About noon we reached the Genesee River, at the opposite side of which was situated the village where we expected to procure horses. We crossed the river in canoes, and took up our quarters at a house at the uppermost end of the village, where we were very glad to find our Indian friends could get no accommodation, for we knew well that the first use they would make of the money we were going to give them would be to buy liquor, and intoxicate themselves, in which state they would not fail of becoming very troublesome companions; it was scarcely dark indeed when news was brought us from a house near the river, that they went to after we had discharged them, that they were grown quite outrageous with the quantity of spirits they had drank, and were fighting and cutting each other in a most dreadful manner. They never resent the injuries they receive from any person that is evidently intoxicated, but attribute their wounds entirely to the liquor, on which they vent their execrations for all the mischief it has committed.
Before I dismiss the subject entirely, I must observe to you, that the Indians did not seem to think the carrying of our baggage was in any manner degrading to them; and after having received their due, they shook hands with us, and parted from us, not as from employers who had hired them, but as from friends whom they had been assisting, and were now sorry to leave.
The village where we stopped consisted of about eight or nine straggling houses; the best built one among them was that in which we lodged. It belonged to a family from New England, who about six years before had penetrated to this spot, then covered with woods, and one hundred and fifty miles distant from any other settlement. Settlements are now scattered over the whole of the country which they had to pass through in coming to it. The house was commodious and well built, and the people decent, civil, and reputable. It is a very rare circumstance to meet with such people amongst the first settlers on the frontiers; in general they are men of a morose and savage disposition, and the very outcasts of society, who bury themselves in the woods, as if desirous to shun the face of their fellow creatures; there they build a rude habitation, and clear perhaps three or four acres of land, just as much as they find sufficient to provide their families with corn: for the greater part of their food they depend on their rifle guns. These people, as the settlements advance, are succeeded in general by a second set of men, less savage than the first, who clear more land, and do not depend so much upon hunting as upon agriculture for their subsistence. A third set succeed these in turn, who build good houses, and bring the land into a more improved state. The first settlers, as soon as they have disposed of their miserable dwellings to advantage, immediately penetrate farther back into the woods, in order to gain a place of abode suited to their rude mode of life. These are the lawless people who encroach, as I have before mentioned, on the Indian territory, and are the occasion of the bitter animosities between the whites and the Indians. The second settlers, likewise, when displaced, seek for similar places to what those that they have left were when they first took them. I found, as I proceeded through this part of the country, that there was scarcely a man who had not changed his place of abode seven or eight different times.
As none but very miserable horses were to be procured at this village on the Genesee River, and as our expedition through the woods had given us a relish for walking, we determined to proceed on foot, and merely to hire horses to carry our baggage; accordingly, having engaged a pair, and a boy to conduct them, we set off early on the second morning from that of our arrival at the village, for the town of Bath.
PICTURESQUE VIEWS.
The country between these two places is most agreeably diversified with hill and dale, and as the traveller passes over the hills which overlook the Genesee River and the flats bordering upon it, he is entertained with a variety of noble and picturesque views. We were particularly struck with the prospect from a large, and indeed very handsome house in its kind, belonging to a Major Wadsworth, built on one of these hills. The Genesee River, bordered with the richest woods imaginable, might be seen from it for many miles, meandering through a fertile country; and beyond the flats, on each side of the river, appeared several ranges of blue hills rising up one behind another in a most fanciful manner, the whole together forming a most beautiful landscape. Here, however, in the true American taste, the greatest pains were taking to diminish, and, indeed, to shut out all the beauties of the prospect; every tree in the neighbourhood of the house was felled to the ground; instead of a neat lawn, for which the ground seemed to be singularly well disposed, a wheat field was laid down in front of it; and at the bottom of the slope, at the distance of two hundred yards from the house, a town was building by the major, which, when completed, would effectually screen from the dwelling house every sight of the river and mountains. The Americans, as I before observed, seem to be totally dead to the beauties of nature, and only to admire a spot of ground as it appears to be more or less calculated to enrich the occupier by its produce.
The Genesee River takes its name from a lofty hill in the Indian territory, near to which it passes, called by the Indians Genesee, a word signifying, in their language, a grand extensive prospect.
GENESEE RIVER.
The flats bordering upon the Genesee River are amongst the richest lands that are to be met with in North America, to the east of the Ohio. Wheat, as I told you in a former letter, will not grow upon them; and it is not found that the soil is impoverished by the successive crops of Indian corn and hemp that are raised upon them year after year. The great fertility of these flats is to be ascribed to the regular annual overflowing of the Genesee River, whose waters are extremely muddy, and leave no small quantity of slime behind them before they return to their natural channel. That river empties itself into Lake Ontario: it is somewhat more than one hundred miles in length, but only navigable for the last forty miles of its course, except at the time of the inundations; and even then the navigation is not uninterrupted the whole way down to the lake, there being three considerable falls in the river about ten miles above its mouth: the greatest of these falls is said to be ninety feet in perpendicular height. The high lands in the neighbourhood of the Genesee River are stony, and are not distinguished for their fertility, but the valleys are all extremely fruitful, and abound with rich timber.
The summers in this part of the country are by no means so hot as towards the Atlantic, and the winters are moderate; it is seldom, indeed, that the snow lies on the ground much longer than six or seven weeks; but notwithstanding this circumstance, and that the face of the country is so much diversified with rising grounds, yet the whole of it is dreadfully unhealthy; scarcely a family escapes the baneful effects of the fevers that rage here during the autumn season. I was informed by the inhabitants, that much fewer persons had been attacked by the fever the last season than during former years, and of these few a very small number died, the fever having proved much less malignant than it was ever known to be before. This circumstance led the inhabitants to hope, that as the country became more cleared it would become much more healthy. It is well known, indeed, that many parts of the country, which were extremely healthy while they remained covered with wood, and which also proved healthy after they had been generally cleared and settled, were very much otherwise when the trees were first cut down: this has been imputed to the vapours arising from the newly cleared lands on their being first exposed to the burning rays of the sun, and which, whilst the newly cleared spots remain surrounded by woods, there is not a sufficient circulation of air to dispel. The unhealthiness of the country at present does not deter numbers of people from coming to settle here every year, and few parts of North America can boast of a more rapid improvement than the Genesee country during the last four years.