The saboted French, the wide-breeched Germans, the straw-crowned Swiss, the beshawled Irish, the shad-coated New-Englander, the gray-frocked Quaker, the sandy Scotch, all mingled in the brotherhood of citizenship, while laughing black slaves looked on.
The wings of the air--geese, ducks, and songbirds; the hoofs of the fields--deer, buffalo, and boar; the fins of the rivers--bass, trout, and pickerel--all added to the zest of this new life, as did also the luscious growth of plants and the odor of flowers.
One hundred years ago, this Middle West of ours had reached a most interesting period. Never before and never since could there have been more curious happenings than in those stirring times.
One boy, coming down the river then to seek his fortune, heard tales of the past and hopes for the future from the people whom he met.
Strong Parson Cutler, quaint Johnny Appleseed, brave Simon Kenton, Colonel Johnson's Long Hunters, pious Lorenzo Dow, the reformer Rapp, the statesman Henry Clay, the legislator Jennings, and the boy Abraham Lincoln were all his friends.
The strange stories about them in this book are _almost_ true! For that boy told them to a person who told them to another person who told them to me. In substance they are a faithful picture of the sort of adventures that helped pioneer lads of the Great Valley to grow into the full measure of men.
"O--YI--O! O--yi--o!" sang fifteen-year-old Obadiah Holman--called Doby for short--as he tried to skip a flat stone across the big river. "O--yi--o! O--yi--o!"
Dark clouds were tumbling up from the southwest, but March sunshine still dimpled and danced and sparkled with the current.
"It _is_ pretty water. That's what the Indian name means, O--yi--o, beautiful. A river beautiful," and he hopped about joyously, kicking out another hatchet-shaped stone or two on the stream's edge of one of the choice town lots of the O--hi--o river-port of Marietta in the new farthest northwest State of Ohio, beyond whose small beginnings of civilization lay the wilderness of the great Northwest Territory in this year of 1816.
A flatboat made of green-oak planks, which held a family's household goods and farming tools, was anchored 'longshore in a bayou that promised safety from the coming storm.