Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 March 1882 — Down in Florida. [ARTICLE]

Down in Florida.

The St. John’s River is a queer river, says a Florida correspondent. It is about 150 miles long, from four to ten miles wide, and averages about a foot deep. In the center, of course, the channel gets to be quite deep. Sometimes it has a depth of forty feet. Its current runs about a mile a day. I presume it would take about 150 days for a oork to float from the source of the St, John’s to its mouth. It is salt for fifty miks from its mouth, and brackish for 100 miles. It is full of shad, cattish, frogs, toads, eels, alligators, and cawi-fishes. I don’t know of any fish or reptile that don’t live in the St. John’s River. “ Call this a river ?” I said to an old alligator killer who was fishing for catfish off the pier at Palatka. “Why, it’s a great bay.' It’s no more a river than Lake Erie is. Lake Erie runs faster than the St. John’s River.”

“Thar you’s wroDg agen, stranger. She’s neither a river nor a bay; she’s a cow pasture. Don’t you see the cows standing all over the river?” That man was right. All the cows in Florida seemed to congregate in the St. John’s. There they stood in the water all day long, slashing the mosquitoes with their tails, while their heads are under water eating grass. It is a strange thing, indeed, to see droves of cattle feeding along a liver with their heads under the water. They look like a lot of 6attle without heads. They will put even their horns and ears under when the grass lays deep, §,nd keep them under sometimes two minutes. They get to be as amphibious as the orocodile. A submarine cow pasture is an institution enjoyed by the State of Florida.