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Updated: June 10, 2025
Gambling was constantly going on, day and night. I don't think there was an interruption to it of fifteen minutes in three days. The conversation was almost exclusively confined to the topics of steamboats, liquors, cards, black-land, red-land, bottom-land, timber-land, warrants, and locations, sugar, cotton, corn, and negroes.
The land was dry and very poor, with the exception of here and there some small pieces of bottom land, the great bulk of the bottom-land occurring on the north side of the stream. We continued the survey up some twenty miles into the hills above the mill of Dailor and Sheldon.
Then Albany came into view, leaning against its sharp acclivity, and spreading over its extensive bottom-land. It was not the town it is to-day, by quite three-fourths less in dwellings and people; but it was then, as now, one of the most picturesque-looking places in America.
Along the rivers there is a strip of bottom-land, countersunk beneath the general level, and wider toward the foot-hills, where magnificent oaks, from three to eight feet in diameter, cast grateful masses of shade over the open, prairie-like levels.
The road is heavy with sand all along by Winnemucca, and but little riding is to be done. The river runs through green meadows of rich bottom-land hereabouts; but the meadows soon disappear as I travel eastward. Twenty miles east of Winnemucca the river arid railroad pass through the ca¤on in a low range of mountains, while my route lies over the summit.
I put in the day examining the superb timber of this bottom-land. White spruce is the prevailing conifer and is here seen in perfection. A representative specimen was 118 feet high, 11 feet 2 inches in circumference, or 3 feet 6 1/2 inches in diameter 1 foot from the ground, i.e., above any root spread. There was plenty of timber of similar height.
In a letter which I wrote on that occasion, I gave the following description of the country adjoining the river, and the incidents of a night bivouac before the battle: "The bottom-land of the Yazoo is covered with a heavy growth of tall cypress-trees, whose limbs are everywhere interlaced.
Children came; young folks married; old ones died; Indian Creek overflowed the bottom-land; crops failed; one by one the stage bore boys and girls away to seek their fortunes in the far-off world; at long intervals some tragedy streaked the yellow clay monotony with red; January blew petals from her silver garden; April poured her vase of life; August crawled her snail length; years passed, leaving rusty streaks back to a dull horizon.
"Wait for what?" "Wait till you see the corn on my bottom-land if the river down there doesn't drown it out. If we don't have too much rain, I'm going to have corn on that river-bottom that will beat anything in this county, Mr. Bronson." And the young farmer spoke with assurance. On the seventeenth day of June Hiram had "grappled out" a mess of potatoes for their dinner.
The result showed that Nick had not exaggerated. The pond was found, as he had described it to be, covering at least four hundred acres of low bottom-land; while near three thousand acres of higher river-flat, covered with beach and maple, spread around it for a considerable distance.
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