Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/266

 very rugged, but nothing near so much as the one that leads from Strasburgh to Bedford in Pennsylvania. About forty miles from Nasheville we met an emigrant family in a carriage, followed by their negroes on foot, that had performed their journey without any accident. Little boards painted black and nailed upon the trees every three miles, indicate to travellers the distance they have to go.

In this part of Tennessea the mass of the forests is composed of all the species of trees that belong more particularly to the mountainous regions of North America, such as oaks, maples, and nut trees. Pines abound in those parts where the soil is the worst. What appeared to me very extraordinary was, to find some parts of the woods, for the space of several miles, where all the pines that formed at least one fifth part of the other trees were dead since the preceding year, and still kept all their withered foliage. I was not able to learn the causes that produced this singular phenomenon. I only heard that the same thing happens every fifteen or twenty years.

At West Point is established a fort, pallisadoed round with trees, built upon a lofty eminence, at the {215} conflux of the rivers Clinch and Holston. The fedral government maintain a company of soldiers there, the aim of which is to hold the Indians in respect, and at the same time to protect them against the inhabitants on the frontiers, whose illiberal proceedings excite them frequently to war. The objects of these insults were to drive them from their possessions; but the government has prevented this fruitless source of broils and wars, by declaring that all the possessions occupied by the Indians within the boundaries of the United States, comprise a part of their domains.