Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 11).djvu/189

 friend, "he is fit only for hard knocks and Indian warfare." We passed his seat, very little bigger and no better than my kitchen at Somersham. "It is not now exactly what it was. During the last war it was in part burnt down, and he contents himself with just what the fire left him—a mere apology for a house. It stands on an eminence close to the road, in the centre of a large, uncultivated, but rich domain." I passed plenty of sugar-trees, and troughs to hold the sap or juice, and abundance of tall iron-weed five feet high, in full flower; all sure indications of fine land, and seen throughout the western country, and always noted by land-hunters. I saw at Chilicothé, and elsewhere, to-day, many ancient mounds, and one regular extensive fortification now defaced by the plough. Many such are found over these wild regions. They are evidently the handiwork of an unknown and distant age and people, whose history, and every {185} relic by which they might perhaps have been identified, have perished.

I had fine wild venison at dinner to-day, good and fat as ever fell to the lot of a lord. There is plenty of it in this section of the country; but what is strange, no mutton, nor beef that is good, where it ought to be the best. Every thing, though wild, is generally good, except beef, which is best tame, and fed on cultivated, instead of wild vegetables, which make it ill-flavoured, dark, and tough. Found iron-weed all day, and fine extensive peach orchards of several acres each, having nearly half the trees spoiled, by hurricanes breaking down their boughs when heavily laden with fruit. These dead arms, or boughs, hang on from year to year, until they rot and drop of themselves, and the sight is singularly desolate and ruinous: all this for the want of a pruning knife and hatchet.

At eight, p. m. I reached a poor log-house, to lodge in,