Note 12 — XXXVI.

"The experienced savage or solitary voyager, descending the Mississippi for a thousand miles, paddles his canoe through the deep forests from one bluff to the other. He moves, perhaps, along the inundated forests of the vast interval through which the Mississippi flows, into the mouth of White river. He ascends that river a few miles, and by the Grand Cut-off moves down the flooded forest into Arkansas. From that river he finds many bayous, which communicate readily with Washita and Red river; and from that river, by some one of its hundred bayous, he finds his way into the Atchafalaya and the Teche; and by this stream to the Gulf of Mexico, reaching it more than twenty leagues west of the Mississippi. At that time this is a river from thirty to a hundred miles wide, all overshaded with forests, except an interior strip of little more than a mile in width, where the eye reposes upon the open expanse of waters visible between the forests, which is the Mississippi proper."