About three miles below Captina creek we stopped on the left at Mr. Cressop’s fine farm. He was on the plantation overseeing his labourers, but Mrs. Cressop received us politely. She is young and very handsome, and her employments of rocking her infant in its cradle while she exercised her needle, did not diminish any thing of her beauty or respectability. She is sister in law to Mr. Luther Martin, a celebrated lawyer of Baltimore.[80]
Mr. Cressop owns a thousand acres of land here in one body, most of it first rate bottom, his cottage is well furnished, and he has a neat and good garden.
A little lower we passed Woods’s fine island, about a mile long, and stopped just beyond it at Biddle’s tavern on the left, at the conflux of Fish creek[81] and the Ohio, a mile and a half below Cressop’s. Biddle keeps a ferry over Fish creek, which is a fine deep stream, fifty yards wide, running thirty miles through the country, but having no mills on it yet.
Mr. and Mrs. Biddle are kind and hospitable, decent in their manners, and reasonable in their charges. He is a tenant of Mr. Robert Woods, whose house and extensive improvements we had passed at Roland’s ferry near Wheeling.
Biddle pays a rent of one hundred dollars per annum, for which he has a right to cultivate and build wherever he pleases on Woods’s land, Mr. Woods paying him per valuation for the buildings. The house he now resides in cost him six hundred dollars, {100} which he has been repaid. He has cleared and cultivated the land for some distance round the house, and he has ten acres in corn on the island, which contains fifty acres of the first quality of soil above the highest flood marks, the rest being liable to inundation.
At nine o’clock, we landed on the left at John Wells’s, seven miles from Biddle’s. It was a fine night. Eight or nine young men who had been reaping for Wells during the day, were stretched out at their ease on the ground, round the door of the cabin, listening to the vocal performance of one of their comrades, who well merited their attention, from the goodness of his voice, his taste, execution, variety and humour. We enjoyed a rural supper, while listening to the rustick chorister, then resisting our friendly host’s invitation to accept of a bed, and provided with a light and some milk for next morning’s breakfast, we retired to our skiff, threw out a night line to fish, and endeavoured to compose ourselves to sleep under our awning. We were much disturbed throughout the night by gnats and musquitoes, attracted probably by our light, before extinguishing of which, we killed a winged animal of the fly kind, the largest of the species I had ever seen. It was about three inches long, with four gauzy wings, and a most formidable display of forceps on each side the mouth, like those of a scorpion, for which reason it might be named not improperly a winged scorpion, though it is probably not venomous like it.
Wells and his wife are a young couple who removed last spring to this place, from his father’s, an opulent farmer, eighteen miles lower down the river. They are kind and obliging, and better informed than one might expect, from their limited opportunities of acquiring knowledge in so remote a situation. Mrs. Wells, though a delicately formed woman, and with {101} twin boys only six weeks old, both of whom she nurses, seemed neither to have, nor to require any assistance in her domestick employments, yet both plenty and order were observable throughout her cabin. Though we were much incommoded here by musquitoes, yet I must observe, that comparatively with the country to the eastward of the Allegheny mountains, particularly near the sea coast, in the vicinity of salt marshes, we found very few of those troublesome insects, in our descent of the Ohio, and though we occasionally heard the unwelcome hum of a few solitary ones, we never once saw or heard a swarm of them: we were however sometimes at night, when sleeping in our skiff, infested by gnats or sand flies, but not in such numbers as we might have expected on a river in the warmest season of the year.
FOOTNOTES:
[75] For a sketch of Joseph Tomlinson, a well-known pioneer, see Harris’s Journal, vol. iii of this series, p. 360, note 40. The expression “forted” means that he lived within a stockade stronghold until the close of the Indian wars.—Ed.
[76] On the subject of Indian mounds, see for recent scientific conclusions, Lucien Carr, “Mound Builders,” in Smithsonian Institution Report, 1891 (Washington, 1893), pp. 503-599; also American Bureau of Ethnology 12th Annual Report (Washington, 1894).—Ed.