De Soto first looked on these Ozark Mountains and a weary time his men-at-arms, in coats of mail and chain armor, must have had to climb them. They were then, as they were until very recently, uninhabited, and the home of all kinds of wild beasts known on the continent. The black bear, the cougar, catamount, deer and elk, were found among its ravines and the glades at their foot, and even now old beaver-dams attest the existence of those bestial republicans on almost all the minor streams which run into the Illinois. The land is barren, except upon the immediate bank of the river, and the mountains seem masses of pebbles similar in character to those over which the river runs. Strangely enough gigantic pines grow upon the mountains, the dark foliage of which, seen even in the sunlight, looks, compared with that of other trees, like the shadows cast by what Schiller calls Fliegende Wolken, Segler des Luft, over the earth during a windy day of March. The table-land, however, at the top of what I may call the secondary hills, is covered with what are called black-jacks, the ugliest and most ungainly of all things on the surface of the earth, not excepting the Mexican cactus, which is like no other thing animal or vegetable, except the porcupine. The hills seem vast masses of limestone, with the granite occasionally showing itself. I have no doubt of the richness of the soil in mineral wealth, copper being everywhere apparent, and the Ozark Mountains evidently connecting themselves with the Sierra Madre and Cordillera of Mexico. Some day the gold-hunter will deform this beautiful land, the vast groves and of timber which crown its mountains will fall. Worse than all, the picturesque Illinois will be deformed and forced to pass through some series of plank troughs in the gold-washing establishment of Messrs. Jones, Smith & Co.