and middle states has wished to shine his hour as a wise man, and has assumed this terrific name; and thus the impression has finally been established, that almost all the emigrants who pass down the rivers are Yankees." (p. 32.) This, however, will not do. A Southron would, indeed, deserve the epithet of a “blockhead,” if he assumed a character to inspire terror where he would wish to conciliate regard. Besides, it would be as difficult for him to assume the character, dialect, &c. of a Yankee so as to deceive a Yankee, as it would for the latter successfully to disguise himself as a Southron; which we regard as almost an impossibility.

At Marietta, they purchased a Kentucky flat of forty tons, subject to the incumbrance of a Kentuckian and his family, who had previously insured a passage in it. He was a pretty fair specimen of the rough frank character of his country. He swore a great deal, but upon learning the character of our traveller, he promised to abstain and kept his word. His great delight was to tease the children by ridiculing the Yankees ; but it all went off harmoniously enough, and they reached Cincinnati, though not without encountering a severe thunder storm at night, accompanied with wind and rain, which drenched the boat, and terrified the passengers.

It is not our intention to follow our author in describing any of these towns. In their general outline they resemble each other. They are all newly erected upon spots, which, a few years since, were the abodes of savages and wild beasts. The wilderness, in most places, still surrounds them, though every where pierced with cultivated farms. But in provement hourly advances, and the foundations of newer towns are continually laid out and built up. Whether they succeed or fail, depends on commerce, whose blessings are voluntarily bestowed, and cannot be forcibly snatched.

Of the manner in which these towns are sometimes made, our author gives us the following account.

When I

"Vevay in Indiana, has grown to be a considerable town. was there, the village had just commenced. I was lodged in the house of a respectable Swiss gentleman, who had married a wife from Kentucky. The people were prompt and general in attending divine service. The next evening there was a warned meeting of the inhabitants, and the object was to locate the town-house, a market, and First, Second and Third-streets. I attended the meeting. The night was dark and rainy. The deep and rich bottom, the trees of which had been just cut down, was so muddy that my feet sunk at every step. Huge beach and sycamore trunks of trees so impeded these avenues and streets, that were to be, that I doubt if a chaise could have made its way by daylight, and the most careful driving amidst the logs. When you hear about market-houses, and seminaries and streets, Nos. 1, 2 and 3, in the midst

of a wilderness of fallen logs, you will have some idea of the language appropriate to a kind of speculation almost peculiar to this country, that is to say, town-making. You will infer from this too what magnificent ideas these people have with respect to the future. I learned, in recently ascending the Ohio, that these splendid anticipations are now realized, that the town house, market and streets actually exist, and that instead of huge sycamore trunks, they have now blocks of brick buildings." p. 59.

It was to this place that the colony from Switzerland brought their vines, and established their noble vineyard. They cultivated the cape grape and the sweet-water grape of Madeira.The vines grow with the greatest luxuriance, and consequently require severe pruning; but they reward the toil with the richest clusters.

But to return to Ohio. The soil is excellent, indeed it is said that this State contends with Illinois alone in the possession of the largest bodies of fine land. The prairies are not large, but the forests are heavy and deep; they contain, however, few evergreens, and but little cypress. The State is dotted with small farms, and cultivated by a hardy and numerous body of freemen, whose manners resemble the New-Englanders, from whom they have sprung.

After remaining sometime in Cincinnati, our traveller left his family, and in the spring made a tour through the State of Indiana, on its front on the Ohio; then across the Ohio through part of Kentucky, and back to rejoin them.

men.

The native Kentuckians are described as a very large race of The difference in manners between them and their neighbours of the non-slave-holding states is said to be very perceptible. Their villages are full of people, at leisure, from whose dress and appearance may be seen their exemption from personal labour. Rustic opulence appeared every where; but leisure and opulence, without refinement of manners or cultivation of mind must lead to gross and vulgar excesses; accordingly, they are addicted to what our traveller terms the prevailing vices of the west (would to God they were confined to the west) gambling and intemperance. Both parents and children, when admonished, admitted and deplored the fact. They had virtue enough, sometimes, to resolve to amend, but not enough to adhere to their resolution. The truth is, their only security for amendment will be the improvement of their minds, but from their conceited and boastful character, this is scarcely to be expected. In this respect, it is surprising what a resemblance exists between them and all islanders, not excepting Englishmen. Insulated as it were by their forests and mountains from VOL. II.-No. 3. 26

the civilized world, they think all they have or are connected with, is, beyond comparison, the best in the world. Their horses, dogs, guns, wives, children, country, are superior to those of all mankind. All their sons are the bravest and wisest, and their women the fairest and most virtuous. They look, with disdain on the younger States, and, like the English, “designate their own country with the veneration due to age, by the name of "Old Kentucky." One of their methodist preachers holding forth, in a neighbouring State on the happiness of heaven, having gradually advanced towards his climax, concluded thus, "In short, my brethren, to say all in one word, heaven is a Kentuck of a place!" p. 64.

Now, we have no objection to acknowledge it a virtue in a Kentuckian or any other person to have an exclusive preference to his own State and its possessions, but its obtrusive excess becomes not only offensive to others, but opposes a bar to all improvement. He who is wise in his own conceit will disdain instruction, and undertake to teach his master. We agree with our author "that there is a distinct and striking moral physiognomy in this people; an enthusiasm, a vivacity and ardour of character, courage, frankness, generosity, that have been developed with the peculiar circumstances under which they have been placed; and that these are incitements to all that is noble in a people." We unite with him in the exclamation—

"O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona nôrint."

