An old Indian trace, now the post road from Louisville to Vincennes, crosses it at twenty-five miles from its mouth.
The distance from the governour’s mills to Vincennes, is about one hundred miles.
After leaving Blue river we went sixteen miles without any settlement, and then passed a small one on the left. The river having narrowed in that distance to less than a quarter of a mile wide, and very crooked, with gently sloping hills rising from the banks. Ten miles lower, on the left, we came to the next settlement just began, and three miles further passed Flint island, one mile long, with the hull of a small ship on the upper end, stranded there in descending last winter from Marietta.
When about three miles below Flint island, the wind blowing very fresh ahead and causing a good deal of sea, we stopped on the right shore abreast of Wheatly’s cabin, and moored. Wheatly comes from Redstone in Pennsylvania, and first lived on the opposite bank in Kentucky, where he owned one thousand acres of land, which he was obliged to part with from following boating and neglecting farming. He has now three hundred and forty acres here, from six of which that he has cleared, he raised last year five hundred bushels of corn. He told us that a small tribe of Miami Indians were encamped on Oil creek about two miles distant. On asking if they were troublesome, he replied with much sang froid, still splitting his log, “We never permit them to be troublesome, for if any of them displease us, we take them out of doors and kick them a little, for they are like dogs, and so will love you the better for it.” This doctrine might suit an athletick, active man, {239} upwards of six feet high and in the prime of life, like Wheatly, but I question whether the Indians would submit to it from people less powerful. He informed us, that they frequently get the Indians together, take their guns, knives and tomahawks from them, then treat them with whiskey until they are drunk, when they set them by the ears, to have the pleasure of seeing them fight, at which they are so awkward (like young bears, according to his phrase) that they scuffle for hours without drawing blood, and when their breath is exhausted they will sit down quietly to recruit, and then “up and at it again.”
We picked some fine wild greens (lamb’s quarters) and got some milk, and next morning,
May 14th, proceeded. At eight miles below we passed some good settlements on the right, and a ferry, from whence a trace is opened seventy-five miles, to Vincennes. Leaving Sinking creek on the right, and a large double log cabin and very fine settlement on the left, ten miles more brought us to squire Tobin’s on the Indiana side, where we landed in the skiff. The squire has opened a fine farm in the three years he has been from Redstone, Pennsylvania.
A keel of forty tons came to the landing at the same time we did. She was worked by a horizontal wheel, kept in motion by six horses going round in a circle on a gallery above the boat, by which are turned two cog wheels fixed each to an axle which projects over both gunwales of the boat, one before and the other behind the horizontal wheel. Eight paddles are fixed on the projecting end of each axle, which impel the boat about five or six miles an hour, so that she can be forced against the current about twenty miles a day. One Brookfield, the owner, who conducts the boat, had her built last year about two miles above Louisville, in Kentucky, and then went in her to New Orleans, from whence he was now {240} returning, disposing of a cargo of sugar from place to place in his ascent. He expected to get home and to commence a second voyage in about a month. Seven horses had died during the voyage, and he had only two remaining of the first set he had commenced with.
FOOTNOTES:
[172] For the early history of Vincennes, see Croghan’s Journals, vol. i of this series, p. 141, note 113.—Ed.
[173] The career of William Henry Harrison, ninth president of the United States, belongs to general history. Harrison was appointed governor of Indiana Territory upon its erection in 1800, and took much interest in its development. While making his home at Vincennes, he became interested in the Blue River settlement, which was begun about 1802 by Squire Boone (brother of Daniel) and his son Moses. The settlement and Harrison’s mills were at a place now called Wilson’s Springs in Harrison County, Indiana.—Ed.