The American Indians. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

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      Shawneetown is a word which brings to mind one of the North American tribes, who, between 1632 and the present time, figure as one of the frontier actors in our history. They have, in this time, with the ubiquity of one of their own genii, skipped over half America. They were once, certainly dwellers on the Savannah, if not, at a still earlier day, on the Suanee, in Florida; then fled north, a part coming down the Kentucky river, and a part fleeing to the Delaware, and thence west. They are now on the Konga, west of the Missouri. So much for the association of names. History never remembers any thing which she can possibly forget, and I found at least, one high-feeling personage here, who did not like the manner in which I associated the modern town with reminiscences of the savages. "Why, sir," said he, as we walked the deck of the ark, floating down the Ohio, and getting nearer the place every moment, "we have a bank there, and a court house; it is the seat of justice for Gallatin county;—and a printing press is about to be established;—it is a very thriving place, and it bids fair to remain second to none below the Wabash." "All this, truly," I responded, willing to reprove pride in an easy way, "is a great improvement on the wigwam and the council-fire, and wampum coin-beads." It is sometimes better to smile than argue, and I found it so on the present occasion. I did not wish to tread on the toes of rising greatness, or pour upon a love of home and locality, honorable and praise-worthy in my fellow traveller, the chilling influence of cold historical facts. My allusions were the mere effect of the association of ideas, resulting from names. If the residents of Shawneetown do not like to be associated with the native inhabitant, who would not have exchanged a good bow and arrows for all the court houses in Christendom, they should bestow upon the place some epithet which may sever the tie.

      NO. IV.

      After stopping a day or more at Shawneetown, and reconnoitering its vicinity, I proceeded to the mouth of the Cumberland, and from thence, after many days detention at that point waiting for a boat, to the mouth of the Ohio. I found this to be a highly interesting section of the river, from its great expanse and its fine water prospects. The picturesque calcareous cliffs on the west banks, display a novel and attractive line of river scenery. The Ohio had, from its commencement, well sustained the propriety of its ancient appellation of the Beautiful River; but it here assumed something more than beautiful—it was majestic. Let it be borne in mind that this stream, in the course of some seven or eight hundred miles flow from Pittsburg to Shawneetown, had been swelled on the right and left hand by the Scioto, the Muskingum, the Kentucky, the Miami, Green River, Wabash, and other rivers of scarcely inferior size. It is still further augmented, from the left bank, with those noble tributaries, the Cumberland and Tennessee, which bring in the gathered drain of the middle ranges of the Alleghanies. It is below Shawneetown, too, that the cliffs of the Cave-in-Rock-Coast present themselves on the west shore—with their associations of the early robber-era which has been commemorated by the pen of fiction of Charles Brockden Brown. These cliffs are cavernous, and assume varied forms. They rise in bold elevations, which bear the general name of the Knobs, but which are well worthy of the name of mountains. Distinct from the interest they have by casting their castle-like shadows, at sunset, in the pure broad stream, they constitute a kind of Derbyshire in their fine purple spars, and crystalized galena and other mineralogical attractions. I was told that a German of the name of Storch, who pretended to occult knowledge, had, years before, led money and mineral diggers about these Knobs, and that he was the discoverer of the fine fluates of lime found here.

      One can hardly pass these broken eminences, with the knowledge that they tally in their calcareous structure and position with the rock formation of the Missouri state border, lying immediately west of them, without regarding them as the apparent monuments of some ancient geological change, which affected a very wide space of country north of their position. A barrier of this nature, which should link the Tennessee and Missouri coasts, at Grand Tower, would have converted into an inland sea the principal area of the present states of Illinois, Indiana, and Southern Ohio. The line of separation in this latitude is not great. It constitutes the narrowest point between the opposing rock formations of the east and west shores, so far as the latter rise through and above the soil.

      I was still in a floating Monongahela ark as we approached this coast of cliffs. The day was one of the mildest of the month of June, and the surface of the water was so still and calm that it presented the appearance of a perfect mirror. Our captain ordered alongside the skiff, which served as his jolly boat, and directed the men to land me at the Great Cave. Its wide and yawning mouth gave expectations, however, which were not realized. It closes rapidly as it is pursued into the rock, and never could have afforded a safe shelter for gangs of robbers whose haunts were known. Tradition states, on this point, that its mouth was formerly closed and hid by trees and foliage, by which means the unsuspecting voyagers with their upward freight were waylaid. We overtook the slowly floating ark before it had reached Hurricane Island, and the next land we made was at Smithfield, at the mouth of the Cumberland. While here, several discharged Tennessee militiamen, or volunteers from the still unfinished Indian war in the south, landed on their way home. They were equipped after the fashion of western hunters, with hunting shirts and rifles, and took a manifest pride in declaring that they had fought under "old Hickory"—a term which has, since that era, become familiar to the civilized world. I here first saw that singular excrescence in the vegetable kingdom called cypress knees. The point of land between the mouth of the Cumberland and Ohio, was a noted locality of the cypress tree. This tree puts up from its roots a blunt cone, of various size and height, which resembles a sugar loaf. It is smooth, and without limb or foliage. An ordinary cone or knee would measure eight inches in diameter, and thirty inches high. It would seem like an abortive effort of the tree to put up another growth. The paroquet was exceedingly abundant at this place, along the shores, and in the woods. They told me that this bird rested by hooking its upper mandible to a limb. I made several shooting excursions into the neighbouring forests, and remember that I claimed, in addition to smaller trophies of these daily rambles, a shrike and a hystrix.

      At length a keel boat came in from the Illinois Saline, commanded by a Captain Ensminger—an Americo-German—a bold, frank man, very intelligent of things relating to river navigation. With him I took passage for St. Louis, in Missouri, and we were soon under weigh, by the force of oars, for the mouth of the Ohio. We stopped a short time at a new hamlet on the Illinois shore, which had been laid out by some speculators of Cincinnati, but was remarkable for nothing but its name. It was called, by a kind of bathos in nomenclature, "America." I observed on the shores of the river at this place, a very recent formation of pudding-stone, or rather a local stratum of indurated pebbles and clay, in which the cementing ingredient was the oxyde of iron. Chalybeate waters percolated over and amongst this mass. This was the last glimpse of consolidated matter. All below, and indeed far above, was alluvial, or of recent origin. Nothing could exceed the fertile character of the soil, or its rank vegetation and forest growth, as we approached the point of junction; but it was a region subject to periodical overflows, the eras of which were very distinctly marked by tufts and bunches of grass, limbs, and other floating matter which had been lodged and left in the forks and branches of trees, now fifteen or twenty feet above our heads. It was now the first day of July, and I felt the most intense interest as we approached and came to the point of confluence. I had followed the Ohio, in all its sinuosities, a thousand miles. I had spent more than three months in its beautiful and varied valley; and I had something of the attachment of an old friend for its noble volume, and did not well like to see it about to be lost in the mighty Mississippi. Broad and ample as it was, however, bringing in the whole congregated drain of the western slopes of the Alleghanies and the table lands of the Great Lakes, the contest was soon decided. The stream had, at that season, sunk down to its summer level, and exhibited a transparent blue volume. The Mississippi, on the contrary, was swelled by the melting snows of the Rocky Mountains, and was in its vernal flood. Coming in at rather an acute angle, it does not immediately arrest the former, but throws its waters along the Tennessee shores. It runs with prodigious velocity. Its waters are thick, turbid, and replete with mingled and floating masses of sand and other comminuted rock and floating vegetation, trees, and rubbish. For miles the line of separation between the Ohio and Mississippi СКАЧАТЬ