History Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana (Classic Reprint)

Download or read book History Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana (Classic Reprint) written by Berry Robinson Sulgrove and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2018-03-24 with total page 996 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from History Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana Flora - The central region of Indiana was a favor ite hunting-ground of the Indian tribes that sold it in 1818. Its woods and waters were unusually full of game. There were no prairies of any extent and not many swamps. The entire surface was densely covered with trees. On the uplands, which were dry and rolling, the sugar, white and blue ash, black walnut, white walnut or butternut, white oak, red beech, poplar, wild cherry prevailed; on the more level uplands were bur-oak, white elm, hickory, white beech, water ash, soft maple, and others; on the first and second bottoms, sycamore, buckeye, black wal nut, blue ash, hackberry, and mulberry. Grape vines, bearing abundantly the small, pulpless acid fruit called coon grapes, grew profusely in the bottoms, covering the largest trees, and furnishing more than ample stores for the preserves and pies of the pioneer women. Under all these larger growths, especially in the bottoms, there were dense crops of weeds, among which grew equally dense thickets of spice-brush, - the backwoods substitute for tea, papaw, wahoo, wild plum, hazel, sassafras, red and black haw, leatherwood, prickly ash, red-bud, dog wood, and others. The chief weed growths, says Professor Brown, were nettles and pea-vines matted together, but with these were Indian turnip, - the most acrid vegetable on earth probably, cohosh, lobelia, and, in later days, perfect forests of iron-weeds. There are a good many small remains of these primeval forests scattered through the county, with here and there patches of the undergrowth, and not a few nut-trees, walnut, hickory, and butternut, but the hazel, the spicewood, the sassafras, the plum and black haw and papaw are never seen anywhere near the city, and not frequently anywhere in the county. The Indian turnip is occasionally found, but ginseng has disappeared as completely as the mound-builders, though in the last generation it was an article of considerable commercial importance. Fauna. - The principal animals in these primeval woods were the common black bear, the black and gray wolf, the buffalo, deer, raccoon, opossum, fox. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.