Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

A Buckeye Titan
A Buckeye Titan
A Buckeye Titan
Ebook681 pages10 hours

A Buckeye Titan

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

Here is a panorama of life as it was lived and witnessed by one Ohio citizen, his family, and his friends, from 1816-1876. From the diary and correspondence of John H. James of Urbana, Ohio, and from contemporary manuscripts, periodicals, and newspapers, William E. and Ophia D. Smith have created an authentic picture of the times. A Buckeye Titan is not so much a biography of a man as it is an exposition of the contribution of his manuscripts to American history in general and to Ohio history in particular. The point of view presented is that of the protagonist and his friends.

Cincinnati and Louisville are seen when slow-moving, square-rigged barges and primate boats propelled by “elastic vigor” crowded their landings, and when stately floating castles received and discharged passengers and cargoes upon their busy rivers. Lexington, Athens of the West, is portrayed as it was in the lush days of Horace Holley. The sophistication of New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York sets off the awkward adolescence of such Mid-Western towns as Columbus, Dayton, Urbana, and Indianapolis. Against a background of devious politics and frenzied finance, the Mad River and Lake Erie Rail Road begins in Sandusky and stubbornly fights its way to Springfield. Whigs and Loco Focos engage in a titanic struggle of the establishment of a second banking system.

Civil War days are graphically drawn. The tumultuous conflict of opinion, the graft and corruption, the political chicanery in the raising of troops and in the promotion of officers and men, the strength and the weakness of the Northern fighting forces and their leaders—all are here.

Statesmen and politicians, reformers and scholars, authors and artists, actors and actresses, soldiers, travelers, bankers and merchants, founders of the first Swedenborgian college in the world, and plain everyday people, as well as intimate glimpses of distinguished characters, appear in these pages.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherPapamoa Press
Release dateDec 5, 2018
ISBN9781789125610
A Buckeye Titan
Author

William E. Smith

Dr. William Ernest Smith (1892-1969) was Dean of the Graduate School and Head of the History Department of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, with a number of important book titles to his credit. Together with his wife, Ophia Smith, he co-authored various books of Ohio and American history, including the three-volume History of Southwestern Ohio: The Miami Valleys. Dr. Smith was a member of Miami University’s history faculty from 1926 until his retirement in 1962. He served as chairman of the Department of History from 1934-1957; Dean of the Graduate School from 1950-1959; Research Professor of History from 1959-1962; curator of the McGuffey Collection from 1946 until the opening of the McGuffey museum; and director of that Museum from 1959-1962. As he became Professor Emeritus of History and Dean Emeritus of the Graduate School, Miami University conferred the honorary degree Doctor of Letters upon him in 1962. Dr. Smith died on December 12, 1969. Ophia Delilah Smith (1891-1994) was a well-known lecturer and frequent contributor to historical periodicals. She wrote a series of articles on the New Jerusalem Church and early churchmen for The Ohio State Archeological and Historical Quarterly and co-authored a number of books with her husband, Dr. William E. Smith, including this biography of Col. John H. James, founder of Urbana University. Ophia Smith died on February 23, 1994, at the age of 103.

Related to A Buckeye Titan

Related ebooks

United States History For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for A Buckeye Titan

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    A Buckeye Titan - William E. Smith

    This edition is published by Papamoa Press – www.pp-publishing.com

    To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – papamoapress@gmail.com

    Or on Facebook

    Text originally published in 1953 under the same title.

