The Kentucky Warbler

by James Lane Allen

"They warned him of his danger, urged him to take a rower, urged him not to go at all. Those who risked the passage of the river floated down on barges called Kentucky arks or in canoes hollowed each out of a single tree, usually the tulip tree, which you know is very common in our Kentucky woods. But to mention danger was to make him go to meet it. He would have no rower, had no money to hire one, had he wished one. He tells us what he had on board: in one end of the boat some biscuit and cheese, a bottle of cordial given him by a gentleman in Pittsburgh, his gun and trunk and overcoat; at the other end himself and his oars and a tin with which to bail out the skiff, if necessary, to keep it from sinking and also to use as his drinking-cup to dip from the river.

"That February day—the swollen, rushing river, the masses of white ice—the solitary young boatman borne away to a new world on his great work: his heart expanding with excitement and joy as he headed toward the unexplored wilderness of the Mississippi Valley.

"Wondrous experiences were his: from the densely wooded shores there would reach him as he drifted down, the whistle of the red bird—those first spring notes so familiar and so welcome to us on mild days toward the last of February. Away off in dim forest valleys, between bold headlands, he saw the rising smoke of sugar camps. At other openings on the landscape, grotesque log cabins looked like dog-houses under impending mighty mountains. His rapidly steered skiff passed flotillas of Kentucky arks heavily making their way southward, transporting men and women and children—the moving pioneers of the young nation: the first river merchant-marine of the new world: carrying horses and plows to clearings yet to be made for homesteads in the wilderness; transporting mill-stones for mills not yet built on any wilderness stream; bearing merchandise for the pioneers who in this way got their clothing until they could grow flax and weave to clothe themselves. Thus in the Alps of the Alleghenies he came upon the river peddlers of America as years before amid the Alps of Scotland he had come upon the foot peddlers of his own land. On the river were floating caravans of men selling shawls and muslins. He boarded a number of these barges; as they approached a settlement, they blew a trumpet or a lonely horn on the great river stillness.

"The first night he drew in to shore some fifty miles down at a riverside hovel and tried to sleep on the only bed offered him—some corn-stalks. Unable to sleep, he got up before day and pushed out again into the river, listening to the hooting of the big-horned owl echoing away among the dawn-dark mountains, or to the strangely familiar crowing of cocks as they awoke the hen roosts about the first American settlements in the West.

"He records what to us now sounds incredible, that on March fifth he saw a flock of parrokeets. Think of parrokeets on the Ohio River in March! Of nights it turned freezing cold and he drew liberally on his bottle of cordial for warmth. Once he encountered a storm of wind and hail and snow and rain, during which the river foamed and rolled like the sea and he had to make good use of his tin to keep the skiff bailed out till he could put in to shore. The call of wild turkeys enticed him now toward the shore of Indiana, now toward the shore of Kentucky, but before he reached either they had disappeared. His first night on the Kentucky shore he spent in the cabin of a squatter and heard him tell tales of bear-treeing and wildcat-hunting and wolf-baiting. All night wolves howled in the forests near by and kept the dogs in an uproar; the region swarmed with wolves and wildcats 'black and brown.'

"On and on, until at last the skiff reached the rapids of the Ohio at Louisville and he stepped ashore and sold his frail saviour craft which, at starting, he had named the Ornithologist. The Kentuckian who bought it as the Ornithologist accepted the droll name as that of some Indian chief. He soon left Louisville, having sent his baggage on by wagon, and plunged into the Kentucky forest on his way to Lexington.

"And now, indeed, you see he is coming nearer.

"It was the twenty-fourth of March when he began his first trip southward through the woods of Kentucky. Spring was on the way but had not yet passed northward. Nine-tenths of the Kentucky soil, he states, was then unbroken wilderness. The surface soil was deeper than now. The spring thaw had set in, permeating the rich loam. He describes his progress through it as like travelling through soft soap. The woods were bare as yet, though filled with pigeons and squirrels and wood-peckers. On everything he was using his marvellous eyes: looking for birds but looking at all human life, interested in the whole life of the forest. He mentions large corn fields and orchards of apple and of peach trees. Already he finds the high fences, characteristic of the Kentuckians. He turned aside once to visit a roosting place of the passenger pigeon.