Two miles below New Martinsville, on the West Virginia shore, we pitch camp, just as the light begins to sink over the Ohio hills. The atmosphere is sweet with the odor of wild grape blossoms, and the willow also is in bloom. Poison ivy, to whose baneful touch fortunately none of us appear susceptible, grows everywhere about. From the farmhouse on the narrow bottom to our rear comes the melodious tinkle-tinkle of cow bells. The operatic calliope is in full blast, at Bearsville, its shrieks and snorts coming down to us through four miles of space, all too plainly borne by the northern breeze; and now and then we hear the squeak of the New Martinsville fiddles. There are no mosquitoes as yet, but burly May-chafers come stupidly dashing against our tent, and the toads are piping merrily.
CHAPTER VII.
In Dixie—Oil and natural gas, at Witten's Bottom—The Long Reach—Photographing crackers—Visitors in camp.
Above Marietta, Saturday, May 12th.—Since the middle of yesterday afternoon we have been in Dixie,—that is, when we are on the West Virginia shore. The famous Mason and Dixon Line (lat. 39° 43' 26") touches the Ohio at the mouth of Proctor's Run (121½ miles).
There was a heavy fog this morning, on land and river. But through shifting rifts made by the morning breeze, we had kaleidoscopic, cloud-framed pictures of the dark, jutting headlands which hem us in; of little white cabins clustered by the country road which on either bank crawls along narrow terraces between overtopping steeps and sprawling beach, or winds through fertile bottoms, according to whether the river approaches or recedes from its inclosing bluffs; of hillside fields, tipped at various angles of ascent, sometimes green with springing grain, but oftenest gray or brown or yellow, freshly planted,—charming patches of color, in this somber-hued world of sloping woodland.
At Williamson's Island (134 miles) the fog lifted. The air was heavy with the odor of petroleum. All about us were the ugly, towering derricks of oil and natural gas wells—Witten's Bottom on the right, with its abutting hills; the West Virginia woods across the river, and the maple-strewn island between, all covered with scaffolds. The country looks like a rumpled fox-and-geese board, with pegs stuck all over it. A mile and a half below lies Sistersville, W. Va., the emporium of this greasy neighborhood—great red oil-tanks and smoky refineries its chiefest glory; crude and raw, like the product it handles. We landed at Witten's Bottom,—W——, the Boy, and I,—while the Doctor, philosophically preferring to take the oily elephant for granted, piloted Pilgrim to the rendezvous a mile below.
Oil was "struck" here two or three years ago, and now within a distance of a few miles there are hundreds of wells—"two hun'rd in this yere gravel alone, sir!" I was told by a red-headed man in a red shirt, who lived with his numerous family in a twelve-foot-square box at the rear of a pumping engine. An engine serves several wells,—the tumbling-rods, rudely boxed in, stretching off through the fields and over the hills to wherever needed. The operatives dwell in little shanties scattered conveniently about; in front of each is a vertical half-inch pipe, six or eight feet high, bearing a half bushel of natural-gas flame which burns and tosses night and day, winter and summer, making the Bottom a warm corner of the earth, when the unassisted temperature is in the eighties. It is a bewildering scene, with all these derricks thickly scattered around, engines noisily puffing, walking-beams forever rearing and plunging, the country cobwebbed with tumbling-rods and pipe lines, the shanties of the operatives with their rude lamp-posts, and the face of Nature so besmeared with the crude output of the wells that every twig and leaf is thick with grease.
Just above Witten's commences the Long Reach of the Ohio—a charming panorama, for sixteen and a half miles in a nearly straight line to the southwest. Little towns line the alternating bottoms, and farmsteads are numerous on the slopes. But they are rocky and narrow, these gentle shoulders of the hills, and a poor class of folk occupy them—half fishers, half farmers, a cross between my Round Bottom friend and the houseboat nomads.
A picturesquely-dilapidated log house, with whitewashed porch in front, and a vine arbor at the rear, attracted our attention at the foot of the reach, near Grape Island. I clambered up, to photograph it. The ice was broken by asking for a drink of water. A gaunt girl of eighteen, the elder of two, with bare feet, her snaky hair streaming unkempt about a smirking face, went with a broken-nosed pitcher to a run, which could be heard splashing over its rocky bed near by. The meanwhile, I took a seat in the customary arcade between the living room and kitchen, and talked with her fat, greasy, red-nosed father, who confided to me that he was "a pi'neer from way back." He occupied his own land—a rare circumstance among these riverside "crackers;" had a hundred and thirty acres, worth twenty dollars the acre; "jist yon ways," back of the house, in the cliff-side, there was a coal vein two feet thick, as yet only "worked" for his own fuel; and lately, he had struck a bank of firebrick clay which might some day be a "good thing for th' gals."