928 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[June 17, 1911. 
behind. With this outfit and the full load of 
passengers and baggage, we could make about 
five miles an hour in still water. 
The problem of sleeping accommodations for 
a dozen men in such small quarters was solved 
as follows: The six oldest men slept on cots 
placed crosswise of the main cabin, which they 
almost filled, and the cook had his bed in the 
kitchen. The preacher and I slept side by side 
in the launch, just aft of the engine, where the 
space was so narrow that the edges of our cots 
overlapped an inch or two. The navigator, who 
owned the launch, lay on the floor between the 
seats forward of the engine, and over him three 
planks placed across the combing and suitably 
secured supported one cot during the first few 
nights and later another one when the member¬ 
ship of our party was increased by one. 
We had no adequate protection against mos¬ 
quitoes, a fact which caused some of us some 
apprehension, but we were assured by the more 
experienced members of the party that we wou d 
not be troubled by these pests at all, and their 
predictions proved to be correct.. The nights on 
the river at that season were rather cool and 
damp, and the early morning hours foggy, but 
most of the days were simply perfect as far as 
weather was concerned. 
We embarked on the Warrior River at Tusca¬ 
loosa on Oct. 7. About the only witness of the 
departure of this memorable expedition was the 
photographer of the Alabama Geological Survey, 
who took some pictures of us and promised to 
have prints waiting for us at the first place where 
we called for mail. We were pretty well equip¬ 
ped for snapshots ourselves, haying five or six 
cameras with us, of various sizes up to 5 x 7 - 
One or two of the men also had guns, with 
which they hoped to add some of the waterfowl 
to our larder. 
Tuscaloosa is 361 miles from its seaport, 
Mobile, by water (about half that distance in a 
straight line), and as the river falls only about 
ninety feet in that distance, when the water is 
low the current is rather sluggish, perhaps a 
mile or two an hour. In spring it often rises 
as much as sixty feet at Tuscaloosa and a pro¬ 
portionate amount further down, but at this time 
the river was very nearly at its lowest stage, a 
condition which gave us the best possible oppor¬ 
tunities for examining the banks, but seriously 
hindered our progress at some places. We of 
course traveled only in the day time, and the 
greatest distance covered in a day was forty- 
nine miles. We had with us excellent maps of 
these rivers, with every mile marked, so we al¬ 
ways knew exactly what progress we were mak¬ 
ing. 
For the first two or three miles below Tusca¬ 
loosa the river happens to be straight, but be¬ 
yond that we could hardly ever see more than 
a mile ahead, and usually not more than half 
a mile. The average width of the Warrior for 
a hundred miles or so below our starting point 
is probably a little less than a hundred yards. 
The banks for the first fifty miles are mostly 
clay, but either high or densely wooded or both, 
so we could see very little of what kind of coun¬ 
try we were passing through. Few houses are 
built close to the river, and we sometimes 
traveled for hours without seeing one. Ferries 
were more frequent and steamboat landings still 
more so, but some of the latter were visible only 
to the practiced eye, as they often consisted 
merely of a small clear space on a sloping bank 
with perhaps a tree or two near by showing the 
marks of ropes. About four hours after start¬ 
ing we passed under the only wagon bridge 
there is on this system of rivers below Tusca¬ 
loosa. After leaving Tuscaloosa county the river 
forms a county boundary all the rest of the way 
to the. Gulf, and there is probably not enough 
communication by wagon between two counties 
to warrant the expense of a drawbridge. A man 
who happened to be crossing this bridge at the 
time gazed at our strange craft in astonishment 
until we disappeared around the next bend. 
The most conspicuous trees at the water’s edge 
were willows, and where thousands of these had 
been drowned by the slipping in of clay banks, 
their dead tops effectually prevented any land¬ 
ing. Where the banks were a little firmer, a 
small crooked tree known as the water elm 
usually overhung the water. A little further 
back multitudes of cottonwoods, sycamores, 
birches and white maples were nearly always in 
sight with occasionally a few cypresses. 
On the higher banks above the reach of floods 
short leaf pines, water oaks and sweet gums 
could usually be seen. Mistletoe grew on most 
of the broad-leaved trees along the river, espe¬ 
cially the cottonwoods. On low and muddy 
banks the swamps were generally effectually 
screened from view by canebrakes or a dense 
tangle of vines. Swamps, however, are few and 
far between in Alabama, the rivers there nearly 
all having high banks. 
We saw more birds in the first two or three 
days than we did later. Diedappers (a species 
of grebe) could nearly always be seen swimming 
in small flocks, but as their flesh is not con¬ 
sidered fit to eat, we did not molest them. 
