I left my baggage, consisting of two well-filled trunks, in charge of Mr. Ellis, a worthy innkeeper of the town, and when I was ready to continue my way on foot for St. Louis, I was joined in this journey by Messrs. Kemp and Keen, my fellow-voyagers on the water from Louisville. We set out on the 26th of the month. The weather was hot and the atmosphere seemed to be lifeless and heavy. Our road lay over gentle hills, in a state of nature. The grass had but in few places been disturbed by the plough, or the trees by the axe. The red clay soil seemed fitter for the miner than the farmer.
At the distance of seven miles, we came to a remarkable locality of springs strongly impregnated with sulphur, which bubbled up from the ground. They were remarkably clear and cold, and deposited a light sediment of sulphur, along the little rills by which they found an outlet into a rapid stream, which was tributary to the Mississippi.
Five miles beyond these springs, we reached the valley of the Merrimack, just at nightfall; and notwithstanding the threatening atmosphere, and the commencement of rain, before we descended to the stream, we prevailed with the ferryman to go down and set us over, which we urged with the view of reaching a house within less than a mile of the other bank. He landed us at the right spot; but the darkness had now become so intense that we could not keep the road, and groped our way along an old wheel-track into the forest. It also came on to rain hard. We at last stood still. We were lost in utter darkness, and exposed to a pelting storm. After a while we heard a faint stroke of a cow bell. We listened attentively; it was repeated at long intervals, but faintly, as if the animal was housed. It gave us the direction, which was quite different from the course we had followed. No obstacle, though there were many, prevented us from reaching the house, where we arrived wet and hungry, and half dead with fatigue.
The Merrimack, in whose valley we were thus entangled, is the prime outlet of the various streams of the mine country, where Renault, and Arnault, and other French explorers, expended their researches during the exciting era of the celebrated illusory Mississippi scheme.