Recollections of the last ten years, passed in occasional residences and journeyings in the valley of the Mississippi

Front matter

RECOLLECTIONS OI THE LAST TEN YEARS, PASSED IN OCCASIONAL RESIDENCES AND JODRNEYINCS IN THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI, FROM PITTSBURG AND THE MISSOURI TO THE GULF OF MEXICO, AND FROM FLORIDA TO THE SPANISH FRONTIER ; IN A SERIES OF LETTERS TO THE REV. JAMES FLINT, OF SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS BY TIMOTHY FLINT, PRINCIPAL OF THE SEMINARY OF RAPIDE, LOUISIANA. Forsan hæc olimjneniinisse juvabif. BOSTON : CUMMINGS, HILL1ARD, AND COMPANY,— WASHINGTON" STREET. 1826. DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS, TO WIT : District Clerk's Office. Be it remembered, that on the tenth day of March, A. D. 1826, and in the fiftieth year of the Independence of the United States of America, Cummings, Hilliard, <|- Co. ofthe said district, have deposited in this office the title of a book, the right whereof they claim as proprietors, in the words following, to wit: — " Recollections of the last ten years, passed in occasional Residences and Journe3'ings in the Valley ofthe Mississippi, from Pittsburg and the Missouri, to the Guif of Mexico, and from Florida to the Spanish frontier; in a series of Letters to the Rev. James Flint, of Salem, Massachusetts.

By Timothy Flint, Principal of the Seminary of Rapide, Louisiana. Forsan hæc olim meminisse juvabit." In conformity to the Act of the Congress of the United States, entitled, " An Act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned:" and also to an Act, entitled, " An Act supplementary to an Act, entitled, ' An Act for the encour agement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies during the times therein mentioned ;' and extending the benefits thereof to the arts of designing, engraving, and etching historical and other jpiiuts." JNO. W. DAVIS, Clerk ofthe District of Massachusetts. TO THE REV. JAMES FLINT, 05c. Salem, Mass., Sept. 1825.

My Dear Friend, These letters are addressed to you in testimony of a friendship, which commenced with our boyhood, went with us to school, and followed us to the halls of our Alma Mater — a friendship which was not less in tense, when our duties severed us wide from each oth er — a friendship which made itself felt beyond mountains and ' rivers unknown to song,' — a friendship which has survived changes of every sort, the wither ing touch of time and disease, and the still more fatal influence of differing opinion. To your wishes, to your kindness, and that of your excellent townsman, endeared to me by the remem brance of kind offices of twenty-five years' standing, they owe their birth. I may not be allowed here to record his name. But in these days of refined selfish ness, I may speak of munificence and kindness, which have sustained me in suffering and disease, and which, unsought and unsolicited, pursued me to the remotest legions of the West.

Letter I

Alexandria, Red River, Oct. 1324. Dear Sir, You are kind enough to suppose that some details of what I have seen, enjoyed, and suffered, in the valley of the Mississippi, during ten years' journeying, and occasional residence in that region, might be of suffi cient interest for publication. I have been so much accustomed to deference to your judgment, as to suppose at times, that the capability, which you supposed, must exist. Often I have taken up the task, and as often it has fallen from my hands. There are such showers of journa's, and travels, and residences, and geographies, and gazetteers ; and every person, who can in any way fasten the members cf a sentence together, after having travelled through a country, is so sure to begin to scribble about it, that I have felt a kind of awkward consciousness at the thought of starting in the same beaten track.

And yet I cannot certainly be classed with those writers of travels, who travel post, or are wafted through a country in a steam boat, and assume, on the ground of having thus tra versed it, to know all about it. Nor can this be pro nounced an effort of book -making, in which the con tents of other books are served up in another form. It will probably be my most obvious fault, to have con sulted no others' writings or opinions, and to have re lied too much for interest and instruction, on what I have myself seen and felt. I have, as you know. drunk of every considerable stream that yields tribute to the Mississippi, far from the parent channel ; have traversed the country in all directions ; have resided a considerable time in the northern, middle, and south ern divisions, and in the discharge of duties, which necessarily brought me in contact with all classes of the inhabitants ; so that, as far as long and familiar observation of the country can qualify one to describe it, I am so qualified.

I speak not of the vicissitudes of disease and suffering which I have endured ; of the trials and privations which I encountered. The re trospect is too gloomy for myself, and would, probably, be neither of interest nor use to my readers. Another discouragement has occurred, in thinking of the task which you propose. Had I originally contemplated such a work as this, I should have kept a regular and detailed journal. The duties which I assumed when I first visited this country, compelled me to keep such a journal for some years. This manuscript, together with many others, was blown away in a hurricane which occurred on the Arkansas, in which every part of the house where we resided was penetrated by the wind and the rain ; and in which the suffering and danger of a sick family pre cluded anxiety upon any other score.

