Four-and-a-Half Months’ Stay in New Harmony
Description of the region – Natural history – Messrs. Say, Lesueur, and Owen – Hunting excursions in Indiana and Illinois – Wabash, Fox River – Illinois prairies – Albion – Black River – Mr. Bodmer’s trip to New Orleans
December 7, 1832
At seven thirty, temperature of 5 3/4°R [44.9°F, 7.2°C]. Rain and densely overcast sky. It is exactly seven months today since we left Neuwied. Today a change of weather prevented us from making a hunting excursion to the Fox River. If the water in that stream were warm during this season, we would have gathered an unforgettable harvest of nice Unio and Anodonta specimens there, since numerous huge and very fine mussels of these clams live there in the mud (see the list I provided above on p. 135 of this journal). At twelve noon, temperature of 7 1/2°R [48.9°F, 9.4°C]. The rain had subsided, but now the ground was bottomless and soft, as it always is in this fertile soil. When cornfields are established here, they are not fertilized for quite a few years.
In the afternoon at the home of Mr. Lesueur, I met a certain Mr. Nohl from New Orleans, who had just come directly from there. He had been traveling for twenty-one days. One of the boilers on his steamboat had burst and had killed seven persons. Fortunately for the passengers in the large cabin, of whom there were twenty to thirty, there was a large pile of bags of salt between the cabin and the boiler; they absorbed and broke the main force of the steam and boiling water. The chief engineer was just taking his morning rest before daybreak, and a Negro had charge of the boiler.
In New Orleans as many as 500 persons had died in one day from cholera, but now the number was only twenty to thirty. In the countryside near the city, there were more deaths than in the city itself, and the greater number of individuals are said to have died of fear and anxiety. Mr. Bodmer visited Mr. Owen in the afternoon, and during the evening [he] went to the home of Mr. Say, where I [also] spent several hours.