An observant man was this philosopher, and had studied human nature to some purpose. He described the condition of the poor farmers along the river, as being pitiful; they had no money to hire help, and were an odd lot, anyway—the farther back in the hills you get, the worse they are.
He loved to talk about himself and his lowly condition, in contrast with his former glory as a sub-contractor on the railway. When a man was down, he said, he lost all his friends—and, to illustrate this familiar phase of life, told two stories which he had often read in a book that he owned. They were curious, old-fashioned tales of feudal days, evidently written in a former century,—he did not know the title of the volume,—and he related them in what evidently were the actual words of the author: a curious recitation, in the pedantic literary style of the ancient story-teller, but in the dialect of an Ohio-river "cracker." His greatest ambition, he told us, was to own a floating sawmill; although he carefully inquired about the laws regulating peddlers in our State, and intimated that sometime he might look us up in that capacity, in our Northern home.
As we approach Louisville to-day, the settlements somewhat increase in number, although none of the villages are of great size; and, especially in Kentucky, they are from ten to twenty miles apart. The fine hills continue close upon our path until a few miles above Louisville, when they recede, leaving on the Kentucky side a broad, flat plain several miles square, for the city's growth. For the most part, these stony slopes are well wooded with elm, buckeye, maple, ash, oak, locust, hickory, sycamore, cotton-wood, a few cedars, and here and there a catalpa and a pawpaw giving a touch of tropical luxuriance to the hillside forest; while blackberry bushes, bignonia vines, and poison ivy, are everywhere abundant; otherwise, there is little of interest to the botanist. Redbirds, catbirds, bluebirds, blackbirds, and crows are chattering noisily in the trees, and turkey-buzzards everywhere swirl and swoop in mid-air.
The narrow little bottoms are sandy; and on lowland as well as highland there is much poor, rock-bewitched soil. The little whitewashed farmsteads look pretty enough in the morning haze, lying half hid in forest clumps; but upon approach they invariably prove unkempt and dirty, and swarming with shiftless, barefooted, unhealthy folk, whom no imagination can invest with picturesque qualities. Their ragged, unpainted tobacco-sheds are straggling about, over the hills; and here and there a white patch in the corner of a gray field indicates a nursery of tobacco plants, soon to be transplanted into ampler soil.
It is not uncommon to find upon a hillside a freshly-built log-cabin, set in the midst of a clearing, with bristling stumps all around, reminding one of the homes of new settlers on the far-away logging-streams of Northern Wisconsin or Minnesota; the resemblance is the closer, for such notches cut in the edge of the Indiana and Kentucky wilderness are often found after a row of many miles through a winding forest solitude apparently but little changed from primeval conditions. Now and then we come across quarries, where stone is slid down great chutes to barges which lie moored by the rocky bank; and frequently is the stream lined with great boulders, which stand knee-deep in the flood that eddies and gurgles around them.
On the upper edge of the great Louisville plain, we pitched tent in the middle of the afternoon; and, having brought our bag of land-clothes with us in the skiff, from Cincinnati, took turns under the canvas in effecting what transformation was desirable, preparatory to a visit in the city. In the early twilight we were floating past Towhead Island, with its almost solid flank of houseboats, threading our way through a little fleet of pleasure yachts, and at last shooting into the snug harbor of the Boat Club. The good-natured captain of the U. S. Life Saving Station took Pilgrim and her cargo in charge for the night, and by dusk we were bowling over metropolitan pavements en route to the house of our friend—strange contrast, this lap of luxury, to the soldier-like simplicity of our canvas home. We have been roughing it for so long,—less than a month, although it seems a year,—that all these conveniences of civilization, these social conventionalities, have to us a sort of foreign air. Thus easily may man descend into the savage state.
CHAPTER XVII.
Storied Louisville—Red Indians and white—A night on Sand Island—New Albany—Riverside hermits—The river falling—A deserted village—An ideal camp.
Sand Island, Tuesday, May 29th.—Our Louisville host is the best living authority on the annals of his town. It was a delight and an inspiration to go with him, to-day, the rounds of the historic places. Much that was to me heretofore foggy in Louisville story was made clear, upon becoming familiar with the setting. The contention is made that La Salle was here at the Falls of the Ohio, during the closing months of 1669; but it was over a century later, under British domination, before a settlement was thought of. Dr. John Connolly entertained a scheme for founding a town at the Falls, but Lord Dunmore's War (1774), and the Revolution quickly following, combined to put an end to it; so that when George Rogers Clark arrived on the scene with his little band of Virginian volunteers (May, 1778), en route to capture the Northwest for the State of Virginia, he found naught but a savage-haunted wilderness. His log fort on Corn Island, in the midst of the rapids, served as a base of military operations, and was the nucleus of American settlement, although later the inhabitants moved to the mainland, and founded Louisville.