without manure for a hundred years, and are still loaded annually with luxuriant crops.'

6

The second portion consists wholly, on the western side, of that low uninterrupted tract of land known by the name of the Great Swamp, or, as it is sometimes called, the Dismal Swamp. Scarcely a tree or a bush for 300 miles is to be seen except the funereal cypress (Cupressus Disticha), whose innumerable conical excrescences,' says Mr. James, called knees, which spring up from the roots, resembling the monuments in a churchyard, give a gloomy and peculiar aspect to the scenery of these cypress swamps.' This tree is common in England, but we believe has not been known to ripen its seed, or to throw out these large knees;' the climate, perhaps, being too cold; for, Mr. James says, it is rarely met with in America, north of latitude 38°. The eastern banks are also low, with here and there some partial elevations, called the Chickasaw Bluffs; the river flowing in one uniform current, dangerous, however, to navigation from the numerous' snags, mags and sawyers.' This part of the river, Mr. Nuttall says, is truly magnificent, though generally bordered by the most gloomy solitudes, in which there are now no visible traces of the abode of man.' A little farther down, however, some French exiles had built a few log-huts, which they dignified with the name of New Madrid ! This part of the valley is not only extremely unhealthy, but subject to earthquakes, which overthrow the houses, tear up the forests, and rend the banks of the river in a most extraordinary manner, These shakes,' as the concussions are called, are very frequent; but so accustomed to them are the few miserable sickly inhabitants, that when some travellers, on feeling the house which they had entered, so violently shaken as scarcely to allow them to stand on their feet, were expressing their terror, they were desired by the hostess not to be alarmed, for (said she) it is only an earthquake.' The third portion consists of one great alluvial surface, in which, however, the river has worked a channel of at least a hundred feet deep; the crumbling banks consisting of clay, ferruginous sand, and quartzy gravel. Almost every flood undermines some part of these banks, when they fall in, and carry with their ruins

lapides adesos,

Stirpesque raptas, et pecus, et domos,'

and fields and plantations into the stream, now increased by the Big Black river, the Arkansas, the Waspita, and the Red river from the westward. At Point Coupée, near the town of St. Francisville, the banks begin to descend, till at Baton Rouge and from thence to the sea, they are scarcely elevated above the level of the river, and would be overflowed during the freshes, but for

the

the artificial embankments, called levées, by which a long narrow line of plantations is defended, extending from about eighty miles above, to sixty miles below, New Orleans. All beyond is one vast level swampy surface, cut into a thousand different channels, covered with rank grass, reeds and rushes, and totally destitute of trees. The inundations are said to reach to the enormous height of fifty or sixty feet.

It will easily be imagined, that the breaking down of the levée and the tremendous rush of such a vast body of water as is contained between the two banks, must be certain destruction to those plantations near which the accident happens. Strict regulations are therefore established for its prevention, and for affording assistance on the occurrence of so calamitous an event. At such times the whole surface beyond the sloping banks or glacis, exhibits, for many thousand square miles, one vast ocean. This has been the case in the present year, when upwards of three hundred plantations were laid under water, and their crops entirely destroyed. The unhealthiness of such a country may readily be supposed; and the churchyards of New Orleans furnish a thousand melancholy records of the mortality of the place. The extremes of heat and cold are very great. Heavy snow has been known to fall at Natchez, in lat. 31°, and they have frost every winter at New Orleans, in lat. 29° 57'.

In summer the thermometer frequently stands at 90°, and has been known at 98°. The severe cold of winter, which pervades every part of North America, is usually attributed to the northwest wind blowing from the Rocky Mountains, but we doubt the sufficiency of this cause; and should rather assign it to the immense extent of surface covered with lakes and swamps, and stagnant plashes of water.

Mr. Schoolcraft estimates the elevation of the source of the Mississippi (calculating from that of Lake Superior) to be 1330 feet above the Atlantic; which, he says, in 2,978 miles, (the whole length of its course,) will give a mean descent of two feet, 21338 inches,' and that he is not aware of any fallacies in these calculations.' We are rather surprized that so sensible a man, and a philosopher, could make so egregious a blunder, and be satisfied with such a result; which he has obtained by dividing 2,978 by 1330, (and dividing it wrong,) instead of reversing the operation. According to his data, the average descent of the Mississippi will be 5.36 inches, instead of 2 feet 3 in. nearly, which would. make its source 6,700 feet (instead of 1330) above the level of the But we are persuaded that Mr. Schoolcraft has overrated the elevation of its source, and that it does not exceed 1,000 feet; and the ground of our opinion is this:-It has been found, from the

sea.

surveys

surveys of the line of the great canal of New York, that the ele vation of Lake Erie is only 564 feet above the level of the Atlantic; and from this, Major Long deduces the head of the Illinois at 450 feet. The length of this river to its mouth in the Mississippi, is 1,200 miles, and from thence to the gulf of Mexico 1,200 more. Now a fall of 450 feet in 2,400 miles gives no more than 24 inches per mile; and as the Illinois and the Mississippi run nearly parallel, and must be nearly on the same level, the Mississippi, at 2,000 miles from its mouth, cannot, we think, have more than 500 feet elevation. It is the rush of waters from the westward, rather than its slope, that impels its stream at a mean velocity of about 5 miles an hour, which, below the junction of the Missouri, becomes four miles, and sometimes more.

It is now time that we should return to Major Long's party, and accompany them in their steam-boat up the Missouri; first, however, noticing an object which attracted their attention on the bank of the Mississippi near the point of confluence, namely, distinct impressions of two human feet, on the horizontal surface of the limestone rock upon which the town of St. Louis is built, and which some American geologists, we are told, have been pleased to consider as " contemporaneous with those casts of submarine animals, which occupy so great a part of the body of the limestone.' Mr. James supposes that the induration of the mud, consisting of clay and lime, left on the shelvings of the rocks, may account for the phenomenon, by giving the appearance of an impressiou in the limestone itself. We think differently, and have little doubt they are the work of some ingenious Frenchman of the town of St. Louis, at an early period of the settlement.

