It was in April, late one Saturday evening, the steamboat “Red Stone” blew up sixty-five miles above Louisville, while landing on the Kentucky shore; the boat burned to the water edge, and many lives were lost. Men returning from the South, to the homes of their nativity, were consigned to the placid waters of the Ohio for a resting place, others were mangled and torn, left to eke out a weary life, without some of their limbs. The scene upon the shore was heart-rendering above description. The body of one poor man was picked up one-quarter of a mile from the boat, in a corn field, every bone in his body was broken, and its fall to the earth made a hole in the ground, eighteen inches deep. How high he went in the air can only be conjectured, but we may safely say it was out of sight. Several were seen to fall in the middle of the river, who never reached the shore. The dead and dying were gathered up and carried to the houses nearest at hand. The inhabitants of the shore had gathered for three miles up and down the river—all classes and ages were seen pulling pieces of the wreck and struggling persons to the shore= Two girls or half-grown women passed by me walking slowly upon the pebbled shore, gazing into the water, when some distance from me, I saw one of them rush into the water up to her arm-pits and drag something to the shore. I hastened to the spot, and the girls passed on toward the wreck. Several men were carrying the apparently lifeless body of a man upon a board in the direction of the half-way castle, a place of deposit for the dead and dying. His identity was ascertained by some papers taken from his pocket, it was—Don Carlo—the “Hero of Shirt-Tail Bend.”
SCENE THIRD—THE SEPARATED SISTERS.
On the stream of human nature's blood,
Are ups and downs in every shape and form,
Some sail gently on a rising flood,
And some are wrecked in a tearful storm.
Tom Fairfield was descended from one of the best families in Virginia. Yet he was animated by what we may call a restless spirit. He ran away from home at twelve years of age, and came to Kentucky with a family of emigrants, who settled near Boone Station, in 1791. Kentucky, until after Wayne's treaty, in 1795, was continually exposed to incursions from the Indians; yet, before Tom's day of manhood, the bloody contest between the white and the red men had terminated on the virgin soil of the new-born State—Kentucky was admitted into the Union in 1792. Yet the heroic struggles with the Indians by the early settlers were fresh in the memories of all. Prior to the settlement of Kentucky by white men, the Southern and Northwestern tribes of Indians were in the habit of hunting here as upon neutral ground. No wigwam had been erected, but it was claimed by all as a hunting ground. The frequent and fierce conflicts that occurred upon the meeting of the Indian tribes, together with conflicts with white men, caused the Indians first to call Kentucky “The dark and bloody ground.” At no point on the American Continent had the hatred between the two races risen to a higher point. Long after the peace between England and America, and the close of the war of American Independence, the conflict between the white and red men in Kentucky was a war of extermination. The quiet cabin of the white man was frequently entered, under cover of night, by some roving band of Indians, and women and children tomahawked in cold blood. White men when taken by them, whether in the field at work, or behind a tree, watching their opportunity to shoot an Indian, were taken off to their towns in Ohio and burned at the stake, or tortured to death in a most cruel manner. No wonder the early settler in Kentucky swore eternal vengeance against the Indian who crossed his path, whether in peace or war. In a land where the white woman has cleaved the skull of the red warrior with an ax, who attempted to enter her cabin rifle in hand, from whence all but her had fled—who shall refuse to remember the heroines of the early settlers, and the historic name of the dark and bloody ground.
When Tom Fairfield arrived at manhood, the golden wing of peace was spread over the new-born State, from the Cumberland Mountains to the Ohio river.