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Show 320 Early Western Travels [ VoL » 6 At periods of higher stages, however, this stream has been navigated nearly to the confluence of its forks, a distance of some hundred miles; and in the spring of 1832 a boat of some size arrived within five miles of Springfield. An inconsiderable expense in removing logs and overhanging trees, it is said, would render this river navigable for keel-boats half the year. The advantages of such a communication, through one of the richest agricultural regions on the globe, can hardly be estimated. The Sangamon bottom has a soil of amazing fertility, and rears from its deep, black mould a forest of enormous sycamores; huge, overgrown, unshapely masses, their venerable limbs streaming with moss. When the traveller enters the depths of these dark old woods, a cold chill runs over his frame, and he feels as if he were entering the sepulchre. A cheerless twilight reigns for ever through them: the atmosphere he inhales has an earthly smell, and is filled with floating greenish exhalations; the moist, black mould beneath his horse's hoofs, piled with vegetable decay for many feet, and upon whose festering bosom the cheering light of day has not smiled for [ 68] centuries, is rank and yielding: the enormous shafts leaning in all attitudes, their naked old roots enveloped in a green moss of velvet luxuriance, tower a hundred feet above his head, and shut out the heavens from his view: the huge wild- vine leaps forth at their foot and clasps them in its deadly embrace; or the tender ivy and pensile woodbine cluster around the aged giants, and strive to veil with their mantling tapestry the ravages of time. There is much cathedral pomp, much of Gothic magnificence about all this; and one can hardly fling off from his mind the awe and solemnity which gathers and joins the Illinois River nine miles above Beardstown. The river is nearly two hundred and forty miles in length, including the north fork, and was named in honor of a local Indian chief.- ED. |