- ical herbs. The Ching Sang and Ipecacuanha are found,
for emetics. The vine is very luxuriant, and cultivated at Harmony with success; while the trees are full of gum. The Dogwood Bark is also found as efficient as the Peruvian, and the Sassafras tea is in general use for two or three months.
Great idleness prevails in the Illinois; little or no produce is yet raised. G. Flower had contracted with the American hunters, to raise and cultivate 500 acres of corn and grain; he finding land and seed, and they all the labour of raising and getting it fit for market, at nine dollars an acre. This bargain became void.
9th.—A doctor, of little or no skill, lives twelve miles distant, and this little settlement of Sandersville has no school for the children, who remain at home pestering their parents, and retrograding into barbarism. Mrs. Ingle dreads their mixing and associating with the race of children who surround them. A schoolmaster here would be welcomed with a salary of from 400 to 500 dollars a year, although not one of the first grade, but he must be content to live in a wilderness.
I feel, every day, more and more convinced that the western country is suited only to working families, like those of J. Ingle; where Mrs. Ingle, (delicately bred) and all turn out to work, as to-day, {240} and the other night to put out the approaching fires.
The bears and wolves have devoured several sows while farrowing; they are then weak and defenceless, and therefore an easy prey. Never did I behold such ghostly pigs as here. Soap, candles, sugar, cotton, leather, and woollen clothes, of a good quality, are here all made from the land, but not without the most formidable, unremitting industry on the part of the females. Filth and rags,
