Captina Creek (108 miles) is not far down on the Ohio bank, and beside it the little hamlet of Powhattan Point, with the West Virginia hills thereabout exceptionally high and steep, and wooded to the very top. Washington, who knew the Ohio well, down to the Great Kanawha, wrote of this creek in 1770: "A pretty large creek on the west side, called by Nicholson [his interpreter] Fox-Grape-Vine, by others Captema creek, on which, eight miles up, is the town called Grape-Vine Town." Captina village is its white successor. But there were also Indians at the mouth of the creek; for when George Rogers Clark and his missionary companion, Jones, two years later camped opposite on the Virginia shore, they went over to make a morning call on the natives, who repaid it in the evening, doubtless each time receiving freely from the white men's bounty.
The next day was Sunday, and the travelers remained in camp, Jones recording in his journal that he "instructed what Indians came over." In the course of his prayer, the missionary was particularly impressed by the attitude of the chief of Grape-Vine Town, named Frank Stephens, who professed to believe in the Christian God; and he naively writes, "I was informed that, all the time, the Indians looked very seriously at me." Jones appears to have been impressed also with the hardness of the beach, where they camped in the open, doubtless to avoid surprises: "Instead of feathers, my bed was gravel-stones, by the river side ... which at first seemed not to suit me, but afterward it became more natural."
In those days, traveling was beset with difficulties, both ashore and afloat. Eight years later (spring of 1780), three flatboats were descending the Ohio, laden with families intending to settle in Kentucky, when they suffered a common fate, being attacked by Indians off Captina Creek. Several men and a child were killed, and twenty-one persons were carried into captivity—among them, Catherine Malott, a girl in her teens, who subsequently became the wife of that most notorious of border renegades, Simon Girty.
On the West Virginia shore, not over a third of a mile below Captina Creek, empties Grave Yard Run, a modest rivulet. It would of itself not be noticeable amid the crowd of minor creeks and runs, coursing down to the great river through rugged ravines which corrugate the banks. But it has a history. Here, late in October or early in November, 1772, young George Rogers Clark made his first stake west of the Alleghanies, rudely cultivating a few acres of forest land on what is now called Cresap's Bottom, surveying for the neighbors, and in the evenings teaching their children in the little log cabin of his friend, Yates Conwell, at the mouth of Fish Creek, a few miles below. Fish Creek was in itself famous as one of the sections of the great Indian trail, "The Warrior Branch," which, starting in Tennessee, came northward through Kentucky and Southern Ohio, and, proceeding by way of this creek, crossed over to Dunkard Creek, thence to the mouth of Redstone. Washington stopped at Conwell's in March or April, 1774; but Clark was away from home at the time, and the "Father of his Country" never met the man who has been dubbed the "Washington of the West." Lord Dunmore's War was hatching, and a few months later the Fish Creek surveyor and schoolmaster had entered upon his life work as an Indian fighter.
At Bearsville (126 miles) we first meet a phenomenon common to the Ohio—the edges of the alluvial bottom being higher than the fields back of them, forming a natural levee, above which curiously rise to our view the spires and chimneys of the village. Harris' Journal (1803) made early note of this, and advanced an acceptable theory: "We frequently remarked that the banks are higher at the margin than at a little distance back. I account for it in this manner: Large trees, which are brought down the river by the inundations, are lodged upon the borders of the bank, but cannot be floated far upon the champaign, because obstructed by the growth of wood. Retaining their situation when the waters subside, they obstruct and detain the leaves and mud, which would else recoil into the stream, and thus, in process of time, form a bank higher than the interior flats."
Tied up to Bearsville landing is a gayly painted barge, the home of Price's Floating Opera Company, and in front its towing-steamer, "Troubadour." A steam calliope is part of the visible furniture of the establishment, and its praises as a noise-maker are sung in large type in the handbills which, with numerous colored lithographs of the performers, adorn the shop windows in the neighboring river towns.
Two miles farther down, on a high bank at the mouth of Fishing Creek, lies New Martinsville, West Va. (127 miles), a rather shabby town of fifteen hundred souls. As W—— and I passed up the main street, seeking for a grocery, we noticed that the public hall was being decorated for a dance to come off to-night; and placards advertising the event were everywhere rivaling the gaudy prints of the floating opera.
Meanwhile, a talkative native was interviewing the Doctor, down at the river side. It required some good-natured fencing on the part of our skipper to prevent the Virginian from learning all about our respective families away back to the third generation. He was a short, chubby man, with a Dixie goatee, his flannel shirt negligée, and a wide-brimmed straw hat jauntily set on the back of his head. He was sociable, and sat astride of our beached prow, punctuating his remarks with squirts of tobacco juice, and a bit of lath with which he meditatively tapped the gunwale, the meantime, with some skill, casting pebbles into the water with his bare toes. "Ax'n yer pardon, ma'm!" he said, scrambling from his perch upon W——'s appearance; and then, pushing us off, he bowed with much Southern gallantry, and hat in hand begged we would come again to New Martinsville, and stay longer.
The hills lining these reaches are lower than above, yet graceful in their sweeping lines. Conical mounds sometimes surmount them, relics of the prehistoric time when our Indians held to the curious fashion of building earthworks. We no longer entertain the notion that a separate and a prouder race of wild men than we know erected these tumuli. That pleasant fiction has departed from us; but the works are none the less interesting, now that more is known of their origin.