stoddert: Amos Stoddard. The favorite federal paper was the Baltimore Federal Republican. On 14 Nov. 1803 TJ submitted a bundle of documents to the United States Congress that digested information on the vast territories recently acquired from France, “furnished to the Executive by several individuals among the best informed upon that subject.” A section containing a “General Description of Upper Louisiana” mentioned the existence of a salt mountain “about one thousand miles up the Missouri, and not far from that river. … The existence of such a mountain might well be questioned, were it not for the testimony of several respectable and enterprising traders who have visited it. … This mountain is said to be one hundred and eighty miles long, and forty-five in width, composed of solid rock salt, without any trees, or even shrubs on it” (ASP description begins American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, 1832–61, 38 vols. description ends , Miscellaneous, 1:344, 346). Federalist writers referred sardonically to this report for years, with one editor confessing to standing “for some minutes as if I had been … metamorphosed into a block of Louisiana mountain rock-salt!” before proceeding to excoriate Republican leaders, including “Emperor Thomas” (New York Weekly Inspector, 20 Sept. 1806). tub for the whale: “Sea-men have a Custom when they meet a Whale, to fling him out an empty Tub, by way of Amusement, to divert him from laying violent Hands upon the Ship” (Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub. Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind, 2d ed. [London, 1704], 14). Stoddard’s book on louisiana reported that a salt mountain was said to be “situated at the head of one of the western branches of the Arkansas. This mountain, if it may be so called, has been visited by Indians only, and on them we are unfortunately obliged to rely for a description of it” (Stoddard, Sketches, Historical and Descriptive, of Louisiana [Philadelphia, 1812; Sowerby, description begins E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 1952–59, 5 vols. description ends no. 4077], 403). The “mountain” in question seems actually to have been a red-sand plain with large underlying salt deposits situated in present-day northwest Oklahoma (Thomas D. Isern, “Jefferson’s Salt Mountain: The Big Salt Plain of the Cimarron River,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 58 [1980]: 160–75).