xcii LIFE OF 



cane. I lodged this night in a miner's, who told me he had been 

 engaged in forming no less than thirteen companies for hunting 

 mines, all of whom had left him. I advised him to follow his farm, 

 as the surest vein of ore he could work. Next day (Saturday) I 

 first observed the cane growing, which increased until the whole 

 woods were full of it. The road this day winded along the high 

 ridges of mountains that divide the waters of the Cumberland from 

 those of the Tennessee. I passed few houses to-day; but met several 

 parties of boatmen returning from Natchez and New Orleans, who gave 

 me such an account of the road, and the difficulties they had met with, 

 as served to stiffen my resolution to be prepared for everything. 

 These men were as dirty as Hottentots; their dress, a shirt and 

 trousers of canvass, black, greasy, and sometimes in tatters ; the 

 skin burnt wherever exposed to the sun ; each with a budget, 

 wrapt up in an old blanket ; their beards, eighteen days old, added 

 to the singularity of their appearance, which was altogether savage. 

 These people came from the various tributary streams of the Ohio, 

 hired at forty or fifty dollars a-trip, to return back on their own 

 expenses. Some had upwards of eight hundred miles to travel. 

 When they come to a stream that is unfordable, they coast it for 



fallen tree ; if that cannot be had, they enter with their budget 

 n their head, and, when they lose bottom, drop it on their 

 shoulders, and take to swimming. They have sometimes fourteen 

 or fifteen of such streams to pass in a day, and morasses of several 

 miles in length, that I have never seen equalled in any country. 

 I lodged this night at one Dobbin's, where ten or twelve of these 

 men lay on the floor. As they scrambled up in the morning, they 

 very generally complained of being unwell, for which they gave an 

 odd reason, — lying within doors, it being the first of fifteen nights 

 they had been so indulged. Next morning (Sunday) I rode six 

 miles to a man's of the name of Grinder, where our poor friend 

 Lewis perished.* In the same room where he expired, I took 

 down from Mrs Grinder the particulars of that melancholy event, 

 which affected me extremely. This house, or cabin, is seventy- 

 two miles from Nashville, and is the last white man's as you enter 



* " It is hardly necessary to state that this was the brave and enterprising 

 traveller, whose journey across the Rocky Mountains, to the Pacific Ocean, 

 has obtained for him well merited celebrity. The true cause of his committing 

 the rash deed, so feelingly detailedjiere, is not yet known to the public." 



