THE

BLOODY BROAD-HORN.

CHAPTER II.

IN WHICH MR. MICHAEL LAW BEGINS HIS STORY: WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF COLONEL STORM AND HIS FAMILY.

"HAD Fulton and Stevens, and the, other great men who have covered the rivers of America with steamboats,"-thus began the narrator," commenced their experiments twenty years earlier than they did, the history of the West would have presented no such tales of blood as 1 am now about to relate, and its settlement would have advanced with equal rapidity and safety. With a steamboat on the Ohio, to waft us, the first invaders of the wilderness, upon our voyage, instead of the wretched broad-horns in which so many of us went to our deaths, the voyage to Kentucky would have present

ed none of those dangers and difficulties by which colonization was so seriously retarded, and the rich fields of the West left so long in possession of the savage Red-man.

"I was born in Virginia, in what is now Jefferson county, on the Upper Potomac,— an honourable birth-place; but I cannot boast a lineage either rich or distinguished. On the contrary, I found myself, at the age of eighteen, in the month of March, 1791, an ignorant younker, (ignorant of every thing but the rifle, which I had learned to handle in hunter's style by mere instinct, and the hoe, the use of which noble implement starvation and a hard-labouring father had as early taught me,) set adrift upon the world, to seek my fortune, or, in other words, shift for myself as I could; my father, Michael Law, (which is also my own name,) having brought home to his cabin, one fine morning, a new friend in the person of a step-mother; who was never at rest until she had succeeded in driving me from the house; a catastrophe to which my father the more readily consented, as I was now, he said, 'a man grown, and full as able to make my way in the world as he was.'

"He gave me his blessing, a knife, a new

shirt, and a pair of shoes, with an old haversack to put them in, a dried venison-ham, (which was, however, of my own shooting,) and as much parched corn as I chose to carry; and my step-mother adding, as proofs of her affectionate regard, a pair of stockings and a worsted nightcap of her own knitting, I bade them farewell; and, in company with three other adventurers like myself, turned my face towards Pittsburg, with the design of proceeding to Kentucky; where I was told I might have a fine farm for nothing, save an occasional fight for it with the Indians, and plenty of stock, horses and cows, as many as I might want, from any body for the mere asking.

"Arriving at Pittsburg, then a miserable little hamlet, in which no wiseacre could foresee the bustling and important city into which it has now grown, I began to be somewhat alarmed at the dismal stories every one had to tell of the terrors of the downward voyage, of the frequent, nay, daily destruction of boats with all on board, by the Indians; from whom, many declared, it was a mere accident and miracle that any boats should escape at all. My companions were even more dismayed than I, one of them returning home

within a week, and the others hiring themselves out at labour upon the fortress, which the government of the United States was then constructing at Pittsburg.

"As for me, having a little money in my pocket, won at sundry-shooting matches during the preceding winter, and treasured up against a rainy day, I resolved to play the gentleman as long as it lasted, and then determine upon the course to be pursued-to go to work like my friends, for which I had but little appetite, having a soul quite above my condition, or join some enterprising boat's crew, and proceed to Kentucky, for which I still felt a hankering, notwithstanding the notorious perils of the voyage.

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My money, as I employed it freely, first, in decorating my person with a much handsomer suit of clothes than had ever before decked it, and, secondly, in establishing myself in the best tavern in the place, I soon managed to make away with; upon which, having now made up my mind for Kentucky, I began to look about me for a boat, and the means of obtaining a passage in it to Kentucky.

"In this I found no great difficulty. The great preparations which General St. Clair,

Governor of the Territories Northwest of the Ohio, and commander of the national forces in the West, was making at his camp, Fort Hamilton, the site, as all know, of the present Cincinnati, for a great expedition, which, every body supposed, was to sweep the Indians from the face of the earth, and so end the Indian wars in Kentucky for ever, had given a vast impulse and increase to emigration; and there was now not a week,—indeed, scarce a day, in which some boat, or fleet of boats, did not depart from Pittsburg. And these were seldom so heavily laden, or strongly manned, but that room could be readily found for a single unencumbered man, a sprightly lad like myself, who could balance a rifle, had muscles for an oar, and otherwise promised to make himself serviceable on the

voyage.

"It was my good fortune (for such, notwithstanding the disasters of the voyage, I shall always esteem it,) to find, among other emigrants who were making their preparations for descending the river, a certain Colonel Storm, a worthy old gentleman of Virginia, who had fought through the French Wars and the Revolution at the head of a regiment of Buckskins, and bore the reputa