New Albany was built below the Falls on the rich alluvial bottom-land, and, alas! also within reach of the river freshets.
"She reminds me," Doby had thought at first sight of her, "of a pretty girl shaking in her shoes for fear the water will come up and wet her feet. About every other year she gets a soaking. When the river goes down she keeps on shaking with chills 'n' fever from the ague vapors that the floods leave behind. It is the price she has to pay for the big crops the bottom-land gives her."
If Doby ever came to be seized with the dreaded chills 'n' fever—the great scourge of all new countries—the one malady the pioneers were sure to catch from the miasma of newly opened ground, he would never again speak lightly of it.
When two settlers met, the most important greeting was, "Ketched the agur yit?" The dismal head-shaking which the one who had had it gave, struck such apprehension into the heart of the one who had not had it, that he really could not enjoy the perfect health of the moment for the dread of that future hour when "the shakes would git 'im sure."
The circuit-riding preachers who ministered to the souls of these river people carried ample saddle-bags. In those saddle-bags was an endless collection of "yarbs" and powders and bottles, which the preachers carried to comfort the bodies of their hearers.
The pioneer doctor of divinity was "called" to preach, not by the financial head of his congregation, but by the voice of the Lord. He would not accept worldly money for spiritual service. But for the herbs he gathered and brewed and the bitter concoctions he made, he expected to be paid. On the sale of them he lived.
Some emigrants avoided the river. In the beautiful hills above the falls, higher still than Jeffersonville, were tiny hamlets of Old World folk, Irish, Swiss, German, and French, still wearing their native peasant costumes.
All these places gave shelter and staple foods to the emigrants. In return they accepted salt, tobacco, sugar, steel tools, and the small luxuries of the river like packets of mail and newspapers and almanacs.
Doby liked the people. "But whenever we come to a town, then ma begins to wash me," he sighed. "I don't see why. My hands are hardly dirty at all. Brooks are good enough tubs for me. I do not need so much soap. That towel is ma's. I know that towel whatever town I see it in. 'Tis so scratchy that it skins the curlicues in my ears." He eyed the instruments of torture askance.
He had to draw on his stock of courage to prepare himself for the ordeal by thinking, "I do want to go to meeting and I can't go unless I'm washed according to ma's ideas."