Rochester and Beaver, divided by the Beaver River; in their rear, well-rounded hills rise gracefully, checkered with brown fields and woods in many shades of green, in the midst of which the flowering white dogwood rears its stately spray. Our sloping willowed sand-beach, of a hundred feet in width, is thick strewn with driftwood; back of this a clay bank, eight feet sheer, and a narrow bottom cut up with small fruit and vegetable patches; the gardeners' neat frame houses peeping from groves of apple, pear and cherry, upon the flanking hillsides. A lofty oil-well derrick surmounts the edge of the terrace a hundred yards below our camp. The bushes and the ground round about the well are black and slimy with crude petroleum, that has escaped during the boring process, and the air is heavy with its odor. We are upon the edge of the far-stretching oil and gas-well region, and shall soon become familiar enough with such sights and smells in the neighborhood of our nightly camps.

No sooner had Pilgrim been turned up against a tree to dry, and a smooth sandy open chosen for the camp, than the proprietor of the soil appeared—a middling-sized, lanky man, with a red face and a sandy goatee surmounting a collarless white shirt all bestained with tobacco juice. He inquired rather sharply concerning us, but when informed of our innocent errand, and that we should stay with him but the night, he promptly softened, explaining that the presence of marauding fishermen and house-boat folk was incompatible with gardening for profit, and he would have none of them touch upon his shore. As to us, we were welcome to stop throughout our pleasure, an invitation he reinforced by sitting upon a stump, whittling vigorously meanwhile, and glibly gossiping with the Doctor and me for a half-hour, on crop conditions and the state of the country—"bein' sociable like," he said, "an' hav'n' nuth'n 'gin you folks, as knows what's what, I kin see with half a eye!"

Footnote A: (return)

Figures in parentheses, similarly placed throughout the volume, indicate the meandered river mileage from Pittsburg, according to the map of the Corps of Engineers, U.S.A., published in 1881. The actual mileage of the channel is a trifle greater.

CHAPTER III.

Shingis Old Town—The dynamiter—Yellow Creek.

Kneistley's Cluster, W. Va., Tuesday, May 8th.—We were off at a quarter past seven, and among the earliest shoppers in Rochester, on the east bank of the Beaver, where supplies were laid in for the day. This busy, prosperous-looking place bears little resemblance to the squalid Indian village which Gist found here in November, 1750. It was then the seat of Barney Curran, an Indian trader—the same Curran whom Washington, three years later, employed in the mission to Venango. But the smaller sister town of Beaver, on the lower side of the mouth,—or rather the western outskirts of Beaver a mile below the mouth,—has the most ancient history. On account of a ford across the Beaver, about where is now a slack-water dam, the neighborhood became of early importance to the French as a fur-trading center. With customary liberality toward the Indians, whom they assiduously cultivated, the French, in 1756, built for them, on this site, a substantial town, which the English indifferently called Sarikonk, Sohkon, King Beaver's Town, or Shingis Old Town. During the French and Indian War, the place was prominent as a rendezvous for the enemies of American borderers; numerous bloody forays were planned here, and hither were brought to be adopted into the tribes, or to be cruelly tortured, according to savage whim, many of the captives whose tales have made lurid the history of the Ohio Valley.

Passing Beaver River, the Ohio enters upon its grand sweep to the southwest. The wide uplands at once become more rustic, especially those of the left bank, which no longer is threaded by a railway, as heretofore all the way from Brownsville. The two ranges of undulating hills, some three hundred and fifty feet high, forming the rim of the basin, are about a half mile apart; while the river itself is perhaps a third of a mile in width, leaving narrow bottoms on alternate sides, as the stream in gentle curves rebounds from the rocky base of one hill to that of another. When winding about such a base, there is at this stage of the water a sloping, stony beach, some ten to twenty yards in width, from which ascends the sharp steep, for the most part heavily tree-clad—maples, birches, elms and oaks of goodly girth, the latter as yet in but half-leaf. On the "bottom side" of the river, the alluvial terrace presents a sheer wall of clay rising from eight to a dozen feet above the beach, which is often thick-grown with willows, whose roots hold the soil from becoming too easy a prey to the encroaching current. Sycamores now begin to appear in the bottoms, although of less size than we shall meet below. Sometimes the little towns we see occupy a narrow and more or less rocky bench upon the hill side of the stream, but settlement is chiefly found upon the bottoms.

Shippingsport (32 miles), on the left bank, where we stopped this noon for eggs, butter, and fresh water, is on a narrow hill bench—a dry, woe-begone hamlet, side-tracked from the path of the world's progress. While I was on shore, negotiating with the sleepy storekeeper, Pilgrim and her crew waited alongside the flatboat which serves as the town ferry. There they were visited by a breezy, red-faced young man, in a blue flannel shirt and a black slouch hat, who was soon enough at his ease to lie flat upon the ferry gunwale, his cheeks supported by his hands, and talk to W—— and the Doctor as if they were old friends. He was a dealer in nitroglycerin cartridges, he said, and pointed to a long, rakish-looking skiff hard by, which bore a red flag at its prow. "Ye see that? Thet there red flag? Well, thet's the law on us glysereen fellers—over five hundred poun's, two flags; un'er five hundred, one flag. I've two hundred and fifty, I have. I tell yer th' steamboats steer clear o' me, an' don' yer fergit it, neither; they jist give me a wide berth, they do, yew bet! 'n' th' railroads, they don' carry no glysereen cartridge, they don't—all uv it by skiff, like yer see me goin'."

These cartridges, he explained, are dropped into oil or gas wells whose owners are desirous of accelerating the flow. The cartridge, in exploding, enlarges the hole, and often the output of the well is at once increased by several hundred per cent. The young fellow had the air of a self-confident rustic, with little experience in the world. Indeed, it seemed from his elated manner as if this might be his first trip from home, and the blowing of oil wells an incidental speculation. The Boy, quick at inventive nomenclature, and fresh from a reading of Robert Louis Stevenson, called our visitor "the Dynamiter," and by that title I suppose we shall always remember him.

The Dynamiter confided to his listeners that he was going down the river for "a clean hundred miles, and that's right smart fur, ain't it? How fur down be yees goin'?" The Doctor replied that we were going nine hundred; whereat the man of explosives gave vent to his feelings in a prolonged whistle, then a horse laugh, and "Oh come, now! Don' be givin' us taffy! Say, hones' Injun, how fur down air yew fellers goin', anyhow?" It was with some difficulty that he could