CHAPTER X.
Cliff-dwellers on Long Bottom—Pomeroy Bend—Letart's Island and Rapids—Game in the early day—Rainy weather—In a "cracker" home.
Letart's Island, Tuesday, May 15th.—After we had gone to bed last night,—we in the tent, the Doctor and Pilgrim under the fly, which serves as a porch roof,—the heavenly floodgates lifted; the rain, coming in sheets, beat a fierce tattoo on the tightly-stretched canvas, and visions of a sudden rise in the fickle river were uppermost in our dreams. Everything about us was sopping at daybreak; but the sun rose clear and warm from a bed of eastern clouds, and the midnight gale had softened to a gentle breeze.
Palisades were frequent to-day. We stopped just below camp, at an especially picturesque Ohio hamlet,—Long Bottom (207 miles),—where the dozen or so cottages are built close against the bald rock. Clambering over great water-worn boulders, at the river's brink, the Doctor and I made our way up through a dense tangle of willows and poison ivy and grape-vines, emerging upon the country road which passes at the foot of this row of modern cliff-dwellings. For the most part, little gardens, with neat palings, run down from the cottages to the road. One sprawling log house, fairly embowered in vines, and overtopped by the palisade rising sheer for thirty feet above its back door, looked in this setting for all the world like an Alpine chalet, lacking only stones on the roof to complete the picture. I took a kodak shot at this, also at a group of tousle-headed children at the door of a decrepit shanty built entirely within a crevice of the rock—their Hibernian mother, with one hand holding an apron over her head, and the other shielding her eyes, shrilly crying to a neighboring cliff-dweller: "Miss McCarthy! Miss McCarthy! There's a feller here, a photergraph'n' all the people in the Bottom! Come, quick!" Then they eagerly pressed around me, Germans and Irish, big and little, women and children mostly, asking for a view of the picture, which I gave all in turn by letting them peep into the ground-glass "finder"—a pretty picture, they said it was, with the colors all in, and "wonderfully like," though a wee bit small.
Speaking of color, we are daily struck with the brilliant hues in the workaday dresses of women and children seen along the river. Red calico predominates, but blues and yellows, and even greens, are seen, brightly splashing the somber landscape.
After Long Bottom, we enter upon the south-sweeping Pomeroy Bend of the Ohio, commencing at Murraysville (208 miles) and ending at Pomeroy (247 miles). It is of itself a series of smaller bends, and, as we twist about upon our course, the wind strikes us successively on all quarters; sometimes giving the Doctor a chance to try his sail, which he raises on the slightest provocation,—but at all times agreeably ruffling the surface that would otherwise reflect the glowing sun like a mirror.
The sloping margins of the rich bottoms are now often cultivated almost to the very edge of the stream, with a line of willow trees left as a protecting fringe. Farmers doing this take a gambling risk of a summer rise. Where the margins have been left untouched by the plow, there is a dense mass of vegetation—sycamores, big of girth and towering to a hundred feet or more, abound on every hand; the willows are phenomenally-rapid growers; and in all available space is the rank, thick-standing growth of an annual locally styled "horse-weed," which rears a cane-like stalk full eighteen or twenty feet high—it has now attained but four or five feet, but the dry stalks of last year's growth are everywhere about, showing what a formidable barrier to landing these giant weeds must be in midsummer.
We chose for a camping place Letart's Island (232 miles), on the West Virginia side, not far below Milwood. From the head, where our tent is pitched on a sandy knoll thick-grown to willows, a long gravel spit runs far over toward the Ohio shore. The West Virginia channel is narrow, slow and shallow; that between us and Ohio has been lessened by the island to half its usual width, and the current sweeps by at a six-mile gait, in which the Doctor and I found it difficult to keep our footing while having our customary evening dip. Our island is two long, forested humps of sand, connected by a stretch of gravel beach, giving every evidence of being submerged in times of flood; everywhere are chaotic heaps of driftwood, many cords in extent; derelict trees are lodged in the tops of the highest willows and maples—ghostly giants sprawling in the moonlight; there is an abandon of vegetable debris, layer after layer laid down in sandy coverlids. Wild grasses, which flourish on all these flooded lands, here attain enormous size. Dispensing with our cots for the nonce, we have spread our blankets over heaps of dried grass pulled from the monster tufts of last year's growth. The Ohio is capable of raising giant floods; it is still falling with us, but there are signs at hand, beyond the slight sprinkle which cooled the air for us at bedtime, of rainy weather after the long drouth. When the feeders in the Alleghanies begin to swell, we shall perch high o' nights.