On the road we met a Mr. Ball and another man, both armed, going in search of four negro slaves, who had ran away from him, and two of his neighbours near Boonsborough,[116] seven had ran away, but three had been apprehended that morning.
We saw from the eminences on the road, the smoke of the salt furnaces, when three miles distant from them.
{154} In fording the Licking, which is a fine river about eighty yards wide, we kept rather too high, and got into such deep water that mine had to swim some yards, while A——, who was behind me took advantage of my mistake, and kept lower down, so that his horse was only up to the saddle skirts.
Some negro salt labourers on the bank, mischievously beckoned and called to us towards them, enjoying our embarrassment, but taking care to get out of sight when we got firm footing on the same side of the river with them.
We found Mrs. Williams an obliging hostess, and her sister Miss Howard, a very agreeable woman; they favoured us with their company at supper, and were both much better bred, and better informed than most of the tavern ladies we had seen since we left Pittsburgh.
There were some other ladies and some children in the house from Washington, who were here for the benefit of drinking the waters of the salt spring, which are esteemed efficacious in some disorders. They are frequented by people from different parts of the state, as both a cure and antidote for every disorder incident to the human frame. I believe them to be perfectly neutral: They are impregnated with sulphur, and smell and taste exactly like the bilge water in a ship’s hold, of course they are very nauseous. They act sometimes as a cathartick, and sometimes as an emetick, but without causing either griping, or sickness of the stomach.
There are seven furnaces wrought here, but the water which lies at the surface is not near so strong as that at the salt lick near the Ohio, each furnace here making only about twenty-five bushels of salt per week. The Blue lick salt is much whiter and handsomer than the other, but it only sells at the same price. Each furnace rents at about three hundred dollars a year.
{155} These licks were much frequented by buffaloes and deer, the former of which have been destroyed or terrified from the country. It is only fourteen or fifteen years since no other except buffaloe or bear meat was used by the inhabitants of this country.[117]
FOOTNOTES:
[113] An ear of corn, in most parts of Ireland, England, and Scotland, and other parts of Europe, is deemed a great curiosity, and is carefully preserved, when it can be procured, for a number of years by some families as a shew of a singular production of nature, and is as much admired and as closely examined as would be here the shoe of a Chinese lady of quality. A young Irish gentleman tells me, when a boy in Ireland he once carried a corn cob fourteen miles in his pocket to shew it to his relatives, who viewed it as a great curiosity from America, and could form no just idea of the manner of its growing, or of its utility, but concluded it grew like oats or barley, and like these were cut with sickles or scythes. The cob had been previously stripped of its grains by as many individuals, each taking one, as a sight of singular curiosity for their families and neighbourhood.—Cramer.