THE ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH. 
283 
of our sails, reminding us that we were travellers surely, 
while it was a native of the soil, and had the advantage 
of us. Conversation flagged. I would only hear the 
Indian, perhaps, ask my companion, “ You load my 
pipe ? ” He said that he smoked alder bark, for medi¬ 
cine. On entering the West Branch at Nickertow it 
appeared much larger than the East. Polis remarked 
that the former was all gone and lost now, that it was 
all smooth water hence to Oldtown, and he threw away 
his pole which was cut on the Umbazookskus. Thinking 
of the rapids, he said once or twice, that you would n’t 
catch him to go East Branch again; but he did not by 
any means mean all that he said. 
Things are quite changed since I was here eleven 
years ago. Where there were but one or two houses, I 
now found quite a village, with saw-mills and a store 
(the latter was locked, but its contents were so much the 
more safely stored), and there was a stage-road to Mat- 
tawamkeag, and the rumor of a stage. Indeed, a steamer 
had ascended thus far once, when the water was very 
high. But we were not able to get any sugar, only a 
better shingle to lean our backs against. 
We camped about two miles below Nickertow, on the 
south side of the West Branch, covering with fresh twigs 
the withered bed of a former traveller, and feeling that 
we were now in a settled country, especially when in the 
evening we heard an ox sneeze in its wild pasture 
across the river. Wherever you land along the fre¬ 
quented part of the river, you have not far to go to find 
these sites of temporary inns, the withered bed of flat¬ 
tened twigs, the charred sticks, and perhaps the tent- 
poles. And not long since, similar beds were spread 
along the Connecticut, the Hudson, and the Delaware, 
