cxx 
LIFE OF WILSON. 
supposed to be corn-stalks, or something worse ; so preferring the 
smooth bosom of the Ohio to this brush heap, I got up long before 
day, and, being under no apprehension of losing my way, I again 
pushed out into the stream. The landscape on each side lay in 
one mass of shade, but the grandeur of the projecting headlands 
and vanishing points, or lines, were charmingly reflected in the 
smooth glassy surface below. I could only discover when I was 
passing a clearing by the crowing of cocks ; and now and then in 
more solitary places the big-horned owl made a most hideous hol- 
lowing that echoed among the mountains. In this lonesome manner, 
with full leisure for observation and reflection, exposed to hardships 
all day, and hard births all night, to storms of rain, hail and snow, 
for it froze severely almost every night, I persevered, from the 24th 
of February to Sunday evening March 17 th, when I moored my 
skiff safely in Bear Grass Creek, at the Rapids of the Ohio, after a 
voyage of seven hundred and twenty miles. My hands suffered the 
most ; and it will be some weeks yet before they recover their for- 
mer feeling and flexibility. It would be the task of a month to 
detail all the particulars of my numerous excursions, in every di- 
rection from the river. In Steubenville, Charlestown and Wheel- 
ino-, I found some friends. At Marietta I visited the celebrated re- 
mains of Indian fortifications, as they are improperly called, which 
cover a large space of ground on the banks of the Muskingum. 
Seventy miles above this, at a place called Big Grave Creek, I exa- 
mined some extraordinary remains of the same kind there. The 
Big Grave is three hundred paces round at the base, seventy feet 
perpendicular, and the top, which is about fifty feet over, has sunk 
in, forming a regular concavity, three or four feet deep. This tu- 
mulus is in the form of a cone, and the whole, as well as its imme- 
diate neighbourhood, is covered with a venerable growth of forest 
four or five hundred years old, which gives it a most singular ap- 
pearance. In clambering around its steep sides I found a place 
where a large white oak had been lately blown down, and had torn 
