Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/184

 the main channel. Whenever we came near those shallows the swiftness of the current was extreme, and the canoe was carried away like an arrow, which led us to observe that it was only as we distanced the islands that the bed increases in depth, and that the stream becomes less rapid.

On the day of our departure we joined, in the evening, a Kentucky boat, destined for Cincinnati. This boat, about forty feet long and fifteen broad, was loaded with bar iron and brass pots. There was also an emigrant family in it, consisting of the father, mother, and seven children, with all their furniture and implements of husbandry. The boatmen, three in number, granted us, without difficulty, permission to fasten our canoe to the end of their boat, and to pass the night with them. We intended, by that means, to accelerate our journey, by not putting up {94} at night, as we had before been accustomed to do, and hoped to spend a more comfortable night than the preceding one, during which we had been sadly tormented by the fleas, with which the greater part of the houses where we had slept, from the moment of our embarkation, had been infested. However our hopes were frustrated; for so far from being comfortable, we were still more incommoded. In the course of my travels it was only on the banks of the Ohio that I experienced this inconvenience.

We were on the point of leaving them about two in the morning, when the boat ran aground. Under these circumstances we could not desert our hosts, who had entertained us with their best, and who had made us partake of a wild turkey which they had shot the preceding evening on the banks of the river. We got into the water with the boatmen, and by the help of large sticks