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Show 94 &* rfy Western Travels [ Vol. 26 as those magnificent streams, with which his name is associated, shall continue to roll on their volumed waters to the deep. These remarks have been suggested by scenes of constant recurrence to the traveller on the Mississippi The banks, the forests, the islands all differ as much as the stream itself from those of the soft- gliding Ohio. Instead of those dense emerald masses of billowy foliage swelling gracefully up from the banks of " the beautiful river," those of the Mississippi throw back a rough, ragged outline; their sands piled with logs and uprooted trees, while heaps of wreck and drift- wood betray the wild ravages of the stream. In the midst of [ 65] the mass a single enormous sycamore often rears its ghastly limbs, while at its foot springs gracefully up a light fringe of the pensile willow. Sometimes, too, a huge sawyer, clinging upon the verge of the channel, heaves up its black mass above the surface, then falls, and again rises with the rush of the current Against one of these sawyers is sometimes lodged a mass of drift- wood, pressing it firmly upon the bottom, till, by a constant accumulation, a foundation is gradually laid and a new island is formed: this again, by throwing the water from its course, causes a new channel, which, infringing with violence upon the opposite bank, undermines it with its colonnade of enormous trees, and thus new material in endless succession is afforded for obstructions to the navigation. The deposites of alluvion along the banks betray a similar origin of gradual accumulation by the annual floods. In some sections of the American Bottom,** commencing at its southern extremity with the Kaskaskia River, the mould, upward of thirty feet in depth, is made up of numerous strata of earth, which may be readily distinguished and counted by the colours. 19 In reference to the American Bottom, see Ogden's Letters, in our volume nz, p. 6a, note 48.- ED. |