The first day's march of about eighteen miles was a hard one, passing over the winding trail which skirted the southern side of the marshes that flanked the sloughs and lakes of Massac County, but finally leading to the bluffs, near the Cache River, where, probably on Indian Point, the first night's camp was pitched.[7] The first taste of the swamps of Illinois was not discouraging, and on the day after, June 29, the march was resumed. The route today was on the top of the watershed between the Cache River on the left (west) and Dutchman's Creek on the right. Buffalo Gap was passed today, a mile south of the present Goreville, Johnson County. Camp was pitched this night, after a twenty-mile march, probably at the spring two miles north of the present Pulley's Mill. The route all day was along the buffalo trail or hunter's road from which Buffalo Gap received its name.[8] This gap, like Moccasin Gap to the eastward, was a famous portal to the prairie country for the bison, Indian, and white man. Two old-time state roads were built through these two gaps.[9] Pushing forward from the spring near Pulley's Mill on the morning of June 30, the Virginians ere long came into the prairie lands lying in Williamson County. Phelps Prairie was reached first, the path entering the southern portion of the prairie. Here it was that "John Saunders, our principal guide, appeared confused, and we soon discovered that he was totally lost." These Illinois prairies are almost treeless, save near the water courses; the grass in the old days grew rank and high and one could tell his course only, perhaps, by the stars, if the pathways were obscured. The paths in these prairies are overgrown in the summer time,[10] and it is probable that this is why Clark's guide, attempting to find the Kaskaskia Trace, lost his bearings. The important landmarks in these prairies were the forests which often bounded them and in many instances extended into them. These extremities of the forests were and are still known as "points," and many of them are yet landmarks in Illinois history. A spring beside a point in a prairie made an ideal camping-spot known to half a continent in the olden time. Clark's campground in Phelps Prairie was, without doubt, at a spring just west of Bainbridge.