It was a detail. too, of religious duties, and they are necessarily so uniform, that a page or two will serve as a sample of all the rest. I have felt the less regret at the loss of these materials, from reflecting, that a traveller who copies from a daily journal will hardly fail to copy much that is trivial aud uninteresting. But the inci dents that have remained fresh in my memory for the period of ten years, must have excited a vivid impression when they occurred, and must have had, in the narrator at least, their share of interest. On my return to my native country after so many years of absence, you were aware how many acquaint ances were importuning me for soi~e information of this sort. And you are aware, how much the feeble ness and dejection of a constitution, broken down by so much wandering, toil, and disease, endured in the wilderness, and in those sickly climes, disqualified me for such a task.

Nor is this intended to disarm criti cism, but simply to account for deficiency either of manner or matter. For the rest, if in the following pages the feelings of the writer occupy too conspicuous a place in the view of that severe ordeal, in which the square and compass are applied to works of this kind, let it be remembered, that these pages were chiefly intended for the eye of friends, to whom, it was well known, such would be the most interesting parts of the work. Let him that objects, too, be constituted in any measure as I am, and let him have been placed in the actual positions in which I have been placed, and I would then hope, that my apology would be fur nished.

Letter II

You are entirely informed of the circumstances, which induced me, after a laborious but secluded min istry of fourteen years, to leave that asylum, and direct my eourse to the West. You remember the miserable state of my health, and the hopes I entertained, that in a milder climate and a new order of things, I might regain my health and cheerfulness. I remember but too faithfully, the bitter spirit of political rancour, that rendered the condition of so many ministers at that time so unhappy. With many prayers on my ojj/n part, and that of my friends, that these evils might not follow me, my family left the land of their fathers the fourth of October 1815. Toward the latter part of the month, we began to as cend the Allegany hills. In our slow mode of travelling, we had had them in view several days.

With their interminable blue outline, stretching hill beyond hill, and interposing to the imagination of such travel lers as we were, a barrier to return almost as impassa ble as the grave, it may easily be imagined with what interest we contemplated them. It is, I believe, generally conceded to the inhabitants of New England, that, perhaps, with the exception of the Scotch, they have more national feeling than any other people. We had broken all the ties that render the place, where we first drew breath, so dear. Occasional samples of the people and the country beyond these hills, not at all calculated to sooth our feelings," or to throw pleasing associations over our contemplated residence beyond them, had frequently met us. The people on our route constantly designated them by the appellation of "back-woodsmen," and we heard these men themselves uniformly calling their baggage " plunder."

The wolf, the bear, and the bald eagle, were the most frequent emblems in the tavern-signs, near the acclivities of these mountains. The bald eagle itself was soaring in the blue of the atmosphere, high above the summits of the first ridge, and its shrill and savage cries were sufficiently loud to reach our ears. We had, too, many "compagnons de voyage," ex act samples ofthe general character of New England emigrants ; poor, active, parsimonious, inquisitive, aud fully impressed that no country, in moral advantages, could equal the country which they had left. They felt, in common with us, their love for the clear homes they had left, increasing as they receded from them. In common with us, too, they calculated to have taken a final farewell of those homes. When we had at last reached the highest point of the first of the three par allel ridges, before we began to descend a declivity, which we expected would forever shield the Atlantic country from our view ; before we went " over the hills and far away," it will readily be conceived, that a family which had been reared in seclusion, such as ours, would be likely to drop " some natural tears," and to take a long and anxious look at the land, which contain ed all their ties and charities.

We tried to comfort each other, as we steadily contemplated the blue summits that were just before us, that we had a world in wdiich " to choose our place of rest, and Providence our guide." But we had already wandered far enough from home, to admit the full truth of the exclama tion of Attala : " Happy they, who have not seen the smoke of the stranger's fire."

Letter III

We passed these hills on the common route from Philadelphia to Pittsburg. The first ridge was not very precipitous, and I should suppose, short of a thousand feet above the level of its base. The grandeur r of these mountains, so impressive when their blue out line just touches the horizon in the distance, diminish es when you reach their summits. They have not the pathless precipices, nor the rushing torrents, of the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont. But whatever they wanted in sublimity, at the time when we passed them, they more than made up in the diffi culty ..nd danger of crossing them. I have no wish, however, to fatigue you with the recital of our exertions in lifting n\e carriage up precipitous ascents, washed by the rains, and the still greater exertions necessary to let it down again.

