hallows, object
lessons in patience, were great blue herons, carefully peering for the
prey which never seems to be found. As night closed in upon us, owls
dismally hooted in the mainland woods, buzzards betook themselves to
inland roosts, herons winged their stately flight to I know not where,
and over on the Kentucky shore could faintly be heard the barking
of dogs at the little "cracker" farmsteads hid deep in the lowland
forest.

CHAPTER XX.

Shawneetown--Farm-houses on stilts--Cave-in-Rock--An island
night.

Half-Moon Bar, Thursday, June 7th.--A head-breeze prevailed all day,
strong enough to fan us into a sense of coolness, but leaving the
water as unruffled as a mill-pond; thus did we seem, in the vivid
reflections of the early morning, to be sailing between double lines
of shore, lovely in their groupings of luxuriant trees and tangled
heaps of vine-clad drift. It was a hazy, mirage-producing atmosphere,
the river appearing to melt away in space, and the ever-charming
island heads looming unsupported in mid-air. From the woods, the
piercing note of locusts filled the air as with the ceaseless rattle
of pebbles against innumerable window-panes.

At a distance, Shawneetown appears as if built upon higher land than
the neighboring bottom; but this proves, on approach, to be an optical
illusion, for the town is walled in by a levee some thirty feet
in height, above the top of which loom its chimneys and spires.
Shawneetown, laid out in 1808, soon became an important post on the
Lower Ohio, and indeed ranked with Kaskaskia as one of the principal
Illinois towns, although in 1817 it still only contained from
thirty to forty log dwellings. During the reign of the Ohio-River
bargemen,[A] it was notorious as the headquarters of the roughest
elements in that boisterous class, and frequently the scene of most
barbarous outrages--"the odious receptacle," says a chronicler of the
time, "of filth and villany."

In those lively days, which lasted with more or less vigor until
about 1830,--by which time, steamboats had finally overcome popular
prejudice and gained the upper hand in river transportation,--the
people of Shawneetown were largely dependent on the trade of the salt
works of the neighboring Saline Reserve. The salt-licks--at which
in early days the bones of the mammoth were found, as at Big Bone
Lick--commenced a few miles below the town, and embraced a district
of about ninety thousand acres.