6

Near the confluence of the two rivers are a multitude of those earthy tumuli of various forms and magnitude, which are found in almost every part of the vale of the Mississippi, some of them from two to three hundred feet in length, and seventy feet in height; generally of a pyramidal form, like those of Mexico, and sometimes surrounded by a ditch. Mr. Nuttall notices one of large dimensions, on the banks of the Ohio, on the summit of which was growing, among other trees, a white oak, of not less than two centuries duration.' This proves very little of that vast antiquity which has been assigned to these cemeteries, for such they appear to be; and such, in fact, but of smaller dimensions, are still raised over the deceased bodies of their chiefs by the present Indians. Thus a chief of the Omawhaws, named Blackbird, who died in 1808, was interred sitting on his favourite horse, on the summit of a high bluff on the bank of the Missouri, and a mound raised over his remains. On a recent mound being opened, the body of a white officer was discovered in a sitting posture, clothed

clothed in a red coat trimmed with gold lace; he had been scalped, and was supposed to have been a Spanish officer. But though they have no pretensions to a great antiquity, they undoubtedly commemorate the existence of a people more numerous and pow erful than the present race of Indians.

The bones of animals and snakes have sometimes been found mixed with human bones in these tumuli; also stone pipes and pottery; and out of one near Cincinnati were dug two large marine shells, one of which was the Cassis Cornutus of the Asiatic islands, the other the Fulgur perversus of the coast of Georgia and East Florida; and hence it has been inferred, that an intercourse must anciently have existed between the Indians of this part of North America and the inhabitants of Asia, and between them and those of the Atlantic. There is, indeed, a popular belief that the American Indians had their origin in Asia; and, as we observed in our last Number, many circumstances, still existing, give probability to the conjecture. In their persons, colour and reserved disposition, they have a strong resemblance to the Malays of the Oriental Archipelago; that is to say, to some of the Tartar tribes of Upper Asia; and it is a remarkable circumstance that, like these, they shave the head, leaving only a single lock of hair; they have also, as Mr. Schoolcraft observes, the custon of binding the feet of their female infants in such a manner as to make the toes point inward, which gives them in after-life a very awkward appearance in walking.' We really thought that this practice had been confined to those refined Tartars, the Chinese. We might adduce the picture-language of the Mexicans, as corresponding with the ancient picture-language of China, and the quipos of Peru with the knotted and party coloured cords which the Chinese history informs us were in use in the early period of the empire; we might compare the high cheek bones, and the elongated eye of the two people, and produce other resemblances as so many corroborating proofs of a common origin. But as this is not the place for so fruitful a source of discussion, we willingly leave it to the new Asiatic Society.'

6

At the confluence of the Osage with the Missouri, a town had been located, to which the name of Missouriopolis was given; and of which, from its situation, great expectations were formed. The Osage rises in the Ozark mountains to the southward, and is stated, in point of magnitude, to rank nearly with the Cumberland and Tenessee; but it is full of sand-banks, capable, however, of being removed, which would open a navigation of six hundred miles, through a rich and densely wooded country, resembling in all respects the western slope of the Alleghany mountains. Beyond this a day's sail carried the steam-boat to the rising town of Franklin, the country about which abounds in brine-springs, at one of which,

named

named Boon's lick, eighty bushels of salt are said to be manufac tured daily.

The navigation of the Missouri above and below the spot where the Grand River falls into it from the northward, was nearly imprac ticable from the rapidity of the current, and the multitude of snags and sand-bars; the steam-boat grounded every moment, and it required the greatest exertion to arrive at Fort Osage, about one hundred miles above the mouth of the Grand River, and the extreme frontier at that time of the white American settlements, being four degrees of longitude to the westward of the mouth of the Missouri. But such is the restless disposition of these back-woodsmen, and so averse are their habits from those of a civilized neighbourhood, that nothing short of the salt, sandy desert can be expected to stop them. One of these squatters, who had gradually reached this point in his migration from Tenessee, told them, that 'a man might live in greater ease and freedom, where his neighbours were not very numerous;' and the notorious Daniel Boon, who about fifty different times has shifted his abode westward, as civilization approached his dwelling, when asked the cause of his frequent change, replied, "I think it time to remove, when I can no longer fell a tree for fuel so that its top will lie within a few yards of the door of my cabin.' There is not much to be said for the squatters; but they are preceded in their wanderings by another class, known by the name of 'White Hunters,' who, by the testimony of Mr. James, are the most abandoned and worthless among the whites; frequently men whose crimes have excluded them from society.' These people hunt very little themselves, but trade with, cheat, and corrupt the Indians.

The steam-boat arrived near the confluence of the Platte and the Missouri, about the middle of September. This branch, during its floods, is said to pour into the Missouri a greater volume of water than is contained in the main branch, or that upon which Messrs. Lewis and Clarke proceeded in their route to the Pacific. On the bank of the latter, at a short distance above the junction of the Platte, the party erected cabins, and wintered, sending back the steam-boat as being of no further use. this spot they gave the name of Engineer Cantonment.' Its latitude was 41° 25'4' N. longitude 95° 43′ 53′′ W. During their winter's residence, the thermometer was frequently below zero, and the ice on the Missouri was sixteen inches thick; but it broke up and was entirely dispersed by the end of March.

6

To

Near this spot the Americans had established a fort and garrison, which was suffering severely from sickness.

Camp Missouri has been sickly, from the commencement of winter; but its situation is at this time truly deplorable. More than three hundred