We passed hundreds of Pittsburg waggons, in the crossing. Many of them had broken axles and wheels, and in more than one place it was pointed out to us, that teams had plunged down the precipices and had perished. In descending the ridges, a winding road, just wide enough to admit one carriage, was carried round the verge of the de clivity, perhaps for r,iore than a mile. In this case, if two carriages met, there would be no alternative but to retreat to the commencement of the narrow way. To prevent this, it is necessary that the carriage, which is commencing the ascent or descent, give notice by blowing a horn, or sending a messenger in advance. These people, who drive teams between Philadel phia and Pittsburg, were to me, in their manners and way of living, a new species, perfectly unique in their appearance, language, and habits.

They devote them selves to this mode of subsistence for years, and spend their time continually on the road. They seemed to me to be more rude, profane, and selfish, than either sailors, boatmen, or hunters, to whose modes of living theirs is the most assimilated. We found them addicted to drunkenness, and very little disposed to assist each other. Such was the aspect they presented to us. We were told, there were honourable exceptions, and even associations, wdio, like the sacred band of Thebes, took a kind of oath to stand by, and befriend each other. I often dropped among them, as by accident, that impressive tract, the " Swearer's Prayer." 1 was pleased to remark the result of their reflections, as they read the tract, apart on their window-seats. 'In some it seemed to produce a momentary thoughtfulness ; in others a smile ; and again in others, a deep growl of acquiescence, very like that which every one has heard, who has attended a council of Indians, and heard them express a kind of reluctant assent to terms proposed to them.

In the valley, between the middle and the last of -the parallel ridges, we encountered a drove of more than a thousand cattle and swine, from the interior of Ohio ; a name which yet sounded in our ears like the land of savages. The appearance of the swine and cattle, in our eyes, had an unnatural shagginess, and roughness, like wolves ; and such, you know, even yet, are the impressions of multitudes of the Atlantic people, with respect to that beautiful country. The name of the country from wdiich this drove came, added something, no doubt, to these associations. They were from " Mad River." We were told that the chief drover, a man as untamed and wild in appearance, as Robinson's man, Friday, was taking them on to Pennsylvania to fatten, previous to their being sold in the Philadelphia market.

There is a considerable tract of table-land, before you descend the last hill, and on this there was a public house. Here we encountered a stage broken down. The passengers had been drenched in rain. They o were a company of tinners, going to establish them selves somewhere in the West, and a printer from Connecticut, with his young and beautiful wife, about to commence a printing-office for a gazette in Ken tucky. This fine young woman, who had suffered her share with the rest, gave us an example of natural equanimity and philosophy. She was cheerful and conversable, while the other women were querulous, in tears, and out of temper with every thing about them, and full of all the tedious complaints with which inexperienced travellers meet the incidental disasters of their way. Our journey from the beautiful Moravian settlements in Pennsylvania had been rendered sometimes tedious, and sometimes amusing, by the company of a German Lutheran minister and his family, who had been sent out to some Lutheran settlements on the Big Miami.

He was recommended to us as an amiable and exemplary man, and had been reared, I believe, in Germany. A more singular specimen of a clergyman could not well be presented to a New England minister. He was a short, robust man, with a round and ruddy face, with a singular expression, between cheer fulness and apathy. When travelling, he had con stantly in his mouth a pipe, in form much like that musical instrument called a serpent, in which the smoke circulated through many circumvolutions, and finally reached his mouth through a silver mouth-piece. He rode a huge Pennsylvania horse, apparently with no consciousness of want of feeling for his wife and children, who, for the most part, trudged along beside their waggon on foot. When we arrived at the public house, and were seated to the substantial and sump tuous fare that is furnished at the good houses in these •regions, and this family at the same time ordered then national diet, boiled potatoes, sour milk, and mush, we could easily discover by the longing looks of the children, that, all national preferences to the contrary, it would have been easy to persuade them to exchange their diet for ours.

I can scarcely hope to give you any impression of our feelings when we began to descend the last. O CT ridge, and the boundless valley of the Ohio began to open upon our view. The finishing of the superb national road from Baltimore to Wheeling, and the present ease and frequency of crossing the mountains, will soon render it difficult to conceive what a new and strange world opened at that time and place before the imagination of an unpractised Atlantic traveller. In such an unexplored and unlimited view of a country to be our resting-place, and the field of our labours, where there was no fixed point, no shelter for our hopes and expectations, where all must necessarily be strange, a country to which, in approaching, we had constantly heard the term " back woods " applied, melancholy thoughts and painful remembrances would naturally arise in our minds.

