Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/304

 The horses that they rear in this part of the {282} southern states are inferior to those of the western. The inhabitants keep but very few sheep, and those who have a dozen are accounted to have a great number.

The commercial intercourse of the Upper Carolines and Georgia is carried on, in a great measure, with Charleston, which is not much farther than Wilmington and Savannah. The inhabitants go there in preference, because the commerce is more active, and the sales more easy. The articles they carry there consists chiefly in short cotton, tobacco, hams, salt butter, wax, stag, and bear skins, and cattle. They take, in return, coarse iron ware, tea, coffee, powder sugar, coarse cloths, and fine linen, but no bar iron, the upper country abounding in mines of that metal, and those which are worked sufficing the wants of the inhabitants. They also bring salt from the sea-ports, since there are no salt pits in any part of the Atlantic states. The carriage of these goods is made in large waggons with four wheels, drawn by four or six horses, that travel {283} about twenty-four miles a day, and encamp every evening in the woods. The price of conveyance is about three shillings and four-pence per hundred weight for every hundred miles.

Although the climate of the Upper Carolinas is infinitely more wholesome than that of the lower parts, it is not, in the mean time, at two hundred miles, and even two hundred and fifty, from the ocean, that a person is safe from the yellow fever.

Eight-tenths of the inhabitants of this part of the country are in the same situation as those of Tennessea and Kentucky. They reside, like the latter, in log-houses isolated in the woods, which are left open in the night as well as the day. They live in the same manner with re