Much tobacco is raised on the rounded, gently-sloping hills below Maysville. Away up on the acclivities, in sheltered spots near the fields in which they are to be transplanted, or in fence-corners in the ever-broadening bottoms, we note white patches of thin cloth pinned down over the young plants to protect them from untoward frosts. There are many tobacco warehouses to be seen along the banks—apparently farmers coöperate in maintaining such; and in front of each, a roadway leads down to the water's edge, indicating a steamboat landing. On the town wharves are often seen portly barrels,—locally, "puncheons,"—filled with the weed, awaiting shipment by boat; most of the product goes to Louisville, but there are also large buyers in the smaller Kentucky towns.
Occasionally, to-day, we have seen moored to some rustic landing a great covered barge, quite of the fashion of the golden age of Ohio boating. At one end, a room is partitioned off to serve as cabin, and the sweeps are operated from the roof. These are produce-boats, which are laden with coarse vegetables and sometimes live stock, and floated down to Cincinnati or Louisville, and even to St. Louis and New Orleans. In ante-bellum days, produce-boats were common enough, and much money was made by speculative buyers who would dispose of their cargo in the most favorable port, sell the barge, and then return by rail or steamer; just as, in still earlier days, the keel or flatboat owner would sell both freight and vessel on the Lower Mississippi,—or abandon the craft if he could not sell it,—and "hoof it home," as a contemporary chronicler puts it.
Ripley, Levanna (417 miles), Higginsport (421 miles), Chilo (431 miles), Neville (435 miles), and Point Pleasant (442 miles) are the Ohio towns to-day; and Dover (417 miles), Augusta (424 miles), and Foster (435 miles), their rivals on the Kentucky shore. Sawmills and distilleries are the leading industries, and there are broad paved wharves; but a listless air pervades them all, as if once they basked in the light of better days. Foster is rather the shabbiest of the lot. As I passed through to find the postoffice, at the upper edge of town, where the hills come down to meet the bottom, I saw that half of the store buildings still intact were closed, many dwellings and warehouses were in ruins, and numerous open cellars were grown to grass and weeds. Few people were in sight, and they loafing at the corners. The postoffice occupied a vacated store, evidently not swept these six months past. The youthful master, with chair tilted back and his feet on an old washstand which did duty as office table, was listlessly whittling a finger-ring from a peach-stone; but shoving his feet along, he made room for me to write a postal card which I had brought for the purpose.
"What is the matter with this town?" I asked, as I scratched away.
"Daid, I reck'n!" and he blew away the peach-stone dust which had accumulated in the folds of his greasy vest.
"Yes, I see it is dead. What killed it?"
"Oh! just gone daid—sort o' nat'ral daith, I reck'n."
We had a pretty view this morning, three or four miles below Augusta, from the top of a tree-denuded Kentucky hill, some two hundred and fifty feet high. Hauling Pilgrim into the willows, we set out over a low, cultivated bottom, whose edges were being lapped by the rising river, to the detriment of the springing corn; then scrambling up the terrace on which the Chesapeake & Ohio railway runs, we crawled under a barb-wire fence, and ascended through a pasture, our right of way contested for a moment by a gigantic Berkshire boar, which was not easily vanquished. When at last we gained the top, by dint of clambering over rail-fences and up steep slopes bestrewn with mulleins and boulders, and over patches of freshly-plowed hardscrabble, the sight was well worth the rough climb. The broad Ohio bottom, opposite, was thick-dotted with orchard clumps, from which rose the white houses and barns of small tillers. On the generous slopes of the Kentucky hills, all corrugated with wooded ravines, were scores of fertile farmsteads, each with its ample tobacco shed—the better class of farmers on the hilltops, their buildings often silhouetted against the western sky, and the meaner sort down low on the river's bank. Through this pastoral scene, the broad river winds with noble sweep, until, both above and below, it loses itself in the purple mist of the distant hills.
We are now upon the Great Bend of the Ohio, beginning at Neville (435 miles) and ending at Harris's Landing (519 miles), with North Bend (482 miles) at the apex. The bend is itself a series of convolutions, and our point of view is ever changing, so that we have kaleidoscopic vistas,—and with each new setting, good-humoredly dispute with each other, we at the oars, and the others in the stern-sheets, as to which is the more beautiful, the unfolding or the dissolving view.
Our camp to-night is beside a little hillside torrent on the lower edge of Point Pleasant. We are well up on the rocky slope; an abandoned stone-quarry lies back of us, up the hill a bit; and leading into the village, half a mile away, is a picturesque country road, overhung with sumacs and honey locusts—overtopped on one side by a precipitous pasture, and on the other dropping suddenly to a beach thick-grown to willows, maples, and scrub sycamores.