Through the Woods to Lake Superior
AMONG other advantages claimed for the Minnesota climate is the obliging disposition of the rain, which is said to pay its tribute most frequently in the night. By day it exercises a thoughtful forbearance towards the outdoor tasks of the farmer, and treats with respect even an excursion party ; then with the darkness falls the welcome shower. Not that it can always time its visitations thus to suit man’s convenience ; for accidents will happen in the best-regulated families. This morning, for example (August 10th), the weather has certainly forgotten itself at a most unfortunate time for us, since Fort Snelling and Minnehaha were in our programme for to-day.
10 o’clock. — The rain, after pouring all the morning, holds up just in season to save its reputation. Our carriages are at the door. We look up at the breaking clouds, and boldly order the covers thrown back. Up the left bank of the river from St. Paul, along the slope of the receding hills (far off on one of which the very ground seems crawling: phenomenon produced by a little flock of sheep, — only a few thousands, we are told), and here we are at last descending the steep road (warily, driver ! ) to the ferry under the bluff. Opposite rises, confronting us, a whitebreasted, rock-shouldered, green-bearded cliff, its thighs laved by the Mississippi on one side, and on the other muffled in the luxuriant verdure of the banks of the Minnesota. Its forehead “ the likeness of a kingly crown has on ”; this is the fort which we are going to visit.
The ferry is a strong flatboat, capable of taking over four carriages at a time; the ferryman is the Father of Waters himself. The boat is set diagonally in the current, by means of ropes and pulley-blocks running on a line stretched from shore to shore ; and the strong stream, putting shoulder to us, carries us quickly across. Then comes the steep ascent by a road winding up the crooked arms, so to speak, and over the rocky shoulders, to the broad green back of the fort-crowned cliff We pass the spot where Little Nix and Walking Lightning, Sioux chiefs, were hung for bloody work in the late Indian outbreak. Walking Lightning (what splendor of terrors in that name ! you can almost see the zigzag legs and dazzling tomahawk), — Walking Lightning, I say, just before the ground was snatched from under him, and there was no more walking for him to do, made a speech, which one who heard it describes to us here and now, not without emotion. “A brave man, he uttered no complaint. Chief of a great tribe, owning once the very ground on which his scaffold stood, he saw his race disappearing before the white man ; he made One last fight for the old hunting-grounds ; he had failed; now he was ready to die.”
Entering the fort, we find the usual display of glaring whitewashed barracks and angular grass-plats, and the beautiful ensign of our country flying from its tall flagstaff over all. The noteworthy thing about Fort Snelling is its situation. Its most attractive point is the wooden tower on the verge of the cliff overlooking the confluence of the two rivers, — the Minnesota, with the broad low green island at its mouth, and the long, dreamy vista of its charming valley; the Mississippi, with its precipitous bluffs, its sweeping flood (streaked with chips and sawdust from the Minneapolis mills), and the ferryboat (so far below us) crossing the dark, slow eddies. The tower is roofed, but its sides are left open to the sweet air and surrounding beauty; and its floor affords, to the officers and their wives and friends, ample space for the cotillon and the waltz, on moonlit summer nights.
From the fort we keep the summit of the bluff, or rather plateau, up the bank ot the Mississippi, on the edge of a fine farming country, — past yellow grainfields, which the great reapers are fast converting into stubble-lands, — till our driver, who has the lead, reins up at the gate of what seems a rustic wayside inn and picnic-ground. Entering, we pass a brown arbor about which are woven, in green and white embroidery, the delicate vines of the wild cucumber, all in blossom. Near by, seated on benches or on the ground, is a family group, with open baskets and a suggestive bottle or two, and a well - garnished white cloth spread on the turf. Farther on is a pleasant grove, from the depths of which breathes the subdued, thunderous bass of a waterfall. We hasten along well-worn paths, guided at first by the roar, then by a pale ghost of mist seen rising amid the shadowy boughs, until we stand on the brink of a wooded chasm, into which pours a curved sheet of foam over a broad, projecting ledge. This is Minnehaha.
We find a goodly volume of water (thanks to the morning’s rain we thought so ill of), and are thus more fortunate than some of our party were last year, who, visiting the spot, deemed it unworthy its poetic fame, there being scarcely water enough to make a fall. “ Then we could step across the brink above without wetting our feet,” says Mrs. F—, whose account seems today scarcely credible, in the face of the plunging, snowy cataract.
