Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

3o8 ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
RACHEL WATKINS' JOURNAL
Pittsburg, 25 July, 1800.
We at last reached this place after a tiresome journey of
six weeks. We left Elizabethtown, N. J., on the tenth of
June. I greatly feared the journey and before we started
used to say to mother: "Mother, the road to Kentucky is as
dark as night to me," but she would say, "Why, Rachel, what
do you mean? 'Tis as light as day to me," and so she urged
us and was always ready to go. My brother Robert rode
across the mountains in 1799 and returned with glowing
reports of the new land. "You could ride," he said, "for a
whole day and not find a stone to throw at a bird." This took
my husband's mind, for his ten acres were so stony that he
often had to carry the earth on his hoe to cover the seed corn.
But one story that Brother Robert told impressed us more than
anything. A settler from Jersey had taken a farm in the
Millcreek valley and cleared four or five acres in 1798, intending
to plow the land and sow wheat, but he could not plow it and
when September came he determined to sow without plowing,
but the weeds were so that he could not get thro', so he mounted
a horse and rode through, scattering the grain as he went.
When Robert was there last summer the wheat was six feet
high and as thick as it could stand. We had for ten years
been hearing a song the burden of which was:
26 July.
The girls will sit and sew.
And the boys will reap and hoe.
And we'll hunt the buffalo
On the banks of the 0-hi-o.
I had no chance to write anything on our way. Sometimes
we camped out but usually stopped at taverns and private
houses to stay over night. At one place we wanted to stay
over night but the folks could not understand our language
nor we theirs. Mother talked to them in Low Dutch but
they could not understand; she said they were High Dutch
people. Mother has been a great comfort to me; she is of a
cheerful and hopeful temper while I am fearful and despondent.