Two miles above the fall, the stream breaks into its two chief confluents—the New River and the Gauley. Hawk's Nest, near their junction, is a peculiarly romantic spot. In its vicinity our command halted. It was far from its base, and Wise ran too fast for capture. We had five thousand troops, who were ill-disciplined and discontented. General Cox was then fresh from the Ohio Senate. After more field experience, he became an excellent officer.
A Tragedy of Slavery.
When I returned through the valley, I found Charleston greatly excited. A docile and intelligent mulatto slave, of thirty years, had never been struck in his life. But, on the way to a hayfield, his new overseer began to crack his whip over the shoulders of the gang, to hurry them forward. The mulatto shook his head a little defiantly, when the whip was laid heavily across his back. Turning instantly upon the driver, he smote him with his hayfork, knocking him from his horse, and laying the skull bare. The overseer, a large, athletic man, drew his revolver; but, before he could use it, the agile mulatto wrenched it away, and fired two shots at his head, which instantly killed him. Taking the weapon, the slave fled to the mountains, whence he escaped to the Ohio line.
St. Louis, August 19, 1861.
In the days of stage-coaches, the trip from Cincinnati to St. Louis was a very melancholy experience; in the days of steamboats, a very tedious one. Now, you leave Cincinnati on a summer evening; and the placid valley of the Ohio—the almost countless cornfields of the Great Miami (one of them containing fifteen hundred acres), where the exhaustless soil has produced that staple abundantly for fifty years—the grave and old home of General Harrison, at North Bend—the dense forests of Indiana—the Wabash Valley, that elysium of chills and fever, where pumpkins are "fruit," and hoop-poles "timber"—the dead-level prairies of Illinois, with their oceans of corn, tufts of wood, and painfully white villages—the muddy Mississippi, "All-the-Waters," as one Indian tribe used to call it—are unrolled in panorama, till, at early morning, St. Louis, hot and parched with the journey, holds out her dusty hands to greet you.
The Future of St. Louis.
No inland city ever held such a position as this. Here is the heart of the unequaled valley, which extends from the Rocky Mountains to the Alleghanies, and from the great lakes to the Gulf. Here is the mighty river, which drains a region six times greater than the empire of France, and bears on its bosom the waters of fifty-seven navigable streams. Even the rude savage called it the "Father of Waters," and early Spanish explorers reverentially named it the "River of the Holy Ghost."
St. Louis, "with its thriving young heart, and its old French limbs," is to be the New York of the interior. The child is living who will see it the second city on the American continent.
Three Rebel newspapers have recently been suppressed. The editor of one applied to the provost-marshal for permission to resume, but declined to give a pledge that no disloyal sentiment should appear in its columns. He was very tender of the Constitution, and solicitous about "the rights of the citizen." The marshal replied:
"I cannot discuss these matters with you. I am a soldier, and obey orders."