I also learned that he had written a confession of his crimes, the manuscript of which was then in the jail, for he had knocked the keeper down with a stone ink-stand, with which he had been furnished to write his confession.
By the politeness of the jailor I was permitted to examine the confession, which closed with these remarkable words,
“To-morrow is the day appointed for my execution, but I will not hang.”
The confession was afterward published. I read it many times, but have forgotten most of it. I remember he said the first man he ever murdered was in Europe, and that he was compelled, for safety, to flee the country and come to America. There was nothing so unusual in this, but the manner in which he disposed of his victim was singular, and more particularly the revelation he gave of his thoughts at the time.
He said he carried the body to a graveyard, and, with a spade that had been left there, he shoveled all of the dirt out of a newly-made grave until he came to the coffin. He then laid the body of the murdered man on the coffin and refilled the grave. “I then,” says he, “left the graveyard, and spent the balance of the night in reflections. How strange, I thought, it would be for two spirits, on the last day, to find themselves in the same grave.”
“I thought,” says he, “if the relatives of the rightful owner of the grave should, in after years, conclude to move the bones of their kinsman, when they dug them up there would be two skulls, four arms, and so on, and how it would puzzle them to get the bones of their kinsman.”
After reading this confession I regretted very much that I had never seen Alonzo Phelps while living, for there was blended in his composition many strange elements. But that part of his confession that gives interest to our story was the papers taken from the man he murdered in Europe, of which we have spoken. He concealed the papers, in a certain place, on the night he buried the man, and, as he was compelled to flee the country, said papers were, a long time afterward, discovered by reading his confession made in America.
With the settlement of the West, the navigation of the western waters was one of the principal industries. Keel and flat bottom boats were the first used. Keel boats were propelled against the stream with long poles, placed with one end on the bottom of the stream and a man's shoulder at the other end, pushing the boat from under him, and consequently against the stream. Flat bottom boats only drifted with the current, sometimes bearing large cargoes.
Louisville, Kentucky, was one of the principal points between Pittsburg and New Orleans. Here the placid waters of the beautiful river rushed madly over some ledges of rocks, called the falls of Ohio. Many reshipments in an early day were performed at this point, and if the boat was taken over the falls her pilot for the trip to New Orleans was not considered competent to navigate the falls. Resident pilots, in Louisville, were always employed to perform this task.
And few of the early boatmen were ever long upon the river without having acquaintances in Louisville.