The boy was eager to visit it, but
the distance was too great to the falls, and he was forced to relinquish
this pleasure. Continuing their journey westward, they reached the Ohio
River, down which stream they floated on a flatboat until they came to
Cincinnati, then a city of fourteen thousand inhabitants.
Through the assistance of his eldest son, the editor, Mr. Powers was
enabled to secure a farm not far from Cincinnati, and removing his
family to it, began the task of clearing and cultivating it.
Unfortunately for the new-comers, the farm was located on the edge of a
pestilential marsh, the poisonous exhalations of which soon brought the
whole family down with the ague. Mr. Powers the elder died from this
disease, and Hiram was ill and disabled from it for a whole year. The
family was broken up and scattered, and our hero, incapable of
performing hard work so soon after his sickness, obtained a place in a
produce store in Cincinnati, his duty being to watch the principal road
by which the farmers' wagons, laden with grain and corn whisky, came
into the city, and to inform the men in charge of them that they could
obtain better prices for their produce from his employers than from any
other merchants in the city.
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