Obadiah Holman knew that she could puff away as soon as she cared to do so, no matter if the landlubbers did use hot arguments to prove that, "It stands to reason that she cain't never go ag'in natur'."
The boy hung over the side of his father's flatboat and watched the people who were watching the steamer. "I've seen a lot of towns," thought he, "but never any as quiet as this."
There was something in the changing sky above the misty blue hills, something in the deep water which reflected the sky and the hills, something in the long vistas and the fragrant air, that may have reminded a little band of Swiss colonists of their native mountain-land. They loved this place as soon as they saw it and settled here.
Log cabins were built somewhat like the cottages which the herdsmen of Switzerland set up among the Alps. Tiny chalets they were, and they were perched on the prettiest heights above the river and the valley so that the beauty-loving Swiss might have the finest views.
"Oh, sleepy little town! how enchanting you are!" The boy inhaled the breeze. "It smells delicious." He scanned the acres of good bottom-land between Indian and Plum creeks and took in the terraced hillsides. Everywhere were stakes and trellises. "Ha! Grapes are in bloom. That's what I smell. They are raising grapes."
He eagerly studied out the plan of the vineyards and the fields. It interested him, this art which the Swiss had brought with them to the banks of the Ohio. It would have been even more interesting could he have foreseen that the grape culture begun by John Francis Dufour and his brother John James Dufour in this valley was to spread up and down the river and along the Great Lakes and become one of the sources of the wealth of the Middle West.