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

Front matter

RECOLLECTIONS

OF

THE LAST TEN YEARS,

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 of these mountains, so impressive when their blue outline just touches the horizon in the distance, diminishes 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 difficulty and danger of crossing them. I have no wish, however, to fatigue you with the recital of our exertions in lifting the 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 declivity, perhaps for more than a mile. In this case, if two carnages 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, wThich is commencing the ascent or descent, give notice by blowing a horn, or sending a messenger in advance.

These people, who drive teams between Philadelphia 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 themselves 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, who, 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." I 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 which 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 2 were a company of tinners, going to establish themselves 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 Kentucky. 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 Pennsjdvania 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 wTas 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 cheerfulness and apathy. When travelling, he had constantly 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 sumptuous fare that is furnished at the good houses in these regions, and this family at the same time ordered their 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 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 experiencing ourselves strangers in a strange land.

There are some very handsome villages on the slopes of the hills as you approach Pittsburg. Pennsylvania abounds with them, especially on the east of the Allegany ridges. Some of these, the names of which had only met us on an itinerary, astonished us by their size and populousness. Others delighted us with the beauty of their situations. East Pennsylvania is a beautiful country in every point of view. I have 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 Pennsylvania 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 hillock, which characterize our landscape. Except the inhabitants in the immediate vicinity of Pittsburg, 01* other manufacturing villages, they find indifferent markets for their produce, and their chances for making money are very precarious. In healthiness, in the difficulty of procuring the means of subsistence, in abstemiousness, and in habits of rigid industry, we compared them to our New England people. The intermixture of Irish, Scotch, and Germans, has given them a singular and rather ludicrous dialect, in wThich 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 declivity, 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 personal injury.

Letter Iv.— Pittsburg

Many travellers and emigrants to this region, view the first samples of the modes of travelling in the western world, on the Allegany at Oleanne point, or the Monongahela at Brownsville. These are but the retail 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 elegant form, and generally carrying from fifteen to thirtytons. 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, " broadhorns," 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 embarked, and floating down on the same bottom. Then there are what the people call " covered sleds," or ferryflats, and Allegany-skifTs, 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 comaion 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 instances 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, Arkansas, 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 danger of " riffles," meaning probably, ripples, and planters, 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 opinion, that a " Kentuck " 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 : and 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 dia lect, but to new modes of enjoyment, riot, and fighting. . 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 dowu the forest, and floating the boat gently forward, — all these circumstances harmonize in the excited youthful imagination.

The boatmen are dancing 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 tile pernicious employment of boating. And in this view we may account for the detestation of the inhabitants 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 slop for a moment, indications of the " narrow house the rude monument, the coarse memorial; carved on an adjoining 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 uninteresting 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 places on the Ohio. Various causes have concurred to this result ; but especially the multiplication of steamboats, and the consequent facility of communication with the Atlantic ports by the Mississippi. There is little 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 hardening 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,

BIB' 3 yh both for culinary and manufacturing purposes, has given a sooty and funereal aspect even to the buildings5; 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 of the hospitality of the owner. But a New England minister expects in vain, in these regions, the simple, unaffected, and ample hospitality, which constitutes so delightful 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. It has been said, that the decay of the business of this place has been connected with its moral improvement, and that in moral and humane institutions, and in the urbanity and kindness of its manners, it now holds a respectable competition with other places. That this order of things may go on increasing is " a consummation devoutly to be wished."

Letter V

Our first river voyage commenced in the early part of November, on a beautiful autumnal afternoon. We had waited a considerable time for the rising of the river, for as yet no boat of any considerable draught of water was able to descend. We had become impatient of remaining here, and embarked in a very small flat-boat, laden with factory cottons and cutlery. The owner was from Dorchester in Massachusetts, and probably his whole capital was embarked on this bottom. He was as little experienced in this mode of navigation as we were. Our notions of what we had to expect on this voyage were formed from contemplating the gentle and equable current of this beautiful river, and resulted in the persuasion, that the whole trip would be an excursion of pleasure and entire safety. Hundreds of emigrants from the eastern country commence this descent equally inexperienced.

