We had passed a small island of about three acres, called Cow island, separated from Neville’s or Long island by a channel of one hundred and fifty yards. This latter takes its name of Long from its extending six miles down the river from opposite Baldwin’s mill, it is narrow, but its soil being of the first quality, it might be divided into several good farms; there is however but one on it as yet, cultivated for the proprietor, major Craig of Pittsburgh, who has on the middle of the island a large but very plain wooden farm house of two stories, and about sixty feet long.[52]
We here overtook a covered flat, with two families of the name of Frazey, migrating from the neighbourhood of Elizabethtown in New Jersey, to Cincinnatti in Ohio. They had embarked at Redstone on the Monongahela.[53] The father of one of the families was dangerously ill with a nervous fever and deranged in his intellects.
Hog island on the left just below Neville’s island, is very small, and immediately below it also on the left we passed Middletown, lately laid out, containing ten houses including barns, and opposite to it, a Mr. White’s finely situated house.
From a point two miles below Middletown, the river opening gradually into a long reach, has a fine effect to the eye. A little below the point, a charmingly situated farm on the right exciting our inquiry, {80} we were informed that it was squire Ways. The squire however, was badly lodged, if he had no better house than the small log hovel we saw on the bank. Deadman’s island a little below is small, covered with aquatick shrubs and plants, and so low, that it must always be inundated in moderate risings of the river, which is not here more than a hundred and fifty yards wide, and in general not exceeding two hundred. The banks on each side abound with partridges whose responsive calls are continually heard, interrupted by the buzz of multitudes of large horse flies, which probably attracted by the odour of our provisions, seemed much more pleased with our boat than we were with them.
Eight miles below Middletown, we passed Logstown on the left: This is a scattering hamlet, of four or five log cabins, in the neighbourhood of which, on the opposite side of the river, a considerable tribe of Indians resided, until after the reduction of Fort Du Quesne, now Pittsburgh, by general Forbes in 1758.[54]
From Logstown a mile and a half to Crow’s island which is small, the banks are very pleasant, rising gradually from the water’s edge, and having a fine bottom on the right. Here we met two large keel boats loaded with cotton in bales, from Nashville in Tennessee bound to Pittsburgh, out twenty-six days. They had nine men in each—one steering, six poling, and two resting.
Half a mile from hence on the right, is a good log house with a sign of a white horse, kept by James Knox; in passing, it, a young woman answered several questions we asked her very civilly; which I mention as a rare circumstance, as the inhabitants of the banks of the Ohio, have too generally acquired a habit, of either not deigning an answer to the interrogatories of the numerous river travellers, or of giving them a short and boorish one, or of turning {81} their questions into ridicule; which proceeds from the impertinent manner in which they are generally hailed and addressed by the people in the boats.
Two miles lower we passed a good house and a saw mill in a beautiful rural situation on the left bank, and here we met a decent looking man, polling a skiff against the current: He was going to Pittsburgh and had come upwards of twenty miles since morning.
At half past four in the afternoon we were abreast of Big Beaver creek or river on the right, five miles below the saw mill. It empties through a level, and is about fifty yards wide at its mouth, with a gentle current.
Some boys on the beach mischievously misinformed us respecting the proper landing, to the town of Beaver, which is but a little way beyond the creek, instead of which we rowed a mile lower down, and then had to set our skiff across a bar, which extends above a mile in front of the right bank. After landing, we had to climb a precipice to a log cabin, on the top and edge of the cliff, near two hundred feet above the surface of the river: Here we got directions for our path, and after a walk of half a mile, we reached the town of Beaver.