Near Bay City, IL[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 As the expedition nears Fort Massac, they pass numerous islands above the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. One week ahead of Lewis and Clark, fellow traveler Thomas Rodney describes an Indian family living in this area.
1814 Map of the Lower Ohio
Zadok Cramer, The Navigator, 1814.
Islands 89–91 are the First, Second, and Third Sisters followed by Stewart’s Island (92) and the Cumberland Islands (93–96). This map was not in the edition of The Navigator available to the captains in 1803.
Islands
A series of islands greeted travelers as they approached the Cumberland River, only 60 miles from the mouth of the Ohio. An island blocks the mouth, forcing most to pass it and row upstream
—Fortescue Cuming[2]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
An Indian Family
The old man and woman had no ornaments. The eldest girl had a necklace of glass purple beads and a half a dozen ringlets of tin bobs in each ear. They had some durty raged linnen and calico beside their blankets around them. They, I presume, however, were not of much distinction; nor could we larn of what nation they were as they could not talk our language or we theirs; only the old woman on seeing a cheese pronounced the name very distinctly.
—Thomas Rodney[3]2 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
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 the captains stopped near present-day Bay City near this date. |
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| ↑2 | 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). |
| ↑3 | 2 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), 160. |
