BY FAYETTE ROBINSON.
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Every one knows of the Illinois River emptying into the Mississippi at Alton, and of the fertile champagne country it waters. All are familiar with the traditions of the hardships undergone in its discovery by the good fathers Hennepin and Marquette; of the stirring wars of the Illinois, Potawatamie and Peoria Indians, and of the recollections of that cordon of military posts by which France united Detroit with the great point d’appui of Fort Chartres, built near where Trinity now stands, but of which scarcely a trace remains, except a portion of the curtain and bastions. These are the associations which rise in the mind of most persons at the word Illinois, which to me, however, is suggestive of another train of ideas. In a south-western direction from the point of confluence of the Gasconade and Missouri Rivers, extends a broad chain of mountains, of which little except the name Ozark is known. Many streams which elsewhere would be esteemed large rivers roll from its valleys northward into the Osage, and in a southern direction into the Arkansas. After crossing two-thirds of the state of Missouri, this ridge passes through the north-west county of the State of Arkansas, and thence reaches across the country of the Cherokees and Chactas far into Texas. Through the passes of this range many important rivers flow, among which are the Arkansas, Red and Canadienne. There is a striking peculiarity in this mountain range—that all the waters flowing from it, either northward or southward, are clear as crystal, while all the other streams of the country are foul and turbid. On one of these streams, the Neosho, stands the lonely post of Fort Gibson, and twenty miles below is another river called the Illinois. This is not a large stream, measuring certainly not more than a hundred miles, but is one of the most picturesque imaginable. Flowing between two ridges of the Ozark, it winds like a serpent around the bases of the mountains, which now tower in immensity, clad to their very summits with huge pines, or again gradually decrease in size until they spread into rich and luxuriant prairies. The road from Fort Gibson to Fayetteville, in Arkansas, is along this stream, which it crosses more than a dozen times, and thus enables the traveler to behold all the wonderful beauties of the scenery. Words cannot describe it adequately. I have often in fording the river, which may at many places be done without wetting the saddle-girths, looked up the bed. Smooth and transparent as glass, rolling over pebbles of silex and crystal, it looks like a band of silver beneath the arched boughs of the aspen and gigantic walnut trees, while the immediate banks were fringed by the long-leaved willow and cane. Not unfrequently a single glance would reveal to me, when lost in admiration at the quiet beauty of such a scene, another of a far different yet equally pleasing style. The current would quicken—small islets would appear, scarcely more than a rood in breadth, against which the waters would leap and lash themselves into fury. The current would quicken yet more, and in the distance a rugged mountain would be seen. Against the base of this the waters would rush and whirl into eddies over the seething surface of which wild-fowl almost constantly floated. The low grounds on the river abounded with the sloe or scuppanon, and at distances of every mile or two, natural vineyards, bearing a large, rich, luscious grape, without a particle of the musky flavor which characterises almost all the American uvæ, were seen. So immense were these vines that they ran from tree to tree, masking every thing with their foliage, and displaying their grand clusters over the barren limbs of the stunted oak or hickory. I have called the Illinois a beautiful river, and have spoken of the lucidness of its water—I can give an illustration of the latter which is most apropos. Several years since I was stationed on the bank of this stream with a small detachment of men, and without any other officer. In the long August days, when the prairies were burned, and scarcely a breath of air was to be had in the forests, I used to while away many weary hours upon the banks of the river either fishing or bathing. One day I amused myself with an Indian lance in killing the fine buffalo-fish, which I could see distinctly in the translucent waters. I had posed myself on the bow of the boat in pursuit of one peculiarly large fish which shot up the stream with the rapidity of an arrow. The soldier who sat at the stern of the boat, a very active and nervous man, (he was killed, poor fellow, at the storming of Taos, in New Mexico,) drove the boat after the quarry with scarcely less rapidity. At last I had overtaken him, the boat hung above him, like a gigantic leaf in the atmosphere, which could scarcely be distinguished from the water below. Poising myself, I drove the lance into the fish, and a second afterward, to my amazement, was floundering ten feet below the surface of the water, and probably yet twenty from the pebbly bottom. I would have sworn the water was not more than four feet deep, and scrambled out I know not how, for I could never swim—not, however, until I had upset the boat and made poor Orndorf a sharer in my calamity. The clearness of the water, surpassing any thing I have ever seen, is only approached by the one spring near Fort Fanning, in Florida, upon which so much inquiry has been expended. I would myself pronounce it the famous fountain of health for which De Leon sought so long, were it not that every human being who drinks of its transparent waters, unless craftily qualified, dies with that most loathsome of all diseases, the ague and fever.
