Dinner over, the crew hauled Pilgrim under cover, and within prepared for her sailing-master a cosy bed, with the entire ship's stock of sleeping-bags and blankets. W——, the Boy, and I then started off to find quarters in Sciotoville (1,000 inhabitants), which lies just below the river's mouth, here a dozen rods wide. Scrambling up the slimy bank, through a maze of thorn trees, brambles, and sycamore scrubs, we gained the fertile bottom above, all luscious with tall grasses bespangled with wild red roses and the showy pentstemon. The country road leading into the village is some distance inland, but at last we found it just beyond a patch of Indian corn waist high, and followed it, through a covered bridge, and down to a little hotel at the lower end of town.
A quaint, old-fashioned house, the Sciotoville tavern, with an inner gallery looking out into a small garden of peaches, apples, pears, plums, and grapes—a famous grape country this, by the way. In our room, opening from the gallery, is an antique high-post bedstead; everywhere about are similar relics of an early day. In keeping with the air of serene old age, which pervades the hostelry, is the white-haired landlady herself. In well-starched apron, white cap, and gold-rimmed glasses, she benignly sits rocking by the office stove, her feet on the fender, reading Wallace's Prince of India; and looking, for all the world, as if she had just stepped out of some old portrait of—well, of a tavern-keeping Martha Washington.
Footnote A:[ (return) ]
Two miles up the Little Scioto, Pine Creek enters. Perhaps a mile and a half up this creek was, in 1771, a Mingo town called Horse Head Bottom, which cuts some figure in border history as a nest of Indian marauders.
CHAPTER XIII.
The Scioto, and the Shawanese—A night at Rome—Limestone—Keels, flats, and boatmen of the olden time.
Rome, O., Monday, May 21st.—At intervals through the night, rain fell, and the temperature was but 46° at sunrise. However, by the time we were afloat, the sun was fitfully gleaming through masses of gray cloud, for a time giving promise of a warmer day. Dark shadows rested on the romantic ravines, and on the deep hollows of the hills; but elsewhere over this gentle landscape of wooded amphitheatres, broad green meadows, rocky escarpments, and many-colored fields, light and shade gayly chased each other. Never were the vistas of the widening river more beautiful than to-day.
There are saw-mill and fire-brick industries in the little towns, which would be shabby enough in the full glare of day. But they are all glorified in this changing light, which brings out the rich yellows and reds in sharp relief against the gloomy background of the hills, and mellows into loveliness the soft grays of unpainted wood.
At the mouth of the Scioto (354 miles), is Portsmouth, O. (15,000 inhabitants), a well-built, substantial town, with good shops. It lies on a hill-backed terrace some forty feet above the level of the neighboring bottoms, which give evidence of being victims of the high floods periodically covering the low lands about the junction of the rivers. Just across the Scioto is Alexandria, and on the Kentucky side of the Ohio can be seen the white hamlet of Springville, at the feet of the dentated hills which here closely approach the river.
The country about the mouth of the Scioto has long figured in Western annals. Being a favorite rendezvous for the Shawanese, it naturally became a resort for French and English fur-traders. The principal part of the first Shawanese village—Shannoah Town, in the old journals—was below the Scioto's mouth, on the site of Alexandria; it was the chief town of this considerable tribe, and here Gist was warned back, when in March, 1751, he ventured thus far while inspecting lands for the Ohio Company. Two years later, there was a great—perhaps an unprecedented—flood in the Ohio, the water rising fifty feet above the ordinary level, and destroying the larger part of the Shawanese village. Some of the Indians moved to the Little Miami, and others up the Scioto, where they built, successively, Old and New Chillicothe; but the majority remained, and rebuilt their town on the higher land north of the Scioto, where Portsmouth now stands. An outlying band had had, from before Gist's day, a small town across the Ohio, the site of Springville; and it was here that George Croghan had his stone trading house, which was doubtless, after the manner of the times, a frontier fortress. In the French and Indian war (1758), the Shawanese, tiring of continual conflict, withdrew from their Ohio River settlements to Old (or Upper) Chillicothe, and thus closed the once important fur-trade at the mouth of the Scioto. It was while the Indian town at Portsmouth was still new (1755), that a party of Shawanese brought here a Mrs. Mary Inglis, whom they had captured while upon a scalping foray into Southwestern Virginia. The story of the remarkable escape of this woman, at Big Bone Lick, of her long and terrible flight through the wilderness along the southern bank of the Ohio and up the Great Kanawha Valley, and her final return to home and kindred, who viewed her as one delivered from the grave, is one of the most thrilling in Western history.[A]