Afloat on the Ohio. Reuben Gold Thwaites
numerous ravines, ascend sharply from the flood; at the quarried base, a wagon road and the customary railway; and upon the stony beach, two or three rough shelter-tents, housing the Black Diamond Brass Band, of Monongahela City, out on a week's picnic to while away the period of the strike.
It was seven o'clock when we struck camp, and our frugal repast was finished by lantern-light. The sun sets early in this narrow trough through the foothills of the Laurel range.
McKeesport, Pa., Saturday, May 5th.—Out there on the beach, near Charleroi, with the sail for an awning, Pilgrim had been converted into a boudoir for the Doctor, who, snuggled in his sleeping-bag, emitted an occasional snore—echoes from the Land of Nod. W—— and our Boy of ten summers, on their canvas folding-cots, were peacefully oblivious of the noises of the night, and needed the kiss of dawn to rouse them. But for me, always a light sleeper, and as yet unused to our airy bedroom, the crickets chirruped through the long watches.
Two or three freighters passed in the night, with monotonous swish-swish and swelling wake. It arouses something akin to awe, this passage of a steamer's wake upon the beach, a dozen feet from the door of one's tent. First, the water is sucked down, leaving for a moment a wet streak of sand or gravel, a dozen feet in width; in quick succession come heavy, booming waves, running at an acute angle with the shore, breaking at once into angry foam, and wasting themselves far up on the strand, for a few moments making bedlam with any driftwood which chances to have made lodgment there. When suddenly awakened by this boisterous turmoil, the first thought is that a dam has broken and a flood is at hand; but, by the time you rise upon your elbow, the scurrying uproar lessens, and gradually dies away along a more distant shore.
We were slow in getting off this morning. But the dense fog had been loath to lift; and at first the stove smoked badly, until we discovered and removed the source of trouble. This stove is an ingenious contrivance of the Doctor's—a box of sheet-iron, of slight weight, so arranged as to be folded into an incredibly small space; a vast improvement for cooking purposes over an open camp-fire, which Pilgrim's crew know, from long experience in far distant fields, to be a vexation to eyes and soul.
Coaling hamlets more or less deserted were frequent this morning—unpainted, windowless, ragged wrecks. At the inhabited mining villages, either close to the strand or well up on hillside ledges, idle men were everywhere about. Women and boys and girls were stockingless and shoeless, and often dirty to a degree. But, when conversed with, we found them independent, respectful, and self-respecting folk. Occasionally I would, for the mere sake of meeting these workaday brothers of ours, with canteen slung on shoulder, climb the steep flight of stairs cut in the clay bank, and on reaching the terrace inquire for drinking water, talking familiarly with the folk who came to meet me at the well-curb.
There are old-fashioned Dutch ovens in nearly every yard, a few chickens, and often a shed for the cow, that is off on her daily climb over the neighboring hills. Through the black pall of shale, a few vegetables struggle feebly to the light; in the corners of the palings, are hollyhocks and four-o'clocks; and, on window-sills, rows of battered tin cans, resplendent in blue and yellow labels, are the homes of verbenas and geraniums, in sickly bloom. Now and then, a back door in the dreary block is distinguished by an arbored trellis bearing a grape-vine, and furnishing for the weary housewife a shady kitchen, al fresco. As a rule, however, there is little attempt to better the homeless shelter furnished by the corporation.
We restocked with provisions at Monongahela City, a smart, newish town, and at Elizabeth, old and dingy. It was at Elizabeth, then Elizabethtown, that travelers from the Eastern States, over the old Philadelphia Road, chiefly took boat for the Ohio—the Virginians still clinging to Redstone, as the terminus of the Braddock Road. Elizabethtown, in flatboat days, was the seat of a considerable boat-building industry, its yards in time turning out steamboats for the New Orleans trade, and even sea-going sailing craft; but, to-day, coal barges are the principal output of her decaying shipyards.
