Sisyphus

When last I spoke of Francis Baily here, it was December 21, 1796. He was stranded on the banks of the Ohio, he and his Kentucky boat party having managed just barely to save their goods and livestock from their sinking boat. The boat had been stove in by an ice floe, part of a tremendous breaking of river ice that destroyed many emigrant boats and lives.

Baily’s party found an abandoned cabin in which to live and store their goods while figuring a way out of their dilemma. Their biggest obstacle in achieving this shelter was the river bluff, a job so Sisyphean that Baily is inspired to quote Homer. Thus:

Thursday, January 5th, 1797.—We had by this time got all our things hauled to our new habitation. We found the greatest difficulty in getting them up the bank, which (as I observed before) was upwards of fifty feet high, and nearly perpendicular. When I have been helping the men up with some of the heavier packages, our feet have slipped from under us, and the package (freed from its support) has come trundling down the bank, and with difficulty been saved from falling into the river again; and this sometimes when we had nearly reached the summit of the bank, so that we had all our labour to go through again; it often reminded me of our fellow-labourer in the regions below, as described by Homer in his Odyssey;—

I turn’d my eye, and as I turn’d, survey’d [. . .]
A mournful vision! the Sisyphian shade;
With many a weary step, and many a groan,
Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone;
The huge round stone, resulting with a bound,
Thunders impetuous down, and smokes along the ground.

Book XI

Quoted from Ellen Eslinger�s Running Mad for Kentucky. Frontier Travel Accounts (University Press of Kentucky, 2004), p. 205.

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