Life ashore and afloat—Marietta, "the Plymouth Rock of the West"—The Little Kanawha—The story of Blennerhassett's Island.
Blennerhassett's Island, Sunday, May 13th.—The day broke without fog, at our camp on the rocky steep above Marietta. The eastern sky was veiled with summer clouds, all gayly flushed by the rising sun, and in the serene silence of the morning there hung the scent of dew, and earth, and trees. In the east, the distant edges of the West Virginia hills were aglow with the mounting light before it had yet peeped over into the river trough, where a silvery haze lent peculiar charm to flood and bank. Up river, one of the Three Brothers isles, dark and heavily forested, seemed in the middle ground to float on air. A bewitching picture this, until at last the sun sprang clear and strong above the fringing hills, and the spell was broken.
The steamboat traffic is improving as we get lower down. Last evening, between landing and bedtime, a half dozen passed us, up and down, breathing heavily as dragons might, and leaving behind them foamy wakes which loudly broke upon the shore. Before morning, I was at intervals awakened by as many more. A striking spectacle, the passage of a big river steamer in the night; you hear, fast approaching, a labored pant; suddenly, around the bend, or emerging from behind an island, the long white monster glides into view, lanterns gleaming on two lines of deck, her electric searchlight uneasily flitting to and fro, first on one landmark, then on another, her engine bell sharply clanging, the measured pant developing into a burly, all-pervading roar, which gradually declines into a pant again—and then she disappears as she came, her swelling wake rudely ruffling the moonlit stream.
We caught up with a large lumber raft this morning, descending from Pittsburg to Cincinnati. The half-dozen men in charge were housed midway in a rude little shanty, and relieved each other at the sweeps—two at bow, and two astern. It is an easy, lounging life, most of the way, with some difficulties in the shallows, and in passing beneath the great bridges. They travel night and day, except in the not infrequent wind-storms blowing up stream; and it will take them another week to cover the three hundred miles between this and their destination. Far different fellows, these commonplace raftsmen of to-day, from the "lumber boys" of a half-century or more ago, when the river towns were regularly "painted red" by the men who followed the Ohio by raft or flatboat. Life along shore was then more picturesque than comfortable.
Later, we stopped on the Ohio shore to chat with a group of farmers having a Sunday talk, their seat a drift log, in the shade of a willowed bank. They proved to be market gardeners and fruit-growers—well-to-do men of their class, and intelligent in conversation; all of them descendants of the sturdy New Englanders who settled these parts.
While the others were discussing small fruits with these transplanted Yankees, who proved quite as full of curiosity about us as we concerning them, I went down shore a hundred yards, struggling through the dense fringe of willows, to photograph a junk-boat just putting off into the stream. The two rough-bearded, merry-eyed fellows at the sweeps were setting their craft broadside to the stream—that "the current might have more holt of her," the chief explained. They were interested in the kodak, and readily posed as I wished, but wanted to see what had been taken, having the common notion that it is like a tintype camera, with results at once attainable. They offered our party a ride for the rest of the day, if we would row alongside and come aboard, but I thanked them, saying their craft was too slow for our needs; at which they laughed heartily, and "'lowed" we might be traders, too, anxious to get in ahead of them—"but there's plenty o' room o' th' river, for yew an' we, stranger! Well, good luck to yees! We'll see yer down below, somewhar, I reckon!"
Just before lunch, we were at Marietta, at the mouth of the Muskingum (171 miles), a fine stream, here two hundred and fifty yards wide. A storied river, this Muskingum. We first definitely hear of it in 1748, the year the original Ohio Company was formed. Céloron was here the year following, with his little band of French soldiers and Indians, vainly endeavoring to turn English traders out of the Ohio Valley. Christopher Gist came, some months later; then the trader Croghan, for "Old Wyandot Town," the Indian village at the mouth, was a noted center in Western forest traffic. Moravian missionaries appeared in due time, establishing on the banks of the Muskingum the ill-fated convert villages of Schönbrunn, Gnadenhütten, and Salem. In 1785, Fort Harmar was reared on the site of Wyandot Town. Lastly, in the early spring of 1788, came, in Ohio river flatboats, that famous body of New England veterans of the Revolution, under Gen. Rufus Putnam, and planted Marietta—"the Plymouth Rock of the West."
We smile at these Ohio pilgrims, for dignifying the hills which girt in the Marietta bottom, with the names of the seven on which Rome is said to be built—for having a Campus Martius and a Sacra Via, and all that, out here among the sycamore stumps and the wild Indians. But a classical revival was just then vigorously affecting American thought, and it would have been strange if these sturdy New Englanders had not felt its influence, fresh as they were from out the shadows of Harvard and Yale, and in the awesome presence of crowds of huge monumental earthworks, whose age, in their day, was believed to far outdate the foundations of the Eternal City itself. They loved learning for learning's sake; and here, in the log-cabins of Marietta, eight hundred miles west of their beloved Boston, among many another good thing they did for posterity, they established the principle of public education at public cost, as a national principle.
They were soldier colonists. Washington, out of a full heart, for he dearly loved the West, said of them: "No colony in America was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at the Muskingum. Information, property, and strength will be its characteristics. I know many of the settlers personally, and there never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a community." And when, in 1825, La Fayette had read to him the list of Marietta pioneers,—nearly fifty military officers among them,—he cried: "I know them all! I saw them at Brandywine, Yorktown, and Rhode Island. They were the bravest of the brave!"