Minnehaha (“Curved Water,’ not “ Laughing Water,” if you please) is embosomed in scenery which adds greatly to its charms. The steep sides of the gorge are formed of broken and mossy rocks, clasped here and there by the crooked talons of overbrooding trees. It is enclosed, at the upper end, by a curved wall of water-worn, beetling rocks, over an open space in the centre of which shoots the cascade, having a perpendicular fall ol about forty-five feet. The wide brink beyond, on each side, is overgrown with trees and bushes, and the face of the projecting ledge is tinted with mosses and festooned by drooping vines. Below the fall the shattered and broken water gushes away over its stony bed in a foaming and tumbling torrent.
Some of our party descend the side of the cool, shadowy gorge by a rugged footpath along its ribs. Others, from a coigne of vantage half-way down, watch the rest scattered about the banks of the stream, resting on the pretty footbridge below, or passing along the wet shelf of rock which affords a pathway beneath the jutting ledge and the veil of the cascade. Does not the presence of human figures add to such a scene even more than it takes away ? The solemn spell that reigns over primeval solitudes is broken; but in its stead we have the feeling of companionship in enjoyment, and fresh hints of delight to ear and eye, when we hear the silvery laugh ring out above the noise of the waters, and watch the bright bits of color which gay costumes and fair faces scatter among the brown and green and snowy tints of rock and foliage and foam.
We all in turn pass under the descending sheet, and look out upon pictures of the gorge-sides through its gusty fringes. Some cross quite over to the opposite bank, and repass the stream on the foot-bridge below. Two of us attempt to follow its course thence to the point where it falls into the Mississippi, which we judge to be not far off; but having got pretty thoroughly drenched in making our way through bushes still dripping from the morning’s rain, and having come to a small mill-pond in the opening bottomland, where a tall fisherman on the dam informs us that he “ hain’t seen no Mis’sippi,” we retrace our steps, and rejoin our waiting companions at the carriages. Then to Minneapolis and dinner, and home by way' of St. Anthony and the left bank.
August 11 th. — An excursion up the Minnesota valley, by invitation from officers of the St. Paul and Sioux City Railroad. A beautiful country of flat and rolling prairie, with occasional groves and woody undergrowths interspersed. The low shores of the Minnesota River present an almost tropical luxuriance of trees and vines. Hillsides gay with flowers. A region of small farms, and one of the oldest settled portions of the State.
Eighty-five miles from St. Paul, in a southwesterly direction, we reach, at Mankato, the end of the railroad, which is pushing its way forward, however, towards Sioux City, on the Missouri. We are received by a delegation of citizens, with a variety of vehicles for conveying us where we wish to go. “To the hotel,” say some. “ To the prairies,” to see the great wheat farms, still five or six miles away, is the choice of the most of us. Three or four loaded wagons start off, and after considerable delay half a dozen more; all (as we suppose) with the prairies in view. Second division of vehicles loses sight of first division; drivers take us out two or three miles, to banks of Blue Earth River ; there we stop to look at railroad bridge building, and inspect lager-beer brewery (very critically, with glasses); after which, a little circuit, and lo, here we are back at Mankato ! Where are the prairies, the wheat lands ? Too late now to drive out to them, we are told. Are we victims of a blunder ? No, of a neat little stratagem. Mankato meant well by us, and honestly placed the teams at our disposal ; but the proprietor of those of the second division, being himself leading driver thereof, and a merciful man withal, bethinketh him that it is trying weather for horseflesh (it is indeed sultry), and so, after the slight diversion of the beer and the bridge, we are whisked back, ignorant and deceived, to the village.
Nor is Mankato the liveliest place in the world for a crowd of disappointed visitors waiting for absent friends and dinner. A pleasantly situated valley town, on the right bank of the Minnesota, its streets have a tediously wooden and commonplace look to eyes prepared to gaze on great prairies and waving grain-fields. Our coming creates a sort of holiday in the village; and only a few fire-crackers let off in the street before the hotel, and now and then a pistol-shot round the corner, are wanting to make it seem an oldfashioned rural Fourth of July, of superior dulness. The bar-room is well patronized ; indeed, too well, if we may judge of the efforts a most dignified citizen (not of Mankato) is making to maintain an upright position in his chair. He seems aware that he has already given and accepted too many invitations to stand—or lean, as the case may be — with friends at the bar ; and he has just moral strength enough to decline joining them when they go up at last under a mild pretence of beer. “ No ! ” he declares emphatically, with a heavy lurching nod, and a downward inflection. “Nô,” with a circumflex, after a moment’s thought, his resolution beginning to waver, like his voice. “ I won’t take any beer” with renewed firmness. But he adds immediately, staggering to his feet, with a compromise designed to bridge over the difference between refusal and compliance, “ I won’t take anything but a square drink of whiskey, by ——! ” And he takes it, without feeling that he has jeopardized his reputation for consistency.
