1821.  I left New York for Chicago on the 16th June—­hurried rapidly through the western part of that State—­passed up Lake Erie from Buffalo, and reached Detroit just in season to embark, on the 4th of July.  General Cass was ready to proceed, with his canoe-elege in the water.  We passed, the same day, down the Detroit River, and through the head of Lake Erie into the Maumee Bay to Port Lawrence, the present site, I believe, of the city of Toledo.  This was a distance of seventy miles, a prodigious day’s journey for a canoe.  But we were shot along by a strong wind, which was fair when we started, but had insensibly increased to a gale in Lake Erie, when we found it impossible to turn to land without the danger of filling.  The wind, though a gale, was still directly aft.  On one occasion I thought we should have gone to the bottom, the waves breaking in a long series, above our heads, and rolling down our breasts into the canoe.  I looked quietly at General Cass, who sat close on my right, but saw no alarm in his countenance.  “That was a fatherly one,” was his calm expression, and whatever was thought, little was said.  We weathered and entered the bay silently, but with feelings such as a man may be supposed to have when there is but a step between him and death.

We ascended the Miami Valley, through scenes renowned by the events of two or three wars.  I walked over the scene of Dudley’s defeat in 1812; of Wayne’s victory in 1793; and of the sites of forts Deposit and Defiance, and other events celebrated in history.  From Fort Defiance, which is at the junction of the River Auglaize, we rode to Fort Wayne, sleeping in a deserted hut half way.  We passed the summit to the source of the Wabash, horseback, sleeping at an Indian house, where all the men were drunk, and kept up a howling that would have done credit to a pack of hungry wolves.  The Canadians, who managed our canoe, in the mean time brought it from water to water on their shoulders, and we again embarked, leaving our horses at the forks of the Wabash.  The whole of this long and splendid valley, then wild and in the state of nature, till below the Tippecanoe, we traversed, day by day, stopping at Vincennes, Terrehaute, and a hundred other points, and entered the Ohio and landed safely at Shawneetown.  Here it was determined to send the Canadians with our canoe, round by water to St. Louis, while we hired a sort of stage-wagon to cross the prairies.  I visited the noted locality of fluor spar in Pope County, Illinois, and crossing the mountainous tract called the Knobs, rejoined the party at the Saline.  Here I found my old friend Enmenger, of Kemp and Keen memory, to be the innkeeper.  On reaching St. Louis, General Cass rode over the country to see the Missouri, while I, in a sulky, revisited the mines in Washington, and brought back a supply of its rich minerals.  We proceeded in our canoe up the River Illinois to the rapids, at what is called Fort Rock, or Starved Rock, and from