Читать книгу Afloat on the Ohio - Reuben Gold Thwaites - Страница 8

Beaver River, Monday, May 7th.—We have to-day rowed and paddled under a cloudless sky, but in the teeth of frequent squalls, with heavy waves freely dashing their spray upon us. At such times a goodly current, aided by numerous wing-dams, appears of little avail; for, when we rested upon our oars, Pilgrim would be unmercifully driven up stream. Thus it has been an almost continual fight to make progress, and our five-and-twenty miles represent a hard day's work.

We were overloaded, that was certain; so we stopped at Chartier, three miles down the river from Pittsburg, and sent on our portly bag of conventional traveling clothes by express to Cincinnati, where we intend stopping for a day. This leaves us in our rough boating costumes for all the smaller towns en route. What we may lose in possible social embarrassments, we gain in lightened cargo.

Here at the mouth of Chartier's Creek was "Chartier's Old Town" of a century and a third ago; a straggling, unkempt Indian village then, but at least the banks were lovely, and the rolling distances clothed with majestic trees. To-day, these creek banks, connected with numerous iron bridges, are the dumping-ground for cinders, slag, rubbish of every degree of foulness; the bare hillsides are crowded with the ugly dwellings of iron-workers; the atmosphere is thick with smoke.

Washington, one of the greatest land speculators of his time, owned over 32,000 acres along the Ohio. He held a patent from Lord Dunmore, dated July 5, 1775, for nearly 3,000 acres lying about the mouth of this stream. In accordance with the free-and-easy habit of trans-Alleghany pioneers, ten men squatted on the tract, greatly to the indignation of the Father of his Country, who in 1784 brought against them a successful suit for ejectment. Twelve years later, more familiar with this than with most of his land grants, he sold it to a friend for $12,000.

Just below Chartier are the picturesque McKee's Rocks, where is the first riffle in the Ohio. We "take" it with a swoop, the white-capped waves dancing about us in a miniature rapid. Then we are in the open country, and for the first time find what the great river is like. The character of the banks, for some distance below Pittsburg, differs from that of the Monongahela. The hills are lower, less precipitous, more graceful. There is a delightful roundness of mass and shade. Beautiful villas occupy commanding situations on hillsides and hilltops; we catch glimpses of spires and cupolas, singly or in groups, peeping above the trees; and now and then a pretty suburban railway station. The railways upon either bank are built on neat terraces, and, far from marring the scene, agreeably give life to it; now and then, three such terraces are to be traced, one above the other, against the dark background of wood and field—the lower and upper devoted to rival railway lines, the central one to the common way. The mouths of the beautiful tributary ravines are crossed either by graceful iron spans, which frame charming undercut glimpses of sparkling waterfalls and deep tangles of moss and fern, or by graceful stone arches draped with vines. There are terraced vineyards, after the fashion of the Rhineland, and the gentle arts of the florist and the truck-gardener are much in evidence. The winding river frequently sweeps at the base of rocky escarpments, but upon one side or the other there are now invariably bottom lands—narrow on these upper reaches, but we shall find them gradually widen and lengthen as we descend. The reaches are from four to seven miles in length, but these, too, are to lengthen in the middle waters. Islands are frequent, all day. The largest is Neville's, five miles long and thickly strewn with villas and market-gardens; still others are but long sandbars grown to willows, and but temporarily in sight, for the stage of water is low just now, not over seven feet in the channel.

Emerging from the immediate suburbs of Pittsburg, the fields broaden, farmsteads are occasionally to be seen nestled in the undulations of the hills, woodlands become more dense. There are, however, small rustic towns in plenty; we are seldom out of sight of these. Climbing a steep clay slope on the left bank, we visited one of them—Shousetown, fourteen miles below the city. A sad-eyed, shabby place, with the pipe line for natural gas sprawling hither and yon upon the surface of the ground, except at the street crossings, where a few inches of protecting earth have been laid upon it. The tariff levied by the gas company is ten cents per month for each light, and a dollar and a half for a cook-stove.

We passed, this afternoon, one of the most interesting historic points upon the river—the picturesque site of ancient Logstown, upon the summit of a low, steep ridge on the right bank, just below Economy, and eighteen miles from Pittsburg. Logstown was a Shawanese village as early as 1727–30, and already a notable fur-trading post when Conrad Weiser visited it in 1748. Washington and Gist stopped at "Loggestown" for five days on their visit to the French at Fort Le Bœuf, and several famous Indian treaties were signed there. A short distance below, Anthony Wayne's Western army was encamped during the winter of 1792–93, the place being then styled Legionville. In 1824 George Rapp founded in the neighborhood a German socialist community, and this later settlement survives to the present day in the thriving little rustic town of Economy.

At four o'clock we struck camp on a heavily-willowed shore, at the apex of the great northern bend of the Ohio (25 miles).^A Across the river, on a broad level bottom, are the manufacturing towns of Rochester and Beaver, divided by the Beaver River; in their rear, well-rounded hills rise gracefully, checkered with brown fields and woods in many shades of green, in the midst of which the flowering white dogwood rears its stately spray. Our sloping willowed sand-beach, of a hundred feet in width, is thick strewn with driftwood; back of this a clay bank, eight feet sheer, and a narrow bottom cut up with small fruit and vegetable patches; the gardeners' neat frame houses peeping from groves of apple, pear and cherry, upon the flanking hillsides. A lofty oil-well derrick surmounts the edge of the terrace a hundred yards below our camp. The bushes and the ground round about the well are black and slimy with crude petroleum, that has escaped during the boring process, and the air is heavy with its odor. We are upon the edge of the far-stretching oil and gas-well region, and shall soon become familiar enough with such sights and smells in the neighborhood of our nightly camps.

No sooner had Pilgrim been turned up against a tree to dry, and a smooth sandy open chosen for the camp, than the proprietor of the soil appeared—a middling-sized, lanky man, with a red face and a sandy goatee surmounting a collarless white shirt all bestained with tobacco juice. He inquired rather sharply concerning us, but when informed of our innocent errand, and that we should stay with him but the night, he promptly softened, explaining that the presence of marauding fishermen and house-boat folk was incompatible with gardening for profit, and he would have none of them touch upon his shore. As to us, we were welcome to stop throughout our pleasure, an invitation he reinforced by sitting upon a stump, whittling vigorously meanwhile, and glibly gossiping with the Doctor and me for a half-hour, on crop conditions and the state of the country—"bein' sociable like," he said, "an' hav'n' nuth'n 'gin you folks, as knows what's what, I kin see with half a eye!"

Footnote A: (return)

Figures in parentheses, similarly placed throughout the volume, indicate the meandered river mileage from Pittsburg, according to the map of the Corps of Engineers, U.S.A., published in 1881. The actual mileage of the channel is a trifle greater.