Chapters: V, VI, VIII, IX, X, XII, XVII, XIX, XXV, XXVI, XXXVI, XL, XLIV, XLV, XLVI, XLVIII, LVI

Chapter V

The time of the present journey was late in April, the nights being often very cold, but the days only moderately cool, and sometimes even warm. Snow lay in spots near the summit of the mountains; although in places lying toward the south and east vegetation was in rapid progress; so that nothing could be more in unison with our feelings than the renovated world amid the Alleghanies. (23)

We stood now on the pinnacle of the great Core Mountain and were gazing on the mingled grandeur and beauty of the scene.... [W]as I not on the dividing ridge between two worlds—the worn and faded East, the new and magic West?... I was eager to pass those peaks—some near as if they might be touched, and glorious with the new sunbeams, and some sinking down away off till the dim outline of the farthest visible tops melted into hazy distance! (23-24)

What noiseless streets! What green meadows! Did you ever see anything so picture like—so like patchwork? It would be so pleasant to live in that nice, quiet, snug picturesque village! (25)

Chapter VI

… When the shadows of the mountain began, at the decline of day, to darken the valleys, and silence and thoughtfulness pervaded the party, fancy easily brought back the red-man to his ancient haunts and made robbers crouch in ambush in every thicket and behind every tree. (28)

Chapter VIII

Easy is it to float down the Ohio—try to float up once. (33)

Chapter IX

"Who could have dreamed, my dear," said Mrs. Carlton to her husband, "these forests so picturesque when seen from Ohio, concealed such roads?" (46) [Mrs. Carlton is referring to the less than comfortable traveling conditions of the roads in Indiana.]

And I think the thrill or whatever it was, grew more and more intense on turning towards the onward road, and finding a suspicion in my mind that it only led to the endless repetition of the agreeable night scene around us.... (48)

Chapter X

What the oasis of dry desert is, all know; but the oasis of waste woods and waters is—a clearing with its dry land and sunlit opening. Such was now before us, not indeed sunlit—for the sun was long since set—and in the midst of a very extensive clearing was not a cabin, but a veritable two-story house.... (54)

Chapter XII

The day was pleasant; and on the day ridges, being free from great perils, we began to enjoy the wilderness of the primative [sic] world. And what grander than the three column-like trees ascending, many twenty, many thirty and some even forty feet, with scarce a branch to destroy the symmetry! (69)

Unable, from their number, to send out lateral branches, they had all grown straight up, hastening as in race, each to out-top its neighbor, till their high heads afforded a shelter to squirrels, far beyond the sprinkling of a shot-gun, and almost beyond reach of the rifle! The timber in the purchase was only trunk and top! Yet where a hurricane had passed, and by destroying a part, allowed room for the others to grow, there plainly could be seen how such could "toss giant branches"—branches in amplitude and strength greater than the trunks, or rather slim bodies of puny trees in modern graves and parks! (69)

Every noise now by bird or squirrel seemed serpentish; and every perfume of wild flower or blossom was like cucumbers, the odor of which resembles the fragrance of rattlesnakes, and every crooked dark stick in the leaves or twisting vines was a formidable reptile. (70)

Gay birds were warbling farewell songs with distinct and thrilling articulation, while some darting from bank to bank seemed rays of sunlight winged and glancing over the waters—such was their plumage. And squirrels, without fear, raced and sported on hoary and patriarchal trees so inclined towards the river, that from opposite banks they united their umbrageous tops in green and flowery arches above its bosom! (73)

The river was still swollen and turbulent from recent rains and although within its banks, it had barely retired from its overflowing. And now a glorious sunset was there, far away in the grand solitudes where century after century the gods of day had gone down while his last beams were pouring the rich mellow haze of evening over the distant homes of the East. (73)

...We soon lost sight of all roads, paths and blazes; and then hearing the sound of an axe still more to the left, traveled that direction by ear, through a wondrous wilderness of spice-wood, papaw, and twenty unknown bushes briers, and weeds, till we fell suddenly into a clearing, supposed to be our neighbors, Sam Littles. (75)

