Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/16

8 on the fifth of August. The following day, he crossed the Ohio, and after examining lands in the vicinity, proceeded partly on foot, partly by stage and saddle, over the newly-opened state road of Ohio, through Chillicothe, Lancaster, and Zanesville to Wheeling; thence back to Pittsburg, where he arrived the evening of August 21.

The following year (1808), Cuming begins his narrative at the point on the Ohio where he had left the river the previous year—at Maysville, whence he embarked on the seventh of May for Mississippi Territory. With the same fulness of detail and accurate notation that characterize his former narrative, Cuming describes the voyage down the Ohio and the Mississippi until his arrival at Bayou Pierre on the sixth of June, after a month afloat.

Starting from Bruinsbury, at the mouth of Bayou Pierre, August 22, he took a horseback trip through the settlements of Mississippi Territory lying along the river and some distance inland on its tributaries—Cole's Creek, St. Catharine's Bayou, the Homochito, etc.—penetrating the then Spanish territory of West Florida as far as Baton Rouge, and returning by a similar route to Bruinsbury, where he arrived the fifteenth of September.

At this point Cuming's tour is concluded. In order to give completeness to the work, however, the first editor added the journal of a voyage taken in 1799 "by a gentleman of accurate observation, a passenger in a New Orleans boat." From just above Bayou Pierre, this anonymous author departed on the ninth of February for New Orleans, where he arrived on the twenty-third of the same month. Embarking therefrom March 12, he reached Philadelphia after a month's voyage via Havana and the Atlantic shore. His narrative is far less effective than that of Cuming.

Like a well-bred man of affairs, Cuming never intrudes his private business upon our attention; but incidentally we