Early in the same season that Mr. Clark came with the Gilham family, a colony of one hundred and twenty-six emigrants from the south branch of the Potomac in Virginia, set out for Illinois. At Redstone, on the Monongahela, (now Brownsville,) they fitted out several flat boats, on which, with their horses and wagons, they floated down the current to Pittsburgh, and thence down the Ohio to Massac, where they landed and went across the country to the settlement of New Design. That season, and especially after they left the Ohio, was unusually rainy and hot. The streams overflowed their banks, and covered the alluvial, or bottom lands on their borders; and the low ground in the woods and prairies were covered with water. They were twenty-one days traveling through this wilderness, the distance of about one hundred miles, and much of it through dreary forests. The old settlers had been so long harassed with Indian warfare, that farming business had been neglected, their cattle were few in number, and bread corn was scarce. Their cabins usually contained each a single room for all domestic purposes; and though hospitality to strangers is a universal trait in frontier character, it was entirely beyond the ability of the inhabitants to provide accommodations for these ‘new comers,’ who arrived in a deplorably famishing and sickly condition. They did all they could; a single cabin frequently contained four or five families. Their rifles could provide venison from the woods, but the weather that followed the severe rains in midsummer was so unusually hot and sultry, that their fresh meat spoiled before they could pack it from the hunting grounds; and they were destitute of salt to preserve and season it. Medical aid could be procured only from a great distance, and that very seldom. Under such circumstances, no one need be surprised that of the colony, who left Virginia in the Spring, only one-half of their number were alive in autumn. A ridge in the western part of the settlement, adjacent to the bluffs, was covered with the newly formed graves. They were swept off by a putrid fever, unusually malignant, and which, in some instances, did its work in a few hours. The old settlers were as healthy as usual. No disease like this ever appeared in the country before or since. Mr. Clark had good health, and found work enough among these suffering families in nursing, instructing, and praying with the sick, and consoling the dying. The settlement of New Design had been commenced by American families about a dozen years previous. Its situation was on the elevated plateau, about thirty miles north of the town of Kaskaskia, and from ten to twelve miles from the Mississippi, and from three to six miles east of the American bottom and contiguous bluffs. Along the wide alluvial tract, or bottom, there were American families settled at intervals from Prairie du Rocher to the vicinity of Cahokia. The character of the American families was various. Some