according to what I have been told, the winters are as severe in Tennessea as in any parts of France.
West Tennessea is not so salubrious as Holston and Kentucky. A warmer and damper climate is the cause of intermittent fevers being more common there. Emigrants, for the first year of their settling there, and even travellers, are, during that season, subject to an exanthemetic affection similar to the itch. This malady, with which I began to be attacked {238} before I reached Fort Blount, yielded to a cooling regimen, and repeated bathings in the rivers Cumberland and Roaring. This disorder is very appropriately called in the country the Tennessean itch.
{239} CHAP. XXVI
Different kinds of produce of West Tennessea.—Domestic manufactories for cottons encouraged by the legislature of this state.—Mode of letting out estates by some of the emigrants.
West Tennessea, or Cumberland, being situated under a more southerly latitude than Kentucky, is particularly favourable to the growth of cotton; in consequence of which the inhabitants give themselves up almost entirely to it, and cultivate but little more corn, hemp, and tobacco than what is necessary for their own consumption.
The soil, which is fat and clayey, appears to be a recent dissolving of vegetable substances, and seems, {240} till now, less adapted for the culture of corn than that of Indian wheat. The harvests of this grain are as plentiful as in Kentucky; the blades run up ten or twelve feet high; and the ears, which grow six or seven feet from the earth, are from nine to ten inches in length, and proportionate
