The descriptions and advice which prospectors in the west sent home are exemplified in a letter of F.X.  Martin, written in New Orleans in 1911, to a friend in eastern North Carolina.  The lands, he said, were the most remunerative in the whole country; a planter near Natchez was earning $270 per hand each year.  The Opelousas and Attakapas districts for sugar, and the Red River bottoms for cotton, he thought, offered the best opportunities because of the cheapness of their lands.  As to the journey from North Carolina, he advised that the start be made about the first of September and the course be laid through Knoxville to Nashville.  Traveling thence through the Indian country, safety would be assured by a junction with other migrants.  Speed would be greater on horseback, but the route was feasible for vehicles, and a traveler would find a tent and a keg of water conducive to his comfort.  The Indians, who were generally short of provisions in spring and summer, would have supplies to spare in autumn; and the prevailing dryness of that season would make the streams and swamps in the path less formidable.  An alternative route lay through Georgia; but its saving of distance was offset by the greater expanse of Indian territory to be crossed, the roughness of the road and the frequency of rivers.  The viewing of the delta country, he thought, would require three or four months of inspection before a choice of location could safely be made.[14]

[Footnote 14:  Plantation and Frontier, II, 197-200.]

The procedure of planters embarking upon long distance migration may be gathered from the letters which General Leonard Covington of Calvert County, Maryland, wrote to his brother and friends who had preceded him to the Natchez district.  In August, 1808, finding a prospect of selling his Maryland lands, he formed a project of carrying his sixty slaves to Mississippi and hiring out some of them there until a new plantation should be ready for routine operation.  He further contemplated taking with him ten or fifteen families of non-slaveholding whites who were eager to migrate under his guidance and wished employment by him for a season while they cast about for farms of their own.  Covington accordingly sent inquiries as to the prevailing rates of hire and the customary feeding and treatment of slaves.  He asked whether they were commonly worked only from “sun to sun,” and explained his thought by saying, “It is possible that so much labor may be required of hirelings and so little regard may be had for their constitutions as to render them in a few years not only unprofitable but expensive.”  He asked further whether the slaves there were contented, whether they as universally took wives and husbands and as easily reared children as in Maryland, whether cotton was of more certain yield and sale than tobacco, what was the cost of clearing land and erecting rough buildings, what the abundance and quality of fruit, and what the nature of the climate.