Two bonfires gleamed ruddily on the creek bank, where a fiddle’s moving strains rose and fell, blending to a chorus of joyous voices and much laughter. Just within the mouth of Fish Creek, where the swollen current of the Ohio “backs up” the smaller stream, lay the ark of 1803, laden with everything which such craft carried, and ready to cast off in the morning. The crew of seventeen hardy fellows had come together, young frontiersmen, ready to brave all the perils and hardships of a voyage of a hundred days, exposed every day of it to wreck and hostile bullet. New Orleans was farther away to these pioneer youths of Ohio than is Australia to us, and the voyage thither was subject to a hundred times greater perils. Yet every year an increasing number of these unwieldy arks made the long voyage, and the arksmen rendered a good account of themselves against all enemies by the way, and steering warily past snag and shoal, made the wished-for port, shrewdly trafficked their cargoes and, late in the year, got back to Ohio, Kentucky or Pennsylvania, with pockets well lined with Spanish gold, and packs replete with trinkets.
For then, as now, the settlers’ wives, daughters and sweethearts longed for silk gowns and bonnets à la mode, laced kerchiefs and jeweled combs; and much hard work at the pioneer clearings unquestionably earned them.
The Ohio was rising, steadily rising, much as it had risen every spring for thousands of years previously, much as it has risen for a hundred years since. Yet, how unlike the Ohio of the present day it was!
Only a few scattered clearings then notched the virgin forests that stretched along its banks from Cairo to Pittsburgh. Cairo, in fact, did not then exist. Louisville and Cincinnati were but two pioneer hamlets, hardly known to each other.
No steamboat had as yet made the shores resound to its whistle; no suspension bridges spanned the broad stream. Lurking parties of hostile Indians lay in ambush at the narrower reaches of the channel; and, at certain points, still-more-to-be-dreaded bands of white outlaws had their haunts and lay in wait to rob the adventurous “arks” that floated down the river to seek their distant and only market at the French city of the Gulf.