_November 28._ To-day I have crossed several flooded creeks: one by a tree which has accidentally fallen across it, and one has a tree that has been felled intentionally for a bridge; one I crossed on an accumulated heap of driftwood; and _once_ by a horse, where a farmer allows a Negro boy to derive a perquisite from carrying over travellers.--Goods are now carried from Limestone to Lexington for a dollar per hundred pounds weight.--This is somewhat lower than the usual rate. Waggoners are occasionally interrupted by flooded streams. Between the river Ohio and Lexington, limestone is the only rock which I have observed. Like that noticed in Ohio State, it is crowded with organic remains. The variety of the surface, in this part of the country, is pleasant. The eminences are gentle swells rather than hills, and the intervals between them are smooth, rich, and dry {107} ground. Marshy land is scarcely to be seen.--These are convincing marks of the excellence of the subsoil. FOOTNOTES: [55] Piketown, first settled about 1796 by pioneers from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and laid out about 1814, is on the Scioto River sixty-four miles south of Columbus, and about thirty miles from the Ohio.--ED. [56] Paint Creek, a stream about sixty miles long, empties into the Scioto from the west, five miles below Chillicothe.--ED. [57] For a brief description of Chillicothe, see F. A. Michaux’s _Travels_, volume iii of our series, note 35.--ED. [58] Flint travelled from Chillicothe to Limestone over Zane’s Trace. For an account of this road, see Cuming’s _Tour_, volume iv of our series, note 135.--ED. [59] The Virginia Military District, reserved by that state when she ceded her possessions north of the Ohio River to the United States Government, was a triangular tract, with the Ohio River shore between Little Miami and Scioto rivers as its base, and the apex at the sources of the Huron River. Large portions were given as bounty lands to Virginia soldiers of the Revolution; the remainder was ceded to the Federal Government in 1852. In 1871 the government retroceded this district to the state of Ohio, which, in turn, donated it to Ohio State University. See Hinsdale, _Old Northwest_ (New York, 1888), p. 292.--ED. [60] For a brief account of the battle of Tippecanoe, see Evans’s _Tour_, volume viii of our series, note 131.--ED. [61] Dr. Daniel Drake, a native of Plainfield, New Jersey, whose boyhood was spent in Kentucky, came to Cincinnati in 1800 to study medicine. Graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1816, he interested himself in establishing the Ohio Medical College, at Cincinnati, and became its first president. From that time until his death in 1852, he was connected with some medical college, either in Ohio or Kentucky. In addition to his writings on medical subjects, he published (1815) the book several times mentioned by Flint, _Pictures of Cincinnati and the Miami Country_.--ED.