Frederick Marryat – The Complete Collection

Chapter 36

There is one great luxury in America, which is the quantity of clear pure ice which is to be obtained wherever you are, even in the hottest seasons, and ice-creams are universal and very cheap. I went into an establishment where they vended this and other articles of refreshment, when about a dozen black swarthy fellows, employed at the iron-foundry close at hand, with their dirty shirt-sleeves tucked up, and without their coats and waistcoats, came in, and sitting down, called for ice-creams. Miss Martineau says in her work, "Happy is the country where factory-girls can carry parasols, and pig-drivers wear spectacles." She might have added, and the sons of Vulcan eat ice-creams. I thought at the time what the ladies, who stop in their carriages at Gunter's, would have said, had they behold these Cyclops with their bare sinewy arms, blackened with heat and smoke, refreshing themselves with such luxuries; but it must be remembered that porter is much the dearer article. Still the working classes all over America can command not only all necessary comforts, but many luxuries; for labour is dear and they are very well paid. The Americans will point this out and say, behold the effects of our institutions; and they fully believe that such is the case. Government has, however, nothing to do with it; it is the result of circumstances. When two years' exertion will procure a clever mechanic an independence, the effects will be the same, whether they labour under a democratic or a monarchical form of government.

Bear cubs (I mean the black bear) are caught and brought down to the cities on this side of the river, to be fattened for the table. I saw one at Alton about a year old, which the owner told me was to be killed the next day, having been bespoken for the feast of the 4th of July. I have eaten old bear, which I dislike; but they say that the cub is very good. I also saw here a very fine specimen of the grizzly bear (Ursus Horridus of Linnaeus). It was about two years old, and although not so tall, it must have weighed quite as much as a good-sized bullock. Its width of shoulder and apparent strength were enormous, and they have never yet been tamed: Mr Van Amburgh would be puzzled to handle one of them. The Indians reckon the slaying of one of these animals as a much greater feat than killing a man, and the proudest ornament they can wear is a necklace of the grizzly bear's claws.

I for myself, must confess, that I had rather be attacked by, and take my chance with, three men than by one of these animals, as they are seldom killed by the first or even the second bullet. It requires numbers to overcome them. The largest lion, or Bengal tiger, would stand but a poor chance, if opposed to one of these animals full grown. One of the gentlemen employed by the Fur Company told me, that he once saw a grizzly bear attack a bull buffalo, and that, at the first seizure, he tore one of the ribs of the buffalo out of his side, and eventually carried away the whole carcass, without much apparent effort. They are only to be found in the rocky mountains, and valleys between them, when the game is plentiful.

Visited the museum. There were once five large alligators to be seen alive in this museum; but they are now all dead. One demands our sympathy, as there was something Roman in his fate. Unable to support such a life of confinement, and preferring death to the loss of liberty, he committed suicide by throwing himself out of a three-storey-high window. He was taken up from the pavement the next morning; the vital spark had fled, as the papers say, and, I believe, his remains were decently interred.

The other four, never having been taught in their youth the hymn, "Birds in their little nests agree," fought so desperately, that one by one they all died of their wounds. They were very large, being from seventeen to twenty-one feet long. One, as a memorial, remains preserved in the museum, and to make him look more poetical, he has a stuffed n***o in his mouth.

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER THIRTY TWO.

Thank Heaven I have escaped from St Louis; during the time that I remained in that city, I was, day and night, so melting away, that I expected, like some of the immortal half-breeds of Jupiter, to become a tributary stream to the Mississippi.

As you descend the river the land through which it flows becomes more level and flat, while the size of the forest trees increases; the log houses of the squatters, erected on the banks under their trunks, appear, in contrast with their size, more like dog-kennels than the habitations of men. The lianes, or creeping plants, now become plentiful, and embrace almost every tree, rising often to the height of fifty or sixty feet, and encircling them with the apparent force of the boa-constrictor. Most of them are poisonous; indeed, it is from these creeping parasites that the Indians, both in North and South America, obtain the most deadly venom. Strange that these plants, in their appearances and their habits so similar to the serpent tribe, should be endowed with the same peculiar attributes, and thus become their parallels in the vegetable kingdom--each carrying sudden death in their respective juices. I hate the Mississippi, and as I look down upon its wild and filthy waters, boiling and eddying, and reflect how uncertain is travelling in this region of high-pressure, and disregard of social rights, I cannot help feeling a disgust at the idea of perishing in such a vile sewer, to be buried in mud, and perhaps to be rooted out again by some pig-nosed alligator.

Right glad was I when we turned into the stream of the Ohio, and I found myself on its purer waters. The Ohio is a splendid river, running westward from the chain of Alleghany mountains into the Mississippi, dividing the States of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio on its northern bank from Kentucky, and Virginia on its south; the northern being free, and the southern slave States. We stopped at the month of the Cumberland river, where we took in passengers. Among others were a slave-dealer and a runaway n***o whom he had captured. He was secured by a heavy chain, and followed his master, who, as soon as he arrived on the upper deck, made him fast with a large padlock to one of the stancheons.