About one o'clock in the afternoon we began to float down the Allegany, and in a few moments we were moving on the broad bosom of the Ohio, at the point of junction nearly a mile in width. The autumns of every part of our country are beautiful, but those of the western country are pre-eminently so. Nothing resulting from beauty of sky, temperature of air, and charm of scenery, can surpass what was now i above us and around us. The bright sun, the mild blue sky, a bland feeling of the atmosphere, the variegated foliage of the huge sycamores which line the banks of the Ohio, their leaves turning red and yellow, and finely contrasting with the brilliant white of their branches, the unruffled stream, which reflected in its bosom the beautiful surrounding nature, — all things conspired to give us very high anticipations from being wafted down " la belle riviere." We were congratulating each other, that this was indeed worth ail the toils and privations, we had endured in arriving at. the Ohio. But, alas for human calculations ! While we were noticing every object on the banks with such intense interest, while the owner was seated amidst his goods and wares, indulging probably in golden dreams of easy, certain, and great profits, while one of the company that you know of, was completely given up to reverie, at which you have so often smiled, — on a sudden the roar of the river admonished us that we were near a ripple. We had with us that famous book u The Navigator," as it is called. The boat began to exchange its gentle and imperceptible advance for a furious progress. Soon after, it gave a violent bounce against a rock on one side, which threatened to capsize it. On recovering her level, she immedidiately bounced on the opposite side, and that in its turn was keeled up. Instead of running to the oar, we ran to look in the " Navigator." The owner was pale. The children shrieked. The hard ware came tumbling upon us from the shelves, and Mrs. F, was almost literally buried amidst locks, latches, knives, and pieces of domestic cotton. The gentle river had not intended in this first alarm to swallow us up, but only to give us timely warning, that too much tranquillity and enjoyment are not to be expected here. We floated off from this ripple, which bore the ominous name of " Dead Man's," into the smooth water, with no other injury than the chaotic state of our lading. But from that moment, adieu to our poetic dreams of floating down the beautiful river in such perfect safety. We were continually running to the " Navigator," astonished to find how full the river was, of chutes and ripples.

I might easily record a succession of disasters of a like kind, sufficiently formidable to such fresh- water sailors as we were, without a single pilot or waterman on board. Sometimes we were jostling on the rocks in the ripples. Sometimes we were driven furiously along the chutes, and sometimes we stuck fast on the sand-bars. One night we lay grounded on a rock in the middle of the river, with the roar of a ripple in hearing, just below us. Our fear was, that the river, which was rising, would float us over these dangerous falls in the night ; and you will easily imagine, that for this night we gave " no sleep to our eyes."

At Beaver in Pennsylvania we exchanged this dangerous and tedious mode of conveyance, for one more suited to the present stage of the water. We purchased a large skiff. It has the advantage of being able to run in any stage of the water, without grounding, and is perfectly safe. In fine weather it furnishes a very pleasant way of descending the river. But we soon found that we had exchanged one inconvenience for another. We could look round us indeed ; we went forward securely. But at one time the sun beat intensely upon us. At another we suffered from fogs and rains. At every landing, too, where we stopped to spend the night, and find lodging, we were obliged to remove every article of lading from the boat, and not too well assured, that some of the numerous adventurers would not take away our boat during the night.

In this manner we floated by many thriving villages, that had just risen in the wilderness, and many indications of commencing settlements, The Ohio broadened evidently at every advancing bend. The bottoms diverged farther from the shores, and the fertility of the soil increased. We remarked a curious but uniform circumstance, which applies equally to the Mississippi, and all its tributaries. It is, that with few exceptions, where the bluffs of the river rise immediately from the shore on the one hand, the bottoms broaden on the other ; and when the bluff commences at the termination of the bottom, that commences on the opposite shore. Thus they regularly alternate with each other.

