Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 11).djvu/205

 pleased to turn my back on all the spitting, gouging, dirking, duelling, swearing, and staring, of old Kentucky.

I crossed the Ohio at Portland, and landed at New Albion, a young rising village, to breakfast, where, for the first time in America, I found fine, sweet, white, home-baked bread. The staff of life is generally sour, and, though light and spongy, very ill-flavoured, either from bad leaven, or the flour sweating and turning sour in the barrel.

At eleven, a. m., I rested, and baited at a farm log house, having one room only; the farmer came to it ten years ago, and has settled on two quarter sections of land. He has a good horse-mill at work, night and day, to which people come with {204} grist, from 10 to 15 miles, working it with their own horses, four in number, and leaving him (the miller) an eighth for his toll. "My land" (says he) "is good, but not like that of old Kentuck. I get from 40 to 60 bushels of corn, and wheat, 25 to 30 bushels per acre, and a market at my door, in supplying gentlemen-travellers, and emigrants." The first house is, for five or six years, a miserable hole, with one room only, after which, rises a better, and the old one remains for a kitchen. This man seems full of money, and knows all things; he damns the state government for denying him the privilege of slavery, and of using his Kentucky negroes, who, in consequence, (he says) are hired and exposed to cruelty. "I was raised under a monarchy government, in Virginia, where every man did as he pleased. This Indiana a free state, and yet not at liberty to use its own property! You tell me to quit it, I guess, if I do not like it." "Yes, I do." "Well then, the government, d—n it, has the power, it seems, to drive me out." This strange man was very civil and coarsely kind to me, and whispered aside to my driver, that he knew I was a very large proprietor in this state.