Mankato has stirring reminiscences of the late Indian atrocities, and shows with satisfaction the public square in which on one occasion thirtyeight Sioux braves were hung in a row, amid a fence of bristling bayonets, to the great edification of a community outraged by their unchristian method of carrying on war. Lithographic prints of the tragic scene are generously offered us, as interesting mementos of our visit; and respectable citizens take pleasure in displaying gold - headed, canes made of wood from the scaffold. I do not carry away one of the prints ; nor do I regard the canes as very sacred relics. Neither do I here, or elsewhere in the State, attempt to reason with our good friends touching the violence of feeling I find almost universally entertained against the red man. I do not cherish any very sentimental notions regarding the “ noble savage,” of whose squalor and treachery and ill deeds I have seen and know enough. I have witnessed his feeble attempts at the cultivation of the soil after the white man’s fashion, on Indian reservations ; I have heard him in his wooden meeting-house sing dissonant psalms through his nose ; and I do not declare him capable of being either civilized or Christianized. He had his place in the wild forests and in the unploughed prairies, — hunter, fisher, warrior,— with his squaw, his medicine-man, and his manitou, in the America of the past; and I would he might have been left in undisturbed enjoyment of that free life. But the Maker of this continent had, it seems, a better use for it; and in the America of the future I see not anywhere an inch of room for our lank-cheeked, straight-haired brother. Let him pass. Yet it is well to consider that he did but act after his kind, in trespassing against us, even as does the white settler who occupies his land, the trader or agent who cheats him, and the Christian community that hangs him. And for our own sakes, if not for his, let us, O excellent friends! cease to view him through that mist of blood that hideth mercy even from the eyes of the gentlehearted.
After dinner, a smart young tradesman, who has his buggy at the tavern door, proposes to take me to ride ; and I am shown the pleasant sights of the town in general, and the paces of his mare in particular. The roads are not quite so smooth as billiard-tables ; and I modestly inquire, after a little unpleasant jolting, if we are not travelling unnecessarily fast. “ O, this is nothing to what she can do ! ” says he, and gives the nag a touch. But my young tradesman, though well grounded in arithmetic, as appears from a clear statement of the profits derived from his business, is not nearly so well versed in natural philosophy; and when, as we are passing the new Normal Schoolhouse (a very fine building, by the way, suggesting youthful studies),
I venture to hint that, should our vehicle have its centre of gravity at any moment thrown beyond its base, it would be subject to the laws that govern leaning bodies, and very probably upset, I get from him only a smile for myself, and another crack of the whip for the mare. When, moreover, even in very plain language, I remind him that the momentum of objects moving about a circle tends to throw them off in a straight line, he seems wonderfully dull to the fact, and to use less precaution than his beast; for does not she, in turning a sharp corner, instinctively lean her whole body towards it, in a manner to convert the attraction of gravitation into a centripetal force counterbalancing the centrifugal ? But he must have a still more forcible illustration of the law, and he gets it at the next corner, when, fortunately for my neck and his education, he happens to be on the outside; we are turning swiftly ; he does not lean as I and the mare do ; and, presto ! all of a sudden, there is no driver on the seat beside me, but he is flying off at a tangent,— in short, tumbling down, reins in hand, between the wheels. Luckily, one leg lodges in the buggy, and I find it of signal assistance, when I “seize the descending man,” and drag him by his skirts, muddied and bruised, with torn raiment and a very white face, back into the vehicle, still in rapid motion. After which trifling incident he appears disgusted with experiments in natural philosophy; and I am willingly driven to the depot.
Returning S.Paul-ward by the train, a young Bostonian proposes to me a new sensation in the way of locomotion,—as if I had not had enough of that sort of thing for one day. Ever since we left Philadelphia, riding on the locomotive has been a favorite pastime with our party; ladies and gentlemen mounting the black steed together, and enjoying in that advanced position novel and surprising views of scenery, and the sense of speed and adventure, to be had in no other part of the train. And my young friend once, finding the places in the locomotive cab occupied, did rashly mount the top,— a place of peril and anguish as it proved, the road being rough, the speed great, and the locomotive light, so that, to avoid being shaken off. he was obliged to flatten himself on the rounded roof, and hold on for dear life with tooth and nail. The only upright object within reach was the steam-whistle ; but it uttered a howl and shot a deluge of hot steam over his head when he touched the lever of the valve, and burned his hand when he grasped the whistle itself. At the end of his fearful ride,which seemed interminable,— for he durst not relax the grip of fingers and chin on the roof-edge, in order to get down, until the next watering-place was reached, — the fun of the thing was shown by the toes of his boots and the knees of his trousers worn through.
