The American Indians: Their History, Condition and Prospects, from Original Notes and ManuscriptsSchoolcraft, Henry Rowe
History
The American Indians: Their History, Condition and Prospects, from Original Notes and Manuscripts
Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe
Indians of North America
After stopping a day or more at Shawneetown, and reconnoitering its
vicinity, I proceeded to the mouth of the Cumberland, and from thence,
after many days detention at that point waiting for a boat, to the mouth
of the Ohio. I found this to be a highly interesting section of the
river, from its great expanse and its fine water prospects. The
picturesque calcareous cliffs on the west banks, display a novel and
attractive line of river scenery. The Ohio had, from its commencement,
well sustained the propriety of its ancient appellation of the Beautiful
River; but it here assumed something more than beautiful--it was
majestic. Let it be borne in mind that this stream, in the course of
some seven or eight hundred miles flow from Pittsburg to Shawneetown,
had been swelled on the right and left hand by the Scioto, the
Muskingum, the Kentucky, the Miami, Green River, Wabash, and other
rivers of scarcely inferior size. It is still further augmented, from
the left bank, with those noble tributaries, the Cumberland and
Tennessee, which bring in the gathered drain of the middle ranges of the
Alleghanies. It is below Shawneetown, too, that the cliffs of the
Cave-in-Rock-Coast present themselves on the west shore--with their
associations of the early robber-era which has been commemorated by the
pen of fiction of Charles Brockden Brown. These cliffs are cavernous,
and assume varied forms. They rise in bold elevations, which bear the
general name of the Knobs, but which are well worthy of the name of
mountains. Distinct from the interest they have by casting their
castle-like shadows, at sunset, in the pure broad stream, they
constitute a kind of Derbyshire in their fine purple spars, and
crystalized galena and other mineralogical attractions. I was told that
a German of the name of Storch, who pretended to occult knowledge, had,
years before, led money and mineral diggers about these Knobs, and that
he was the discoverer of the fine fluates of lime found here.
One can hardly pass these broken eminences, with the knowledge that they
tally in their calcareous structure and position with the rock formation
of the Missouri state border, lying immediately west of them, without
regarding them as the apparent monuments of some ancient geological
change, which affected a very wide space of country north of their
position. A barrier of this nature, which should link the Tennessee and
Missouri coasts, at Grand Tower, would have converted into an inland
sea the principal area of the present states of Illinois, Indiana, and
Southern Ohio. The line of separation in this latitude is not great. It
constitutes the narrowest point between the opposing rock formations of
the east and west shores, so far as the latter rise through and above
the soil.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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