    © Papamoa Press 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

    Publisher’s Note

    Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

    We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

    A BUCKEYE TITAN

    BY

    WILLIAM E. AND OPHIA D. SMITH

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    Contents

    TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

    DEDICATION 5

    ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 6

    ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHORS 7

    PREFACE 8

    ILLUSTRATIONS 10

    I—ON WESTERN WATERS 11

    CHAPTER I—CAPTAIN JAMES BUILDS THE BARGE ELIZA 11

    CHAPTER II—THE SUPERB VULCAN 18

    CHAPTER III—THE PATRIOT 29

    CHAPTER IV—THE SPLENDID AND THE AMBASSADOR 39

    II—THE BROADWAY CIRCLE 45

    CHAPTER V—SHELLBARK THESPIANS 45

    CHAPTER VI—COLLEGE DAYS 49

    CHAPTER VII—THE BROADWAY CIRCLE 58

    CHAPTER VIII—LEXINGTON IN 1823 68

    CHAPTER IX—GENERAL LAFAYETTE COMES TO CINCINNATI 78

    CHAPTER X—THE BROKEN CIRCLE 82

    III—URBANA, OHIO 89

    CHAPTER XI—THE YOUNG LAWYER 89

    CHAPTER XII—LIFE IN URBANA, 1837-1860. 96

    CHAPTER XIII—THE URBANA UNIVERSITY 113

    IV—FUGITIVE GLIMPSES OF PLACES AND PEOPLE 128

    CHAPTER XIV—LETTERS FROM A PHILADELPHIA LADY 128

    CHAPTER XV—THE SOCIAL SCENE IN CINCINNATI 1837-1856. 135

    CHAPTER XVI—GENTEEL TRAVELERS 143

    V—THE PIONEER BANKER 153

    CHAPTER XVII—AN AMBITIOUS BANKER 153

    CHAPTER XVIII—JOHN H. JAMES SEEKS A STATE BANKING SYSTEM 165

    CHAPTER XIX—STATE BANKING BILLS IN THE THIRTY-FIFTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF OHIO 173

    CHAPTER XX—THE CRISIS OF 1837 178

    CHAPTER XXI—BANKING HEADACHES AND PARTISAN POLITICS 189

    CHAPTER XXII—THE FALL OF JOHN H. JAMES, PIONEER BANKER 198

    VI—THE MAD RIVER AND LAKE ERIE RAIL ROAD 216

    CHAPTER XXIII—THE MERRY RAILROAD 216

    CHAPTER XXIV—FIZZ, FIZZ, OFF WE GO! 224

    CHAPTER XXV—EXTENDING THE ROAD 236

    CHAPTER XXVI—THE CRISIS 242

    VII—THE LAST WHIG AND THE LOST CAUSE 255

    CHAPTER XXVII—A TRUE WHIG—NO WHIGGEE 255

    CHAPTER XXVIII—GENERAL HARRISON AND THE HURRAH IN 1840 269

    CHAPTER XXIX—THE LAST WHIG AND A LOST CAUSE 282

    VIII—THE CIVIL WAR 294

    CHAPTER XXX—THE ELECTION OF 1860 AND SECESSION 294

    CHAPTER XXXI—A YEAR OF INDECISION AND WAR — 1861 299

    CHAPTER XXXII— THE CRISIS: GREAT PRINCIPLES AND PERSONAL INTERESTS — 1862 308

    CHAPTER XXXIII—THE TRAGEDY OF WAR 319

    CHAPTER XXXIV—THE POLITICAL SCENE 1863-1865 332

    CHAPTER XXXV—RECONSTRUCTION 345

    APPENDIX 357

    THE LEVI JAMES FAMILY 357

    A BUCKEYE TITAN—THE FRANCIS BAILEY FAMILY 359

    BIBLIOGRAPHY 360

    MANUSCRIPTS 360

    MAGAZINES AND MAGAZINE ARTICLES 360

    NEWSPAPERS 362

    SECONDARY SOURCES 362

    MISCELLANEOUS SOURCES 365

    REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 366

    DEDICATION

    FOR

    JOSEPH AND SARA

    ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

    The authors gratefully acknowledge the aid received from the Martha Kinney Cooper Ohioana Library Association. The award of the Ohioana Fellowship for 1949-1950 enabled them to do the extensive research required to place the James manuscripts in their proper historical setting, and made possible the completion of A Buckeye Titan.

    ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHORS

    Books by William E. Smith

    The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics

    The American Civil War: An Interpretation

    (Editor and co-author with Carl Russell Fish)

    Books by Ophia D. Smith

    Giles Richards and His Times

    Old Oxford Houses and the People Who Lived in Them Fair Oxford

    Johnny Appleseed: A Voice in the Wilderness

    (With Robert Price, John W. Stockwell, and Florence Murdoch).

    Books by William E. Smith and Ophia D. Smith

    Colonel A. W. Gilbert, Citizen-Soldier of Cincinnati

    (Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio)

    Contributions of the Puritans

    Colonial Labor

    Colonial Inventions

    PREFACE

    John H. James was a lawyer, banker, railroad builder, scientific farmer and stockbreeder, legislator, politician, editor, lecturer, and writer. In 1821, when he was a senior in college, he began to keep a diary, and continued it until his death in 1881.

    Before he was graduated from the Cincinnati College, he began to write for the Cincinnati newspapers and literary magazines. He fully expected to combine a literary career with his professional practice as a lawyer. He had a keen historical sense, and was a facile and trenchant writer. Methodically he recorded in his diary the historical anecdotes he heard on his travels. He lived in a time when he could converse with men who had known George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, and the military and civic leaders of the early West. He wrote down the recollections of old men who had helped to build a new country. His correspondence shows a wide range of interests. James was an indefatigable collector of documents, manuscripts, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and newspapers. Few men of the West kept so complete a record of the times in which they lived. The James library was considered one of the finest private libraries in the West. It contained thousands of carefully selected books and rare Americana.

    John H. James was a personal friend of Henry Clay, Tom Corwin, William Henry Harrison, and many other prominent Whigs of the West. He was schooled in the intricate politics of Ohio, and was powerful as an adviser to Whig leaders in Congress and the General Assembly of Ohio.

    Possessing unbounded faith in the future of the West, James took great financial risks in banking, land speculation, and railroading. His father, Levi James, had taken incredible risks in steamboating on the Western waters. The mind of John H. James was never bound by the old and familiar; always he grasped the possibilities of the new and untried. In his lifetime he witnessed the coming of the steamboat, the canal, the railroad, the telegraph, and the Atlantic Cable.

    After the death of Henry Clay, James was a man without a party. He was neither a Democrat nor a Republican. During the Civil War, he was accused of being a Copperhead, but that charge was false. He was willing to wage war for the preservation of the Constitution and the Union, but he was not willing to fight for the abolition of slavery. In his resistance to war policies which he considered unconstitutional, he represented a substantial segment of the people in the strife-ridden 1860’s.

    In 1863 he classified his own correspondence and that of his family, a mass of letters that had accumulated since 1814. He arranged each classification in chronological order, and bound the letters in volumes with stiff cardboard covers. It was a long and somewhat arduous task to read one hundred and fourteen volumes of correspondence, a diary of sixty years, and numerous boxes of unbound letters and documents. The task of selection was not easy.

    From this manuscript record of business, politics, education, travel, and everyday living, we have attempted to present a panorama of life as it was lived and observed by one Ohio citizen, his friends, and his family, from 1813 to 1870. A Buckeye Titan is not so much a biography of a man as it is a presentation, in topical form, of the contribution of the James manuscripts to American history in general and to Ohio history in particular. The work has not been carried beyond 1870, because that year seems to mark the close of James’s public career. In order to portray more fully the times in which he lived, the James manuscripts have been supplemented with contemporary manuscripts, periodicals, and newspapers. The viewpoint presented is that of John H. James and his friends.

    We have been assisted by many who have been generous with their time, their possessions, and their knowledge. We are especially obligated to the late John H. James III and his sister, Margaret James, for the free use of the manuscripts and for information about many things. To Larz Hammel, Mrs. A. E. Rumely, and Mrs. Stephens Blakely we are indebted for the use of private manuscripts. Miss Mary Verhoeff of Louisville kindly permitted us to use her microfilm of Penn’s Public Advertiser. To John J. Rowe, E. N. Clopper, Captain Frederick Way, Jr., and Walter Havighurst we owe thanks for suggestions of value. Among others who have helped us are Charles Fisher, president of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, H. F. Niece, Jr., Otto Kersteiner, and Edward F. Memmott, president of Urbana Junior College. To Lee Shepard and Virginius Hall we are grateful for constant aid in seeing A Buckeye Titan through the press.

