Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 21).djvu/41

1832] very few, of those ridiculous prejudices against what they call Yankees, that are observable in Virginia and the Carolinas.

At Baltimore our amphibious carriages excited great attention, and I may add, our whole company was an object of no small curiosity and respect. This, said they, is "Yankee all over!"—bold enterprise, neatness, and good contrivance. As we carefully avoided the expense of inns and taverns, we marched two miles out of Baltimore, and there encamped during four days; and then we put [15] our wagons into the cars on the rail-road; which extends from thence sixty miles, which brought us to the foot of the Alleghany mountains. Quitting the rail-road at the foot of the Alleghany, we encountered that mountain. Here we experienced a degree of inhospitality not met with among the savages. The Innkeepers, when they found that we came from New England, betrayed an unwillingness to accommodate Yankees, from a ridiculous idea, that the common people, so nicknamed, were too shrewd at a bargain and trading, for a slow and straight-forward Dutchman; for the inhabitants of this mountainous region, were generally sons and grandsons of the Dutch and German first settlers; and it cannot be denied and concealed, that the New England land-jobbers were in their bargains too hard for the torpid Dutchman, who, it is true, loved money as much as any people, yet when they, or their fathers had been the sufferers from a set of roving sharpers, it is no wonder that an hereditary prejudice should descend with exaggeration and aggravation from father to son, and that their resentment should visit their innocent sons to the third