Only 50 miles separated Jackson from the Ohio River, which divided the free state of Ohio from slaveholding Kentucky. Joseph likely did not know that his destination lay in a veritable war zone. The town hall faced French’s Tavern, Jackson’s most thriving establishment. Jackson also boasted a post office, hotel, and six shops, including Mrs. Eden it was not, but elements of civilization had reached there, most notably Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches. Mean-looking wooden houses did duty for the town’s main street, every bit as tough as its namesake, Andrew Jackson, Indian killer and hard-handed populist president. The Powells’ cart pulled up the steep escarpment to the rutted main street of Jackson, which crested the 50-foot ridgeline, commanding views of a rugged hilly land harrowed by ridges, deep ravines, and creeks. Six age-old “salt roads” converged like the spokes of a wagon wheel upon what had only very recently become the town of Jackson. In historic times, the Shawnee had padded silently on moccasined feet, and just three decades earlier, the first European settlers had crossed the Appalachians to settle. They may have felt like pioneers, but that same hard-beaten path had carried multifarious travelers since the last Ice Age, all drawn by the region’s salt licks-the deposits of natural saltwater springs-so thick as to permanently frost the banks of local creeks.įirst had come the mastodons and shaggy mammoths of the Pleistocene, later followed by herds of bison-and then the first human beings to leave a mark on the land, the mysterious mound-building peoples of a mere two millennia before. In 1838, four-year-old Wes rode next to his father, Joseph Powell, on the last leg of their journey south to Jackson from Chillicothe, their horse-drawn cart rolling easily down the unusually wide dirt road that wound through the rugged Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio.
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