    We have had the friendly co-operation of staff members of the following libraries: the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, and the Public Library, in Cincinnati; the Miami University Library in Oxford, Ohio; the Newspaper Division of the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, and the State Archives, in Columbus; the Public Library, and the Western Reserve Historical Library, in Cleveland; the Urbana Junior College Library; the Sandusky Public Library and the Collections of the Sandusky Historical Society; the Public Library, and the Filson Club, in Louisville; the Pennsylvania Historical Society, and the Free Library, in Philadelphia; the Public Library, and the William Henry Smith Memorial Library, in Indianapolis; the Special Collections Division of the Indiana University Library in Bloomington; the Library of Congress; the Public Library, and the Library of the Louisiana Historical Society, in New Orleans; the New Church libraries in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Bryn Athyn (Pennsylvania).

    William E. Smith

    Ophia D. Smith

    ILLUSTRATIONS

    Colonel John Hough James

    Captain Levi James

    Steam Boat George Washington

    Public Square, Urbana, Ohio

    Open Gates and Driveway leading up to the James House

    The James House

    Lower Hall

    Upper Hall

    Abby Bailey James

    Urbana University, 1853

    Francis Bailey

    Urbana Bank note

    Urbana small note

    Urbana shinplaster

    Manhattan small note

    Bank of Granville post note

    Bank of West Union small note

    The Sandusky

    Mad River and Lake Erie scrip

    Captain John Henry James and his wife

    Colonel John Hough James, The Old Whig Party

    I—ON WESTERN WATERS

    The masted barge on gliding keel

    Rich bales of traffic bore;

    The laden steamer’s cataract wheel

    Befoamed the River shore.

    WILLIAM HENRY VENABLE,

    "Cincinnati: A Civic Ode"

    CHAPTER I—CAPTAIN JAMES BUILDS THE BARGE ELIZA

    In 1811, Captain Levi James, in failing health, left Virginia to make a trip over the mountains in the company of his brothers-in-law, Samuel and Isaac Hough. They explored the new state of Ohio and decided that of all the towns they saw, Cincinnati was the best. Levi’s health improved, and prospects looked so fair that the three men returned to Virginia determined to make preparations to remove to this flourishing river town.

    On September 23, 1813, Levi James and Doctor Isaac Hough, with their families, departed from the ancestral home of the Houghs at Beaverdam Mills to seek their fortunes in the Western Country. They landed at Cincinnati on the night of November 4. The next morning, thirteen-year-old Johnny James climbed the bank to survey the glamorous city of which he had heard so much. To his great disappointment, it looked straggly, ungainly and without taste anywhere.

    Captain James immediately opened a store and stocked it with goods bought in Alexandria and Baltimore. In 1814 he formed a partnership with a fellow Virginian, William Douglass. An advertisement in the Cincinnati Gazette in 1817 reveals the general character of the merchandise they carried:

    JAMES & DOUGLASS

    Have just received from Philadelphia, and now offer for sale, an assortment of FALL and WINTER GOODS, amongst which are Blankets, Flannels, Coatings, Cloths, Cassimeres, Imperial Cords, Bombazeens, Crapes, Florence, Levantines, Sattins, Lutestring, Senshaw and Sarcenett, Leno, Book and Mull Muslins, Irish Linen and Steam Loom Shirting, Silk, Thread and Cotton Laces, Tartan Plaid, Figured sattinett, Silk Shawls and Vests, Silk Lace Handerchiefs and Capes, Women’s Black and Slate Worsted Hose, do. Morocco Shoes, of the latest fashion, do. do. Bootees, do. Men’s Leather and Morocco Dancing Pumps.

    ALSO, ON HAND

    New Orleans Sugar by the Hogshead, Tanners’ Oil by the bbl. 50 bbls. Rye Whiskey, 500 boxes of Cincinnati Window Glass, &c. &c.

    LIKEWISE, ON CONSIGNMENT

    A quantity of Hardware and Cutlery, which will be sold by wholesale at Philadelphia prices without carriage.

    The difficulties of merchandising were great. A merchant had to travel over execrable roads on horseback and in stagecoaches to Philadelphia or some other Eastern city, encountering all kinds of weather. It cost from six to ten dollars per hundred-weight to ship goods from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh in wagons, the trip requiring from twenty to twenty-five days. For a stout five-horse team, a load of 3,000 or 3,500 pounds was considered good. Flatboats or keelboats had to be bought and crews procured in Pittsburgh. When the water was low, the boats had to be lightened by transferring the goods to canoes. At the low ripples, the boatmen had to scrape out channels wide enough to float the boat, sometimes devoting three days to making the channel. After that critical point was passed, the goods were transferred back to the boat. If low water was again encountered, the same laborious procedure had to be repeated.

    Merchants of the Miami Valley always expected three months of hardship and toil in going East, buying goods, and getting the goods safely delivered. It was such difficulties that gave rise to increased freighting by river. These Miami Valley merchants were compelled to exchange their merchandise for the farmers’ produce, because currency was scarce. To dispose of this produce, they must send or take it to New Orleans. They had to pads pork; they had to make wheat into flour and pack it into barrels; they had to build flat-bottomed boats and commit the country produce to the perils of navigation down the Great Miami, the Ohio, and the Mississippi Rivers. To return home, the merchant went by sea to Philadelphia or Baltimore, or travelled more than a thousand miles by land, five hundred of which lay in hostile Indian lands—unless he chose to make the long and perilous voyage up the Mississippi on a barge or keelboat.

    The voyage down the river was lonely and dangerous. It has been well described by Joseph Hough, a cousin of Rachel Hough James, wife of Captain Levi James. Hough made his first trip in 1808, leaving Cincinnati in December with five loaded flatboats.

    At that time [Hough wrote many years later], there were but few settlers on the Ohio River below the present city of Louisville. The cabins were few and far between, and there were only two small villages between Louisville and the mouth of the Ohio. One was Henderson, known then by the name of Red Banks; the other was Shawnee town. The latter was a village of a few cabins, and was used as a landing place for the salt works on the Saline River, back of the village.

    The banks of the Mississippi, from the mouth of the Ohio to Natchez, were still more sparsely settled. New Madrid, a very small village, was the first settlement below the mouth of the Ohio. There were a few cabins at Little Prairie, a cabin opposite to where Memphis now is, and on the lower end of a bluff on which that city is built there was a stockade fort called Fort Pickering, garrisoned by a company of rangers. Cabins were to be seen at the mouth of White River, at Point Chicot, and at Walnut Hills, two miles above where the city of Vicksburg now is. From this place to Natchez there were cabins at distances from ten to twenty miles apart. The whole country bordering on the Mississippi, from the Ohio to the Natchez, might be regarded as an almost unbroken wilderness, except at a few points where the river approached the high lands.