What he now proposes is a seat on the cow-catcher. I accept, and we mount that formidable plough. An enterprising reporter from St. Paul begs leave to accompany us, which we grant, not without a grimly humorous surmise that, in his heroic devotion to the interests of his sheet, he thus freely risks his own neck and limbs for the chance of seeing ours become the subject of an item.
I take a position between my two companions, with the point of the tremendous wedge betwixt my knees and my feet on its slant sides; attitude erect, arms folded, monarch of all I survey. The bell rings behind us, and we move. Presently the locomotive begins to rock and jounce, and I find it advisable to unlock my complacent arms and place my hands on the cold iron for support, sacrificing dignity to security. Tunder — skip ! —and now I am bent forwards, bracing myself with might and main against the rising ternpest. Swiftei, swifter, swifter; and with hats strained over our foreheads, hair flying behind, and chins thrust out before, cleaving the air which smites us almost with the force of a solid body, holding on ludicrously the while with hands and feet, we are in a position to have very surprising photographs of ourselves taken for such friends as have known us only in the serious walks of life.
Now we are tossed through whizzing space on the iron horn of a ponderous, mad, howling monster, that would seem hardly to touch the ground but for this constant changing and jolting. Presently this fancy changes to the dizzy delusion that we are not moving at all, and that it is the world speeding under us, like the iron-banded wheel of some stupendous machinery.
Meanwhile, something strikes our faces stingingly like fine shot; and once I am hit in the breast by what seems a bullet. This is only a butterfly, in its quiet afternoon sail in the summer air hit by our rushing thunderbolt. The shot are hovering swarms of flies.
Up starts a flock of quails from the track before us. They attempt to fly away, but appear to be flying sidewise and backwards towards us, — such is the impotence of slight wings overtaken by the fury of speed. It were not pleasant to be struck in the face by one of these feathered misiles ! The most escape, but two or three, sucked in as it were by the whirlwind, dash their breasts against the locomotive, and drop down. Suddenly the whistle shrieks alarm; there is a drove of cattle on the track! We remember that the use of the cow-catcher is to pick up such estrays ;—what if it pick them up with us on its snout, going on a “down grade” at the rate of fifty miles an hour? “We should never know what beef-ell us ! ” screams one, in the ears of his companions, — for thus small follies lead to greater, and from recklessness in riding comes recklessness in punning. We prepare to retreat from our post of peril, back over the sides of the locomotive, when our speed slackens,— the brakemen are screwing us down ; and there is an exciting race, the cattle galloping alongthe track before us, until we can almost take the hindmost by the tails. At last they plunge down the embankment, and we pass on. It is such obstacles as these, especially on the unfenced prairie pastures, and the chance there always is of running off the track, or running into something on it, that makes the cow-catcher a dangerous seat; and to the travelling family-man (it is n’t so much matter about bachelors) I would not over-warmly recommend it; although, as a friend on the train remarks, when afterwards we are charged with temerity, “ It makes little difference which end of a streak of lightning you ride on, as far as danger is concerned.”,
Returning to St. Paul, we fall in with travellers who have fearful tales to tell of the route through the woods to Lake Superior, the next thing in our programme;—coaches mired and upset, limbs dislocated, passengers forced to walk over the worst parts of the road, with mud to their knees, belated in the forest, and devoured by mosquitoes. “Ladies in your party? it is madness! you will never get them through!” We meet others who, after attempting the passage from the other side, aban doned it, and returned down the lake, reaching St. Paul after a long detour by water and by rail. There is only the old Military Road, as it is called, cut through the wilderness for government purposes twenty years ago, and traversed now by a tri-weekly stage. The wet season has converted it into one interminable slough, or mud canal; and it is too closely shut in by overshadowing trees to be dried much by the sun in the brief intervals betwixt the constantly recurring rains.
We rely, however, upon the experience and forethought of our friends of the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad, whose management of our excursion thus far inspires unbounded faith in their future plans for us. From St. Paul to Fond du Lac we shall be travelling over their own ground ; making the first fifty miles of the journey on rails newly laid, and the rest in wagons, already provided and sent on ahead with our camp equipage.
Thursday morning, 12th. — We are off. From the depot below the town our train speeds away, winding in among the broken bluffs, rising to higher and higher ground, — over bush prairies and oak barrens, — to White Bear Lake (St. Paul’s favorite picnic spot), ten miles away.
Here preparations have been made for opening an Indian mound for us. A short walk from the station through pleasant, echoing woods brings us to one of those beautiful sheets of water which mottle Minnesota all over, and give it the appropriate name of the Lake State. White Bear is six miles in length, winding among wooded shores and islands. There are inviting sailboats on the beach, which almost make me, an old water-bird, forget the object of our visit, until I am reminded of it by the shouts of my companions climbing the mound.
