Before presenting the facts that have confirmed me in my original view of the manner in which these salt-pans were formed, and that I may be better understood, I will endeavor to describe the location where the fragments are found.
My first visit was in company with my friend the late Dr. David Dale Owen, about the year 1854. We found two water-worn ravines, commencing on the hills that rise abruptly on the south side of the Saline River, and drain into it. At the base of the hills they are crossed by a State road, between which and the river their bottoms are level, hard, and barren, and here, close to the road rise the salt-springs. Between the ravines is a bench or river-bottom subject to annual overflow.
These bottoms, as well as the hill-sides, were covered with a thick growth of young timber—the primitive forest having been cut off for fuel for evaporating the brine at the time the salines were worked by the early settlers. The principal spring was then, and is now, known as the "Nigger" well or salt-works, as it was worked by slave-labor while the State of Illinois was a Territory.
Fig. 1.
The spring in the west ravine overflowed a curbed well about eight feet square, which I sounded, and found to be about forty feet deep. In the east ravine a salt-spring was oozing. A short distance above the curbed well flows a sulphur-spring, and near it one of good fresh water.
I have been informed, by a reliable party who had personal knowledge of all that was done by the early settlers in working the salines,