I fear that my family and myself feel more bitterly and painfully than is the common lot to feel, the gloomy and depressing sensation of experi encing ourselves strangers in a strange land. There are some very handsome villages on the slopes of the hills as you approach Pittsburg. Penn sylvania abounds with them, especially on the east of the Allegany ridges. Some of these, the names of which had only met us ou an itinerary, astonished us by their size and populousness. Others delighted us with the beauty of their situations. East Pennsylva nia is a beautiful country in every point of view. I hav'e no where seen an agriculture apparently so rich as here. In the permanence of their spacious stone mansions and barns, the Germans seem to have thought more of posterity than themselves ; and, with old Cato, to have done all with a view to " posterity and the immortal Gods."

To us, West Penn sylvania appeared to be peopled with a tall, hardy, lank-looking race of men. The soil in many places had the same hard and harsh features of rock and hil lock, which characterize our landscape. Except the inhabitants in the immediate vicinity of Pittsburg, or other manufacturing villages, they find indifferent mar kets for their produce, and their chances for making money are very precarious. In healthiness, in the difficulty of procuring the means of subsistence, in ab stemiousness, and in habits of rigid industry, we com pared them to our New England people. The inter mixture of Irish, Scotch, and Germans, has given them a singular and rather ludicrous dialect, in which the peculiarities of language of these several races are mixed. I may remark in conclusion, that the only disaster worth recording, in our long journey to Pittsburg, occurred just before we left the town.

On a slight de clivity, we came in contact with a carriage rapidly driving from town, and were upset in a moment. But we arose from under the pressure of boxes, bundles, and trunks, alarmed, indeed, but with very little per sonal injury.' ■

Letter IV

— PITTSBURG. Many travellers and emigrants to this region, view the first samples of the modes of travelling in the west ern world, on the Allegany at Oleanne point, or the Monongahela at Brownsville. These are but the re tail specimens. At Pittsburg, where these rivers unite, you have the thing in gross, and by wholesale. The first thing that strikes a stranger from the Atlantic, arrived at the boat-landing, is the singular, whimsical, and amusing spectacle, of the varieties of water-craft, of all shapes and structures. There is the the stately barge, of the size of a large Atlantic schooner, with its raised and outlandish looking deck. This kind of craft, however, which required twenty-five hands to work it up stream, is almost gone into disuse, and though so common ten years ago, is now scarcely seen.

Next there is the keel-boat, of a long, slender, and ele gant form, and generally carrying from fifteen to thirty tons. This boat is formed to be easily propelled over shallow waters in the summer season, and in low stages of the water is still much used, and runs on waters not yet frequented by steam-boats. Next in order are the Kentucky flats, or in the vernacular phrase, " broad horns," a species of ark, very nearly resembling a New- England pig-stye. They are fifteen feet wide, and from forty to one hundred feet in length, and carry from twenty to seventy tons. Some of them, that are called family-boats, and used by families in descending the river, are very large and roomy, and have comfortable and separate apartments, fitted up with chairs, beds, tables and stoves. It is no uncommon spectacle to see a large family, old and young, servants, cattle, hogs, horses, sheep, fowls, and animals of all kinds, bringing to recollection the cargo of the ancient ark, all embark ed, and floating down on the same bottom.

Then there are what the people call " covered sleds," or ferry flats, and Allegany-skiffs, carrying from eight to twelve tons. In another place are pirogues of from two to four tons burthen, hollowed sometimes from one prodigious tree, or from the trunks of two trees united, and a plank rim fitted to the upper part. There are common skiffs, and other small craft, named, from the manner of making them, " dug-outs," and canoes hollowed from smaller trees. These boats are in great numbers, and these names are specific, and clearly define the boats to which they belong. But besides these, in this land of freedom and invention, with a little aid perhaps, from the influence of the moon, there are monstrous anomalies, reducible to no specific class of boats, and only illustrating the whimsical archetypes of things that have previouslo existed in the brain of inventive men, who reject the slavery of being obliged to build in any received form.

You can scarcely imagine an abstract form in which a boat can be built, that in some part of the Ohio or Mississippi you will not see, actually in motion. The New York canal is beginning, indeed, to bring samples of this infinite variety of water-craft nearer to the inspection of the Atlantic people. This variety of boats, so singular in form, and most of them apparently so frail, is destined in many instan ces to voyages of from twelve hundred to three thousand miles. Keel-boats, built at this place, start on hunting expeditions for points on the Missouri, Arkan sas, and Red River, at such distances from Pittsburg as these. Such are the inland voyages on these long streams, and the terms of the navigation are as novel as are the forms of the boats. You hear of the dan ger of " riffles," meaning probably, ripples, and plant ers, and sawyers, and points, and bends, and shoots, a corruption, I suppose, of the French " chute."