    The bands of robbers who had infested the lower part of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers had not been entirely dispersed by the merchant navigators of these rivers, so that the men on the boats were well armed, and during the night, when lying at the shore in the wilderness country, a sentinel was kept on deck to prevent surprise.

    In order to compete with other Cincinnati firms, James and Douglass built their own barge in 1814. They named her the Eliza of Cincinnati. She carried Western produce down the river and brought up manufactured goods from New Orleans. The Eliza was built in Cincinnati, in the shipyard of Daniel Brooks; she was of the largest class of barges—one hundred tons—fitted in the best manner. Like other barges, she looked something like a canal boat, with transom stern and poop deck covering the cabin or cargo box. There was a stand for the patroon at the tiller head. The Eliza was rigged hermaphrodite brig fashion—square-rigged forward and schooner-rigged aft. She was only fifteen or sixteen feet wide and (Sew only two and a half feet of water. Her sails were useful only when the wind was upstream, for she could not stand up against a side wind.

    In a memoir written for his children, David Allen James, son of Captain Levi James, described the operation of the boat:

    ...In calm weather they depended upon pushing poles or cordells...the cargo box...was set inboard about fifteen inches on each side. This was to afford the men a walk close down by the water in using the pushpoles, which were 14 to 15 feet long and armed with iron sockets pointed. [These were] used in going around a sandbar as the water was, there, tolerably shallow. In those parts of the river where there was no bar a cordell was resorted to....

    It will be easily understood that the Barges needed but few hands on the down voyage but in coming up they needed many. There were only two ways for the flatboat men to get back home from New Orleans. One was to walk through the Cherokee nation and Nashville to Louisville, thro’ Ohio to Wheeling or through Lexington to Maysville or Limestone as it was then called. The other way was to hire their services to the Barges, much slower but they got wages and always a full supply offered. One voyage per annum was all that a Barge could make.

    It was a common thing for barges to carry a crew of one hundred men upriver, propelling the vessel against the current at the rate of about fifteen miles a day. The bargemen were a rough lot, caring little for the quality or quantity of their clothing, but having a very high regard for the quality and quantity of the profanity used in the maintenance of discipline. Their diet was ample but coarse, usually consisting of sea biscuit, rice, molasses, salt and smoked meat, and rye coffee, with occasional supplies of sweet potatoes. A filly (three quarters of a gill) of whiskey at daybreak served as an eye-opener, another at eleven o’clock lifted sagging spirits, and yet another at four o’clock relieved the weariness of bone and muscle. Ninety per cent, of the men took their fillies regularly, as a necessary preservative of health. The whiskey bill for the officers and a hundred-man crew up the river from New Orleans to Louisville was a considerable item.

    According to the memoirs of David James and his brother John, the sailing of a barge to New Orleans and back required toughness of body and spirit. In the hard bed of the Ohio, setting poles were sure, but in the soft bed of the Mississippi, they were uncertain. To propel the boat upstream, the crew fixed their sharp-pointed, iron-shod poles in the river, at the command of Set. Then, crouching with feet firmly set against the transverse cleats of the running board on either side of the boat, they leaned their shoulders hard against their poles and shoved the boat upstream, as they slowly drew themselves erect. If the current was swift, only one man on a side could lift. Dragging his pole, he hurried by his fellows to the prow to set his pole again. In returning to the stern, he had to keep well to the edge of the running board to make room for the next in turn to pass. This was a test of skill and courage, especially in swift rapids.

    In the larger streams, the boat might hug the shore in shallow water, the crew on the landward side grasping the bushes and the long trailing branches of the willows to push the boat upstream, while those on the river side rowed. This was called bushwhacking. To overcome a fallen log in their way, the crew struck into it with the iron points of their setting poles and gaff-hooks and pulled around it. At certain points the river had to be crossed, because the current was strong; the men rowed, slanting the head of the boat to the current. In spite of their best efforts the boat might drift a quarter of a mile.

    When the wind failed, the boat was cordelled. This was done by the men lining up on the shore with a stout rope on their shoulders, one end of the rope fastened to the bow or foremast of the barge. By sheer strength of muscle and will they pulled the boat up the river. If no towpath was available, they must either wait for the wind, or warp.

    Warping was a mode of propulsion much used by river-men. This was done by coiling a three-quarter-inch line in a skiff, pulling to a point above, and making one end of the line fast to a tree. Then the skiff dropped down with the other end of the line to the barge, where it was taken in and passed around a large spean. All hands then tailed on and walked aft on the cargo box. As each man reached the stern, he let go, passed quickly forward, and took hold again. In the meantime another skiff had dashed off fifty to one hundred yards ahead and fastened another line to a snag in the river or to a tree on the bank. The process was repeated as many times as the emergency required. Warping was a very nice operation. The skiffman who tied his line too far upstream, or brought back too much line, was in for rough treatment at the hands of the crew.

    In running around a point, anchors were sometimes used. On nearing the anchor, the barge was hauled to shore and the anchor brought aboard. If the shore permitted, the order was given to pole; if not, to cordell until a point was reached where they could use the warp again. Cruel labor it was, but the hardened boatmen rested and refreshed themselves by changing from one method to another. Rowing to poling, poling to bushwhacking, bushwhacking to cordelling, cordelling to warping, warping to poling offered variety enough.

    Passing around headlands with a swift current to stern was another difficult problem. A long line was attached to the foremast of the barge and carried upstream by a few of the crew in a skiff and fastened to a tree. With this line they held the barge on her course, while the men on the barge swayed away on the cord, forcing the barge against the current up to the end of the line.

    Cargoes were often lost or abandoned, so perilous was the trip up the river. Danger lurked all along the shore. Pirates, robbers, Indians, and half-civilized white men were as ready to murder a man as to take a drink of whiskey. Bargemen always travelled well-armed, for too often they had to fight their way down the river and fight their way up again. Only the brave took passage on the first barges, and only the dauntless risked their capital in the early days of the Western river traffic.

