We were told the cows on this part of the Missouri, at certain seasons of the year, give milk so deleterious as to prove fatal, when taken into the stomach; and this effect is commonly attributed to a poisonous plant, said to be frequent in the low grounds, where it is eaten by the cattle. They have a disease called the _milk sickness_: it commences with nausea and dizziness, succeeded by headache, pain in the stomach and bowels, and finally, by a prostration of strength, which renders the patient unable to stand; a general torpor soon ensues, succeeded { 77} by death. It is a common belief that the flesh of animals, that have eaten of this poisonous weed, is noxious, and that horses are destroyed by it.
We have heard it remarked by the inhabitants of the Ohio below the rapids, that the milk of cows running at large in August is poisonous; and this they do not fail to attribute to the effect of noxious plants; and in some places they point out to you one, and in another place another vegetable, to which they assign these properties. The inhabitants generally seem to have no suspicion that milk, unless it is poisoned, can be an unwholesome article of diet; and we have been often surprised to see it given to those labouring under fever. Throughout the western states, and particularly in the more remote settlements, much use is made of butter-milk, and soured milk in various forms; all of which they sell to travellers. Below Cote Sans Dessein we paid, for new milk, twenty-five cents per gallon, and for soured milk, eighteen and three-fourth cents. At that place twenty-five cents per quart were demanded by the French settlers. It is commonly remarked that the French, as well as the Indians, who have been long in the immediate vicinity of the whites, charge a much higher price for any article than the Anglo-Americans, under the same circumstances. Emigrants from the southern states prefer sour milk; and the traveller's taste in this particular, we have often observed, forms a test to discover whether he is entitled to the opprobrious name of _Yankee_, as the people of the northern and eastern states rarely choose sour milk. We have found that in some of the sickliest parts of the valley of the Mississippi, where bilious and typhoid fevers prevail, through the summer and autumn, the most unrestrained use is made of butter, milk, eggs, and similar articles of diet. Dr. Baldwin was of opinion that the _milk sickness_ of the Missouri did not originate from any deleterious vegetable substance eaten by the cows, but { 78} was a species of typhus, produced by putrid exhalations, and perhaps aggravated by an incautious use of a milk diet.