Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 9).djvu/292

 If a notch is cut in the stem of a vine in the spring season, clear and tasteless water runs out, not in drops, but in a continued stream. I have several times quenched my thirst from sources of this kind.

For upwards of two months, the Ohio has been low; steam-boats cannot now pass from the falls at this place to the Mississippi, nor can boats, descending with produce, get down the same rapids without unloading the greater part of their cargoes. The trade of the country is of consequence much interrupted. In spring, 1818, there were thirty-one steam-boats on the Mississippi and Ohio; at present there are sixty on these waters. This increase of craft, together with the decreasing quantity of goods imported, has lowered the freight from New Orleans to the falls of the Ohio, from six cents to two cents per pound. The rates paid by passengers, however, are not reduced in the same proportion.

The falls of the Ohio are occasioned by a bed of horizontal limestone that stretches across the river, which is upwards of a mile in breadth. At the head of the falls, the river is about a mile broad, including a small island, but in dry seasons of the year the waters are much contracted in breadth, leaving a great portion of the rocky bottom entirely dry. The interruption to the navigation is not a precipitous cascade, as the name would imply, but a rapid, which is extremely shallow at the head in dry weather, and runs over an uneven bottom, at the rate of about fourteen miles an hour. After passing the upper, or principal shoot, nearly the whole of the waters are collected into a deep but narrow channel, close by the Indiana shore, leaving some small islands toward the opposite side; {261} the second, or lower shoot, is less violent, having deeper water, and is always navigable for