Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/289

 which gave us some trouble to keep clear of. The rain ceased about three o'clock, when it cleared up calm and hot. At 4 o'clock we passed Island No. 10, on the right. The singing of the birds on this island exceeded every thing of the kind I had ever before heard in America. Notes resembling the wild clear whistle of the European black birds, and others like the call of the quail, or American partridge, were particularly distinguishable among a wonderful variety of feathered songsters. The island probably bears some vegetable production peculiar to itself, which attracts such uncommon numbers of small birds.

At seven, P. M. we rowed into Bayou St. Jean, on the right, at the upper end of New Madrid, to which settlement it serves for a harbour,—having only advanced about fifty miles this whole day. We found here several boats bound down the river.

New Madrid contains about a hundred houses, much scattered, on a fine plain of two miles square, {256} on which however the river has so encroached during the twenty-two years since it was first settled, that the bank is now half a mile behind its old bounds, and the inhabitants have had to remove repeatedly farther back. They are a mixture of French Creoles from Illinois, United States Americans, and Germans. They have plenty of cattle, but seem in other respects to be very poor. There is some trade with the Indian hunters for furs and peltry, but of little consequence. Dry goods and groceries are enormously high, and the inhabitants charge travellers immensely for any common necessaries, such as milk, butter, fowls, eggs, &c. There is a militia, the officers of which wear cockades in common as a mark of distinction, although the rest of their dress should be only a dirty ragged hunting shirt and trowsers.—There is a church going to decay and no preacher, and there are courts of common pleas and quarter sessions,