Burns — On Alexander Wilson. 181 



this way, call and stay with me. You shall be welcome." En- 

 terin,:^ Nashville April 26th, he busied himself drawing the new 

 specimens and prepared for the trip through the Indian coun- 

 try ; de])arting on May 4th. Swimming the Great Harpath, 

 he rode in his wet clothes without inconvenience. Meeting 

 with the Swallow-tailed Kite at Duck creek, he now observed 

 growing cane, and the naked negro children in the solitary 

 clearings. Before proceeding to the Buffalo river, he turned 

 aside to visit the last resting place of his late friend, Captain 

 George Merriwether Lewis, the explorer associated with Gen. 

 William Clark in the Government Expedition across the Con- 

 tinent. After listening to Madam Grinder's unsatisfactory 

 account of the suicide or murder, he gave from his own scanty 

 means the money for a fence around the grave to shelter it 

 from the hogs and wolves. This incident threw Wilson into 

 a very melancholy mood, which the gloomy and savage wilder- 

 ness of forest, cane and morass he was just entering, did not 

 tend to allay ; and to give vent to the despondency of his mind, 

 he composed a poem which he dedicated "In Memory of 

 Captain Lewis" : 



" Uuhappy youth ! here rest thy head. 

 Beloved, lamented by the brave ; 

 Though sileut deserts round thee spread, 

 And wild beasts trample o'er thy grave." 



Entering the Chickasaw country, he slept the first night in 

 one of their huts. Floundering through one bad swamp after 

 another to the banks of the Tennessee, he was obliged to en- 

 camp for the night with the gnats. Owls and Chuck-will's- 

 widow for company ; and to his rage the ferryman did not 

 appear until 11 o'clock of the next day. At Bear creek, enter- 

 ing the extreme north-east corner of the present State of 

 Mississippi, but recently ceded and still known as West Florida ; 

 he first observed the Indian boys with blow guns ; long hol- 

 low tubes of cane, through which a slender dart covered at the 

 ba^e with thistle-down is expelled with violence at a pufT of 

 the breath. The Cerulean Warbler, so rare in the East, be- 

 came the most common of its tribe here. 



