om itself, however,
is apparently of slight value, giving evidence, in the dreary clumps
of dead timber, of being frequently inundated.

An interesting stream is the Wabash, from an historical point of view.
La Salle knew of it in 1677, and was planning to prosecute his fur
trade over the Maumee and the Wabash; but the Iroquois held the
portage, and for nearly forty years thereafter forbade its use by
whites. Joliet thought the Wabash the headwaters of what we know as
the Lower Ohio, and in his map (1673) styled the latter the Wabash,
down to its mouth. Vincennes, an old Wabash town, was one of the
posts captured so heroically for the Americans by George Rogers Clark,
during the Revolutionary War. In 1814, there was established at New
Harmony, also on the Wabash, the communistic seat of the Harmonists,
who had moved thither from Pennsylvania, to which, dissatisfied with
the West, they returned ten years later.

Numerous islands have to-day beautified the Ohio. Despite their
inartistic names, Diamond and Slim are tipped at head and foot with
charming banks and willowed sand, and each center is clothed in a
luxurious forest, rimmed by a gravelly beach piled high with drift
and gnarled roots: the whole, with startling clearness, inversely
reflected in the mirrored flood. Wabash Island, opposite the mouth of
the great tributary, is an insular woodland several miles in length.

Among the prettiest of these jewels studding our silvery path, is the
upmost of the little group known as Brown's Islands, on which we are
passing the night. It was an easy landing on the hard sand, and a
comfortable carry to a level opening in the willows, where we have
a model camp with a great round sycamore block for a table; an
Evansville newspaper does duty as a tablecloth, and two logs rolled
alongside make seats. Four miles below, the smoke of Shawneetown (848
miles) rises lazily above the dark level line of woods; while across
the river, in Kentucky, there is an unbroken forest fringe, without
sign of life as far as the eye can reach. A long glistening bar of
sand connects our little island home with the Illinois mainland;
upon it was being held, in the long twilight, that evening council
of turkey-buzzards, which we so often witness when in an island camp.
Sand-pipers went fearlessly about among them, bobbing their little
tails with nervous vehemence; redbirds trilled their good-nights in
the tree-tops; and, daintily wading in the sandy s