the outline of the old trace is exceedingly plain. The frontispiece of this volume is from a recent photograph of this part of the road. Mr. Nelms informs the writer that the old trace could, in early years, be followed by the camping-spots, where blue-grass sprang up when the prairie-grass was killed out.[1] Blue-grass on the Illinois routes, like the apple-trees on the old track from Albany to the Mohawk in New York, was the first sign of coming civilization. Mr. Nelms remembers with distinctness that in a corn-field near the present Baltimore and Ohio Southwestern Railway depot at Xenia the route of the old trace could be followed by the color of the earth and heavier growth of corn. The general color of the field was black but a wide strip of yellowish clay was the course of the old Kaskaskia Trace—generations of travel over the narrow aisle in the old-time forests having changed the nature of the soil. Here, it is said, the crop of corn was distinctly heavier and better than elsewhere on the prairie.
- ↑ Additional testimony to the same effect is found in Draper MSS., xxv J, fol. 76.
