Near Paducah, KY[1]No known record exists of expedition’s travel between Louisville and Fort Massac. Using information from travelers of the period and Cramer’s 1802 river guide, The Navigator, one … Continue reading On or near this date, the expedition passes the mouth of the Tennessee River. Many Ohio River travelers missed the Tennessee, hidden by an island in 1803, and had to row back to enter the river.
Ohio and Tennessee Confluence
By Farragutful. Permission via the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Above: the mouth of the Tennessee comes in from the right. In 1803, the mouth was obscured by islands.
Mouth of the Tennessee
[P]assed the mouth of the Tenesse River. It is covered by two small long islands, so that you cannot see the mouth till you git below the lower island where it open with great dignity, being half as wide as the Ohio itself and by far superior to every other branch of it.
—Thomas Rodney[2]3 November 1803. Dwight L. Smith and Ray Swick, ed., A Journey Through the West: Thomas Rodney’s 1803 Journal from Delaware to the Mississippi Territory (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), … Continue reading
Mouth of the Cumberland
With some difficulty and much rowing, we forced our 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 Cumberland river, across which we rowed, and moored at the little town of Smithland.
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.
—Fortescue Cuming[3]Fortescue Cuming, Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country: Through the States of Ohio and Kentucky, a voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and a trip through the Mississippi territory, and … Continue reading
Notes
| ↑1 | No known record exists of expedition’s travel between Louisville and Fort Massac. Using information from travelers of the period and Cramer’s 1802 river guide, The Navigator, one conjecture is that stopping at or near Paducah would enable them to arrive at Fort Massac early the next day. |
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| ↑2 | 3 November 1803. Dwight L. Smith and Ray Swick, ed., A Journey Through the West: Thomas Rodney’s 1803 Journal from Delaware to the Mississippi Territory (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), 162. |
| ↑3 | Fortescue Cuming, Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country: Through the States of Ohio and Kentucky, a voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and a trip through the Mississippi territory, and part of West Florida, commenced at Philadelphia in the winter of 1807 . . . (Pittsburgh: Cramer, Spear, & Eichbaum, 1810), 249–50. |
