kade developed into Fort Fincastle, in Lord Dunmore's time;
then, Fort Henry, during the Revolution; and everyone who knows his
Western history at all has read of the three famous sieges of Wheeling
(1777, 1781, and 1782), and the daring deeds of its men and women,
which help illumine the pages of border annals. Finally, by 1784, the
fort at Wheeling, that had never surrendered, was demolished as no
longer necessary, for the wall of savage resistance was now pushed far
westward. Wheeling had become the western end of a wagon road across
the Panhandle, from Redstone, and here were fitted out many flatboat
expeditions for the lower Ohio; later, in steamboat days, the shallow
water of the upper river caused Wheeling to be in midsummer the
highest port attainable; and to this day it holds its ground as the
upper terminus of several steamboat lines.

Below Wheeling are several miles of factory towns nestled by the
strand, and numerous coal tipples, with their begrimed villages.
Fishermen have been frequent to-day, in houseboats of high and low
degree, and in land camps composed of tents and board shanties, with
rows of seines and tarred pound-nets stretched in the sun to dry;
tow-headed children abound, almost as nude as the pigs and dogs
and chickens amongst which they waddle and roll; women-folk busy
themselves with the multifarious cares of home-keeping, while their
lords are in shady nooks mending nets, or listlessly examining trout
lines which appear to yield but empty hooks; they tell us that when
the river is falling, fish bite not, and yet they serenely angle on,
dreaming their lives away.

A half mile above Big Grave Creek (101 miles), we, too, hurry into
camp on a shelving bank of sand, deep-fringed with willows; for over
the western hills thunder-clouds are rising, with wind gusts. Level
fields stretch back of us for a quarter of a mile, to the hills which
bound the bottom; at our front door majestically rolls the growing
river, perhaps a third of a mile in width, black with the reflection
of the sky, and wrinkled now and then with squalls which scurry over
its bubbling surface.[B]

The storm does not break, but the bending tree-tops crone, and toads
innumerable rend the air with their screaming whistles. We had great
ado, during the cooking of dinner, to prevent them from hopping into
our little stove, as it gleamed brightly in the early dusk; and have
adopted special precautions to keep them from the tent, as