not rooted out, and infested our garden. With all the care
we could bestow on them during the passage from New York, only twelve
potatoes were saved, and even these so shrivelled up, that we despaired
of raising any from the few sprouts that still gave signs of life.
Nevertheless we raised one hundred and ninety potatoes the first season,
and after sparing a few plants for our inland traders, we planted about
fifty or sixty hills, which produced five bushels the second year; about
two of these were planted, and gave us a welcome crop of fifty bushels
in the year 1813.

It would result from these facts, that the soil on the banks of the
river, as far as tide water, or for a distance of fifty or sixty miles,
is very little adapted for agriculture; at all events, vegetation is
very slow. It may be that the soil is not everywhere so cold as the spot
we selected for our garden, and some other positions might have given a
better reward for our labor: this supposition is rendered more than
probable when we take into consideration the great difference in the
indigenous vegetables of the country in different localities.

The forest trees most common at the mouth of the river and near our
establishment, were cedar, hemlock, white and red spruce, and alder.
There were a few dwarf white and gray ashes; and here and there a soft
maple. The alder grows also to a very large size; I measured some of
twelve to fifteen inches diameter; the wood was used by us in
preference, to make charcoal for the blacksmith's forge. But the largest
of all the trees that I saw in the country, was a white spruce: this
tree, which had lost its top branches, and bore evident marks of having
been struck by lightning, was a mere, straight trunk of about eighty to
one hundred feet in height; its bark whitened by age, made it very
conspicuous among the other trees with their brown bark and dark
foliage, like a huge column of white marble. It stood on the slope of a
hill immediately in the rear of our palisades. Seven of us placed
ourselves round its trunk, and we could not embrace it by extending our
arms and touching merely the tips of our fingers; we measured it
afterward in a more regular manner, and found it forty-two feet in
circumference. It kept the same size, or nearly the same, to the very
top.

We had it in contemplation at one time to construct a circular staircase
to its summit, and erect a platform thereon for an observatory, but more
necessary