. Recollections of a lifetime : or men and things I have seen : in a series of familiar letters to a friend : historical, biographical, anecdotical, and descriptive . theyreached the expected Canaan ; many perished aftertheir arrival, from fetigue and privation ; and others,from the fever and ague, which was then certain toattack the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818, that I published a smalltract, entitled Tother side of Ohio—that is, theother view, in contrast to the popular notion that itwas the paradise of the world. It was written byDr. Hand—a talented young physician of Berlin—•who
. Recollections of a lifetime : or men and things I have seen : in a series of familiar letters to a friend : historical, biographical, anecdotical, and descriptive . theyreached the expected Canaan ; many perished aftertheir arrival, from fetigue and privation ; and others,from the fever and ague, which was then certain toattack the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818, that I published a smalltract, entitled Tother side of Ohio—that is, theother view, in contrast to the popular notion that itwas the paradise of the world. It was written byDr. Hand—a talented young physician of Berlin—•who had made a visit to the West about these consisted mainly of vivid but painful pictures ofthe accidents and incidents attending this wholesalemigration. The roads over the Alleghanies, betweenPhiladelphia and Pittsburg, were then rude, steep,and dangerous, and some of the more precipitoussloj)es were consequently strewn with the carcasesof wagons, carts, horses, oxen, which had made ship-wreck in their perilous descents. The scenes onthe road—of families gathered at night in miserablesheds, called taverns—mothers frying, children cry- ^ Emigration in 1817. Vol. 2, p. 80. HISTORICAL, ANECDOTICAL, ETC. 81 ing, fathers swearing—were a mingled comedy andtragedy of errors. Even when they arrived in theirnew homes—along the banks of the Muskingumor the Scioto—frequently the whole family—father,mother, children—speedily exchanged the fresh com-plexion and elastic step of their first abodes, for thesunken cheek and languid movement, which marksthe victim of intermittent fever. The instances of home-sickness, described by thisvivid sketcher, were touching. Not even the captiveIsraelites, who hung their harps upon the willowsalong the banks of the Euphrates, wept more bittertears, or looked back with more longing to their na-tive homes, than did these exiles from New England—mourning the land they had left, with its roads,schools, meeting-houses—its
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