It is in the woods by the lake shore, — a broad, conical heap of earth, itself overgrown by forest trees. To save time for us, an opening at the top has been made by a gang of laborers from the railroad embankments; but, alas! although a pit ten or twelve feet in depth has been dug, nothing has been cast out but the black surface soil of the country, clear of even a pebble, and it is not deemed expedient to wait for further excavations. So we stand there a little while, between the whisper of the woods and the murmur of waves upon the shore, which tell us nothing of the secret, long buried in that tomb of the past; then return to the waiting train.
On the way back, question is raised as to the origin of the name of “ White Bear Lake ” ; and one relates a legend, how, when all this country was covered by the sea, a white bear floated down from his boreal home on an enormous iceberg which stranded here, on the subsidence of the waters. The iceberg, sinking into the earth, made the bed of the lake, and afterwards melting, filled it ; while the bear roamed its shores. It is strongly suspected, however, that the story is an invention of the teller, and is, like many another legend, the offspring, not the parent, of the name.
The next station is Forest Lake, where there is a still more extensive body of water and a beautiful town site on its banks. The railroad has been fortunate in its choice of sites for way-stations, as we observe all along the route. Few obstacles stood in the way of such a choice. Flanked, a greater part of the way, by its own magnificent land grant of more than a million and a half of acres, it had, moreover, from the first, the co-operation of a land company, securing in its interest such desirable tracts as lay beyond its domain. We pass through a rolling country of oak openings, and occasional native meadows, once the beds of lakes, converted by time and vegetable decay into grass-lands of exceeding fertility. A few scanty settlements lie scattered along or near this part of the route.
At Rushseba, fifty miles from St. Paul, we come to an end of the completed track, and, we might almost; say, of civilization. Northward hence, the wilderness ! Here we find an unfished depot building, in a little clearing of the woods; Rush Creek, flowing eastward towards the St. Croix River, which divides, not far off, Minnesota from Wisconsin ; a lounging Indian or two ; a white woman with four one children, one in arms, standing near a wood-pile ; and, what is of most importance to us, our wagon-train in waiting.
While caterers are preparing dinner for our party, increased, by accessions from St. Paul, to more than fifty souls (or perhaps I should say stomachs), and while a photographer is getting his apparatus ready for a group, I make acquaintance with the woman at the wood-pile. She lives, she tells me, three miles hence, on Rush Lake, where she settled ten years ago with her husband, both young then, and made a homestead in the woods. When I ask if she is contented there, she praises the country, — thirty-five bushels of winter wheat to the acre ! That speaks well for the soil, but does it keep her always from being lonesome ? “Lonesome?” she replies with a luminous smile ; “ I have my husband and little ones and enough to do, and why should I be lonesome ? ” She rejoices greatly in the railroad, not because it will carry civilization to them, but because it will carry their grain to market. Is she now going on a journey? “ O no! I am just waiting here. My children had never seen railroad cars, and so I took a little walk over here with them, for curiosity.”
After dinner (served on rough board tables under the depot roof), we form a group, with the woods and the wagons in the background, and an Indian in the foreground, for the sake of the conrast, his hat on a stick, and the black icicles of his straight, lank hair dripng down his cheeks, and give the photographer a few shots at us. Then the start. It is like getting an army motion. We climb to seats in the strong, canvas-covered Concord coaches the tinkling of horse-bells resounds pleasantly in the woods, one after another the wagons take the road, and we go rolling and plunging into the forest.
A few farm-clearings and bark-roofed log-houses we pass, and now and then the poles of a dismantled wigwam ; heavily timbered tracts of bard wood, shining growths of silver-limbed poplars and birches (many of the latter of stripped of their bark, which has gone to kindle the red man’s fires, or roof his huts, or build has canoes), high cranberries and raspberries, and swamps of rank wild grass. Here and there is a burnt district ; and I notice a forest of tamaracks all upturned by the roots, and thrown into tangled heaps, by undermining fires in the peat.
Late in the afternoon we reach our first camping-ground, at Chengwatana, where there are a few wooden houses and huts of half-breeds, besides a sawmill, on the east shore of Cross Lake. While our tents are pitching on the stumpy shore, and our supper preparing at the stage-house, we embark on the lake in a barge manned by laborers from the railroad, and steer out into the fiery eye of the sunset burning in sky and wave.
The lake is four miles in length from north to south. It is quite narrow, however, and Snake River, flowing through it from east to west, forms a watery cross, that gives the name. The Chengwatana dam has flooded thousands of acres above, and drowned the timber; and fires have destroyed much that the water spared. The western shores, peopled by melancholy hosts of dead trees, standing mournfully in the water, or charred and dark on the banks, lifting their blasted trunks and skeleton arms against the sky, give to the scene, by this light, a most unearthly aspect.
