Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/305

 years.[194] Notwithstanding {271} favourable appearances, we could obtain no kind of refreshments here, not even milk, they having made cheese in the morning, so we rowed down three miles and a half, to Wm. Basset's delightful situation on the Big Prairie, where was a large stock of cattle, yet we were still disappointed in milk, so we kept on four miles and a half to Anthony's, where we obtained milk, sallad, and eggs, and spent a pleasant night in a fine harbour, very little troubled by musquitoes.

We had passed Well's and Bell's boats at moorings at the Big Prairie, and about an hour after we stopped at Anthony's, the South Carolina and Pittsburgh boats arrived and made fast a little above us.

The Big Prairie is a natural savanna of about sixty acres open to the river on the right bank. It is covered with a fine, rich, short herbage, very proper for sheep. Immediately behind it at less than half a mile from the river, is a small lake eight or nine miles in circumference, formed in the spring and summer by the Mississippi, which in that season rising, flows up a small canal or (in the language of the country) bayau, and spreads itself over a low prairie. As the river falls, the lake discharges its water again by the bayau, and becomes a luxuriant meadow, covered with a tall but nutritive and tender grass. While a lake, it abounds in fish of every species natural to the Mississippi, and when a meadow, it is capable of feeding innumerable herds of cattle. It is then watered by a rivulet which descends from some low hills about three miles to the westward of the river bank. From its regular annual inundation, this appears to be a fine situation for rice grounds, if the water goes off soon enough to allow the rice to ripen.