98 AI,e:XANDER WILSON: POET-NATURAUST 



evening, March 17th, when I moored my skiff 

 safely in Bear-Grass Creek, at the rapids of the 

 Ohio, after a voyage of seven hundred and twenty 

 miles. My hands suffered the most ; and it will be 

 some weeks yet before they recover their former 

 feeling and flexibility." 



Steubenville, Charlestown and Wheeling, where 

 he stopped to visit friends, broke for a while the 

 hardships of his voyage. At Marietta he met the 

 son of General Israel Putnam, and later he viewed 

 Blennerhassett's Island by the light of burning 

 brush. At last the weather became so severe, since 

 it was snowing hard, that he landed on the Ken- 

 tucky shore and made his way to a cabin near at 

 hand, where he was entertained with stories of 

 bear-treeing, wolf-trapping and wild-cat hunting by 

 the old hunter, while "all night long the howling of 

 wolves kept the dogs in a perpetual uproar of bark- 

 ing." As he went on down the river in his boat, he 

 turned aside frequently to examine rocks or to in- 

 quire about fossils ;• he was always eager for any- 

 thing interesting to the scientist. It was a welcome 

 sight to him when he, in the midst of a raging 

 storm, saw at last the houses of Cincinnati, which 

 he declared the "neatest and handsomest situated 

 place" with which he had met since leaving Phila- 

 delphia. Nevertheless, soon he was in the Orni- 

 thologist again, and on the very first afternoon he 

 rowed twenty miles before he rested. The weather 

 was bad, it was raining hard, and his "great-coat" 

 was used to cover his bird-skins, so that all which 

 he had to protect himself with against the cold was 

 a bottle of wine that he soon emptied, drinking the 



