ain to be drawn
off by evaporation, or absorbed by an adhesive soil. Hence the middle
of our large, level prairies are wet, and for several weeks portions of
them are covered with water. To remedy this inconvenience completely,
and render all this portion of soil dry and productive, only requires a
ditch or drain of two or three feet deep to be cut into the nearest
ravine. In many instances, a single furrow with the plough, would drain
many acres. At present, this species of inundated land offers no
inconvenience to the people, except in the production of miasm, and even
that, perhaps, becomes too much diluted with the atmosphere to produce
mischief before it reaches the settlements on the borders of the
prairie. Hence the inference is correct, that our inundated lands
present fewer obstacles to the settlement and growth of the country, and
can be reclaimed at much less expense, than the swamps and salt marshes
of the Atlantic States.

2. _River Bottoms or Alluvion._ The surface of our alluvial bottoms is
not entirely level. In some places it resembles alternate waves of the
ocean, and looks as though the waters had left their deposit in ridges,
and retired.

The portion of bottom land capable of present cultivation, and on which
the waters never stand, if, at an extreme freshet, it is covered, is a
soil of exhaustless fertility; a soil that for ages past has been
gradually deposited by the annual floods. Its average depth on the
American bottom, is from twenty to twenty-five feet. Logs of wood, and
other indications, are found at that depth. The soil dug from wells on
these bottoms, produces luxuriantly the first year.

The most extensive and fertile tract, of this description of soil, in
this State, is the _American Bottom_, a name it received when it
constituted the western boundary of the United States, and which it has
retained ever since. It commences at the mouth of the Kaskaskia river,
five miles below the town of Kaskaskia, and extends northwardly along
the Mississippi to the bluffs at Alton, a distance of ninety miles. Its
average width is five miles, and contains about 450 square miles, or
288,000 acres. Opposite St. Louis, in St. Clair county, the bluffs are
seven miles from the river, and filled with inexhaustible beds of coal.
The soil of this bottom is an argillaceous or a silicious loam,
according as clay or sand happens to predominate in its formation.

On the margin of the river, and of some of its