Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Avoiding, from the same calculation, the passage of the Cumberland Gap, he explored a track in which man, or at least the white man, had never trodden before. We may add, it has never been trodden since. Through cane-brakes and tangled thickets, over cliffs and precipices, and pathless mountains, he made his solitary way.
The forest overhung the water's edge and was occasionally skirted by immense cane-brakes. Wild animals of all kinds abounded. We heard them rushing through the thickets and plashing in the water. Deer and bears would frequently swim across the river; others would come down to the bank and gaze at the boat as it passed.
Its approach can only be made on both sides through belts of swampy cane-brakes, ten miles in breadth, and so difficult to travel over, that the length of the two swamps, short as it is, cannot be passed by a fresh and strong horse in less than fourteen hours.
In Texas, the country presents two different aspects, much at variance with each other, the eastern borders and sea-coast being only a continuation of the cypress swamps, mud creeks, and cane-brakes of south Arkansas, and west Louisiana; while, on the contrary, the north and west offer much the same topography as that of the countries I have just delineated.
Along the buffalo paths, from one salt-lick to another, a group of pioneers took a vagrant way through the dense cane-brakes. Never a wheel had then entered the deep forests of this western wilderness; the frontiersman and the packhorse were comrades.
They painted the fertility and amenity of the flowering wilderness in the most glowing colors. They described the cane-brakes, the clover and grass, the transparent limestone springs and brooks, the open forests, the sugar maple orchards, the buffaloes, deer, turkeys and wild fowls, in all the fervid colors of their own imaginations.
I soon reached the river; soon crossed it, and threw myself deep into the cane-brakes, imitating the tracks of an Indian with my feet, so that no chance might be left for those from whom I had escaped to overtake me.
Suffice it to say that I made my way back through the swamps, the forests, the cane-brakes of the Indian country, along the Natchez trail to Nashville, across the barrens to Harrodstown in Kentucky, where I spent a week in that cabin which had so long been for me a haven of refuge. Dear Polly Ann!
The next morning, the leader of the Cherokee party advised me to take a southern direction, till we should arrive at the head waters of the river Sabine, from whence, proceeding either northward or eastward, we should, in a few days, reach the Red River, through the cane-brakes and the clearings of the new settlers.
Along its southernmost course there are thousands of arms and lakes and bayous where for a time the river ran until it tired, and sought new scenes, new ways across the forests and cane-brakes. The charts may show you that this river is the boundary of a certain state; but who shall tell where or what that boundary may be?
Word Of The Day