    When Levi James came to Cincinnati, boats in the New Orleans trade were comparatively new. James Riddle of Cincinnati had entered the Mississippi River trade about 1799, and in 1805 commanded the third barge ever to ascend the Mississippi from New Orleans to Louisville. Cincinnati had considered herself a ship-building center since 1801, when a brig and two United States gunboats were launched from the Columbia shipyards. In 1811, just two years before the arrival of Levi James, Henry Bechtle, a Cincinnatian, astonished the country by sailing Baum and Perry’s Barge Cincinnati up the falls and on to Cincinnati. Bechtle not only conquered the falls but broke the speed record, sailing from Cincinnati to New Orleans and back in sixty-five days, a voyage that normally required a minimum of ninety to one hundred and twenty days. When Bechtle arrived at Cincinnati, the Liberty Hall proudly announced that the Cincinnati was the first square-rigged vessel ever to ascend the falls. The feat was considered so remarkable that the announcement was reprinted far and wide by the Eastern presses under the head of Ship News in the Woods. At that time, not more than five barges were owned by Ohio citizens.

    The "handsome and well found barge Eliza of Cincinnati" was commanded by Captain Alanthin Ruter. When he sailed from Louisville to New Orleans and back, in sixty-three days, he was elated. The barge he was racing reached Louisville one day before he brought the Eliza into port. The two barges set a new speed record.

    By the time the Eliza was built, the amount of river freight had increased from three hundred tons in 1810 to three thousand tons in 1813. More and larger barges were built, and the price of freight fell to ninety dollars a ton. According to the Louisville Western Courier (July 18, 1814), the manifests of cargoes deposited at Louisville, from down the Mississippi, not counting the freight consigned to Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, amounted to more than a quarter of a million dollars in three months. The cargoes consisted of staples such as cotton, sugar, molasses, salt fish, coffee, wines, fish oil, preserves, spices, indigo, wool, cochineal, lime juice, hides, logwood, copper, steel, rice, and crockery.

    When the Eliza entered the Mississippi River trade, several Cincinnati firms were already operating barges between New Orleans and Louisville. Consignments of goods for Cincinnati were brought up from Shippingport on flatboats. The Cincinnati barges bore such names as Miami Spy, Miami Trader, Wasp, Ohio, Cincinnati, Triton, and Nonsuch [sic]. Their cargoes down the river consisted chiefly of flour, pork, lard, and whiskey.

    In 1814 John James saw the Nonsuch and two keel-boats arrive at Cincinnati on the same day with cargoes of cotton. The Nonsuch, a schooner-rigged vessel of one hundred tons, was under the command of Captain Baum. With freight at five dollars per hundred pounds, her profits were large. John James heard her guns far down the river, firing at intervals as she approached Cincinnati. By the time the boat landed, the populace was at the wharf to greet her. She came up the Kentucky side of the river, firing her guns as rapidly as they could be charged. With each salvo the crew gave their loudest and wildest Indian yells.

    The arrival of a barge was always an exciting event. The voyagers were welcomed home as men from far countries with fabulous tales to tell. They usually obliged with few inhibitions.

    Barges in port were colorful adjuncts to the celebration of any important event. In October 1814 the Triton, belonging to Baum, Wallace and Company, came into port just after the capture of the British fleet on Lake Champlain. To celebrate this victory and the subsequent retreat of the British from their attack on Fort Moreau, the Triton anchored off the town and fired eighteen broadsides of five guns each. Cincinnati and Newport were splendidly illuminated. Citizens formed processions and marched to lively tunes amidst the continuous roar of artillery and small arms till a late hour. Boats anchored nearby augmented the festivity of the scene with brilliant illuminations.

    When the Barge Eliza sailed for New Orleans in December 1816, a part of her cargo was a Negroe man named Magor, who belonged to David Kilgour. James & Duglas & Joseph Hough [were] impoured [empowered] to sell & warrant to any person and for such price as they [might] think proper. They were to get the best bargen they could.

    On the return trip in the spring, Captain Ruter brought the Eliza up to Louisville in seventy-one days. Her cargo of sugar, tanner’s oil, cut nails, logwood, Spanish white, chalk, iron, crockery, Jamaica spirits, and Dutch tumblers was advertised to sell in Cincinnati low for Cash or good paper at 60 days.

    Sometimes the Eliza’s cargo from New Orleans included a keg of oranges for the James family. There was always an empty whiskey keg on board. This was packed full of oranges and the keg filled with whiskey. The oranges arrived in a sound and delectable state, with a rich smack and relish not possessed by common oranges.

    Captain Ruter took the Eliza down the river for the last time in December 1817, arriving at New Orleans with 120 tons of flour, Tobacco, Pork &c. Returning late in April 1818, her last cargo consisted of 57 hogsheads of Orleans sugar, 10 tierces molasses, 13 tons Swedish iron, 4 tons of logwood, 20,000 pounds glauber salts, 25 crates queens-ware, 2 cases of china, 4 cases elegant cut glass, 500 salted hides, 50 barrels of tanner’s oil, 10 gross of assorted white vials, 6 barrels of shad, 4 barrels of pepper, 4 of allspice, 4 of Best green copperas, and 1 pipe of 4th proof cogniac Brandy &c.

    By this time, the Eliza was a bit worn and full of fleas, but still a stout and gallant vessel. Doctor Isaac Hough and James W. Byrne bought her and converted her into a double-decked steamboat, the Comet. Captain Byrne commanded her and James Girty was her pilot. In 1820 she sailed up to the town of Arkansas, the first steamboat ever to ascend the Arkansas River. Three years later, she was snagged and lost near Gallipolis.

    By 1816 Cincinnati was receiving goods from Great Britain. In November of that year the cargo of the Triton consisted chiefly of British goods. The Barge Missouri arrived early in December with a cargo from Liverpool, the second cargo within two months to arrive directly from that port. This was evidence of what could be done by Western merchants to free themselves from Eastern cities under which they had so long labored.

    The port of Cincinnati was now becoming important. The Liberty Hall prefaced its Ship News with:

    Though far removed from Ocean’s roar

    Here Commerce her rich off rings pour.

    Two companies were formed in Cincinnati in 1816 for the importation of goods from Great Britain by way of New Orleans. A British traveler noted in 1818 that English goods blocked the path along the shore in Cincinnati and that flour was waiting to be loaded, some of it to be eaten in London.

