The falls at Louisville are the only considerable obstruction to Ohio-River navigation. At an average stage, the descent is but twenty-seven feet in two-and-a-half miles; in high flood, the rapids degenerate into merely swift water, without danger to descending craft. At ordinary height, it was the custom of pioneer boatmen, in descending, to lighten their craft of at least a third of the cargo, and thus pass them down to the foot of the north-side portage (Clarksville, Ind.), which is three-quarters of a mile in length; going up, lightened boats were towed against the stream. With the advent of larger craft, a canal with locks became necessary—the Louisville and Portland Canal of to-day, which is operated by the general government.
The action of the water, hastened by the destruction of trees whose roots originally bound the loose soil, has greatly worn the islands in the rapids. Little is now left of historic Corn Island, and that little is, at low water, being blasted and ground into cement by a mill hard by on the main shore. To-day, with a flood of nearly twenty feet above the normal stage of the season, not much of the island is visible,—clumps of willows and sycamores, swayed by the rushing current, giving a general idea of the contour. Goose Island, although much smaller than in Clark's day, is a considerable tract of wooded land, with a rock foundation. Clark was once its owner, his home being opposite on the Indiana shore, where he had a fine view of the river, the rapids, and the several islands. As for Clarksville, somewhat lower down, and back from the river a half mile, it is now but a cluster of dwellings on the outskirts of New Albany, a manufacturing town which is rapidly absorbing all the neighboring territory.
Feeling obliged to make an early start, we concluded to pass the night just below the canal on Sand Island, lying between New Albany and Louisville's noisy manufacturing suburb, Portland. An historic spot is this insular home of ours. At the treaty of Fort Charlotte, Cornstalk told Lord Dunmore the legend familiar among Ohio River savages—that here, in ages past, occurred the last great battle between the white and the red Indians. It is one of the puzzles of the antiquarians, this tradition that white Indians once lived in the land, but were swept away by the reds; Cornstalk had used it to spur his followers to mighty deeds, it was a precedent which Pontiac dwelt upon when organizing his conspiracy, and King Philip is said to have been inspired by it. But this is no place to discuss the genesis of the tale. Suffice it, that on Sand Island have been discovered great quantities of ancient remains. No doubt, in its day, it was an over-filled burying-ground.
Noises, far different from the clash of savage arms, are in the air to-night. Far above our heads a great iron bridge crosses the Ohio, some of its piers resting on the island,—a busy combination thoroughfare for steam and electric railways, for pedestrians and for vehicles, plying between New Albany and Portland. The whirr of the trolley, the scream and rumble of locomotives, the rattle of wagons; and just above the island head, the burly roar of steamboats signaling the locks,—these are the sounds which are prevalent. Through all this hubbub, electric lamps are flashing, and just now a steamer's search-light swept our island shore, lingering for a moment upon the little camp, doubtless while the pilot satisfied his curiosity. Let us hope that savage warriors never o' nights walk the earth above their graves; for such scenes as this might well cause those whose bones lie here to doubt their senses.
Near Brandenburg, Ky., Wednesday, 30th.—We stopped at New Albany, Ind. (603 miles), this morning, to stock the larder and to forward our shore-clothes by express to Cairo. It is a neat and busy manufacturing town, with an excellent public market. A gala aspect was prevalent, for it is Memorial Day; the shops and principal buildings were gay with bunting, and men in Grand Army uniforms stood in knots at the street corners.
The broad, fertile plain on both sides of the river, upon which Louisville and New Albany are the principal towns, extends for eight or nine miles below the rapids. The first hills to approach the stream are those in Indiana. Salt River, some ten or twelve rods wide, enters from the south twenty-one miles below New Albany, between uninteresting high clay banks, with the lazy-looking little village of West Point, Ky., occupying a small rise of ground just below the mouth. The Kentucky hills come close to the bank, a mile or two farther down, and then the familiar characteristics of the reaches above Louisville are resumed—hills and bottoms, sparsely settled with ragged farmsteads, regularly alternating.
At five o'clock we put in at a rocky ledge on the Indiana side, a mile-and-a-half above Brandenburg. Behind us rises a precipitous hill, tree-clad to the summit. The Doctor found up there a new phlox and a pretty pink stone-crop, to add to our herbarium, while here as elsewhere the bignonia grows profusely in every crevice of the rock. At dark, two ragged and ill-smelling young shanty-boat men, who are moored hard by, came up to see us, and by our camp-fire to whittle chips and drone about hard times. But at last we tired of their idle gossip, which had in it no element of the picturesque, and got rid of them by hinting our desire to turn in.
The towns were few to-day, and small. Brandenburg, with eight hundred souls, was the largest—a sleepy, ill-paved, shambling place, with apparently nobody engaged in any serious calling; its chief distinction is an architectural monstrosity, which we were told is the court-house. The little white hamlet of New Amsterdam, Ind. (650 miles), looked trim and bright in the midst of a green thicket. Richardson's Landing, Ky., is a disheveled row of old deserted houses, once used by lime-burners, with a great barge wrecked upon the beach. At the small, characterless Indiana village of Leavenworth (658 miles), I sought a traveling photographer, of whom I had been told at Brandenburg. My quest was for a dark-room where I might recharge my exhausted kodak; but the man of plates had packed up his tent and moved on—I would no doubt find him in Alton, Ind., fifteen miles lower down.
We have had stately, eroded hills, and broad, fertile bottoms, hemming us in all day, and marvelous ox-bows in the erratic stream. The hillsides are heavily wooded, sometimes the slopes coming straight down to the stony beach, without intervening terrace; where there are such terraces, they are narrow and rocky, and the homes of shanty-men; but upon the bottoms are whitewashed dwellings of frame or log, tenanted by a better class, who sometimes have goodly orchards and extensive corn-cribs. The villages are generally in the deep-cut notches of the hills, where the interior can be conveniently reached by a wagon-road—a country "rumpled like this," they say, for ten or twelve miles back, and then stretching off into level plains of fertility. Now and then, a deserted cabin on the terraces,—windowless and gaunt,—tells the story of some "cracker" family that malaria had killed off, or that has "pulled up stakes" and gone to seek a better land.