EMBARK ON THE OIHO.

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CHAPTER XI.

Embark on the Ohio. Banks of the River.

Wheeling.

Remarkable Indian Mound.-Risings of the River.-Arrival at Cincinnati.-The Town.-The Museum.-Manufacture.— Mrs. Trollope's Bazaar- her erroneous Statements.- Prosperity of Cincinnati-Hospitality of its Inhabitants.-American Servants.-The Cholera.- Contrast between the States of Ohio and Kentucky-Character of the Kentuckians.Brutal Method of Fighting.

HAVING spent a day at Pittsburgh, I committed myself to the bosom of " La Belle Rivière" (as the French used to call the Ohio), on the first steamboat with a high-pressure engine that I had yet seen. The noise, the furious and vain attempt made by the confined caloric to escape, and the violent shaking of the vessel, render it more disagreeable than those impelled by low-pressure engines; and, however the western worthies may wish to disguise the truth, they are much more dangerous. While on board, I read an account of the bursting of a boiler a few days previously, lower down the river, by which thirty or forty persons were killed or missing! I heard a rough Kentuckian chap relating, that he had been on board the steamer at the time of

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66

the explosion; he said he felt a sort of a queer shake, but he did not mind it at all;" and he concluded his pithy narration of the death of these thirty or forty luckless victims by saying, "It was d-d lucky, it was only a parcel of these Dutch;" meaning thereby that the sufferers were chiefly German emigrants.

The Ohio is indeed a noble and majestic stream, flowing between high and undulating banks teeming with a profusion of foliage, which includes every verdant hue from the willow to the cedar. Wherever clearances have been made, the trees immediately on the water's edge have been spared, in order that their huge trunks and wide-spread roots might break the force of the current, which rises after the melting of the snows to an extraordinary height. I observed many of them growing, twenty or thirty feet perpendicular, above the present elevation of the stream, with the soil completely washed from their base, and their sinewy fibrous roots exposed above the earth, and giving clear evidence of the furious attacks which they had resisted. This perpetual fringe of verdure, together with the equable and quiet nature of the current, gives a tone of beauty and repose to this river that I have never seen equalled; while its numerous bends, and the islands which here and there break its uniformity, prevent the eye from being cloyed by the profuse and interminable mass of foliage.

After passing Wellsburgh and several other vil

WHEELING.-GRAVE CREEK.

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lages, which bore a busy and thriving appearance, we arrived at Wheeling, situated on the extreme north-western point of Virginia. This is a town of considerable and increasing importance; the soil is alluvial, and the greatest obstacle to its becoming a very wealthy city, appears to be the extreme narrowness of the ledge on which it is built, there being but a small area between the mountains and the river; so that the streets, if extended, must be extended only longitudinally. The neighbourhood abounds with coal; and the great national western road passes through this town, which contains probably from seven to eight thousand inhabitants.

Among other objects of interest, a spot was pointed out to me, about fifteen miles below Wheeling, by the side of a stream, called, if I remember right, Grave Creek-an Indian mound, composed of bones and skulls. It is between one hundred and fifty and two hundred yards in circumference at the base, seventy feet high, and sixty feet in diameter at the summit, which is concave; the whole is regular and uniform in its construction. By what race and in what age these gigantic mounds were raised, has hitherto been, and probably ever will be, an unexplained mystery: it seems highly improbable that they were constructed by any Indian tribes, so vast are their dimensions, and so great the labour necessary to build them, as well as the population requisite to fill them.

The average breadth of the Ohio between Pitts

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RISINGS OF THE RIVER.

burgh and Cincinnati is six hundred yards, but it varies more than most rivers at the different seasons of the year; indeed, the "freshes," or rapid risings to which it is liable after heavy rains, are productive of great inconvenience and sometimes of danger to the residents near its banks. As an instance of the former, I might mention the impossibility of erecting wharfs or quays at the different commercial ports, where the want of such conveniences is but poorly supplied by house-boats, or floating wharfs moored close to the shore. I was told that two or three years ago the river rose sixty feet in height, and flooded all the lower parts of Cincinnati and other towns, so that the inhabitants were reduced to the gondola for their daily intercourse; provisions were introduced into the houses through the windows of the second and third story, and steam-boats plyed to and from the marketplace.

The only fault of the scenery in descending this noble river, is the rich endless variety of foliage which its banks present to the eye, and the want of any breaks or vistas by which a view of the adjacent country could be here and there obtained: it is self-evident, from what has been said of the rising of the water, that such a picturesque luxury would be most destructive to the banks.

On the last day of spring I arrived at Cincinnati, that precocious daughter of the West, that seems to have sprung, like the fabled goddess of war and

wisdom, into existence in the full panoply of manufacturing and commercial armour. Its situation is admirably chosen both for convenience and beauty, as it stands on a plain gently inclining towards the river; the area of this plain is nearly four miles in diameter, bounded on the north, north-east, and north-west by an undulating well-wooded range of hills, from the top of which the view of the fertile vale, the city, and the sweeping river, with its broad bosom speckled by steamers and other boats, is one of the loveliest that the eye can desire.

The streets in this city are laid out rectangularly; and thus the eye, in looking along the greater part of them, rests upon the hills before described, which gives a freshness to the prospect rarely to be found in a town. Many of the private houses are large and commodious, and some of them surrounded by pleasant and neatly cultivated gardens; there are about thirty churches, a college, a lunatic asylum, and one for orphans, and other public buildings usually found in a wealthy city.

The museum contains little worthy of notice ; moreover, its contents, mean as they are, are miserably deficient in order and arrangement. I was surprised and disappointed, as I had heard much of the valuable collection to be seen in this establishment. There are a few fossil mammoth bones of extraordinary size, and also a number of skulls found in some of the ancient mounds, differing materially in form from those of the modern race of