It is about seven years since several families from New England commenced this beautiful settlement. The situation is almost a peninsula, formed by a continued bending of the river in an extent of four miles, the whole of which is cultivated in front, but the clearing extends back only one hundred and fifty rods, where is a lake, and some low swampy land, always inundated during the summer freshes. There are sixteen families, who occupy each a front of only forty rods, so that the settlement has the appearance of a straggling village. The soil is very fertile, as a proof of which, Mrs. Hubbard, to whose house I went for milk, informed me that last year she had gathered seventeen thousand pounds of cotton in {281} seed, from nine acres, which, allowing it to lose about three quarters in cleaning, left five hundred pounds of clean cotton to the acre, which is a great excess of produce over the West India or Georgia plantations, where an acre rarely yields more than two hundred and seventy-five pounds. At this early season the corn was well advanced, and I observed some in tassel.
Palmyra is one of the most beautiful settlements in the Mississippi Territory, the inhabitants having used all that neatness and industry so habitual to the New Englanders. They now complain that they have too little land, and several of them have appropriated more on the banks of a lake about a mile behind the opposite bank of the Mississippi, in Louisiana. I think the lake and swamp behind Palmyra must render it unhealthy, and the pale sallow countenances of the settlers, with their confession that they are annually subject to fevers and agues, when the river begins to subside, confirms me in my opinion. Indeed this remark may be applied to the banks of the Mississippi in the whole of its long course, between the conflux of the Ohio and the Gulph of Mexico.
June 6th.-We proceeded this morning through the
