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46 ^ Hockhocking Valley. 



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Topography of Hockhocking Valley. 



From the sources of this stream to its mouth, the distance is about 

 eighty miles. The average breadth for fifty miles above the mouth 

 is about fifty yards. The region drained by its numerous tributary 

 streams, and which may be called its valley, will average about 

 twenty miles in width. The whole extent of the valley, except 

 near its northern extremity, is hilly and broken ; the hills risin^ 

 from two hundred to three hundred feet above the beds of the neigh- 

 boring streams. Its general direction is southeasterly. On one of 

 the head branches, a few miles N. W. of Lancaster, there is a per- 

 pendicular fall of nearly forty feet ; and about eighteen miles below 

 Lancaster, the main stream has a fall of seven feet. At these spots 

 several mills are erected, as well as at many other places along the 

 course of the river. The alluvial lands are broad and rich, bu't are 

 occasionally overflowed from the sudden floods that take place in 

 this stream ; the water being precipitated from the hills with such 

 rapidity that the channel of the stream is insufficient to contain it. 

 This difficulty is common to all the streams in the hilly parts of the 

 Ohio valley, and will probably continue to increase as the country 

 becomes more and more divested of its forests, which now act as a 

 salutary check on the rapid descent of the rains on the hill sides, 

 not only by their numerous roots and rotting foliage, which cover the 

 surface, but by keeping the soil in a more loose and open condition 

 than It is found to be in when In a state of cultivation. The hilly 

 IfUids through this region are covered with a fertile soil, and clothed 

 with a heavy growth of forest trees. At the southern extremity of the 

 valley, the yellow pine is very abundant, and seems to have been 

 once, and probably at no very remote period, the prevailing growth 

 of this part of the country. Extensive districts in which a pine is 

 not now found, are thickly scattered with pitch pine knots, lying on 

 . the surface, the relics of former forests, which some disease" or 

 probably the depredations of insects, has destroyed. In these situa- 

 tions large quantities of pitch and tar, were formerly made. In 

 numerous mounds, opened under my direction, the charcoal found 

 about the human bones, which they almost universally contain, and 

 which the aborigines first burned before casting up the mound of 

 earth or stone, as a sacred monument for the dead, is most generally 

 the charcoal of pine wood— leading also to the conclusion, that at 

 the period of their erection, yellow pine was the prevailing tree of 

 the forest, for it is not probable they would take the trouble of 