Chapter XVII

No hollow cavern in enormous trunks, where wolves and bears may lurk! No vast sheltering expanse of tops where panthers and wild cats may find security. How vain to think of crawling through a thicket of undergrowth to the leeside of a deer, stepping with moccasined foot—stirring no leaves—cracking no twig—shaking no bushes—till one can get within the magical distance, a hundred yards. (101)

Yes, I do steal off sometimes and try to fancy myself in the woods. Buy what are these scrawny little trees fenced in to prevent cattle from eating them down? Where is a squirrel, or a raccoon, or a fox, or a turkey to hide? And where can one lose himself and camp out? No grand and centurial trees here reaching up to heaven and sending roots to the centre of the earth! (101)

Chapter XVII

A bid meeting is often held in the woods in our delicious autumns. And nothing is more welcome [sic] to our young people hard at work till then, needing a holiday, than such a gathering. (115)

Chapter XIX

… just about dark I came across a tree what had been twisted off by a harrikin, and was lodged in the butt end on the stump; and the top on the ground was puttce much of a dry brush heap. (145)

… on following the aerial trace of bees, the hive was ascertained to be in a hollow limb of the largest patriarchal sire of the forest—a tree more than thirty feet in circumference! (182-83)

Chapter XXV

Our dark and illimitable forest then hid men of lion hearts, of iron nerves, of sure and deadly weapons! (185)

Laugh away, men of pomatum and essence, at Hoosiers, and corn crackers, and Buckeyes: yes! lace-coats, mow them down in an open plain with canister and grape, you safely encased behind bulwarks; or cut them to pieces with pigeon-breasted, mailed and helmed cuirassiers—but seek them not as enemies in their native or adopted woods! The place of your grave will be notched in their trees and you will never lie under polished marble, in fashionable or decorated cemetery! (186)

Where it is designed to make ‘a clearing,’ the owner has the trees cut down, or ‘deadened,’ that is girded by a deep cut, two inches wide. If the majority of the trees are thus girded, the field is called—‘a deadening’—otherwise it is ‘a clearing.’ Now, it is to a clearing the log-rolling, or for brevity sake, ‘a rolin,’ pertains. (194)

Chapter XXVI

Near the junction of the White River of Indiana and the Wabash, stands a sycamore fully ninety feet in circumference! Within its hollow can be stabled a dozen horses; and if a person take the centre of the ground circle, and hold it in his hand the middle of a pole fifteen feet long, he many twirl that pole, and yet touch no part of the inner tree! (183)

Ah! happy is the tree be dead; for it is destined, if not dead, to a dreadful end—to be burned alive! Oh poor tree! the former friends are compelled to become thy worst enemies—their several trunks are gigantic faggots! Alas! the pile rising up, as log after log rolls heavily against thy quivering column, amid our labour, and shouting and uproar, that pile, now surrounded and crowned with a tangled world of brushwood, is thy sumptuous and magnific [sic] pyre! (195)

Far and wide the forest was grandly illuminated and in returning home I often looked back and saw noble trees at the pyres, tossing their mighty arms and bowing their spreading tops for mercy and succour—like beings sending forth cries of agony unheard in that fiery chaos… I passed that clearing, the arena was yet smoking, although nothing remained of that part of the primeval forest, save heaps of ashes and a few blackened upright masses that far so many creatures has been the living bodies of lately martyred trees! (199)

Chapter XXXVI

The weather was luxurious, and the ride across the small prairies was to me, who now for the first time saw these natural meadows, indescribably bewitching; indeed, this first glimpse of the prairie world was like beholding an enchanted country!... Bunyan must have imagined a world like this meadowy land of wild and fragrant scents wafted by balmy airs from countless myriads of blossoms and flowers! (271-272)

Our way led through successive beautiful little prairies, separated by rich bottom lands of heavy timber and other interposing woody districts—the trees being all magnificently glorious in the autumnal colours of their dense foliage. (281)

Chapter XL

It may be something to live in clover; but what is life in a clover patch of a dozen rods, to life in a prairie corn-field of a thousand acres? (286)

That as it is likely we had been spirited into the Great Thicket of the White River, it would be best to work ahead and strike the river itself now, up or down.... (288)

