Publisher's Synopsis
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.
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