Rowing up the river we pass Indian burial-places on the north shore,-—rude wooden crosses visible among the dead tree-trunks, — and a deserted village of skeleton wigwams, whose bare poles will be reclothed with skin of birch-bark, when the red nomads return to catch fish in these waters and hunt deer and bear in these woods. A week ago there were three hundred Ojibways on this camping - ground. Now we see but a few brown squaws on the bank, and half a dozen frightened Indian children paddling away from us in a canoe.
Chengwatana should have had the railroad depot, but it made the common mistake of setting too high a price on what it deemed indispensable to the company, which, accordingly, stuck to its own land, and put the track the other side of the lake. So grand an enterprise uniting our greatest river with our greatest lake, and forming one of the arteries of a new civilization, can well afford to be independent of a petty waystation. It is the railroad that makes towns, not towns that make the railroad. We row over to the solid stone piers of the unfinished bridge, and the high embankment, and the village of board-shanties about which ruddy Swiss laborers are washing their rough hands and bearded faces, their day’s work done ; then return in the twilight to Chengwatana and supper.
Our tents are pitched on the stumpy shore. A mist is rising from the lake. Camp-fires are early kindled, making ruddy halos in the foggy dark, and lighting us to bed. A bundle of straw and a blanket, — what more does man require? With the ground beneath, and the sloping canvas over us, we are well couched. There ’s no danger of robbers under one’s bed. Mosquitoes swarm, covering the lake shore with their fine, formidable hum ; but against their encroachments smudge-fires without the tents and cigar-smoke within are found effectual ; then the increasing chill of the night protects us. There is much talk about the fires; and presently, in a neighboring tent, resounds a lusty snore, heard throughout the camp. Sweeter sounds rise on the foggy, firelit shore, when our colored attendants transform themselves into a band of musicians, and they who catered to the palate cater more delightfully to the ear, striking up pleasant tunes, to which the strangeness of the scene lends enchantment. Then we three in our tent, lying, looking up at the flashes of firelight flickering in. recite a pslam or two, and talk of those sweet and solemn things which are eternally near, and which seem now the only real presences, looking serenely down and making this, our night encampment, and the wilderness itself, no more to us than the scenery and incident of a dream.
Friday, 13th. — A cold, wet morning. A little cow-bunting visits the camp, hopping about on the blankets, close to our feet, and even on our feet, in the friendliest manner, but coquettishly refusing to be caught.
The lake is both basin and mirror to us, making our toilets. Some, however, seek the little, dark washroom of the stage-house, and perform their ab lutions there. Is not the tooth-brush a test of civilization ? Mr. F—— lays his down on the sink, and afterwards, turning to look for it, finds a rough fellow endeavoring to disentangle his locks with it, having taken it for the public hair-brush. He seems to think it ridiculously small for his purpose ; “Confound the little fool of a thing!" and flinging it down in disgust, he makes a comb of his fingers.
The stage-house table has its limits, and we breakfast by relays. After which I take to the road, walking on alone in the cool of the morning, to enjoy the solitude of the woods and the sweetness of the air. Young aspens twinkle in the early sunshine. Upon a thicket of dead birches a crop of wild buckwheat hangs its festoons of blossoming vines. Here a grove of white poplars and birches gives to the woods the aspect of snow scenery. Waving brakes, raspberry - bushes, alders, wild honeysuckles, wild sunflowers, and wild cucumbers fringe the wayside. Not a bird, not a living creature, not even a tapping woodpecker or cawing crow, appears on this lonely road. I outwalk the wagons, for they must move cautiously through mud-holes which I avoid. After getting a mile or two the start ot them. I sit down on a log to wait, and hark for the tinkling bells of the leading teams coming through the woods.
Dinner at Grindstone, — a log-house and stable in a burnt clearing on Grindstone River. One half our party more than fills the little table-room, and the rest of us receive our dinners on plates, passed over many heads and out at the windows; making the sky our dininghall, and the first barrel-head or hencoop, or the ground itself, a table. Then a dessert of berries in the burnt woods.
Supper at Kettle River, thirty miles from Chengwatana. A terrible day’s work for the teams. Never were worse roads. We who walked on before, at any time in the afternoon, could hear the horses plashing through water far off behind us, and then see the highcovered wagons come rolling and pitching through the hub-deep holes, threatening at one moment to upset, and at another to keel over upon the horses. On one occasion a smoking driver, hurled from his seat by a sudden lurch, turned a somerset, and alighted on his back in the mud, without, however, losing the pipe from his mouth, — a feat to be proud of. Riding was neither so safe nor so agreeable as walking. Dripping wayside bushes pulled down by whiffletrees and wheels were constantly flying back, whipping and bespattering the wagons. Neither man nor beast did we meet in all this day’s journey.
