Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/283

 boats into the narrow Kentucky channel of the second Cumberland island a mile below the first, as otherwise we should not have been able to have got into Cumberland river, which the second island overlaps. A mile more brought us to the entrance of {250} Cumberland river, across which we rowed, and moored at the little town of Smithland.

This town contains only ten or a dozen houses and cabins, including two stores, two taverns and a billiard table. There appears to be only about thirty acres of land, badly cleared and worse cultivated around it, though the soil seems very good, but as it is as yet only considered as a temporary landing to boats bound up and down Cumberland river, the inhabitants depend on what they can make by their intercourse with them, and are not solicitous to cultivate more land than will suffice to give them maize enough for themselves and their horses. They live chiefly on bacon, which comes down the two rivers, and corn, being too indolent to butcher or to fish, though they might raise any quantity of stock, and doubtless the Ohio and Cumberland both abound in fish. On the whole it is a miserable place, and a traveller will scarcely think himself repaid by a sight of the Cumberland, for stopping at Smithland.

There is an old Indian burying ground at the upper end of the town, where we found several human bones enclosed in thin flattish stone tombs close to the surface.

Cumberland river mixes its clear blue stream with the muddy Ohio at an embouchure of about three hundred yards wide. It is the principal river for business in the state of Tennessee, Nashville the capital, being situated on its banks, one hundred and eighty miles by water, and one hundred and thirty by land, above its conflux with the Ohio.[181]