Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/359

 unpleasant, and unwholesome, within seven or eight miles of the Mississippi—and it being fine and in abundance from that to the eastward to the pine woods, which generally begin at from fifteen to twenty miles distance from the river.

The face of the country is also much diversified—a dead swampy but very rich level borders the Mississippi the whole length of the territory and West Florida, from the Walnut hills to Baton Rouge, with the exception of some ends of ridges, or bluffs as they are called, at the Walnut hills, the Grand and Petit gulphs—Natchez and Baton Rouge. The flat or bottom is in general about two miles broad, though in some places nine or ten. The different water courses, {322} which run mostly into the Mississippi from the eastward have each their bottom lands of various breadths, but all comparatively much narrower than those of the Mississippi. The intervals are composed of chains of steep, high and broken hills, some cultivated, some covered with a thick cane brake, and forest trees of various descriptions, and others with beautiful open woods devoid of underwood. Some are evergreen with laurel and holly, and some, where the oak, walnut and poplar are the most predominant; being wholly brown in the winter, at which season others again are mixed, and at the fall of the leaf display a variety of colouring, green, brown, yellow and red.

On approaching the pine woods, the fertility of the soil ceases, but the climate becomes much more salubrious—that will however never draw inhabitants to it while a foot of cane brake land or river bottom remains to be settled.

The pine woods form a barrier between the Choctaw nation and the inhabitants of the Mississippi territory, which however does not prevent the Indians from bringing their squaws every fall and winter to aid in gathering in the cotton crop, for which they are paid in blankets, stroud, (a