Kettle River comes sweeping down through the forest, between magnificent masses of foliage, combining the varied forms and tints of pine, balsam, maple, iron-wood, and tamarack, and rushes whirling under beetling ledges at the road-crossing. Its glossy eddies shine with a strange wild lustre, in the evening light. The water is about the hue of maple sirup, being discolored, like all the streams in this part of the State, by the roots of trees.
On the banks of the river are some Ojibway wigwams, before one of which a squalid squaw, of great age and unspeakable hideousness, is cutting up a hedgehog which an Indian lad has just killed, and throwing pieces of the meat into a pot hung from a pole over a smoky fire. The hut is of poles, covered by strips of birch-bark coarsely stitched together: a blanket in place of a door. Looking in, we perceive dirty mats spread about the household fire, kindled on the ground, its smoke — a part of it, at least — going out through a hole in the low bark roof. On the mats sit a very old Indian and a young squaw with her pappoose, looking desolate and miserable enough. No romance of wild savage life discernible here ! Near the wigwam are three graves. One is that of a child. It is marked by a wooden monument,— a sort of box, resembling a dog-kennel. Over the other two are built little narrow pens of rough poles, perhaps eight feet long and two feet high and broad. I have seen few more pitiful sights. Between these rude attempts of a wretched race to commemorate its dead and the poet’s In Memoriam what infinite distance !
A dismal evening: with the darkness a drizzling rain begins to fall. Last night we had straw ; but now the forest boughs must be our bed. We cut young pines in the woods, drag them to camp, and there by the light of the fires trim them, covering the ground beneath the tents with odorous wet twigs. Blankets and shawls are in demand ; and many a desperate shift is made for pillows. Mrs. K——has one of india-rubber, but there is a treacherous leak in it, and every ten minutes throughout the night she must awake and blow it up afresh. I resort to my valise. But it is too high when shut, so I open it, and lay my head in it. There is a storm in the night ; a deluging rain falls, and many a trickling stream steals in through the tents upon the sleepers. To save my packed linen from a soaking, I am obliged to shut my pillow, — taking my head out, of course ! in a neighboring tent a devoted husband sits up and holds a spread umbrella over his spouse, who sleeps in spite of thunder. The rain quenches the fires, the wind shakes the tents, the welkin cracks overhead. What a scene it is when, in the middle of the night, I look out from the door of our frail shelter, and see the camp, in the midst of roaring woods, instantaneously illumined by quick cross - lightnings playing in the forest-tops !
In the morning, he who is discovered with rueful countenance emptying water from his boots is accused of having set them out to be blacked.
August 14th. — Weather cold and drizzling. Roads this day worse than ever, though worse had seemed impossible. Every little while a wagon sticks in the mud. Now a whiffletree breaks, now a king-bolt; now a baggage-wagon upsets, or a horse is down ; and now we must wait for a gulf of mud to be bridged with logs and brush. At every accident the whole train comes to a halt. We get through only by keeping together and helping each other. The shouts of the drivers, the calls for help, the running forwards, the hurrying back, the beckoning signals, the prying up of mired wheels, the replacing of broken bolts, make ever a picturesque and animated scene. Blueberries by the wayside are abundant, on which we regale ourselves while the wagons are halted.
Dinner at Moose Lake, eighteen miles from Kettle River. A little rest, a little drying of our soaked boots and wet clothes, and in the middle of the afternoon we set off again for Twin Lakes, still eighteen miles farther. It is dark when we reach Black Hoof, and only two thirds of the distance is made, and we are all weary enough. Two ladies quite unable to go on. But supper is ordered at Twin Lakes, and cannot be had here ; and the Black Hoof landlord, perhaps offended because his house was overlooked in our programme, sternly declares, as he sits tipped back against the logs in his glowing room (how cheery it looks to us out in the rain !) that he has not a bed nor a floor for one of us. Fortunately we are the bearers of a message and a present to his wife. She last year anointed the swollen, inflamed hands and face of a mosquito-bitten banker of Philadelphia, who had been fishing in these woods, and cured his hurts ; in acknowledgment of which motherly kindness he has sent her a new gown. It is delivered with a flattering speech from his partner; the good woman is delighted; even the husband’s heart is softened ; and our weary ones are taken in.
Then, six miles farther for the rest of us ! We come to abrupt hills with terrible gullies in their sides. The night is dark, and it is perilous getting on by the light of lanterns. When we strike a piece of smooth road, we bowl briskly along the yielding sand ; while the flashing gleams from the forward wagons, illuminating the boughs and opening vistas of the forest-sides, create for us behind a constant illusion of castles and villas, which vanish ever as we arrive at their gates. Are they prophetic glimpses of the time when these arched and pillared woods shall be transformed to abodes of cultivated man ?