Here he remained looking wistfully at the northern shore, where every one was free, but occasionally glancing his eye on the southern, which had condemned him to toil for others, I had never seen a slave-dealer, and scrutinised this one severely. His most remarkable feature was his eye; it was large but not projecting, clear as crystal, and eternally in motion. I could not help imagining, as he turned it right and left from one to the other of the passengers, that he was calculating what price he could obtain for them in the market. The n***o had run away about seven months before, and not having a pass, he had been secured in goal until the return of his master, who had been on a journey with a string of slaves, to the State of Arkansas: he was about to be sold to pay expenses, when his master saw the advertisement and claimed him. As may be supposed, a strong feeling exists on the opposite shores of the river as to slavery and freedom. The Abolitionists used to assist the slaves to escape, and send them off to Canada; even now many do escape; but this has been rendered more difficult by a system which has latterly been put in practice by a set of miscreants living on the free side of the river. These would go to the slave states opposite, and persuade the n*****s to run away, promising to conceal them until they could send them off to Canada; for a free state is bound to give up a slave when claimed. Instead of sending them away, they would wait until the reward was offered by the masters for the apprehension of the slaves, and then return them, receiving their infamous guerdon. The slaves, aware of this practice, now seldom attempt to escape.

Louisville is the largest city in Kentucky; the country about is very rich, and every thing vegetable springs up with a luxuriance which is surprising. It is situated at the falls of the Ohio, which are only navigable during the freshets; there is no river in America which has such a rise and fall as the Ohio, sometimes rising to sixty feet in the spring; but this is very rare, the general average being about forty feet. The French named it La Belle Riviere: it is a very grand stream, running through hills covered with fine timber and underwood; but a very small portion is as yet cleared by the settlers. At the time that I was at Louisville the water was lower than it had been remembered for years, and you could walk for miles over the bed of the river, a calcareous deposite full of interesting fossils; but the mineralogist and geologist have as much to perform in America as the agriculturist.

Arrived at Cincinnati. How rapid has been the advance of this western country. In 1803, deer-skin at the value of forty cents per pound, were a legal tender; and if offered instead of money could not be refused-- even by a lawyer. Not fifty years ago, the woods which towered where Cincinnati is now built, resounded only to the cry of the wild animals of the forest, or the rifle of the Shawnee Indian; now Cincinnati contains a population of 40,000 inhabitants. It is a beautiful, well built, clean town, reminding you more of Philadelphia than any other city in the Union. Situated on a hill on the banks of the Ohio, it is surrounded by a circular phalanx of other hills; so that look up and down the streets, whichever way you will, your eye reposes upon verdure and forest trees in the distance. The streets have a row of trees on each side, near the curb-stone; and most of the houses have a small frontage, filled with luxuriant flowering shrubs, of which the Althea Frutex is the most abundant. It is, properly speaking, a Yankee city, the majority of its inhabitants coming from the East; but they have intermarried, and blended with the Kentuckians of the opposite shore, a circumstance which is advantageous to the character of both.

There are, however, a large number of Dutch and German settlers here; they say 10,000. They are not much liked by the Americans but have great influence, as may be conceived when it is stated that, when a motion was brought forward, in the Municipal Court, for the city regulations to be printed in German as well as English, it was lost by one vote only.

I was told a singular fact, which will prove how rapidly the value of land rises in this country as it becomes peopled. Fifty-six years ago, the major part of the land upon which the city of Cincinnati stands, and which is now worth many millions of dollars, was swapped away by the owner of it for a pony!! The man who made this unfortunate bargain is now alive, and living in or near Cincinnati.

Cincinnati is the pork-shop of the Union; and in the autumnal, and early winter months, the way they kill pigs here is, to use a Yankee phrase, quite a caution . Almost all the hogs fed in the oak forests of Ohio, Kentucky, and Western Virginia, are driven into this city, and some establishments kill as many as fifteen hundred a day; at least so I am told. They are despatched in a way quite surprising; and a pig is killed upon the same principle as a pin is made,--by division, or, more properly speaking, by combination of labour. The hogs confined in a large pen are driven into a smaller one; one man knocks them on the head with a sledge hammer, and then cuts their throats; two more pull away the carcase, when it is raised by two others, who tumble it into a tub of scalding water. His bristles are removed in about a minute and a half by another party; when the next duty is to fix a stretcher between his legs. It is then hoisted up by two other people, cut open, and disembowelled; and in three minutes and a half from the time that the hog was grunting in his obesity, he has only to get cold before he is again packed up, and reunited in a barrel to travel all over the world. By the by, we laugh at the notion of pork and molasses. In the first place, the American pork is far superior to any that we ever have salted down; and, in the next, it eats uncommonly well with molasses. I have tasted it, and " it is a fact ." After all, why should we eat currant jelly with venison, and not allow the Americans the humble imitation of pork and molasses?