    Barges were steadily turned out at the shipyards of Daniel Brooks and Company at Columbia and of T. J. Palmer at Newport, Kentucky. Brooks and Company operated a number of barges, engaging in mercantile shipping on a big scale. In the spring of 1817, John Brooks and Charles and David Jackson, who felt qualified to build anything from a ship to a skiff, announced that they would build a shipyard near the Cincinnati glassworks.

    James and Douglass dissolved partnership in 1820, and Captain James turned his attention exclusively to the river trade. By this time Levi James was considered one of the foremost citizens of the town. He was one of the original directors of the Bank of Cincinnati which was organized with a capital of $600,000. He was a director of the Cincinnati Insurance Company which dealt primarily with the insurance of boats and cargoes. Captain James was the commander of the Cincinnati Guards. The name of Levi James was almost invariably seen on any important committee that had to do with education, finance, civic betterment, or Whig politics. Captain James was active in politics, but he had no political aspirations for himself or his sons. He was a strong supporter and personal friend of Henry Clay. When William Henry Harrison campaigned for the Presidency in 1840, Levi James, his old friend, was a member of the Harrison Executive Committee. Captain James was a man of literary tastes, a courtly gentleman, and a true Westerner with unlimited faith in the possibilities of the Western Country.

    CHAPTER II—THE SUPERB VULCAN

    In 1798 Erasmus Darwin prophesied:

    Soon shall thy arm, unconquer’d steam! afar

    Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car.

    In 1809, eleven years later, a meeting was called at Yeatman’s Tavern in Cincinnati to consider an invention said to be capable of propelling a boat against the stream by the power of steam or elastic vapor. The citizens, however, did nothing more than talk about it. The unsettled conditions resulting from the renewal of the European wars must have discouraged the risk of capital in anything so novel as a steamboat.

    On an October afternoon in 1811, Nicholas Roosevelt’s New Orleans rounded to and cast anchor opposite Cincinnati. Attracted by the noise of her steam, everybody turned out to see this strange new boat. They could not deny that it could go downstream, but that it could sail upstream was unthinkable. The New Orleans remained only long enough to take on wood, and passed on in fine stile at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour. Shortly after this exciting episode, there was a six-mile race between a steamboat and a horse. To the amazement of the Cincinnatians, the steamboat won! Most unusual, the spectators said.

    By 1816 men were dreaming vast dreams about the steamboat. In New York, Gouverneur Morris said:

    This invention is spreading fast in the civilized world; and tho’ excluded as yet from Russia, will, ere long, be extended to that vast empire. A bird hatched on the Hudson will soon people the floods of the Volga, and cygnets descended from an American swan glide along the surface of the Caspian sea. The hoary genius of Asia...shall bow with grateful reverence to the inventive spirit of this western world.

    Thirty-two steamboats had been built on Western waters by 1818. In that year the firm of James and Douglass, in partnership with Hugh and James Glenn, ordered the Steam Boat Vulcan to be built at the shipyard of Daniel Brooks. She was a vessel of 285 tons, double-decked with a ship’s bow and a high-pressure engine. On March 27, 1819, the Vulcan was launched in the presence of an admiring crowd. On the same day, the Tennessee and the Missouri were launched from the Newport shipyard across the river.

    The Vulcan was praised for the soundness of her materials and the excellence of her workmanship. She was pronounced equal to any steamboat ever launched between Pittsburgh and New Orleans. The progress of western commercial enterprise, exulted the Cincinnati Liberty Hall, is enough to astonish every beholder. Thanks to the inventive genius of Cincinnatians, the distance from the ocean had been shortened by the powerful influence of steam.

    Captain Alanthin Ruter, the commander of the Barge Eliza, commanded the Vulcan. He was a highly intelligent man of temperate habits, much respected by rivermen. Captain Ruter was tall and blond and striking in appearance. There was no need of engine bells on the Vulcan. The Captain’s Start her ahead, Slow, Stop her, rang through the ship like a trumpet. His stentorian voice could be heard distinctly across the river. He was a little nervous about taking the wheel himself in bad weather, but with a competent man at the wheel, he could bawl out his orders with colossal assurance.

    As a bargeman, Captain Ruter had seldom taken the tiller. He had superintended the hands, the warps and the yawls, the sails and the rigging, and everything else connected with the boat, but the two patroons had done the steering. Few small steamboats of the early day had steering wheels. At night, the pilot of a small steamer sat or stood forward and hallooed Starboard, Port, Steady, to the man at the helm or tiller. For the pilots, this was an easier transition from barge to steamboat.

    When the Vulcan made her maiden voyage, there were few settlements between the mouth of the Ohio and Natchez. Twenty-five miles below the mouth of the Ohio, New Madrid was being broken to pieces by earthquakes and carried away by the strong currents of the river. One hundred and thirty miles farther down the river, among the Wapannocka Yuppa Indians, there was a small settlement of white thieves who robbed and plundered at will. The only trading point for flatboats between the mouth of the Ohio and Natchez was about ten miles below this robbers’ den. It was in a small opening in the forest at a sharp point opposite the Fourth Chickasaw Bluff on which the village of Memphis was laid out in 1819.

    According to the Louisiana Gazette (August 24, 1820), seventy-three steamboats, the Vulcan among them, were listed as belonging to the Western Navigation. Approximate annual receipts from steamboat freights amounted to $1,890,000, which with passenger fares amounting to $333,000 made a total of $2,223,000. The exports from New Orleans by steamboat to the various parts of the Western states were estimated at 33,000 tons annually, while the imports from the upper country exceeded that amount.

    After the dissolution of the firm of James and Douglass in 1820, Captain James owned half the Vulcan. She established a good record for service and speed, delivering goods at any landing between New Orleans and Maysville, Kentucky. In March 1821, she made the trip from Louisville to New Orleans in five and a half days, carrying passengers and a heavy cargo. Two months later she ascended the Mississippi to Louisville in sixteen days, with two hundred tons of freight, besides passengers. There were too many steamboats, however. Competition was very keen.

