CXXXIV 
LIFE OF WILSON, 
was near being entangled among some bad drift wood. Now 
and then a solitary farm opened from the woods, where the 
negro children were running naked about the yards. I also 
passed along the north side of a high hill, where the whole 
timber had been prostrated by some terrible hurricane. 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 Cum- 
berland 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 every thing. These men were 
as dirty as Hottentots; their dress a shirt and trowsers of can- 
vass, 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 unforda- 
ble, 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 gene- 
rally complained of being unwell, for which they gave an odd 
reason, lying within doors, it being the first of fifteen nights 
