A little below judge Boon’s we were hailed by a man on the Ohio shore. We landed and found him to be a Mr. White, who had put a box of medicines into our boat at Marietta, for doctor Merrit, and having travelled on horseback had arrived here before us.
We now delivered it to White, who, hearing A—— call me Doctor, he requested me to stop and visit a Mr. Hunt, who with two of his men and his housekeeper, were suffering under a most severe epidemick malady, which was then raging in and about French Grant, and which doctor Merrit, the only medical man in the settlement, had been attacked with yesterday. Prompted by humanity, we walked to the cabin occupied by Mr. Hunt’s family, where we beheld a truly distressing scene. In an Indian grass hammock, lay Mr. Hunt, in a desperate and hopeless stage of the yellow fever; his skin and eyes of a deep yellow, and he in a state of apparent stupor, but still sensible. His housekeeper, looking almost as ill, and groaning piteously, on a bed near him. One of his men seated on a chair, in a {138} feeble state of convalescence; and another standing by almost recovered, but still looking wretchedly. On the floor were travelling trunks, cases, books, furniture, and house utensils, promiscuously jumbled together, but all clean, as was the cabin itself.
I could not help contrasting in my mind Mr. Hunt’s present situation, at so great a distance from his connexions, from cultivated society, and from medical aid, with what it was, when he represented his native state of New Hampshire in congress, or during his travels in Europe. Such are some of the hardships and inconveniences attending the first settlers in a new country.[105]
After approving what doctor Merrit had prescribed, and recommending a continuance of his regimen and advice, which consisted of alterative catharticks followed by tonicks, we took our leave, impressed with the opinion that Mr. Hunt had but a few hours longer of existence, which also seemed to be his own opinion, as when I addressed a few cheering words to him, he only answered by shaking his head and closing his eyes. I supposed the rest of the family would recover. White is an intelligent man, and makes a trade of sinking wells, of which he has sunk a very fine one, of forty-five feet deep for Mr. Hunt, near a good two story house almost finished.
French Grant contains twenty-four thousand acres, given by the United States to some French settlers, who had been disappointed in the titles of their purchases at Galliopolis, amongst whom a Mons. Gervais[106] had for his part four thousand acres, on which he planned a town, which he named Burrsburgh, in honour of the then vice president: but after passing ten solitary years in a small log cabin, with no society except that of his dog and cat, during which time he employed himself in cultivating his little garden, he last year sold his whole tract to Mr. Hunt, except two hundred and seventeen acres, given by him to an {139} agent in Philadelphia, as a recompence for his having enabled him to fulfil the engagement to government by which he held the land. He now lives in Galliopolis, and Mr. Hunt has changed the intended Burrsburgh into a farm.
On our walk to the boat I gave White some directions for himself as preventive to the prevailing disorder, for which he thanked me, and asked our charge for the freight of doctor Merrit’s box in such a manner as to preclude the possibility of making any.
We then crossed the river at Greenupsburgh, the seat of justice of Greenup county, in Kentucky. It is laid out for a town within the last year, but it contains as yet only one dwelling house, occupied by one Lyons as a tavern, where the courts are held; immediately in the rear of which is a strong and wretched dungeon of double logs, called the gaol, with a pillory between. Little Sandy river, about seventy yards wide, flows into the Ohio just below Greenupsburgh.
It was almost dark when we landed at Lyons’s. We ordered supper, during the preparation of which Mrs. Lyons requested my advice for her husband, who had been seized that morning by the prevailing fever. I wrote a prescription for him secundum artem, which I thought fully equivalent to our supper, but as she gave us no credit for it in our bill, she probably supposed that a travelling doctor ought to prescribe gratis.
We had an excellent supper of tea, nice broiled chickens, and fine biscuit, to which travelling and rowing gave us good appetite, notwithstanding we saw our landlady take the table cloth from under her sick husband’s bed clothes. After this let not the delicate town bred man affect disgust at the calls of nature being satisfied in a manner he is unused to, as {140} in a similar situation, I will venture to assert, he would do as we did.
After supper, we dropped down the stream about a mile, then anchored with a stone at the end of a rope, at a little distance from the shore, and went to sleep.