Ducks, sandpipers, herons and kingfishers were 
also frequent, and two of the ducks were shot 
and eaten at different times, but one of them 
turned out to be pretty old and tough. This 
was the only wild game we secured on the trip. 
Fishing was not attempted. 
At every bluff which looked at all interesting 
to the geologists we tied up to the most con¬ 
venient tree and stopped from a few minutes 
to an hour or more, so that we averaged only 
twenty-six miles a day. On the first day there 
were few rocks to be seen, and in spite of our 
rather late start we made thirty-six miles. It 
was almost dark when we stopped, but our 
searchlight was brought into requisition and en¬ 
abled us to find a suitable tree to make fast to. 
A steamboat had passed up the river a few 
minutes before, making waves which shook us 
up somewhat, but we had no disturbance of that 
kind during the night. 
The next morning we awoke to find a gentle 
rain falling, which continued most of that day 
and the next. The principal effect of the rain 
on our work, besides its interference with pho¬ 
tography, was that whenever we went ashore 
on that day and for a few days thereafter, we 
brought back to the boat about a pound of mud 
on each foot, which made the deck rather slip¬ 
pery and the gangplank disagreeable to handle. 
At breakfast time we passed through the first 
lock below Tuscaloosa, which is called Lock 9, 
as it is to be the ninth counting from tidewater. 
This form of river improvement, the necessity 
for which is one of the penalties of reckless de¬ 
forestation, has been used more extensively in 
Alabama up to the present time than in all the 
other Southern States combined. Seven of the 
nine locks between Tuscaloosa and Mobile were 
completed at that time, one of them so recently 
that ours was the first boat of any consequence 
to pass through it, we were told. The fall at 
each lock is about ten feet. Attracting the atten¬ 
tion of the lock tenders to our approach (the 
principal purpose for which our whistle was 
used), making fast to the cribs at the head of 
the lock while it was being filled, and then to 
the inside of the lock while it was being emptied, 
etc., usually took us about twenty-five minutes, 
during which time we were asked the prescribed 
questions about our tonnage, cargo, destination, 
number of passengers, and we always took ad¬ 
vantage of the opportunity to ask a few ques¬ 
tions ourselves. 
On this second day we saw a dead alligator 
floating near one of the locks, but no live ones 
were seen on the whole trip. They probab.y 
never were very numerous so far inland, and 
if we passed any the noise of the engine would 
have given them plenty of warning of our ap¬ 
proach. Lock 8 was passed just after noon on 
Thursday, and Lock 7 about an hour before we 
stopped for the night at Choctaw Bluff, which 
was about forty-five miles from where we started 
that morning. 
By this time we were in the black belt or 
prairie region, where the whole country is under¬ 
laid by the so-called rotten limestone, which 
makes steep chalky bluffs on the rivers and a 
gray clayey soil on the level uplands. This soil 
is or has been very fertile, in which empty 
wagons have been known to become stalled. On 
the morning of the 9th, one of the two Govern¬ 
ment geologists had to leave us in time' to catch 
a 9 o’clock train at Eutaw, six miles away across 
the prairies, and there was no way of getting 
there at that hour except on foot. We were 
powerless to assist him further than by giving 
him directions about the road, and what to do 
if he got stuck in the mud, and we had to go 
on and leave him to his fate; but the fact that 
it had then been raining only about thirty hours 
and not very hard was in his favor, and we 
learned afterward that he made the desired con¬ 
nection. 
The bluffs in the prairie region, although quite 
interesting from a scenic standpoint, are all much 
a'ike and poor in fossils, and the sticky mud de¬ 
terred us from doing much exploring on foot, 
so on this third day, Friday, we made our best 
day’s run, forty-nine miles. Two locks were 
passed, but we found them both full of water 
already, probably indicating that the last boat 
preceding ours had gone in the opposite direc¬ 
tion; one of them detained us only twenty 
minutes and the other still less. About 100 miles 
below Tuscaloosa we first caught sight of the 
Spanish moss, which is so characteristic of the 
forests of the low country of the South, espe¬ 
cially in damp or calcareous regions. This 
“moss,” which is really a flowering plant and 
belongs to the pineapple family, did not appear 
in abundance, however, until we got into the 
Tombigbee. 
In mid-afternoon we drew near to Demopolis, 
the largest river town (and at the same time the 
only one right on the banks of the river) be¬ 
tween Tuscaloosa and Mobile. It is 131 miles 
from the former and 230 miles from the latter 
by water, and is located where the Warrior River 
empties into the Tombigbee, and on the left or 
