Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/336

 the swamp, mounting into a hilly country, covered with a thick cane brake, through which a wagon road is cut in a S. W. direction eleven miles, without settlement, house or water, in all that distance, so that it is both fatiguing and dreary.

I emerged from the hills and canes over a small creek, at a fine plantation of a Mr. Percy. My horse being fatigued, I stopped to request a little {300} fodder for him, which was accorded with a very ill grace by the overseer, the proprietor residing at Washington. And here I will remark that the overseers of plantations in this whole territory, are for the most part a rough, unpolished, uncouth class of people, which perhaps proceeds from their being made use of literally as negro drivers, to keep those unfortunate wretches to their work in the field, and to correct them for all real or supposed offences.—They do this with their own hands, and not as in the sugar colonies, by one of the slaves themselves, appointed for that purpose and called the driver. This renders them callous to every thing like sentiment or feeling, and gives them a roughness and abruptness in their manners, which is extremely disagreeable and disgusting.

A good road with a ridge of hills called Loftus's heights on the left, and the swamp which commenced at Buffaloe creek on the right, leads from hence to Fort Adams in a distance of six miles, there being a few plantations on both sides of the road, those on the right joining the swamp, and the left hand ones being on the broken land beyond the cliffs and hills.[211]

Fort Adams or Wilkinsonburg is a poor little village of a