At Steubenville, in Ohio, we remarked that the river seemed to develope its character for broadness and fertility. Here we first began to notice the pawpaw, the persimon, and other new and beautiful shrubs and plants, peculiar to this climate. Here, too, we saw the most obvious proofs of the advance of this most flourishing country, in population and improvement, the more entire developement of which has been so astonishing within the last ten years. Where we now saw a large village, with the spires of churches, an entire street of large brick buildings, manufactories, a market-house, and the bustle of a busy town, only eighteen years before, there had been a solid and cornpact forest of vast sycamores and beeches. They numbered already in this town four thousand inhabitants.

We were almost daily passing the mouths of boatable streams, which furnish lateral canals, some of them hundreds of miles in extent, into the interior, on which every year new towns and villages were springing up, and pouring the products of cultivation into the Ohio. You understand, that it is not my intention to go into those details, which are best furnished by geographies and gazetteers. My object is simply to present you the observations and reflections, which obtruded themselves upon me, from nature, and the general aspect of things. In the systems of geology and world-making, which have furnished so much amusement to the philosophers, or would-be philosophers of the day, you are aware, that there have been various ingenious contrivances for the formation of this river, and the immense valley in which it runs. Among these theories, that of Mr. Volney, according to my best recollection, for it is many years since I read it, sup-

23 **0*

poses that this valley was in former ages a vast lake. The remains of the dike or barrier exist at present at Louisville, and the falls of the Ohio. It is certain, that the remains of river or lake formation exist, wherever the earth is penetrated to any depth. I have not seen in all this region a single block of granite. The bluffs of the Ohio are carbonate of lime, mixed often with the exuviae of marine animals. I have seen cliffs, which contained millions of a small species of muscle-shells, as distinct in the lime-stone, as if they had been imbedded there but yesterday. I have pondered and reflected much upon these remains of marine formation. But to relate the result of my conclusions upon the subject, as it is not my object, so neither would it, in my judgment, throw much light upon the subject. I leave entirely to other writers to devise devices, and to imagine causes, sufficient to form lakes and drain them, and to account for these indications of marine formation. I cannot, however, help observing, that the " conclusion of the whole matter," in my mind, was, that the bible solution of the matter, was not only as satisfactory, but as plausible as any other, and to me the most philosophical. God made the earth lo be inhabited. Such a river as the Ohio, such lateral streams as pour into it, the mountains, whose outer limits form the rim of the basin, the thousand devious channels, by which the cascades and fountains, that pour from these mountains, find their way to the Ohio, are all necessary to the draining, the irrigation, and the habitancy of the country. In this view, the river and the valley must have been coeval, and formed not only together, but adjusted the one to the other. There is a conformation of physical feature in the country every where, as you approach the Ohio, that indicates to every one the vicinity of the river. The bluffs and bottoms, as I have remarked, almost invariably alternate, and are still opposite each other ; and beyond them there is generally a considerable tract of country, in the south, denominated " hammock-land," and in Ohio " second bottom ; " and beyond all this, there are series of those singular hills, so unique in their appearance and character, as to indicate to you, at the distance of miles from the river, that you are approaching it. Still, beyond all this, there is another strip of country appropriate to the distance which it occupies from the river.

I need not inform you, that the Ohio runs, a considerable distance, wholly in Pennsylvania ; that afterwards, the left shore in descending is the western limit of Virginia, and the eastern of Ohio ; that afterwards, Kentucky is bounded on the left and Ohio on the right shore ; and that afterwards, first Indiana and then Illinois bound on the right shore, and Kentucky opposite on the left, until it enters the Mississippi. The former and the latter river furnish excellent geographical limits to states on a scale corresponding to the physical extent, grandeur, and ultimate moral destination of the country.