    An extract from the log book of the Vulcan on the latter trip reads as follows:

    Mar. 16th passed S b Providence, at the mouth of Salt River, bound to Havana with live hogs—17th met the Calhoun at Galcona—18th A.M. met the Fayette, 12 miles below New Madrid. 11 A.M. met the Comet, and Washington, Byaw River—6 P.M. met the Maysville at the Devils Hatchet—8 P.M. met the Car of Commerce—19th 2 A.M. met the Exchange at Buck Island—met the Rifleman at Grand Cutoff—20th 7 P.M. met the Cumberland at Walnut Hills—met the General Clark at Palmira—21st 4 A.M. met the Alabama and Cincinnati, near Coles Creek—1 P.M. met the Tennessee 10 miles below Elisses Cliffs—22nd 11 A.M. met the Missouri at Placquemine....

    On one of the voyages in 1820, Captain James took his eight-year-old son David to New Orleans. The child was fascinated by Captain Ruter and the steering wheel. After a time, David ventured to lay his hand upon that magic wheel, and was allowed to steer the boat, with the tall captain standing by.

    Old David Kilgour made the voyage with Captain James free of charge, for he was to provide a great quantity of sugar and molasses for the return cargo. When the Vulcan went twelve miles above New Orleans to the Pavé plantation to take on Kilgour’s sugar and molasses, David saw his first orange groves. Kilgour, sensing the timid boy’s consuming desire for oranges, pointed to David, saying to Madame Pavé, Boy. Oranges. He lent David his big silk handkerchief, and Madame Pavé ordered it filled with sweet oranges. The child ran to the boat as fast as his legs would carry him and distributed his treasure among the boat hands. Kilgour was outraged, and scolded the child mercilessly for giving the oranges away. A barrel of oranges would not have been worth such a tirade. For years afterward, David could not bear even the smell of an orange.

    On Sunday, the little boy was taken to the Congo ground to see the slaves disporting themselves on their liberty day. Many of the negroes were straight from the wilds of Africa. When he was an old man, David described that experience to his children:

    One tall elegantly formed and graceful negress particularly attracted me. She wore a turban made of a bandanna Handkerchief with brilliant colors. She was dancing with a negro man...it is a fact that they would refuse to dance if a white man should intrude into their setts. The white people could look on and did so. That negress danced with all the dignity and grace that would become a Princess in her own Africa.

    When David was told that the negroes had been wild, he could understand the term, for he had seen Indian boys shooting their arrows at pieces of money in the streets of Cincinnati.

    In December, Captain James sent his son John to New Orleans to act as clerk on board the Vulcan. A list of John’s luggage reveals what at least one well-dressed young man with literary tastes considered necessary for a voyage to New Orleans:

    1 Surtout Coat—Teluco—1 vol.

    1 Blue do.—Novice of St. Dominick—2. vols.

    1 pr. Blue Pantaloons—Byron’s Works—4. vols.

    1 pr. Linsey do.—La Heunade [sic]—2 vols.

    1 pr. Black do.—Les Lucas—2 vols.

    1 Black Cloth vest—Telemaque—1

    1 Black silk do.—Dictionnarie Francois—1

    3 white mersailes do.—French Grammar—1

    3 ruffled shirts—Bible—1

    5 plain do.—Seasons (Thompson’)—1

    6 pr. Gray socks—Campbell’s Poems—1

    3 pr. Drawers—Whist—1

    8 White Cravats—Beauties of Fielding—1

    1 Black Do.—Johnson—1

    2 flag Hdkfs.——

    1 pr. Boots——

    1 pr. Shoes——

    2 "Pumps——

    John arrived at Louisville on December 29 and found the Vulcan taking on cargo at Shippingport. James Stewart and Company, agents, had advertised the boat as having one of the best engines on the river and as ranking as high with the Louisville Insurance Company as any boat on the river. The Vulcan was now ready to accommodate twenty-five cabin passengers with comfortable state rooms. Owing to the intense cold that kept the river full of huge masses of ice, it was nearly two months before the Vulcan sailed.

    New Year’s Day in Louisville presented a strange aspect to this young man from Ohio. Owners brought great numbers of their slaves to town that day to sell their labor at public auction.

    Louisville society in 1822 still showed the crudities of a new country. There was little time for gracious living, but there was a small circle that formed a core of culture in the town. One member of that circle was George Keats, brother of John Keats the poet. John J. Audubon was a colorful but unfortunate figure in Louisville society for a time. His aristocratic wife, Lucy Green Bakewell, a descendant of the Peverils made famous by Sir Walter Scott’s Peveril of the Peak, upheld the dignity of her family through all vicissitudes. And Judge John Rowan, James Guthrie, Fortunatus Cosby, and William and Thomas Bakewell (brothers of Mrs. Audubon) were among early Louisville’s men of distinction. There were public and private balls, dinner parties, whist games, and occasional concerts and plays for the amusement of the fashionable set.

    On January 8 John James went into Louisville to attend the young ladies of Captain Gray’s household to the ball in honor of the eighth anniversary of General Jackson’s celebrated victory at New Orleans. The ball was attended by a numerous and gay assemblage. The military were out in full uniform, and the ladies appeared alive to the patriotic feelings elicited by the glorious event they were commemorating. Though the ballroom was large, John thought it less elegant than the ballroom in the Cincinnati Hotel at home.

    On the following Sunday, John accompanied some friends to the Presbyterian Church. In the gallery was a handsome organ built by Adam Hurdus which John had seen and heard in Hurdus’ shop in Cincinnati. It had come down to Louisville on the General Pike only a month before. Shadrach Penn, in his Louisville Public Advertiser, called it a superb instrument, one that did credit to the improving state of the arts in the West.

    Parson Daniel Smith delivered an excellent sermon, his language fluent, forcible, and sometimes elegant. He was so wan and emaciated, however, that he appeared as one risen from the dead to warn mankind against the Day of Doom. Though his voice was as weak as his body, that pale shadow of a man had the power to impress his listeners profoundly, even the blasé young gentleman from Cincinnati.

    In New Albany, Indiana, John met all the bucks of the town at Doctor Hale’s tavern. With local belles and some fair ladies from Corydon the young fellows danced at the tavern till midnight. The manners of the people and the style of the place, John wrote in his diary, are entirely different from anything I have hitherto witnessed.