You hear the boatmen extolling their prowess in pushing a pole, and you learn the received opiuion, that a " Ken tuck " is the best man at a pole, and a Frenchman at the oar. A firm push of the iron-pointed pole on a fixed log, is termed a " reverend " set. You are told when you embark, to bring your "plunder" aboard, and you hear about moving " fernenst " the stream ; aud you gradually become acquainted with a copious vocabulary of this sort. The manners of the boatmen are as strange as their language. Their peculiar way of life has given origin not only to an appropriate dialect, but to new modes of enjoyment, riot, and fight ing. Almost every boat, while it lies in the harbour has one or more fiddles scraping continually aboard, to which you often see the boatmen dancing. There is no wonder that the way of life which the boatmen lead, in turn extremely indolent, and extremely laborious ; for days together requiring little or no effort, and attended with no danger, and then on a sudden, laborious and hazardous, beyond Atlantic navigation ; generally plentiful as it respects food, and always so as it regards whiskey, should always have seductions that prove irresistible to the young people that live near the banks of the river.

The boats float by their dwellings on beautiful spring mornings, when the verdant forest, the mild and delicious temperature of the air, the delightful azure of the sky of this country, the fine bottom on the one hand, and the romantic bluff on the other, the broad and smooth stream rolling calmly down the forest, and floating the boat gently i forward, — all these circumstances harmonize in the excited youthful imagination. The boatmen are dan cing to the violin on the deck of their boat. They scatter their wit among the girls on the shore who come down to the water's edge to see the pageant pass. The boat glides on until it disappears behind a point of wood. At this moment perhaps, the bugle, with which all the boats are provided, strikes up its note in the distance over the water. These scenes, and these notes, echoing from the bluffs of the beautiful Ohio, have a charm for the imagination, which, although I have heard a thousand times repeated, and at all hours, and in all positions, is even to me always new, and always delightful.

No wonder that the young, who are reared in these remote regions, with that restless curiosity which is fostered by solitude and silence, who witness scenes like this so frequently, no wonder that the severe and unremitting labours of agriculture, performed directly in the view of such scenes, should become tasteless and irksome. No wonder that the young along the banks of the great streams, should detest the labours of the field, and embrace every opportunity, either openly, or if minors, covertly, to escape and devote themselves to the pernicious employment of boating. And in this view we may account for the detestation of the inhab itants along these great streams towards steam-boats, which are every day diminishing the number of small boats and boatmen, and which have already withdrawn from the western waters, probably ten thousand from that employment.

And yet with all these seductions for the eye and the imagination, no life is so slavish, none so precarious and dangerous. In no employment do the hands so wear out. After the lapse of so very short a period since these waters have been navigated in this way, at every bend, and every high point of the river, you are almost sure to see, as you stop for a moment, indications of the " narrow house ;" the rude monument, the coarse memorial, carved on an adjoin ing tree by a brother boatman, which marks that an exhausted boatman there yielded his breath, and was buried. Pittsburg is a considerable town, generally built of brick, and has been so often described as to render un interesting any new attempt of the kind. The site is romantic and delightful. It is well known as a manufacturing place, and once almost supplied the lower country with a variety of the most necessary and important manufactures.

But the wealth, business, and glory of this place are fast passing away, transferred to Cincinnati, to Louisville, and other pla ces on the Ohio. Various causes have concurred to this result ; but especially the multiplication of steam boats, and the consequent facility of communication with the Atlantic ports by the Mississippi. There is lit tle prospect of the reverse of this order of things. The national road, terminating at Wheeling, contributes to this decay of Pittsburg. Her decline is not much regretted, for she used to fatten on the spoils of the poor emigrants that swarmed to this place. Accustomed to scenes of parsimony, misery, and beggary, and to transient and unprincipled men, occupied in the har dening pursuits of manufactures, she had been brought to think all men rogues, misery the natural order of things, and of course little entitled to commiseration, and every way of getting money fair game.

The traveller was too apt to think of her as immersed in " sin and sea-coal ;" for the constant use of fossil coal, o both for culinary and manufacturing purposes, has given a sooty and funereal aspect even to the buildings'; of course much hospitality could not be expected here. We were introduced, however, to the family of a minister, whose stately mansion and fine furniture, gave us an impression of the opulence, if not ol the hospitality ofthe owner. But a New England minis ter expects in vain, in these regions, the simple, unaf fected, and ample hospitality, which constitutes so de lightful a trait in the character of the clergymen of that country. I need only add, that the charges of the hotel where we lodged, were, as I believe, double of what would have been charged for the same fare at the same kind of house in Boston.