Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 11).djvu/218

 Mr. ) deem themselves deceived and injured by his books and mis-statements.

2nd.—Yesterday at noon came on a heavy gale, which filled the atmosphere for the remainder of the day and night, with a strange mixture of hot {219} smoke, ashes, and dusty sand, to the density and hue of a London fog in December. The sun was completely shorn of his beams, and the whole horizon, for unknown miles in circumference, filled with a blinding commotion, like a gale in the great desert; and at night to the N. W. the sky blazed and reddened over a great extent, while the big Wabash blushed, and the whole atmosphere became illuminated, as though it was the kindling up of the last universal conflagration.

At ten this morning I left old Vincennes for Prince-town. The horse which my friend Baker had borrowed for me was mean and mis-shapen, but covered with buffalo skins, which hide all defects. The horses here are nearly all mean, wild, deformed, half grown, dwarfish things, and much in taste and tune with their riders. The pigs, every where in great abundance, seem more than half wild, and at the approach of man fly, or run like deer at the sight of an Indian rifle. Throughout the western regions they look starved to death. This, however, is a bad season for them, there being little mast, that is, acorns, nuts, and other wild fruit and herbage. I passed over an extensive, sandy, black, burning prairie, the cause of yesterday's and to-day's thick hazy atmosphere, the sun looking more like the moon, and as if turned into blood. At noon, I rode through a large rich river-bottom valley, on the banks of the {220} White River, and which, in winter, is as yet over-flowed, from six to ten feet of water above the surface, as the trees prove by circles round their trunks, and by their boughs dipping and catching the scum of the surf.