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Updated: June 10, 2025
"If I got no land, I got some of dose rights of a citizen, eh?" snorted Antoine, planting himself in front of the Virginian, and bending forward until they almost touched noses. "I reckon you have, and I reckon you better use them. You git your family over on to the bluff before your house is sucked into the Okaw."
It will double the distance, but give us less trouble to get into dead water the other side of the Okaw." Early summer dawn was breaking over that deluged world, a whiter light than moonshine giving increasing distinctness to every object. This hint of day gave rest to the tired ringers in church tower and convent belfry. The bells died away, and stillness brooded on the water plain.
Such boards and posts as the negroes had not carried off lay now along the river brink, and the Okaw was steadily undermining that brink as it had already undermined and carried away the Jesuits' spacious landing. Glancing over their shoulders with secret laughter for that fearful gleam of scythes which was to come, the girls marched back; and their leader's abrupt halt jarred the entire line.
Beyond the last house and alongside the Okaw river stood the ruined building with gaping entrances. The girls stumbled among irregular hummocks which in earlier days had been garden beds and had supplied vegetables to the brethren. The last commandant of Kaskaskia, who occupied the Jesuits' house as a fortress, had complained to his superiors of a leaky and broken roof.
It is situated on the Okaw or Kaskaskia river, three miles from the Mississippi. It never can be a place of much business. The land office is kept at this place. There are some neat buildings, but they are generally old, ugly and inconvenient. Their streets are irregular and of bad widths.
At this time there are thousands of acres of this excellent land for sale at from $4 to $8 an acre, and a good proportion woodland. Dr. Hill not having returned on the 17th, I took a ride, the day being pleasant in consequence of a refreshing shower. Visited the governor's house, a miserable-looking old building, such as is found in the suburbs of towns. Crossed the great Okaw or Kaskaskia river.
It was nineteen miles from the point of the bluffs to the mouth of the Okaw River; ten miles wide up at the bluffs and tapering to a point where the rivers united. Large bands of wild horses French ponies, called "punt" horses were to be found any day feeding on the ever green and nutritious grasses and vegetation.
The wharf was crowded with vessels from New Orleans and Cahokia, and the arched stone bridge across the Okaw was a thoroughfare of hurrying carriages. The road at the foot of the bluff, more than a hundred feet below Jean, showed its white flint belt in distant laps and stretches through northern foliage.
The bluffs bordering the Okaw could not be seen except as a vague bank of forest; and as for the lowlands across the great river, they might as well have had no existence. It grew upon Father Baby's observation that the Mississippi had never looked so threatening.
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