general Jackson, the Choctaws are now about to relinquish the east side of the Mississippi, and to exchange their lands for others in the territory of Arkansa, situated betwixt Arkansa and Red rivers, and extending from the Quapaw reservation to the Pottoe. In consequence of this singular but impolitic measure of crowding the aborigines together, so as to render them inevitably hostile to each other, and to the frontier which they border, several counties of the Arkansa territory will have to be evacuated by their white inhabitants, who will thus be ruined in their circumstances, at the very period when the general survey of the lands had inspired them with the confident expectation of obtaining a permanent and legal settlement.
{237} February 4th.] To-day we left Natchez, and in the distance of 15 miles passed Ellis's Cliffs, another portion of re-entering high land, broken into a very picturesque landscape, decorated with pines and magnolias. These cliffs, no way essentially different from those above, present here, immediately above the carbonaceous bed, a very thick stratum of white sandy clay, so far indurated as to withstand the washing which has carried away the superincumbent soil.
In the course of the night we arrived at Fort Adams,[230] another spur of the high land; a term which can only be used in reference to the alluvion, as the apparent undulation is here nothing more than an adventitious subsidence or washing of the soil, the ravines and gullies being occasioned by its friable nature. Rock, however, appears at
- [Footnote: an eastern running from Point Remove on the Arkansas to a point three miles
below the mouth of Little River. The portion of this tract lying within the limits of Arkansas was ceded to the United States January 20, 1825.—Ed.]
