The next day a milder but damper atmosphere greeted me.  By noon I had rowed twenty-two miles, and was off the mouth of Big Bone Lick Creek, in Kentucky.  Two miles from the mouth of this creek are some springs, the waters of which are charged with sulphur and salt.  The most interesting feature of this locality was the fact that here were buried in one vast bed the fossil bones of “The Mastodon and the Arctic Elephant.”  Formerly these prehistoric relics of a departed fauna were scattered over the surface of the earth.  The first mention of this locality was made, I think, by a French explorer in 1649.  It is again referred to by a British subject in 1765.  A rare copy of a private journal kept by this early explorer of the Ohio, Colonel George Croghan, was published in G. W. Featherstonhaugh’s “American Journal of Geology,” of December, 1831.  This monthly publication ended with its first year’s existence.  Only five copies of this number were known to be in print three years since, when Professor Thomas, of Mount Holly, New Jersey, encouraged the issue of a reprint of one hundred copies, from which some of our public libraries have been supplied.

This Colonel George Croghan, in company with deputies from the Seneca, Shawnesse, and Delaware nations, left Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh), in two bateaux, on the 15th of May, 1765, bound on a mission to the Indian tribes of the Ohio valley.  On the 29th of the month the expedition reached the Little Miami River.  Colonel Croghan there commences his account of the Big Bone Lick region.  He says:  “May 30th we passed the Great Miami River, about thirty miles from the little river of that name, and in the evening arrived at the place where the elephants’ bones are found, when we encamped, intending to take a view of the place next morning.  This day we came about seventy miles.  The country on both sides level, and rich bottoms, well watered.  May 31st.  Early in the morning we went to the great Lick, where those bones are only found, about four miles from the river, on the south-east side.  In our way we passed through a fine-timbered, clear wood:  we passed into a large road, which the buffaloes have beaten, spacious enough for two wagons to go abreast, and leading straight into the Lick.  It appears that there are vast quantities of these bones lying five or six feet under ground, which we discovered in the bank at the edge of the Lick.  We found here two tusks above six feet long; we carried one, with some other bones, to our boat, and set off.”

In relation to the aboriginal inhabitants of the country of the Ohio valley, it is interesting to note that the “Six Nations” held six of the gates to New York, and were strong because they were united, for Colonel Croghan’s enumeration of them shows that they had only two thousand one hundred and twenty fighting-men, and were never supported by more than about two thousand warriors from tributary tribes, when at war with the whites.