In places, a black walnut, or hackberry or sycamore, having, like a Pelagian, an intrinsic virtue, beginning of the swamp; and had ever since kept a head so elevated as now to be overlooked miles around of the mazy world below, and presenting a trunk and boughs so wrapped in vines and parasites as to form a thicket within a thicket. (289-90)

Between us and the sounds, evidently not more than two hundred yards up river, interposed a dense and thorny rampart.... [W]e charged with vengeance of living battering rams.... [O]nward, onward, went we thus...and tumbled through into an open circular clearing of about fifty yards diameter! (291)

Chapter XLIV

The special use of the pony was manifested in fording mud holes, quicksands, quagmires, marshes, high waters, and the like. In vain did the rider pull up his limbs; in vain shrink away up toward the centre of his saddle—up followed the cream-colored mud in beech swamp, the black mud and water in bayous, the black mud itself in walnut and sugar lands, or the muddy water in turbid creeks and rivers. (316)

The waters had, indeed, fallen in a good degree and they were still decreasing, yet no person, a stranger to the West, could have looked on that foaming and eddying river leaping impetuous over the rocky bed, and have heard the echos of its many thunders calling from cliff to cliff, and from one dark cavern to another in the forest arching over the water. (319)

Many a boat had I rowed on the Delaware and the Schuylkill—often a skiff on the Ohio— ay! and pled and set over many a scow; but what avail civilized practice in propelling for the first time a hollow log, and with a small paddle, like a large mush-stick?—and across a raging torrent in a gloomy wilderness. (323)

Chapter XLV

Reader! I do think praise is the most magical thing in nature! In this case it nealy dried in expressibles! And on I followed, condoling myself for the other water in the boots, by singing—"possom up a gum tree." (326)

For many miles the land was low and level, and mostly covered with water in successive pools, seeming at a short distance, like parts of one immense lake of the woods! These pools were rarely more than a few inches deep, unless in cavities where trees had been torn up by riding around the prostrate tops, my friend had not expected quite so much water....(327)

Chapter XLVI

Yet was it nothing...to look on that half reclaimed son of the forest, while he urged our rude flatboat across the tumultuating waters of a river with an Indiana name—Wabash! and we on our way to an Indian battlefield—Tippecanoe. (332)

After this, we turned down the Wabash, keeping our eyes ever directed towards the mournful island of wood, till at last we doubled its cape, and lost sight of Tippecanoe forever. (340)

Chapter XLVIII

The camp proper was a parallelogramic clearing and was most of the day shaded by the superb forests trees, which admitted, here and there, a little meadow sunshine to gleam through the dense foliage upon their own dark forms, quivering in a kind of living shadow over the earth.... [I]ndeed, to the imaginative, there is very much to bewitch in the poetry and romance of a Western camp-meeting;—the wilderness, the gloom, the grandeur of our forests—the gleaming sunlight by day, as if good spirits were smiling on the sons of light, in their victories over the children of darkness....(345)

Chapter LVI

The sun was, indeed, ardent, and rejoicing like one to run a race, but then the dense foliage spread a screen over the pathway, while the balmy breaths of zephyrs, rich with perfume of wild flower and blossoms fanned our face, and sported with the forest leaf and spray. Beauteous birds and tribes of unseen animals and insects from every branch and every bushy lair or cavern, were pouring forth choral symphonies of praise. (434)

We beguiled the way, of course, with anecdote and story of adventures and mishaps till tired of telling and hearing; and then, recreation came on wings—in the shape of horseflies! (435)

And long time what seemed the path, dim always and sometimes obliterated, as it led far away into the gloom of impervious shades, now turning almost back to skirt an impassable thicket, now tumbling almost perpendicularly into a deep ravine, and now scaling its opposite side, then mounting a ridge, the circling a pond of dark and dangerous looking water, and then vanishing for a few moments, as of necessity it passed through patches of weeds and briars....(439)

I discerned the only semblance of a trace… I was soon hid in the shade of true wilderness. However romantic such a wild may be in print, my thoughts in the wilderness itself, were all concentrated on one object—a path. (439)