Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/345

 Mr. Perrie is a native of Fifeshire in Scotland, was a millwright, by which profession, aided by an advantageous matrimonial connexion, he now possesses a hundred negroes, and is alcalde of the quarter—yet he would gladly remove to the land of his nativity, if he could do it conveniently.

Tuesday 6th, a good road through open woods brought me in six miles to Doyle's, from whence, fording Thompson's creek, (a fine little river sixty yards wide) I stopped at Horton's tavern, on the opposite side. Mr. Murdoch, the proprietor, from whom Horton rents the house and adjoining plantation, but who reserves a room for himself, having seen me at Mr. O'Connor's, politely asked me to stay breakfast, after which I proceeded.

All the tract of country from Pinckneyville to near Thompson's creek, being watered by Bayau Sarah, or some of its tributary streams, is most generally known by the name of the Bayau Sarah settlements, and is part in the United States and part in the Spanish territory. It is esteemed as the finest soil, the best cultivated, and inhabited by the most wealthy settlers, of any part of the Mississippi territory or West Florida, but the land appeared to be liable to have its soil washed away, so as to lose it entirely in a few years after clearing it, on all the declivities. It is on the whole however, a charming country.

My road now led through a thick wood, much impeded by copse and briers, and it being a dead flat, the whole of it was a complete slough, in some places deep enough to mire my horse to the saddle skirts for several hundred yards together, so that I made slow progress, for the first six miles, in an easterly {309} direction, which had been the course of the road from doctor Flowers's.

I met a man on foot, of a very suspicious appearance, labouring through the mire. He was a stout active fellow, very ragged, and his face disfigured by a large scar across his