Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 11).djvu/252

 large orchard; is digging a well, and finds some fine good burning coal in it, and a vast mine of rich blue marl. The Missouri, says he, is full of all the rich resources of nature; land, very fine. Here is a large family of men, and Mrs. Maidlow and daughter are drudges to the house, cooking, scouring, and scrubbing, continually. {261} A young lady cleaning knives! How horrid!!

18th.—A few months since, J. Ingle agreed with a neighbouring Kentuckyan hunter, to build him a log-*house, to be begun and finished in a given time. The fellow was procrastinating, and too idle to begin, yet for ever promising. At length Mr. Ingle told him, that unless he began on a certain day, at noon, at latest, the contract should be void, and others should begin it. He came on the day mentioned, but not until six in the evening, when others had begun the job. Greatly enraged, he said, he had come, and would begin in spite of any body. Mr. Ingle said he should never touch it. He said he would, or have Mr. Ingle's blood; "and to-morrow morn, I will come with men, and twenty rifles, and I will have your life, or you shall have mine." Mr. Ingle thought of having recourse to the civil power, which is very distant, insomuch that the people speak and seem as if they were without a government, and name it only as a bugbear.

J. Ingle returned this evening with his poplar boards, not worth carriage, and without being able to buy any tea, sugar, butter, cheese, or apples, for his use, at Princeton, though a county town, having a fine store out of stock, which it receives only once a-year.

19th.—A parson, with his wife, and sixty others, about eighteen months ago, came from the {262} east, as settlers, to the big prairie of Illinois; in which, during the sickly season, last fall, an eighth of their number died in six