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Updated: May 23, 2025
The two Arab boatmen stationed in the bow continually tested the depth of the water with poles and shouted in Arabic the results of their measurements to the anxious commander on the deck above. Notwithstanding these precautions, our steamer occasionally scraped on the sandbars, sometimes sticking on them for a short time.
If he had not been driven offshore here, he might have been just two weeks before Gray on the Columbia, and made good England's claim of all territory between New Spain and Alaska. When the weather cleared on April 27, the ocean was turgid, plainly tinged river-color by inland waters; but ground swell of storm and tide rolled across the shelving sandbars.
About January I, 1847, to lighten the load of the half-starved mules, a barge was made by placing two wagon bodies on dry cottonwood logs and on this 2500 pounds of provisions and corn were launched on the Gila River. The improvised boat found too many sandbars, and most of its cargo had to be jettisoned, lost in a time when rations had been reduced to a few ounces a day per man.
Snags and sandbars grew less and less frequent, and Tom grew more and more at his ease, seeing that all were so lovingly bent upon helping him and overlooking his mistakes.
Along either bank, among the bushes, on sandbars, and in trees, hundreds and hundreds of logs had been stranded when the main drive passed. These logs the rear crew were engaged in restoring to the current.
Side and killed a Cow & Calf the calf was verry fine their bases. it is somewhat singular that the lower part of these hills appear to be formed of a dark rich loam while the upper region about 150 feet is formed of a whiteish brown sand, so hard in many parts as to resemble stone; but little rock or stone of any kind to be seen in these hills. the river is much narrower than usual, the bed from 200 to 300 yards only and possessing a much larger proportion of gravel than usual. a few scattering cottonwood trees are the only timber near the river; the sandbars, and with them the willow points have almost entirely disappeared. greater appearance than usual of the saline incrustations of the banks and river hills. we passed two creeks the one on Stard. side, and the other just below our camp on the Lard. side; each of these creeks afford a small quantity of runing water, of a brackish tast. the great number of large beds of streams perfectly dry which we daily pass indicate a country but badly watered, which I fear is the case with the country through which we have been passing for the last fifteen or twenty days.
The Snakes ran along the edge of the river, looking into the water, with bent bows watching for the enemy's head or body to appear, but they saw nothing. Carefully they looked along the shores and sandbars; they did not find him. Mika´pi had sunk deep in the water. The swift current carried him along, and when he rose to the surface he was beyond his enemies.
He sat just inside the kitchen door, out of the sunshine, in a comfortable rocking chair. Two windows and the stern door gave him a wide view of the river, sandbars and eddy. It seemed but a minute, but he had fallen into a doze, when the splash of a shanty-boat sweeps awakened all the crew with a sudden, frightened start. Whispers, hardly audible, hailed in alarm.
The captain was an ex-pilot of the lower river, taciturn and surly of disposition. Our pilot had been drunk for a week at the levee of St. Louis and I misdoubt that all snags and sandbars looked alike to him. Among the skin-clad trappers, hunters and long-haired plainsmen, I saw but one woman, and she certainly was fit to bear them company.
All the afternoon, till the sun set and the stars came out and we dropped our anchor in a luminous nothingness, a child could have navigated us; but, when the next day brought us up to the northwest corner of Andros, we found ourselves face to face with a variety of difficulties: glimmering sandbars, reaches of moon-white shoals, patches of half-made land with pines struggling knee-deep in the tide; here and there a mile of mangroves, and delusive channels of blue water; beauty everywhere spreading out her sweeping laces of foam a welter of a world still in its making, with no clear passages for any craft drawing more than a canoe.
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