To the northeast the sight was intercepted by
a forest in the midst of the basin, but to the northwest the prairies were
seen swelling up again in the smoothest slopes to their usual height, and
stretching away to a distance so vast that it seemed boldness in the eye
to follow them.
The Winnebagoes and other Indian tribes which formerly possessed this
country have left few memorials of their existence, except the names of
places. Now and then, as at Indiantown, near Princeton, you are shown the
holes in the ground where they stored their maize, and sometimes on the
borders of the rivers you see the trunks of trees which they felled,
evidently hacked by their tomahawks, but perhaps the most remarkable of
their remains are the paths across the prairies or beside the large
streams, called Indian trails - narrow and well-beaten ways, sometimes a
foot in depth, and many of them doubtless trodden for hundreds of years.
As we went down the ridge upon which stands Dad Joe's Grove, we saw many
boulders of rock lying on the surface of the soil of the prairies. The
western people, naturally puzzled to tell how they came there, give them
the expressive name of "lost rocks." We entered a forest of scattered
oaks, and after travelling for half an hour reached the Winnebago Swamp, a
tract covered with tall and luxuriant water-grass, which we crossed on a
causey built by a settler who keeps a toll-gate, and at the end of the
causey we forded a small stream called Winnebago Inlet.
