Shawneetown--Farm-houses on stilts--Cave-in-Rock--An island night.
Half-Moon Bar, Thursday, June 7th.--A head-breeze prevailed all day, strong enough to fan us into a sense of coolness, but leaving the water as unruffled as a mill-pond; thus did we seem, in the vivid reflections of the early morning, to be sailing between double lines of shore, lovely in their groupings of luxuriant trees and tangled heaps of vine-clad drift. It was a hazy, mirage-producing atmosphere, the river appearing to melt away in space, and the ever-charming island heads looming unsupported in mid-air. From the woods, the piercing note of locusts filled the air as with the ceaseless rattle of pebbles against innumerable window-panes.
At a distance, Shawneetown appears as if built upon higher land than the neighboring bottom; but this proves, on approach, to be an optical illusion, for the town is walled in by a levee some thirty feet in height, above the top of which loom its chimneys and spires. Shawneetown, laid out in 1808, soon became an important post on the Lower Ohio, and indeed ranked with Kaskaskia as one of the principal Illinois towns, although in 1817 it still only contained from thirty to forty log dwellings. During the reign of the Ohio-River bargemen,[A] it was notorious as the headquarters of the roughest elements in that boisterous class, and frequently the scene of most barbarous outrages--"the odious receptacle," says a chronicler of the time, "of filth and villany."
In those lively days, which lasted with more or less vigor until about 1830,--by which time, steamboats had finally overcome popular prejudice and gained the upper hand in river transportation,--the people of Shawneetown were largely dependent on the trade of the salt works of the neighboring Saline Reserve. The salt-licks--at which in early days the bones of the mammoth were found, as at Big Bone Lick--commenced a few miles below the town, and embraced a district of about ninety thousand acres. While Illinois was still a Territory, these salines were rented by the United States to individuals, but were granted to the new State (1818) in perpetuity. The trade, in time, decreased with the decadence of river traffic; and Shawneetown has since had but slow growth--it now being a dreary little place of three thousand inhabitants, with unmistakable evidences of having long since seen its best days.