After breakfast, we started to return by a different way from that
which we had taken yesterday, and coming up at ten o’clock with an
encampment of German emigrants carrying their goods in carts, who
had made a rousing fire which they were just quitting, stopped
there to refresh. And very pleasant the fire was; for, hot though
it had been yesterday, it was quite cold to-day, and the wind blew
keenly. Looming in the distance, as we rode along, was another of
the ancient Indian burial-places, called The Monks’ Mound; in
memory of a body of fanatics of the order of La Trappe, who founded
a desolate convent there, many years ago, when there were no
settlers within a thousand miles, and were all swept off by the
pernicious climate: in which lamentable fatality, few rational
people will suppose, perhaps, that society experienced any very
severe deprivation.
The track of to-day had the same features as the track of
yesterday. There was the swamp, the bush, and the perpetual chorus
of frogs, the rank unseemly growth, the unwholesome steaming earth.
Here and there, and frequently too, we encountered a solitary
broken-down waggon, full of some new settler’s goods. It was a
pitiful sight to see one of these vehicles deep in the mire; the
axle-tree broken; the wheel lying idly by its side; the man gone
miles away, to look for assistance; the woman seated among their
wandering household gods with a baby at her breast, a picture of
forlorn, dejected patience; the team of oxen crouching down
mournfully in the mud, and breathing forth such clouds of vapour
from their mouths and nostrils, that all the damp mist and fog
around seemed to have come direct from them.
In due time we mustered once again before the merchant tailor’s,
and having done so, crossed over to the city in the ferry-boat:
passing, on the way, a spot called Bloody Island, the duelling-
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ground of St. Louis, and so designated in honour of the last fatal
combat fought there, which was with pistols, breast to breast.
Both combatants fell dead upon the ground; and possibly some
rational people may think of them, as of the gloomy madmen on the
Monks’ Mound, that they were no great loss to the community.
CHAPTER XIV – RETURN TO CINCINNATI. A STAGE-COACH RIDE FROM THAT
CITY TO COLUMBUS, AND THENCE TO SANDUSKY. SO, BY LAKE ERIE, TO THE
FALLS OF NIAGARA
AS I had a desire to travel through the interior of the state of
Ohio, and to ‘strike the lakes,’ as the phrase is, at a small town
called Sandusky, to which that route would conduct us on our way to
Niagara, we had to return from St. Louis by the way we had come,
and to retrace our former track as far as Cincinnati.
The day on which we were to take leave of St. Louis being very
fine; and the steamboat, which was to have started I don’t know how
early in the morning, postponing, for the third or fourth time, her
departure until the afternoon; we rode forward to an old French
village on the river, called properly Carondelet, and nicknamed
Vide Poche, and arranged that the packet should call for us there.
The place consisted of a few poor cottages, and two or three
public-houses; the state of whose larders certainly seemed to
justify the second designation of the village, for there was
nothing to eat in any of them. At length, however, by going back
some half a mile or so, we found a solitary house where ham and
coffee were procurable; and there we tarried to wait the advent of
the boat, which would come in sight from the green before the door,
a long way off.
It was a neat, unpretending village tavern, and we took our repast
in a quaint little room with a bed in it, decorated with some old
oil paintings, which in their time had probably done duty in a
Catholic chapel or monastery. The fare was very good, and served
with great cleanliness. The house was kept by a characteristic old