By this time, the duties of our little ship's company are well defined. W—— supervises the cuisine, most important of all offices; the Doctor is chief navigator, assistant cook, and hewer of wood; it falls to my lot to purchase supplies, to be carrier of water, to pitch tent and make beds, and, while breakfast is being cooked, to dismantle the camp and, so far as may be, to repack Pilgrim; the Boy collects driftwood, wipes dishes, and helps at what he can—while all hands row or paddle through the livelong day, as whim or need dictates.
Lock No. 3, at Walton, necessitated a portage of the load, over the left bank. It is a steep, rocky climb, and the descent on the lower side, strewn with stone chips, destructive to shoe-leather. The Doctor and I let Pilgrim herself down with a long rope, over a shallow spot in the apron of the dam.
At six o'clock a camping-ground for the night became desirable. We were fortunate, last evening, to find a bit of rustic country in which to pitch our tent; but all through this afternoon both banks of the river were lined with village after village, city after city, scarcely a garden patch between them—Wilson, Coal Valley, Lostock, Glassport, Dravosburg, and a dozen others not recorded on our map, which bears date of 1882. The sun was setting behind the rim of the river basin, when we reached the broad mouth of the Youghiogheny (pr. Yock-i-o-gai'-ny), which is implanted with a cluster of iron-mill towns, of which McKeesport is the center. So far as we could see down the Monongahela, the air was thick with the smoke of glowing chimneys, and the pulsating whang of steel-making plants and rolling-mills made the air tremble. The view up the "Yough" was more inviting; so, with oars and paddle firmly set, we turned off our course and lustily pulled against the strong current of the tributary. A score or two of house-boats lay tied to the McKeesport shore or were bolstered high upon the beach; a fleet of Yough steamers had their noses to the wharf; a half-dozen fishermen were setting nets; and, high over all, with lofty spans of iron cobweb, several railway and wagon bridges spanned the gliding stream.
It was a mile and a half up the Yough before we reached the open country; and then only the rapidly-gathering dusk drove us ashore, for on near approach the prospect was not pleasing. Finally settling into this damp, shallow pocket in the shelving bank, we find broad-girthed elms and maples screening us from all save the river front, the high bank in the rear fringed with blue violets which emit a delicious odor, backed by a field of waving corn stretching off toward heavily-wooded hills. Our supper cooked and eaten by lantern-light, we vote ourselves as, after all, serenely content out here in the starlight—at peace with the world, and very close to Nature's heart.
There come to us, on the cool evening breeze, faint echoes of the never-ceasing clang of McKeesport iron mills, down on the Monongahela shore. But it is not of these we talk, lounging in the welcome warmth of the camp-fire; it is of the age of romance, a hundred and forty odd years ago, when Major Washington and Christopher Gist, with famished horses, floundered in the ice hereabout, upon their famous midwinter trip to Fort Le Bœuf; when the "Forks of the Yough" became the extreme outpost of Western advance, with all the accompanying horrors of frontier war; and later, when McKeesport for a time rivaled Redstone and Elizabethtown as a center for boat-building and a point of departure for the Ohio.
Pittsburg, Sunday, May 6th.—Many of the trees are already in full leaf. The trillium is fading. We are in the full tide of early summer, up here in the mountains, and our long journey of six weeks is southward and toward the plain. The lower Ohio may soon be a bake-oven, and the middle of June will be upon us before far-away Cairo is reached. It behooves us to be up and doing. The river, flowing by our door, is an ever-pressing invitation to be onward; it stops not for Sunday, nor ever stops—and why should we, mere drift upon the passing tide?
There was a smart thunder-shower during breakfast, followed by a cool, cloudy morning. At eleven o'clock Pilgrim was laden. A south-eastern breeze ruffled the waters of the Yough, and for the first time the Doctor ordered up the sail, with W—— at the sheet. It was not long before Pilgrim had the water "singing at her prow." With a rush, we flew past the factories, the house-boats, and the shabby street-ends of McKeesport, out into the Monongahela, where, luckily, the wind still held.
At McKeesport, the hills on the right are of a relatively low altitude, smooth and well rounded. It was here that Braddock, in his slow progress toward Fort Duquesne, first crossed the Monongahela, to the wide, level bottom