The soil is rich beyond any tracts of the same character in the west.  Beautiful white, gray, and red marbles are found here; and sometimes fine specimens of rock-crystals.  Salt springs abound.  It has lead mines; and iron ore is no where more abundant.  Its salt-petre caves are most astonishing curiosities.  One of them has been traced ten miles.  Another, on a high point of Cumberland mountain, has a perpendicular descent, the bottom of which has never been sounded.  They abound in prodigious vaulted apartments and singular chambers, the roofs springing up into noble arches, or running along for miles in regular oblong excavations.  The gloomy grandeur, produced by the faint illumination of torches in these immense subterranean retreats, may be imagined, but not described.  Springs rise, and considerable streams flow through them, on smooth limestone beds.

This is the very home of subterranean wonders, showing the noblest caves in the world.  In comparison with them, the celebrated one at Antiparos is but a slight excavation.  Spurs of the mountains, called the “Enchanted Mountains,” show traces impressed in the solid limestone, of the footsteps of men, horses, and other animals, as distinctly as though they had been made upon clay mortar.  In places the tracks are such as would be made by feet, that had slidden upon soft clay in descending declivities.

Prodigious remains of animals are found near the salines.  Whole trees are discovered completely petrified; and to crown the list of wonders, in turning up the soil, graves are opened, which contain the skeletons of figures, who must have been of mature age.  Paintings of the sun, moon, animals, and serpents, on high and apparently inaccessible cliffs, out of question the work of former ages, in colors as fresh as if recently laid on, and in some instances, just and ingenious in delineation, are a subject of untiring speculation.  Even the streams in this region of wonders have scooped out for themselves immensely deep channels hemmed in by perpendicular walls of limestone, sometimes springing up to a height of three or four hundred feet.  As the traveller looks down upon the dark waters rolling so far beneath him, seeming to flow in a subterranean world, he cannot but feel impressions of the grandeur of nature stealing over him.

It is not to be supposed, that persons, whose sole object in entering the country was to explore it, would fail to note these surprising traces of past races, the beautiful diversity of the aspect of the country, or these wonders of nature exhibited on every hand.  Being neither incurious nor incompetent observers, their delineations were graphic and vivid.

    “Their teachers had been woods and rills,
    The silence, that is in the starry sky;
    The sleep, that is among the lonely hills.”

They advanced into Kentucky so far, as to their imaginations with the fresh and luxuriant beauty of its lawns, its rich cane-brakes and flowering forests.  To them it was a terrestrial paradise for it was full of game.  Deer, elk, bears, buffaloes, panthers, wolves, wild-cats, and foxes, abounded in the thick tangles of the green cane; and in the open woods, pheasants, partridges, and turkeys, were as plenty as domestic fowls in the old settlements.