Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 V13.djvu/303

 *erable bodies of cane appear, indicative of an elevation above the usual inundations; it is, however, probable that these tracts are narrow, and flanked at no great distance by lagoons and cypress marshes subject to the floods. Many bends indeed presented nothing but cypress and black ash.

From the Chicasaw Bluffs downward, along the banks of the Mississippi, we perceive no more of the Tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera), and but little of the Platanus, greatly reduced in magnitude, compared with what it attains along the Ohio. The largest tree of the forest here is that which is of the quickest growth, the Cottonwood poplar (Populus angulata).

27th.] The whole country, generally speaking, along the river, appears uninhabited, though vast tracts of cane land occur in the bends. I am, however, informed that the cane will withstand a partial inundation. Since we left Point Chicot the river presents us with several magnificent views, some of 8, some of 12, and even 15 miles extent; but the absence of variety, even amidst objects of the utmost grandeur, soon becomes tiresome by familiarity. As above the Arkansa, the river still continues meandering. The curves, at all seasons washed by a rapid current, present crumbling banks of friable soil more or less mixed with vegetable matter. By the continued undermining and removal of the earth, the bends are at length worn through, the former tongue of land then becomes transformed into an island, and the stagnation and partial filling of the old channel, now deserted, in time produces a lake. Some idea of the singular caprice of the Mississippi current may be formed, by taking for a moment into view the extraordinary extent of its alluvial valley, which below {230} the Ohio is from 30 to 40 miles in width, through all