Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 V13.djvu/71

 banks, which neither deserved confidence nor credit. Not a note in Kentucky {35} commanded specie, the capital was altogether fictitious, and ought to have been secured by every species of property possessed by the stockholders. A more ruinous and fraudulent system of exchange was never devised in any Christian country; it is truly a novelty to see a whole community, at least the wealthy part of it, conspiring in a common system of public fraud.

The love of luxury, without the means of obtaining it, has proved the bane of these still rude settlements of agriculturists, naturally poor in money by reason of their remoteness from the emporium of commerce, and their neglect of manufactures. When one heard a farmer demand a price for his produce in Kentucky, equal nearly to that of Philadelphia, we might be certain that he expected payment in depreciated paper.

A stranger who descends the Ohio at this season of emigration, cannot but be struck with the jarring vortex of heterogeneous population amidst which he is embarked, all searching for some better country, which ever lies to the west, as Eden did to the east. Amongst the crowd are also those, who, destitute of the means or inclination of obtaining an honest livelihood, are forced into desperate means for subsistence.

In my descent from Pittsburgh to Louisville, I found the wind, excepting about two days, constantly blowing up the river. The north-west or south-west winds, in fact, continue almost three quarters of the year. The deep valley which the river has excavated forms a vortex, into which the rarified air of the land rushes for equilibrium. The south-west wind is uniformly, at this season of the year, attended with a dense and bluish atmosphere,