nd Island--New Albany--Riverside hermits--The
river falling--A deserted village--An ideal camp. 218

Chapter XVIII.

Village life--A traveling photographer--On a country
road--Studies in color--Again among colliers--In
sweet content--A ferry romance. 233

Chapter XIX.

Fishermen's tales--Skiff nomenclature--Green
River--Evansville--Henderson--Audubon and
Rafinesque--Floating shops--The Wabash. 251

Chapter XX.

Shawneetown--Farm-houses on stilts--Cave-in-Rock--Island
nights. 267

Chapter XXI.

The Cumberland and the Tennessee--Stately solitudes--Old
Fort Massac--Dead towns in Egypt--The
last camp--Cairo. 280

_Appendix A._--Historical outline of Ohio Valley
settlement. 296

_Appendix B._--Selected list of Journals of previous
travelers down the Ohio. 320

Index. 329

PREFACE.

There were four of us pilgrims--my Wife, our Boy of ten and a half
years, the Doctor, and I. My object in going--the others went for the
outing--was to gather "local color" for work in Western history. The
Ohio River was an important factor in the development of the West.
I wished to know the great waterway intimately in its various
phases,--to see with my own eyes what the borderers saw; in
imagination, to redress the pioneer stage, and repeople it.

A motley company have here performed their parts: Savages of the
mound-building age, rearing upon these banks curious earthworks for
archaeologists of the nineteenth century to puzzle over; Iroquois
war-parties, silently swooping upon sleeping villages of the
Shawanese, and in noisy glee returning to the New York lakes, laden
with spoils and captives; La Salle, prince of French explorers and
coureurs de bois, standing at the Falls of the Ohio, and seeking to
fathom the geographical mysteries of the continent; French and English
fur-traders, in bitter contention for the patronage of the red
man; borderers of the rival nations, shedding each other's blood in
protracted partisan wars; surveyors like Washington and Boone and the
McAfees, clad in fringed hunting-shirts and leathern leggings, mapping
out future states; hardy frontiersmen, fighting, hunting, or farming,
a