The first white man who ever trod in the valleys of the Ozark was the famous Fernando de Soto. About the year 1539 or 1540, this gallant soldier, capitan-general of Florida, and a marquis, made a voyage to his commandery, for the purpose of conquering it. Sailing from Havana he landed at the bay of the Holy Spirit, now called Tampa, Hillsborough, Honda, etc., and occupied an Indian village not far from the mouth of the Manittee River, and just opposite the present post of Fort Brooke. The old ruins are still visible there, and the trace of an aqueduct or canal which appears at some distant day to have connected the waters of the great interior lakes with the gulf. People say the ruins are the remnant of an old Spanish fort; but half a glance will satisfy any one that all the Spanish troops ever in North America could not have constructed that aqueduct, which to all appearance is old as the city of Seville. The ruins belonged evidently to some older race, and are very curious though they have nothing to do with De Soto.
De Soto marched through Florida across the country of Apalache Indians, with whom he had a fight, across the Mississippi toward Mexico. De Soto, first of Europeans, saw the Mississippi, and crossed it somewhere near Memphis, if the account given by old Biedma, his historian, of topography be true. Thence he now passed through the now State of Arkansas, crossing the Ozark Ridge, passing over the Red River, and marching along the false Wachita until he came to the famous Rio Grande, since famous for the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, and celebrated by the Mexican poet,[[1]] Ho Axe de Saltillo. De Soto did not reach New Spain, but was forced to retrace his steps, died, and was thrown by his soldiers into the Mississippi, to prevent the natives from mutilating his remains. It was a fitting tomb for so great a man. Any one who wishes to read all the items of this great march may find them in old Biedma’s strange book, in the vidas de los Conquistadores, or as those books are somewhat rare, in the Compendium of Discoveries until 1573, by Conway Robinson, Esq., of Richmond, Va., a person who devotes himself for amusement and relaxation to digging out the gems of strange old books most persons would think it hard work to read.
De Soto first looked on these Ozark Mountains and a weary time his men-at-arms, in coats of mail and chain armor, must have had to climb them. They were then, as they were until very recently, uninhabited, and the home of all kinds of wild beasts known on the continent. The black bear, the cougar, catamount, deer and elk, were found among its ravines and the glades at their foot, and even now old beaver-dams attest the existence of those bestial republicans on almost all the minor streams which run into the Illinois. The land is barren, except upon the immediate bank of the river, and the mountains seem masses of pebbles similar in character to those over which the river runs. Strangely enough gigantic pines grow upon the mountains, the dark foliage of which, seen even in the sunlight, looks, compared with that of other trees, like the shadows cast by what Schiller calls
Fliegende Wolken, Segler des Luft,
over the earth during a windy day of March. The table-land, however, at the top of what I may call the secondary hills, is covered with what are called black-jacks, the ugliest and most ungainly of all things on the surface of the earth, not excepting the Mexican cactus, which is like no other thing animal or vegetable, except the porcupine. The hills seem vast masses of limestone, with the granite occasionally showing itself. I have no doubt of the richness of the soil in mineral wealth, copper being everywhere apparent, and the Ozark Mountains evidently connecting themselves with the Sierra Madre and Cordillera of Mexico. Some day the gold-hunter will deform this beautiful land, the vast groves and of timber which crown its mountains will fall. Worse than all, the picturesque Illinois will be deformed and forced to pass through some series of plank troughs in the gold-washing establishment of Messrs. Jones, Smith & Co.
In 1837 these mountains were uninhabited. One road wound among the intricacies of the mountains between Fort Gibson and the village of Fayetteville. After leaving the Methodist Mission of Prospect Hill smoke was scarcely seen by the traveler until he had entered the limits of Arkansas. There were a few hunting and bridle-paths, leading in a direction parallel to the road, which were frequented exclusively by the smugglers engaged in the nefarious business of selling whiskey to the Indians. Since then a mighty change has taken place. On the removal of the Cherokee Indians west, the North Carolina band selected these hills as most like their old homes and established themselves among them. Hamlets grew up in the valleys and farms were opened; so that in a short time the intelligent Cherokee citizens, second to no agricultural class in the world, followed in their train, and large plantations were opened. One of these colonists, the well-known chief, Bushyhead, has a magnificent estate comprising a prairie and grove of about one thousand acres, which has none to surpass it in the country. A wooded knoll rises at the back of his house, to the heighth of about 250 feet, and on a calm summer-day the ripple of the Illinois may be heard in the distance through the forests and green corn-fields. The writer has often partaken of his hospitality, and has been a witness of the prosperity and happiness of his whole household, Indian and Negro, (he has many slaves.) This happiness would be without alloy but that the Indian always knows he is but a tenant at will of the soil he stands upon, and looks back, perhaps with regret, to the days when his forefathers wandered in savage independence on the shores of the Atlantic. On the other side of the Neosho River the mountains are higher and wilder, and even now desolate; and in the year 1840 I crossed that portion of the ridge on duty, and have a strange tale to tell of it.
After a furlough of some years, I returned in 1840 to the west, and after reporting for duty to the headquarters of the department, was ordered to join a squadron of my regiment then stationed on the Red River. The navigation of the western rivers was then most uncertain, and I was ordered to cross the intermediate country by land instead of trusting to the tortuous navigation of the Arkansas, emphatically one of those streams of which John Randolph said, “they were dry in summer and choked up with ice during the winter.”