After a short stay in Buffalo and a visit to Niagara Falls and the battle ground of Chippewa, the boy took a steamboat to Cleveland, where happily he found a friend in Sherlock J. Andrews, Esquire, a successful attorney and a man of kindly impulses.  Finding the city attractive and the requirements for the Ohio bar less rigorous, Douglass determined to drop anchor in this pleasant port.  Mr. Andrews encouraged him in this purpose, offering the use of his office and law library.  In a single year Douglass hoped to gain admission to the bar.  With characteristic energy, he began his studies.  Fate ruled, however, that his career should not be linked with the Western Reserve.  Within a few days he was prostrated by that foe which then lurked in the marshes and lowlands of the West—­foe more dreaded than the redman—­malarial typhoid.  For four weary months he kept his bed, hovering between life and death, until the heat of summer was spent and the first frosts of October came to revive him.  Urgent appeals now came to him to return home; but pride kept him from yielding.  After paying all his bills, he still had forty dollars left.  He resolved to push on farther into the interior.[18]

He was far from well when he took the canal boat from Cleveland to Portsmouth on the Ohio river; but he was now in a reckless and adventurous mood.  He would test his luck by pressing on to Cincinnati.  He had no well-defined purpose:  he was in a listless mood, which was no doubt partly the result of physical exhaustion.  From Cincinnati he drifted on to Louisville, and then to St. Louis.  His small funds were now almost all spent.  He must soon find occupation or starve.  His first endeavor was to find a law office where he could earn enough by copying and other work to pay his expenses while he continued his law studies.  No such opening fell in his way and he had no letters of introduction here to smooth his path.  He was now convinced that he must seek some small country town.  Hearing that Jacksonville, Illinois, was a thriving settlement, he resolved to try his luck in this quarter.  With much the same desperation with which a gambler plays his last stake, he took passage on a river boat up the Illinois, and set foot upon the soil of the great prairie State.[19]

A primitive stage coach plied between the river and Jacksonville.  Too fatigued to walk the intervening distance, Douglass mounted the lumbering vehicle and ruefully paid his fare.  From this point of vantage he took in the prairie landscape.  Morgan County was then but sparsely populated.  Timber fringed the creeks and the river bottoms, while the prairie grass grew rank over soil of unsuspected fertility.  Most dwellings were rude structures made of rough-hewn logs and designed as makeshifts.  Wildcats and wolves prowled through the timber lands in winter, and game of all sorts abounded.[20] As the stage swung lazily along, the lad had ample time to let the first impression of the prairie landscape sink deep.