On or near this date, Lewis passes the Ohio River towns of Alexandria and Vanceburg. He provides no journal entry, but Thomas Rodney describes this area nine days later.[1]Because we have no journal entry from Lewis for this day, his exact location is unknown. He was at Letart Falls on 18 September and arrived in Cincinnati on 28 September. Based on Thomas … Continue reading
Making Salt by Boiling Water
© 2013 by Kristopher K. Townsend. Permission to use granted under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Table Rock
Here I recollect that I omitted to mention the appearance of a cuerious rock on the mountain on the Kentucky shore just before we saw Alexandra round the point. It was an oblong laying like a table on one edge and the upper corners ovalled off a little. It stood on the top of a nob of the mountain and perhaps was 60 ft. long and 15 ft. high. The face was green as if covered with moss and the top edge was crowned with a row of ceaders.
—Thomas Rodney[2]1 October 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), 91.
Alexandria, Ohio
We met with no further impediment to Great Siota which we arrived at about half after eleven; and I went on shore to git some whisky and to see the town of Alexandria, which stands on a hill of high land on the uper side of the Sciota but facing the Ohio. In a street parallel to with the river there is about 20 ordinary logged houses and cabins in it and one framed and one stone house, but few of the buildings finished and the inhabitants miserably poor.
—Thomas Rodney[3]Ibid., 90.
Vanceburg Salt Works
There is a hansom settlement and little town here on the Kentucky shore and a salt works ¼ mile out of town on Salt Lick Creek.
—Thomas Rodney[4]Rodney called the town Vance Ville, today’s Vanceburg at the mouth of Salt Lick Creek. Ibid., 91.
Notes
| ↑1 | Because we have no journal entry from Lewis for this day, his exact location is unknown. He was at Letart Falls on 18 September and arrived in Cincinnati on 28 September. Based on Thomas Rodney’s journal of his similar trip down the Ohio and Cramer’s 1802 river guide, The Navigator, one conjecture is that Lewis stopped for the day somewhere near the 1803 settlement of Vanceburg, Kentucky. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | 1 October 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), 91. |
| ↑3 | Ibid., 90. |
| ↑4 | Rodney called the town Vance Ville, today’s Vanceburg at the mouth of Salt Lick Creek. Ibid., 91. |
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The Lewis and Clark Trail Experience—our sister site at lewisandclark.travel—connects the world to people and places on the Lewis and Clark Trail.
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- The Lewis and Clark Expedition: Day by Day by Gary E. Moulton (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). The story in prose, 14 May 1804–23 September 1806.
- The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery (abridged) by Gary E. Moulton (University of Nebraska Press, 2003). Selected journal excerpts, 14 May 1804–23 September 1806.
- The Lewis and Clark Journals. by Gary E. Moulton (University of Nebraska Press, 1983–2001). The complete story in 13 volumes.
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Unless otherwise noted, journal excerpts are from The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, edited by Gary E. Moulton, 13 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983-2001).