After awhile he crawled out to the water on the Ohio side of the island, and made his way through the brushwood up to the head of it. Here he lay all night, in great misery; but early the next morning he saw a skiff with four men coming down the river, and was able to attract their attention.
They took him with them as far as the settlement at the mouth of the Scioto, where a pioneer surgeon laid open the little blue lump on his rib with a hunting-knife, and extracted the Indian bullet.
Three or four weeks later he was able to work his passage back up the river on a Wheeling flatboat, and told the people at home that the ark was captured by the Indians, and that to the best of his knowledge and belief, he, of all her crew, was the sole survivor.
Such endings of the early efforts of commerce and travel on the Ohio were of too frequent occurrence to render the tale incredible; and, although some had their doubts, most of the settlers believed that Gist’s account was but too likely to be true.
Thus far no such overwhelming disaster had befallen the little pioneer settlement at Fish Creek.
In very truth there were sorrow and mourning at every cabin, and especially in those of the Royce and Ayer families. To Milly Ayer and Mary Royce the year 1803 bade fair to be the saddest of their young lives.
But the stout ark all the while was floating bravely on—past the mouth of the Kanawha, where, in 1749, the ambitious Céleron buried his leaden plates, asserting the claim of France to the entire Ohio Valley; past Point Pleasant, where, in 1774, General Lewis and his rangers fought a fierce, indecisive battle all day with the famous Shawnee chief, Cornstalk, and his braves; past the mouth of the Big Sandy, near which a gigantic railroad bridge now spans the broad river; past the Scioto mouth, where Portsmouth, Ohio, then showed only a few scattered cabins; and so onward till, after nine days, they had come to that little town on the beautiful bluffs now known the world over as Cincinnati.
Cincinnati is said to have been christened Losantiville, in 1788, by the first schoolmaster of that region, one John Filson, whom the Indians subsequently scalped. From the depths of his classical erudition Filson manufactured the name to fit the location, namely: _L_ for Licking River, _os_ for mouth of the same, _anti_ for opposite, and _ville_ for town—The-town-opposite-the-mouth-of-the-Licking.