Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/271

 After leaving Blue river we went sixteen miles without any settlement, and then passed a small one on the left. The river having narrowed in that distance to less than a quarter of a mile wide, and very crooked, with gently sloping hills rising from the banks. Ten miles lower, on the left, we came to the next settlement just began, and three miles further passed Flint island, one mile long, with the hull of a small ship on the upper end, stranded there in descending last winter from Marietta.

When about three miles below Flint island, the wind blowing very fresh ahead and causing a good deal of sea, we stopped on the right shore abreast of Wheatly's cabin, and moored. Wheatly comes from Redstone in Pennsylvania, and first lived on the opposite bank in Kentucky, where he owned one thousand acres of land, which he was obliged to part with from following boating and neglecting farming. He has now three hundred and forty acres here, from six of which that he has cleared, he raised last year five hundred bushels of corn. He told us that a small tribe of Miami Indians were encamped on Oil creek about two miles distant. On asking if they were troublesome, he replied with much sang froid, still splitting his log, "We never permit them to be troublesome, for if any of them displease us, we take them out of doors and kick them a little, for they are like dogs, and so will love you the better for it." This doctrine might suit an athletick, active man, {239} upwards of six feet high and in the prime of life, like Wheatly, but I question whether the Indians would submit to it from people less powerful. He informed us, that they frequently get the Indians together, take their guns, knives and tomahawks from them, then treat them with whiskey until they are drunk, when they set them by the ears, to have the pleasure of seeing them fight, at which they are so awkward