By this time it had grown dusk, and he heard, or thought that he heard, the Indians on the other side of the island. The ark had already passed down the rapids and was out of sight; but Gist fancied that the redskins had towed it round to the Virginia side of the island.
After awhile he crawled out to the water on the Ohio side of the island, and made his way through the brushwood up to the head of it. Here he lay all night, in great misery; but early the next morning he saw a skiff with four men coming down the river, and was able to attract their attention.
They took him with them as far as the settlement at the mouth of the Scioto, where a pioneer surgeon laid open the little blue lump on his rib with a hunting-knife, and extracted the Indian bullet.
Three or four weeks later he was able to work his passage back up the river on a Wheeling flatboat, and told the people at home that the ark was captured by the Indians, and that to the best of his knowledge and belief, he, of all her crew, was the sole survivor.
Such endings of the early efforts of commerce and travel on the Ohio were of too frequent occurrence to render the tale incredible; and, although some had their doubts, most of the settlers believed that Gist’s account was but too likely to be true.
Thus far no such overwhelming disaster had befallen the little pioneer settlement at Fish Creek.
In very truth there were sorrow and mourning at every cabin, and especially in those of the Royce and Ayer families. To Milly Ayer and Mary Royce the year 1803 bade fair to be the saddest of their young lives.
But the stout ark all the while was floating bravely on—past the mouth of the Kanawha, where, in 1749, the ambitious Céleron buried his leaden plates, asserting the claim of France to the entire Ohio Valley; past Point Pleasant, where, in 1774, General Lewis and his rangers fought a fierce, indecisive battle all day with the famous Shawnee chief, Cornstalk, and his braves; past the mouth of the Big Sandy, near which a gigantic railroad bridge now spans the broad river; past the Scioto mouth, where Portsmouth, Ohio, then showed only a few scattered cabins; and so onward till, after nine days, they had come to that little town on the beautiful bluffs now known the world over as Cincinnati.
Cincinnati is said to have been christened Losantiville, in 1788, by the first schoolmaster of that region, one John Filson, whom the Indians subsequently scalped. From the depths of his classical erudition Filson manufactured the name to fit the location, namely: L for Licking River, os for mouth of the same, anti for opposite, and ville for town—The-town-opposite-the-mouth-of-the-Licking.
It was customary for arks’ crews to have a “liberty day” at the embryo metropolis, but on this occasion Marion Royce dissuaded his fellows from stopping there longer than was necessary to make sure that there was no trace in the town of Jimmy Claiborne. They tied up for the night to the Kentucky bank, a little below where Covington now stands, and the next day floated down to the mouth of Big Bone Creek.