CHAPTER VII
THE CAVE ROBBERS
On the same morning that Moses Ayer shot the “gobbler,” Marion Royce and his men came down from Big Bone Lick with their four sled loads of mammoth bones. The ark, however, was blockaded for a week by the dense pack or raft of driftwood, which had set back from the Ohio into the creek mouth.
As long as the river continued to rise, the drift pack was forced back into the slack water with an increasing pressure which defied the efforts of the crew to open a passage through it. On the eighth night, however, the “fresh,” as rivermen term rising water, slackened and fell a few inches, when immediately, as from a magic touch, the densely jammed pack loosened and began floating out into the river.
By dint of poling hard the men got out of the Big Bone early on the morning of the ninth day, and resumed their voyage. That afternoon they passed Vevay, where newly arrived Swiss settlers were beginning to erect log houses and clear land for vineyards.
A bright moon enabled them to go on that evening, and early in the night they passed the mouth of the Kentucky. By the next noon Sand Island was sighted, and here Captain Royce tied up to take a look at the rapid water ahead; for the ark had reached the “Falls of the Ohio,” now made easy for ascending steamers by the canal.
La Salle, the famous early explorer of Western rivers, is said to have been here in 1669, and tradition tells of various efforts to maintain forts and found a settlement here during the tumultuous eighteenth century warfare. In May of 1778, George Rogers Clark was here and built a log blockhouse on Corn Island, in the midst of the rapids. But even as late as 1803 only a few scattered houses could be discerned alongshore from the river.
The falls here are the only real obstruction to navigation on the Ohio, and like most of the so-called “falls” of Western rivers, are more formidable in name than in reality. At low water the rapids are dangerous to inexperienced boatmen, but when the Ohio is in flood, hardly a ripple breaks the swift current.
After a cautious look ahead, Captain Royce double-manned the sweeps and ran the quick water without other incident than an acceleration of the ark’s progress.