sign of recent cultivation.

In the morning 15th, some men were sent to examine the cause of a large
smoke from the northeast, and which seemed to indicate that some Indians
were near; but they found that a small party, who had lately passed that
way, had left some trees burning, and that the wind from that quarter
blew the smoke directly towards us. Our camp lies about three miles
northeast from the old Maha village, and is in latitude 42° 15' 41". The
accounts we have had of the effects of the smallpox on that nation are
most distressing; it is not known in what way it was first communicated
to them, though probably by some war party. They had been a military and
powerful people; but when these warriors saw their strength wasting
before a malady which they could not resist, their phrenzy was extreme;
they burnt their village, and many of them put to death their wives and
children, to save them from so cruel an affliction, and that all might
go together to some better country.

On the 16th, we still waited for the Indians: a party had gone out
yesterday to the Maha creek, which was damned up by the beaver between
the camp and the village: a second went to-day. They made a kind of drag
with small willows and bark, and swept the creek: the first company
brought three hundred and eighteen, the second upwards of eight hundred,
consisting of pike, bass, fish resembling salmon, trout, redhorse,
buffaloe, one rockfish, one flatback, perch, catfish, a small species of
perch called, on the Ohio, silverfish, a shrimp of the same size, shape
and flavour of those about Neworleans, and the lower part of the
Mississippi. We also found very fat muscles; and on the river as well as
the creek, are different kinds of ducks and plover. The wind, which in
the morning had been from the northwest, shifted round in the evening to
the southeast, and as usual we had a breeze, which cooled the air and