The area of land on both sides of the Mississippi subjected to annual overflow, like the country surrounding the Nile, in Egypt, is very large.  There are localities thirty or forty miles away from the river where the height of the overflow of the previous year is plainly registered upon the trunks of the trees by a coating of yellow mud, which sometimes reaches as high as a man’s head.  This great region possesses vast tracts of rich land, as well as millions of acres of low swamps and bayou bottoms.

The traveller, the hunter, the zologist, and the botanist can all find here in these rich river bottoms a ready reward for any inconveniences experienced on the route.  Strange types of half-civilized whites, game enough to satisfy the most rapacious, beast and bird of peculiar species, and over all the immense forests of cypress, sweet-gums, Spanish-oaks, tulip-trees, sycamores, cotton-woods, white-oaks, &c., while the most delicate wild-flowers “waste their sweetness on the desert air.”  Across all this natural beauty the whisper of desolation casts a cloud, for here during most of the year arises the health-destroying malaria.

Upon the high lands the squatter builds his log cabin, and makes his clearing where the rich soil and warm sun assist his rude agricultural labors, and he is rewarded with a large crop of maize and sweet potatoes.  These, with bacon from his herd of wandering pigs, give sustenance to his family of children, who, hatless and bonnetless, roam through the woods until the sun bleaches their hair to the color of flax.  With tobacco, whiskey, and ammunition for himself, and an ample supply of snuff for his wife, he drags out an indolent existence; but he is the pioneer of American civilization, and as he migrates every few years to a more western wilderness, his lands are frequently occupied by a more intelligent and industrious class, and his improvements are improved upon.  The new-comer, with greater ambition and more ample means, raises cotton instead of corn, and depends upon the Ohio valley for a supply of that cereal.

Wednesday, January 5th, was a sunny and windy day.  The Arkansas shores afforded me a protection from the wind as I rowed down towards Fort Pillow, which, according to the map of the United States Engineer Corps, is situated upon Chickasaw Bluff No. 1, though some writers and map-makers designate the Columbus Bluff, below the mouth of the Ohio, as the first Chickasaw Bluff.  The site of Fort Pillow is about thirty feet above the water.  It commands the low country opposite, and two reaches of the river for a long distance.  A little below the fort, on the right bank of the river, was an extensive cotton-field, still white with the flossy cellulose.  Here I landed under the shady trees, and gathered cotton, the result of peaceful labor.  Truly had the sword been beaten into the ploughshare, and the spear into a pruning-hook, for above me frowned down Fort Pillow, the scene of the terrible negro massacre in our late war.  Now the same sun shone so brightly upon the graves scattered here and there, and warmed into life the harvest sown in peace.