Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/201

 employed in the business, to which they made answer, that they did not know there was any preferable mode; and they should follow their own till some person or other from the Old Country (meaning Europe) came and taught them to do better. The scarcity of hands for the cutting down and conveyance of the wood, and the few saline principles that the water contains when dissolved, occasions the salt to be very dear; they sell it at from four to {119} five piasters per hundred weight. It is that scarcity which induces many of them to search for salt springs. They are usually found in places described by the name of Licks where the bisons, elks, and stags that existed in Kentucky before the arrival of the Europeans, went by hundreds to lick the saline particles with which the soil is impregnated. There are in this state and that of Tenessea a set of quacks, who by means of a hazle wand pretend to discover springs of salt and fresh water; but they are only consulted by the more ignorant class of people, who never send for them but when they are induced by some circumstance or other to search over a spot of ground where they suspect one of those springs.

The country we traversed ten miles on this side Mays-Lick, and eight miles beyond, did not afford the least vestige of a plantation. The soil is dry and sandy; the road is covered with immense flat chalky stones, of a bluish cast inside, the edges of which are round. The only trees that we observed were the white oak, or quercus alba, and nut-tree, or juglans hickery, but their stinted growth and wretched appearance clearly indicated the sterility of the soil, occasioned, doubtless, by the salt mines that it contains.

{120} From Mays-Lick I went to Millesburgh, composed of fifty houses; I went there to visit Mr. Savary, who