Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/235

 completely barren; no kind of herbage is seen except a few plants, scattered here and there; and the trees are always far enough apart that a stag may be seen a hundred or a hundred and fifty fathoms off. Prior to the Europeans settling, the whole of this space, now bare, was covered with a species of the great articulated reed, called arundinaria macrosperma, or cane, which is in the woods from three to four inches diameter, and grows seven or eight feet high; but in the swamps and marshes that border the Mississippi it is upward of twenty feet. Although it often freezes in Kentucky, from five to six degrees, for several days together, its foliage keeps always green, and does not appear to suffer by the cold.

Although the ginseng is not a plant peculiar to Kentucky, it is still very numerous there. This induces {169} me to speak of it here. The ginseng is found in America from Lower Canada as far as the state of Georgia, which comprises an extent of more than fifteen hundred miles. It grows chiefly in the mountainous regions of the Alleghanies, and is by far more abundant as the chain of these mountains incline south west. It is also found in the environs of New York and Philadelphia, as well as in that part of the northern states situated between the mountains and the sea. It grows upon the declivity of the hills, in the cool and shady places, where the soil is richest. A man cannot pull up above eight or nine pounds of fresh roots per day. These roots are always less than an inch diameter, even after fifteen years' growth, if by any means we can judge of it with certitude by the number of impressions that are to be seen round the upper part of the neck of the root, produced by the stalks that succeed each other annually. The shape of these roots is generally elliptical; and whenever it is biforked, which