Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/186

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by a more splendid light and easier expansion, extend toward the borders, overshadowing the river, at the same time completely covering the trees situated under them. This natural display, which reigns upon the two banks, affords on each side a regular arch, the shadow of which, reflected by the crystal stream, embellishes, in an extraordinary degree, this magnificent coup d'œil. The Ohio at Marietta presents a perspective somewhat similar, perhaps even more picturesque than the one I have just described, through the houses of this little town, that we perceived five or six miles off, the situation of which is fronting the middle of the river, going up. The Great Kenhaway, more known in the country under that denomination than by that of the New River, which it bears in some charts, takes its source at the foot of the Yellow Mountain in Tennessea, but the mass of its waters proceed from one part of the Alleghany Mountains. The falls and currents that are so frequently met with in this river, for upward {97} of four hundred miles, will always be an obstacle to the exportation, by the Ohio and the Mississippi, of provisions from the part of Virginia which it waters. Its banks are inhabited, but less than those of the Ohio. {98} CHAP. XI Gallipoli.—State of the French colony Scioto.—Alexandria at the mouth of the Great Scioto.—Arrival at Limestone in Kentucky.


Gallipoli is situated four miles below Point Pleasant, on the right bank of the Ohio. At this place assembled nearly a fourth part of the French, who, in 1789 and 1790, left their country to go and settle at Scioto: but it was not till after a sojourn of fifteen months at Alexandria in