The face of the country is also much diversified—a dead swampy but very rich level borders the Mississippi the whole length of the territory and West Florida, from the Walnut hills to Baton Rouge, with the exception of some ends of ridges, or bluffs as they are called, at the Walnut hills, the Grand and Petit gulphs—Natchez and Baton Rouge. The flat or bottom is in general about two miles broad, though in some places nine or ten. The different water courses, {322} which run mostly into the Mississippi from the eastward have each their bottom lands of various breadths, but all comparatively much narrower than those of the Mississippi. The intervals are composed of chains of steep, high and broken hills, some cultivated, some covered with a thick cane brake, and forest trees of various descriptions, and others with beautiful open woods devoid of underwood. Some are evergreen with laurel and holly, and some, where the oak, walnut and poplar are the most predominant; being wholly brown in the winter, at which season others again are mixed, and at the fall of the leaf display a variety of colouring, green, brown, yellow and red.
On approaching the pine woods, the fertility of the soil ceases, but the climate becomes much more salubrious—that will however never draw inhabitants to it while a foot of cane brake land or river bottom remains to be settled.
The pine woods form a barrier between the Choctaw nation and the inhabitants of the Mississippi territory, which however does not prevent the Indians from bringing their squaws every fall and winter to aid in gathering in the cotton crop, for which they are paid in blankets, stroud, (a blue cloth used by them for clothing) handkerchiefs, and worsted binding of various colours, besides other articles of manufactured goods, which are charged to them at most exorbitant prices.
The cotton crop requiring constant attention, and children being useful in gathering it, the bulk of the inhabitants cannot afford to spare the labour of their children, so that education is almost totally neglected, and perhaps there are few people, a degree above the savage, more completely destitute of literary acquirements. But as they grow up, they can find time for attendance at courts of law, horse races, and festive, or rather bacchanalian meetings at taverns, where bad whiskey is drank to the greatest excess. Notwithstanding {323} this proneness to dissipation, to the neglect of manners, morals and property, there is a semblance of religion, so that any noisy sectarian preacher may always be sure of having a congregation, if his time of preaching is known a day beforehand.
With respect to the productions of the territory, cotton is the staple, and since the disappearance of specie it serves in lieu of money. The river bottom lands generally yield from eighteen hundred to two thousand pounds to the acre, the uplands about a thousand. Maize or Indian corn is produced on new land in the ratio of seventy or eighty bushels per acre, well attended. Horses, horned cattle, hogs and poultry might be raised in any quantity, yet cotton so entirely engrosses the planters, that they are obliged to Kentucky for their principal supply of horses and pork and bacon.
Wheat would grow well, but it is not attended to, so that all the wheat flour used, comes down the Mississippi. The middle states supply a quantity of salted beef, and the southern ones rice, which might also be raised abundantly.
When not destroyed by a frost in April, there are abundance of early apples and peaches; but the climate is too cold in winter for the orange or lemon to the northward of La Fourche, on the Mississippi, below Baton Rouge.
The woods abound with bear and deer, which are sometimes killed and sold by the Indian and white hunters. Wild turkeys on the hills, and water fowl of every description in the swamps are abundant, besides smaller game both four footed and feathered of various descriptions. But the chase, either with dogs or the gun is so laborious an occupation, from the difficulty of getting through the cane brakes and underwood, that one seldom meets with game at the tables of the planters.
{324} The Mississippi, the smaller water courses, the lakes and ponds abound with cat-fish of a superiour quality, and a variety of much more delicate and finer fish, yet one seldom meets with them, any more than with game.
In short, the tables of all classes of people have as little variety to boast of as those of any other civilized people in the world. Coffee, although double the price that it is bought for at New Orleans, is by custom become an article of the first necessity, which the wife of the poorest planter cannot do without, and it is of course the most common breakfast. Milk is used to excess, which I have reason to think is an additional cause of the prevalence of bilious disorders.