once Washington's; Captina Island,
just below, long and thickly-willowed, dreamily afloat in a glassy
sea, reflecting every change of light; the whole girt about with the
wide uplands of the winding valley, and overhead the march of sunny
clouds.

Captina Creek (108 miles) is not far down on the Ohio bank, and beside
it the little hamlet of Powhattan Point, with the West Virginia hills
thereabout exceptionally high and steep, and wooded to the very top.
Washington, who knew the Ohio well, down to the Great Kanawha, wrote
of this creek in 1770: "A pretty large creek on the west side, called
by Nicholson [his interpreter] Fox-Grape-Vine, by others Captema
creek, on which, eight miles up, is the town called Grape-Vine Town."
Captina village is its white successor. But there were also Indians
at the mouth of the creek; for when George Rogers Clark and his
missionary companion, Jones, two years later camped opposite on the
Virginia shore, they went over to make a morning call on the natives,
who repaid it in the evening, doubtless each time receiving freely
from the white men's bounty.

The next day was Sunday, and the travelers remained in camp, Jones
recording in his journal that he "instructed what Indians came over."
In the course of his prayer, the missionary was particularly impressed
by the attitude of the chief of Grape-Vine Town, named Frank Stephens,
who professed to believe in the Christian God; and he naively writes,
"I was informed that, all the time, the Indians looked very seriously
at me." Jones appears to have been impressed also with the hardness
of the beach, where they camped in the open, doubtless to avoid
surprises: "Instead of feathers, my bed was gravel-stones, by the
river side ... which at first seemed not to suit me, but afterward it
became more natural."

In those days, traveling was beset with difficulties, both ashore
and afloat. Eight years later (spring of 1780), three flatboats
were descending the Ohio, laden with families intending to settle in
Kentucky, when they suffered a common fate, being attacked by Indians
off Captina Creek. Several men and a child were killed, and twenty-one
persons were carried into captivity--among them, Catherine Malott,
a girl in her teens, who subsequently became the wife of that most
notorious of border renegades, Simon Girty.

On the West Virginia shore, not over a third of a mile below Captina
Creek, empties Grave Yard Run, a modest rivulet. It would of