distant, lies partly across "barrens," that is, land of middling quality, thinly set with timber, or covered with long grass and shrubby underwood; generally level and dry, and gaudy with marigolds, sunflowers, martagon lilies, and many other beautiful flowers. On the whole, the country is tame, poorly watered, and not desirable as a place of settlement; but, from its varied character, it is pleasant to travel over. Vincennes exhibits a motley assemblage of inhabitants as well as visitors. The inhabitants are Americans, French Canadians, and Negroes. The visitors are chiefly Americans from various states; and Indians from various nations: Shawnees, Delawares, and Miamies, who live about a hundred miles northward, and who come here to trade for skins. The Indians were encamped, in considerable numbers, round the town, and were continually riding into the place, to the stores and the whiskey-shops. Their horses and accoutrements were generally mean, and their persons disagreeable. Their faces were painted in various ways, which gave an appearance of ferocity to their countenances.
One of them, a Shawnee, had his eyes, or rather his eyelids and the surrounding parts, daubed with vermilion. He thus looked hideous enough at a distance; but, on a nearer view, he had good features, and was a fine, stout, and fierce-looking man. Some of the Indians were well dressed. One young man, in particular, of the Miami nation, wore a clear, light blue cotton vest, with sleeves; and had his head ornamented with black feathers.
They all wear pantaloons, or rather long moccasins of buck-skin, covering the foot and leg, and reaching half way up the thigh, which is bare: a covering of cloth, a foot square, passes between the thighs, and hangs behind like an apron. Their complexion was various: some were dark, and others were not so swarthy as even Mr. Birkbeck; but he saw none of the copper-colour, which he had imagined to be their distinguishing characteristic. These Indians are addicted to drinking spirits, and are often intoxicated. They use much action in their discourse, and laugh immoderately. Their hair is straight and black, and their eyes are dark. Many of the women are decently dressed and good-looking.
Mr. Birkbeck remarks that, in Great Britain, the people are so circumscribed in their movements, that, with them, miles seem equal to tens of miles in America. He says that, in America, travellers will start on an expedition of three thousand miles, by boats, on horseback, or on foot, with as little deliberation or anxiety, as an Englishman would set out on a journey of three hundred.
At Vincennes, the foundation had just been laid of a large establishment of mills to be worked by steam. Water-mills of great power were building on the Wabash, near Harmony; and undertakings of similar kind will, no doubt, be called for and executed, along the banks of this river, and of its various tributary streams.
On entering Vincennes there is nothing which tends to make a favourable impression on a stranger; but it improves on acquaintance, for it contains agreeable people: and there is a spirit of cleanliness, and even of neatness, in the houses and manner of living. There is also a strain of politeness in the inhabitants, which marks the origin of this settlement to be French.
At Princeton, a place scarcely three years old, Mr. Birkbeck and his family went to a log-tavern, where neatness was as well observed as at many taverns in the cities of England. The people of this town belong to America in dress and manners; but they would not disgrace old England in the general decorum of their deportment.
Mr. Birkbeck lamented here, as in other parts of America, the small account that is had of time. Subsistence is easily secured, and liberal pursuits are yet too rare to operate as a general stimulus to exertion: the consequence is, that life is whiled away in a painful state of yawning lassitude.
Twenty or thirty miles west of this place, in the Illinois territory, is a large country where settlements were beginning; and where, Mr. Birkbeck says, there was an abundant choice of unentered lands, of a description, which, if the statements of travellers and surveyors, even after great abatements, can be relied on, he imagined would satisfy his wishes.
Princeton affords a very encouraging situation for a temporary abode. It stands on an elevated spot, in an uneven country, ten miles from the river Wabash, and two from the navigable stream of the Patok; but the country is rich, and the timber is vast in bulk and height.
The small-pox is likely soon to be excluded from this state; for vaccination is very generally adopted, and inoculation for the small-pox is prohibited altogether; not by law, but by common consent. If it should be known that an individual had undergone this operation, the inhabitants would compel him to withdraw from society. If he lived in a town, he must absent himself, or he would be driven away.
On the 25th of July, Mr. Birkbeck explored the country as far as Harmony and the banks of the Ohio. He lodged in a cabin, at a very new town, on the banks of the Ohio, called Mount Vernon. Here he found the people of a character which confirmed the aversion he had previously entertained to a settlement in the immediate vicinity of a large navigable river. Every hamlet was demoralized, and every plantation was liable to outrage, within a short distance of such a thoroughfare.
Yet, to persons who had been long buried in deep forests, the view of that noble expanse was like the opening of a bright day upon the gloom of night. To travel, day after day, among trees a hundred feet high, without a glimpse of the surrounding country, is oppressive to a degree which those cannot conceive who have not experienced it.
Mr. Birkbeck left Harmony after breakfast, on the ensuing day, and, crossing the Wabash, at a ferry, he proceeded to the Big Prairie, where, to his astonishment, he beheld a fertile plain of grass and arable; and some thousand acres of land covered with corn, more luxuriant than any he had before seen. The scene reminded him of some open well-cultivated vale in Europe, surrounded by wooded uplands. But the illusion vanished on his arrival at the habitation of Mr. Williams, the owner of an estate, on which, at this time, there were nearly three hundred acres of beautiful corn in one field; for this man lived in a way apparently as remote from comfort, as the settler of one year, who thinks only of the means of supporting existence.
The inhabitants of the Prairie are healthy, and the females and children are better complexioned than their neighbours of the timber country. It is evident that they breathe better air: but they are in a low state of civilization, being about half Indian in their mode of life. They are hunters by profession, and would have the whole range of the forests for themselves and their cattle. Strangers appear, to them, invaders of their privileges; as they have intruded on the better founded and exclusive privileges of their Indian predecessors.
After viewing several Prairies, which, with their surrounding woods, were so beautiful as to seem like the creation of fancy; (gardens of delight in a dreary wilderness;) and after losing their horses, and spending two days in recovering them, Mr. Birkbeck and his party took a hunter, as their guide, and proceeded across the little Wabash, to explore the country between that river and the Skillet Fork.
The lonely settlers, in the districts north of Big Prairie, are in a miserable state: their bread-corn must be ground thirty miles off; and it occupied three days to carry to the mill, and bring back, the small horse-load of three bushels. To struggle with privations has now become the habit of their lives, most of them having made several successive plunges into the wilderness.
Mr. Birkbeck's journey across the little Wabash was a complete departure from all mark of civilization. Wandering without track, where even the sagacity of the hunter-guide had nearly failed, they at length arrived at the cabin of another hunter, in which they lodged. This man, his wife, his eldest son, a tall, half-naked youth, just initiated in the hunter's arts; his three daughters, growing up into great rude girls, and a squalling tribe of dirty brats, of both sexes, were of one pale yellow colour, without the slightest tint of healthful bloom. They were remarkable instances of the effect, on the complexion, produced by living perpetually in the midst of woods.
Their cabin, which may serve as a specimen of these rudiments of houses, was formed of round logs, with apertures of three or four inches: there was no chimney, but large intervals were left between the "clapboards," for the escape of the smoke. The roof, however, was a more effectual covering, than Mr. Birkbeck had generally experienced, as it protected him and his party very tolerably from a drenching night. Two bedsteads, formed of unhewn logs, and cleft boards laid across; two chairs, (one of them without a bottom,) and a low stool, were all the furniture possessed by this numerous family. A string of buffalo-hide, stretched across the hovel,