OKEFINOKEE SWAMP 



609 



prairies seem to have no counterpart in Dismal Swamp, but they look 

 very much like some pictures of the Everglades. 



The prairies are dotted here and there with small clumps of cypress 

 trees and evergreen vines and bushes, known as " houses," from the fact 

 that hunters sometimes camp in them while in the swamp. These 

 probably represent shallower spots, or incipient bays. 



In some of the prairies are considerable bodies of open water, known 

 to the natives as lakes. These doubtless mark the deepest parts of the 

 swamp, not yet tilled with vegetation. They are comparatively shallow 

 though, the combined depth of water and muck perhaps nowhere ex- 

 ceeding ten feet. 



Chase's Peaieie. 



Animal Life 



As Okefinokee Swamp has probably never been visited by a zoologist, 

 no reliable account of its fauna can be given here. Bears and deer are 

 still found on the islands, and occasionally stray outside of the swamp. 

 An old hunter living at the north end of the swam]), when interviewed 

 by a correspondent of the Atlanta Constitution in the spring of 1897, 

 estimated that in the forty years he had lived tlicro he had killed about 

 150 bears, 200 deer, and hundreds of wolves, minks and wildcats. In 

 the summer of 1900 there was an item in the same paper to the effect 

 that a large black bear had been seen at Manor, about ten miles noi th- 

 west of the swamp, and caused great consternation among the negroes 

 employed in the turpentine orchards there. Early in 1907 a bear was 

 seen several times near Adel, in Berrien County, about sixty miles 

 farther west, and Col. C. E. Pendleton, commenting on it in his paper, 



