The country soon became broken, and on each side of me rose rough hills. I knew at once I would be forced to cross the ridge, and set manfully to the task. As I progressed the scenery became every mile more grand, and I began to be thankful for the accident which had led me into the bewildering maze.
I have stood on tall mountains, having threaded the Alleghany, and looked on the boldest peaks of wilder lands. Above rose a tall peak with half precipitous sides, its base skirted with a dense growth of the Osage orange. This strange and peculiar tree merits a more minute description. It belongs, I believe, to the same genus with the box-tree of our forest, for from its limbs and leaves, when broken, exudes a milky gelatinous humor, not unlike that of the fig and India-rubber plant. Its leaves are smooth and glazed and so precisely like those of the Florida orange that the two cannot easily be distinguished. It bears a large fruit in character similar to the balls of the sycamore, but which becomes during the process of decay a noisome pulp, and is said to be a deadly poison. The size of the fruit is about that of the cocoa-nut, divested of its husk, and the heighth of the tree about thirty-five feet, with thick, gnarled limbs, covered with long, straight spines, like those of the honey acacia. By the Canadian colonists of Arkansas and the French of Louisiana it was called the _bois d’arc_, from the fact that of this the Natches and Opelousas made their bows. This beautiful growth is now rapidly disappearing, it having been discovered that it furnishes a dye of a brilliant yellow, long a desideratum in the arts. During the last few years many cargoes have been sent to France, and the cutting it has, like the procuring of log-wood, become a distinct and important branch of industry. Many stories are told of this tree which would make us believe it exerts an influence scarcely less baleful than that of the fabulous Upas tree of Borneo, popular superstition attributing to it the deadly disease of man and brute known as the “milk sickness.”
The base of the peak before me was skirted with thickets of this beautiful tree, intermingled with the dog-wood, then in the glory of its flower, and three or four varieties of the acacia and Canadian redbud. Here and there on the very hill-side were expanses grown up with the tall green-cane and the beautiful Mexican oats. Through such a growth I commenced my ascent, and soon passed by the sinuosities of an Indian trail into an expanse of cupriferous volcanic rock, almost without any other growth than the red-root, or Indian tea. Passing through this, I came into a belt of tall pines, reaching far above the crest of the peak. No engineer could have constructed a glacis with a more regular inclination than this portion of the mountain displayed. At last I stood upon the crest, and a prospect opened before me I have never seen surpassed or equaled. I was on the very backbone of the ridge, and before me lay a succession of peaks, gradually descending into the bosom of a vale perhaps ten miles wide, while beyond this happy valley rose another ridge, parallel, descending gradually as the one on which I stood had become elevated. A clear, cold stream ran at the foot of the peak on which I was, and amid the stillness of a calm spring day I distinctly heard the murmur of its ripples. Down the bleak hill-sides of the other ridge I could trace more than one silver line which marked the descent of tributary rills. I could have remained long on that bald mountain-peak, but was warned by the descent of the sun to proceed downward. Taking the horses by the bridle, for I committed the care of the pack-mule to poor Barny, I began carefully to follow the pathway, and was ultimately enabled to reach the base in spite of sundry falls of the heavy pack, which, in spite of discipline, wrung hearty curses from poor Barny’s over-burdened heart. I encamped at the foot of the peak, on a branch of the Boggy, or _Bogue_, itself a tributary of the Red.