It is a creek only by courtesy or an Americanism, at the present day; but when those miles of fertile fields upon the north were unreclaimed, the dank herbage hindered evaporation, and Easton's Pond was fed by unfailing streams.
1910, Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo:
Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive.