cxlvi 
LIFE OF WILSON. 
him to follow his farm as the surest vein of ore he could work. 
Next day (Saturday) I first observed the cane growing, which in- 
creased 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 Neworleans ; 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 every thing. These men were as 
dirty as Hottentots; their dress a shirt and trowsers 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 blan- 
ket; 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 a fallen tree : if 
that cannot be had, they enter with their budget on 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 Dobbins’s, where ten or twelve of these men lay on the floor. 
As they scrambled up in the morning, they very generally com- 
plained of being unwell, for which they gave an odd reason, lying 
xviihin doors, it being the first of fifteen nights they had been so in- 
dulged. Next morning (Sunday) I rode six miles to a man’s of 
the name of Grinder, where our poor friend Lewis perished.* In 
^ 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 detailed above, is not 
yet known to the public ; but his friends will not soon forget the base imputations and cruel ne- 
glect, which the honourable mind of the gallant soldier knew not how to brook. 