    With Captains Palfrey and Carson, John returned to New Albany a few days later. Half a leg deep in mud, they waded through the town half a dozen times, delivering invitations to a party to be held on board Captain Palfrey’s boat, the James Ross. That evening the eligible young men from the steamboats in port gathered on the James Ross to practise the latest cotillion figures.

    The next day John James and Captain Palfrey set out in a six-oared boat to fetch the ladies up. Tea was served on board at dusk. Then the dancing began. Supper was served at nine. When John returned to the Vulcan to sleep, it was midnight.

    An occasional trip to the theater relieved the monotony of steamboat life. The Louisville theater—divided into a pit, two tiers of boxes, and a gallery—was capable of seating eight hundred persons. There was a general refreshment room and a retiring room for the ladies. The sixteen boxes were sometimes sold at auction up to thirty-five dollars each for one performance. Shadrach Penn, in his Public Advertiser, delicately hinted that gentlemen should not stand in the pit, as they usually did, and that the rules of politeness should be observed. Alexander Drake’s company was playing that winter. John James wrote a long review of John Bull and the farce, Wags of Windsor, for the Advertiser.

    At last the Vulcan sailed on February 24. The first night out John turned to Shakespeare for amusement. The next evening there was some very fine music on the Mandoline, by Mr. Tosso, senior, and some very masterly performances on the violin. John had undoubtedly heard of Don Carlos Tosso, for Tosso had been living in Louisville for about two years, probably playing in the theater orchestra. Don Carlos was a graduate of the University of Louvain, a dealer in fine jewels, and an excellent violinist. His son Joseph was a musical prodigy trained as a virtuoso in the Paris Conservatory.{1} It was Joseph who composed and made popular The Arkansaw Traveler. He did more than any other musician, perhaps, to stimulate a love for music on the frontier. He played for the untutored boatman as well as the cultivated gentleman.

    On the fourth day out, the Vulcan was below the Chickasaw Bluffs. Landing at a woodpile, John had his first opportunity to enter a canebrake. Most of the passengers helped with the wooding up. The owner of the woodpile was a young man of intelligence and polished manners, dressed in a buckskin hunting shirt. His neat little log house was furnished with such comforts as a curtained bed, a bureau, and a case of books. There was a little house for his doves and a small cornmill worked by a horse. In less than a year he had sold nearly five hundred cords of wood at an average price of two dollars in specie. The Vulcan took on wood the next day in Arkansas Territory. The family who operated this woodpile had found a barrel of whiskey adrift. Having consumed a liberal portion of it, they were in a gay and sportive mood.

    Wooding up was a unique procedure. There were two rates for deck passage. Tickets of one color were given for the lower rate and tickets of another color for the higher rate. Those who took the lower rate agreed to help wood up. As the boat approached a woodpile, the mate, with lurid oaths and imprecations, hallooed, Woodpile! turn out, and show your tickets. This he bellowed as long as a single wooding up ticket holder remained on deck. It was not pleasant to turn out on a dark and rainy night and carry wood down a steep and slippery bank, while the mate swore and yelled, Hurry, hurry, hurry!

    Some steamboat captains seemed to delight in wooding up at night, especially in foul weather. There were those who held that the captains hoped to escape payment for the wood by taking it late at night. Honest captains simply left a record of the wood taken and stopped on the way up again to settle the bill. Some captains tried to get rid of all their uncurrent money at the woodyards. Sometimes they bought uncurrent money cheaply and foisted it off on unsuspecting woodmen at face value. Even counterfeit bills were paid for wood. The scheme was to get the wood on board, then offer the bad money. The seller simply had to take it or receive nothing at all. The great majority of steamboat captains, however, were fine upstanding men.

    Woodsellers had their tricks, too. Not infrequently the steamboatmen would find a load of wood camouflaged with beautiful beech, straight and neatly corded, while underneath there were only logs and crooked limbs and knots of inferior wood, or corded so loosely you could throw a cat through it. Again, the measurement of the wood might be short.

    On Sunday night, March 3, the Vulcan arrived at New Orleans—eight days from Louisville. The next morning John James walked into the city to see the sights. It was different from any city he had ever seen. The singular appearance of the houses, the stir and bustle on the levee gave him a confused kind of pleasure.

    John was only twenty-one years old, young enough to seek adventure. His friend David Wallace (a future governor of Indiana) had written some very plain letters to him about the wickedness of New Orleans. David, then a boy of seventeen, had written in 1816 to John:

    Dissipation is carried to such an extent, that a young person feels no more shame in going to a whore House and dance and frolick the night away than I would to sit down to eat my breakfast, and I don’t know whether as much.

    To David Wallace, New Orleans was a most miserable place.

    In 1817 David had written:

    I was astonished to see how little regard was paid to Sunday....I...saw the carts and Drays a going making quite as much [noise] as on a week day. I turned about and asked some person if this was not Sunday....He asked me why. I told him people in my country never worked on Sunday. Huh, says the man, you are a Damd fool—and walked off and left me.

    One curious thing that John observed in New Orleans was that persons in dispute upbraided each other volubly in French, but when they resorted to profanity, they invariably swore in English.

    John enjoyed New Orleans. He saw the market with its square-stoned paving, whitewashed and very clean, stocked with the best meats, fish, flowers, fruits, and vegetables in abundance. He went to the legislative halls and heard Edward Livingston speak. He visited the armory; he saw the canal; he was shocked by the cemeteries; he bought books at the bookstores; he had an oyster supper at Gwathmey’s; he went to the American Theater.

    The price of the seats in the boxes and the parquette of the American Theater had been raised the year before, in an attempt to prevent the greasy Kentuckians, and the rabble from leaning over the backs of the boxes to the great annoyance of the Ladies. This applied to the Kentucky boatmen and not to the gentry, of course. Smell-Fungus offered a suggestion in a letter to the Louisiana Gazette early in 1823. The writer had noticed that ladies were not attending the theater very much. They resented being elbowed by a dirty clown, or having their delicacy offended by his low ribaldry. "How often does one see some Yahou throw his unclean feet over the box railings and expose a part still more indelicate to the public gaze? asked Smell-Fungus. Men kept their hats on and smoked their segars" in the theater, too. Why not reduce the price of the seats in the pit? Then many of these pests would go to the pit and leave the boxes for the genteel. The front seats would then be

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1