But we see no chance of their ever knowing what blessings they possess; no prospect of their most desirable improvement, nor ever shall, till a knowledge of their own imperfections is brought home to their hosoms, and they are made modestly to acknowledge, and blushingly to feel that Lexington is not Athens, nor "Kentuck" heaven.

After returning from his tour, and reposing a few days, our traveller purchased a keel boat of about ninety feet in length, and embarked his family for St. Louis. They encountered and weathered a violent storm, and drenched with wet, arrived in the evening at General Harrison's; of whom we have a warm and no doubt a just panegyrick. After two days spent there, they again went adrift, and as they passed the magnificent bluffs of the Ohio, towering aloft in fanciful forms, they could not but be delighted with their grandeur, and that of the vegetable kingdom; nor view, without admiration and unsated curiosity, the flocks of parroquets that animated the trees on the banks. They stopped for a short time at the Shaw-noe town, which they found

just emerging from an inundation. Here they made their arrangements for ascending the Mississippi, and engaged nine hands as a competent crew for the boat. Below this place, the beauty of the banks of the Ohio disappears, the bluffs sink, cultivation almost ceases, and the country, in the spring, exhibits the aspect of inundation. Vast forests on each side rise out of the water, and the only dwellings visible are the cabins of the wood-cutters, raised on piles. About the end of April, they hailed, with emotion, the majestic Mississippi, and had now to experience the novel labour of propelling a boat against the current of one of the most rapid rivers of the world. The Ohio and Mississippi are separated by a point of land on which it was once attempted to erect a great city, but the floods came and the winds blew, and the city of speculation was swept away, leaving but one house to render the solitude more striking. The contrast between these mingling waters is great; the Ohio's being limpid and green, and the other's turbid and white. The characters of the two rivers are equally in opposition, for whilst the Ohio is flowing majestically tranquil, the Mississippi, turbulent and furious, and full of overboiling eddies of great extent, rushes down with a hissing noise. The water, the plants, the trees, seemed to our travellers to be different from the same things elsewhere. The grandeur of the vegetable empire is indescribable; even the small willows in the water's edge bore a flower, which, when crushed, yielded a fragrance like the aroma of burning coffee, and "other aromatics raised the ideas of nectar and ambrosia." Multitudes of water fowl, of different forms and plumage, were pattering in the water among the grass, and as many were procured as were wanted, for no sooner were they roused by the gun than they alighted again after a short flight.

They now commenced working their way up the stream by a process technically called by the boatmen "bush-whacking,' that is, pulling the boat along by the branches of the overhanging trees and bushes, for the depth too often prevents the use of the pole. Whenever they reached a point round which the current proved too strong, they crossed the river with their oars and recommenced bush-whacking. When this failed they had recourse to the "cordelle," which is a rope, fastened ahead to the shore, by which the crew warp the boat up. The rope sometimes gets entangled in snags; and has frequently to be thrown over small trees or carried round large ones. This service requires great experience and dexterity, the leader being often obliged to swim ashore with the rope between his teeth-the French boatmen are said to excel in it. When the impediments on one shore cannot be got over, they cross; and when they

meet with similar obstacles there, which not unfrequently hap pens, they procure additional hands, if possible, on shore, or lie bye for a strong wind up the river, and thus stem the current. Besides the dangers from sawyers and snags, they have to dread being crushed by the falling in of a bank, or of a tree loosed by the wind in the crumbling soil; for such accidents too often occur.

"Sometimes you are obliged to make your way among the trunks of trees, and the water boiling round your boat like that of a mill race. Then if the boat "swings," as the phrase is, that is, loses her direction, and exposes her side to the current, you are instantly carried back, and perhaps strike the snags below you, and your boat is snagged or staved. We were more than one half a day struggling with all our own force, and all that we could raise on the banks to force the boat through a single rapid, or by one difficult place. We were once in imminent peril, not only of our boat, but, such was the situation of the place, if we had been wrecked there, of our lives, severer fatigue, or harder struggling to carry a point I never saw endured than in this case. -The danger and fatigue of this kind of boating are, undoubtedly, greater than those of sea navigation. I do not remember to have traversed this river in any considerable trip without having heard of some fatal disaster to a boat, or having seen a dead body of some boatman, recognized by the red flannel-shirt which they generally wear. The multitudes of carcasses of boats lying at the points, or thrown up high and dry on the wreckheaps, demonstrate, most palpably, how many boats are lost on this wild, and as the boatmen always denominate it "wicked river."92, 93.

-pp.

In this manner they passed on the right bank of the river the large French village of St. Genevieve, which they found to contain many amiable persons of polished manners. Their houses are unlike those of the Americans-they have mud walls, whitewashed, which produce a gay effect at a distance. The prevailing language is French, and the religion is Catholic. On the shore opposite St. Genevieve, below Kaskaskias, is a very rich piece of low land, called the “ American Bottom," and further on, a fertile and beautiful prairie, interspersed with heavy timber land. On reaching Carondelet, they observed two small villages on the opposite shore, and also the ancient French village of Cahokia. On the 24th of May, they reached St. Louis.

The immense internal trade carried on in the west on these water courses, may be partially conceived from the following animated picture of the fleets of boats which often halt for the night at New Madrid, on the Mississippi :

"You can name no point from the numerous rivers of the Ohio and the Mississippi, from which some of these boats have not come. In one place, there are boats loaded with planks from the pine forests of the