Off at 8 o'clock, Pilgrim's crew were soon exploring Moundsville. There are five thousand people in this old, faded, countrified town. They show you with pride the State Penitentiary of West Virginia, a solemn-looking pile of dark gray stone, with the feeble battlements and towers common to American prison architecture. But the chief feature of the place is the great Indian mound—the "Big Grave" of early chroniclers. This earthwork is one of the largest now remaining in the United States, being sixty-eight feet high and a hundred in diameter at the base, and has for over a century attracted the attention of travelers and archæologists.
We found it at the end of a straggling street, on the edge of the town, a quarter of a mile back from the river. Around the mound has been left a narrow plat of ground, utilized as a cornfield; and the stout picket fence which encloses it bears peremptory notice that admission is forbidden. However, as the proprietor was not easily accessible, we exercised the privilege of historical pilgrims, and, letting ourselves in through the gate, picked our way through rows of corn, and ascended the great cone. It is covered with a heavy growth of white oaks, some of them three feet in diameter, among which the path picturesquely zigzags. The summit is fifty-five feet in diameter, and the center somewhat depressed, like a basin. From the middle of this basin a shaft some twenty-five feet in diameter has been sunk by explorers, for a distance of perhaps fifty feet; at one time, a level tunnel connected the bottom of this shaft with the side of the cone, but it has been mostly obliterated. A score of years ago, tunnel and shaft were utilized as the leading attractions of a beer garden—to such base uses may a great historical landmark descend!
Dickens, who apparently wrote the greater part of his American Notes while suffering from dyspepsia, has a note of appreciation for the Big Grave: "... the host of Indians who lie buried in a great mound yonder—so old that mighty oaks and other forest trees have struck their roots into its earth; and so high that it is a hill, even among the hills that Nature planted around it. The very river, as though it shared one's feelings of compassion for the extinct tribes who lived so pleasantly here, in their blessed ignorance of white existence, hundreds of years ago, steals out of its way to ripple near this mound; and there are few places where the Ohio sparkles more brightly than in the Big Grave Creek."
There is a sharp bend in the river, just below Moundsville, with Dillon's Bottom stretching long and wide at the apex on the Ohio shore—flat green fields, dotted with little white farmsteads, each set low in its apple grove, and a convoluted wall of dark hills hemming them in along the northern horizon. Then below this comes Round Bottom, its counterpart on the West Virginia side, and coursing through it a pretty meadow creek, Butler's Run.
Writes Washington, in 1781, to a correspondent who is thinking of renting lands in this region: "I have a small tract called the round bottom containing about 600 Acres, which would also let. It lyes on the Ohio, opposite to pipe Creek, and a little above Capteening." Across the half mile of river are the little levels and great slopes of the Ohio hills, through which breaks this same Pipe Creek; and hereabout Cresap's band murdered a number of inoffensive Shawanese, a tragedy which was one of the inciting causes of Lord Dunmore's War (1774).
We crossed over into Ohio, and pulled up on the gravelly spit at the mouth of Pipe. While the others were botanizing high on the mountain side, I went along a beach path toward a group of whitewashed cabins, intent on replenishing the canteen. Upon opening the gate of one of them, two grizzly dogs came bounding out, threatening to test the strength of my corduroy trousers. The proprietor cautiously peered from a window, and, much to my relief, called off the animals. Satisfied, apparently, that I was not the visitor he expected, the fellow lounged out and sat upon the steps, where I joined him. He was a tall, raw-boned, loose-jointed young man, with a dirty, buttonless flannel shirt which revealed a hairy breast; upon his trousers hung a variety of patches, in many stages of grease and decrepitude; a gray slouch hat shaded his little fishy eyes and hollow, yellow cheeks; and the snaky ends of his yellow mustache were stiff with accumulations of dried tobacco juice. His fat, waddling wife, in a greasy black gown, followed with bare feet, and, arms akimbo, listened in the open door.
A coal company owns the rocky river front, here and at many places below, and lets these cabins to the poor-white element, so numerous on the Ohio's banks. The renter is privileged to cultivate whatever land he can clear on the rocky, precipitous slopes, which is seldom more than half an acre to the cabin; and he may, if he can afford a cow, let her run wild in the scrub. The coal vein, a few rods back of the house, is only a few inches thick, and poor in quality, but is freely resorted to by the cotters. He worked whenever he could find a job, my host said—in the coal mines and quarries, or on the bottom farms, or the railroad which skirts the bank at his feet.
"But I tell ye, sir, th' Italians and Hungarians is spoil'n' this yere country fur white men; 'n' I do'n' see no prospect for hits be'n' better till they get shoved out uv 't!" Yet he said that life wasn't so hard here as it was in some parts he had heard tell of—the climate was mild, that he "'lowed;" a fellow could go out and get a free bucket of coal from the hillside "back yon;" he might get all the "light wood 'n' patchin' stuff" he wanted, from the river drift; could, when he "hankered after 'em," catch fish off his own front-door yard; and pick up a dollar now and then at odd jobs, when the rent was to be paid, or the "ol' woman" wanted a dress, or he a new coat.
This is clearly the lazy man's Paradise. I do not remember to have heard that the South Sea Islanders, in the ante-missionary days, had an easier time of it than this. What new fortune will befall my friend when he gets the Italians and Hungarians "shoved out," and "things pick up a bit," I cannot conceive.
A pleasing panorama he has from his doorway—across the river, the fertile fields of Round Bottom, once Washington's; Captina Island, just below, long and thickly-willowed, dreamily afloat in a glassy sea, reflecting every change of light; the whole girt about with the wide uplands of the winding valley, and overhead the march of sunny clouds.