There are many indirect references to peaches in the Mississippi Valley most of which can be traced to Father Hennepin's account of peaches in Louisiana. He says:[102] "The peaches there are like those of Europe and bear very good fruit in such abundance that the savages are often obliged to prop up the trees with forked sticks." It turns out, however, that Father Hennepin was the Baron Munchausen of the early French explorers, it being doubtful whether he was ever farther down the Mississippi than the mouth of the Illinois. Probably, therefore, we must put much of what early writers say of the great abundance of peaches in this region to the soaring imagination of this early religious explorer. Yet these reports are credited by so careful a man as Kalm, who writes:[103] "I have been told by all those who have made journies to the southern parts of Canada, and to the river Mississippi, that the woods there abound with peach-trees, which bear excellent fruit, and that the Indians of those parts say that those trees have been there since times immemorial." A little later we have reliable information that the peach was naturalized in parts of the Mississippi Valley at least, for Thomas Nuttall, leading botanist of his time and a thoroughly reliable reporter, traveling in Arkansas in 1819, writes:[104] "The thermometer towards noon rises to seventy degrees and the peach and plum trees, almost equally naturalized, have nearly finished blooming." And, again,[105] "The peach of Persia is already naturalized throughout the forests of Arkansa." From this we may picture wild peaches as having grown for generations in parts of Arkansas and, no doubt, of the now famous Ozark region, where, we are told, peach-trees in abundance now decorate, with flower and fruit, primeval forests. Reserving the best description of Indian peaches to the last we now turn from Arkansas to the Carolinas. Here, in 1700, John Lawson, a surveyor, who in his work had ample opportunity to know the country, wrote about the wild and cultivated plants of the region. Lawson, although not a trained naturalist, was a keen observer, a lover of nature and much interested in the agricultural development of the Carolinas. Moreover, he writes so simply, directly, and in a tone so temperate, in contrast to the declamatory style of the times, that one accepts without question what he says. We feel we are justified in quoting at some length Lawson's description of Indian peaches:[106]