It is near midnight, and it is rainy and very cold, when we tumble from the coaches, weary and hungry and chilled, at Twin Lakes. Two log-cottages receive us, and furnish us most welcome excellent suppers ; and we all sleep under roofs this night, some on floors, some on hay in the barns, and a few in beds. Next morning (Sunday, 15th) finds us rested and hilarious. I look about me, and am interested to observe with what cheerfulness men and women accustomed to the luxuries of life accept the discomforts and endure the hardships of days and nights like these. Even he whose shrunken boots, his only pair, resist all attempts at coaxing or coercion, and, at the end of an hour’s straining and pushing, steadily refuse to go on the excruciated feet, yields with decency to fate, and appears happy as a king in a pair of stout brogans purchased of the hostler.
The lakes (as we see by daylight in the morning) are mere ponds, one of them full of leeches, which we dip up with the water in pail or basin, when we go to the shore to wash ourselves.
The cottages boast, and justly, of the butter and cream with which they treat their guests. The landlady of one of them tells me her two cows gave her one hundred and six pounds of butter in the month of June last, “ and I kept a stopping-place besides, which takes milk and cream.” We measure a spear of timothy pulled up by chance in the dooryard, and find it five and a half feet in length ; and clover is thick at its roots. Winter wheat, she avers, is a sure crop, yielding from twenty to twenty-five bushels to the acre. These are among the many evidences we have met with all along the route, showing that this vast forestcovered region is one of the richest of the State. Its mighty growths of timber possess an incalculable value for the fuel and lumber with which they will supply rising cities on rivers and lakes, and settlements on the great prairies ; and the soil, shorn of its forests, will equal the best in Minnesota, for pasturage, root crops, and wheat.
Three miles beyond Twin Lakes we branch off from the old road leading to Superior, and take a new track cut through the woods to Fond du Lac. Our route on this, the fourth, morning lies through a region of pines, some of enormous size. The fragrance of their breath, the grandeur of the forest scenery, and even the terrible roots and hills and hollows over which we go rocking and tilting, all combine to fill old and young with childlike exhilaration. The country grows almost mountainous as we advance; we cross high ridges, and wind along the sides of deep gorges, and at noon come out upon heights that overlook the gleaming sinuosities and far-winding valley of the St. Louis.
Where the river rushes out from between wooded bluffs and the valley opens, there is Fond du Lac, a little cluster of old wooden houses, making the most westerly point of that immense system of lake and river and canal navigation whose seaward opening gate is the mouth of the St. Lawrence,— an interesting fact, viewed in the light of our fresh memories of St. Anthony, where a few days since we stood at the head of navigation on the Mississippi. One who has made this grand portage cannot help comparing the two places. From St. Anthony the river flows southward two thousand two hundred miles to the Gulf of Mexico, winding through fifteen degrees of latitude. A chip cast upon these more northern waters will float many more miles, through nearly thirty degrees of longitude, before it tosses on the waves of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Here, too, we are at the foot of extensive falls, creating a rival water-power, ordained to make lumber of these tremendous forests, and flour of the wheat from limitless grain-fields. Neither St. Anthony nor Fond du Lac is approachable, however, by any but smallsized craft; and as the real head of navigation for Mississippi steamers is at St. Paul, so that of lake vessels is at Duluth, twenty miles hence, down the St. Louis.
We have made this grand portage laboriously in wagons (for the most part), and we have been three days and more about it. The railroad completed, it will be made comfortably in a few hours. This terrible mud-canal navigation through the wilderness will soon be obsolete, and a thing to be wondered at when the new avenue of trade and travel shall be established, with civilization brightly crystallizing in its course.
We have kept within two or three miles of the railroad grade ever since leaving Rushseba ; and here once more it meets us, having crossed the river somewhere above, and throwing up now its fresh embankments on the opposite bank. There, too, moored by the marshy shore, lie two little steamers, which hospitable citizens, friends of the railroad and of its builders, have sent up for us from Duluth. We gleefully set out to cross to them, leaving our wagon-train on the south bank.
I embark with half a dozen others in a skiff, furnished with rudder and sail, and assist in getting it off. It is in the charge of a young man from Duluth, who, surmising that I have seen a gaff before to-day, asks, can I manage the sail ? I think I am equal to that, and it is accordingly hoisted. I have the helm and sheet, and try the starboard tack, and wonder why we don’t head up stream, and edge away from those villanous rocks below there. By heavens! we are drifting straight down upon them, spite of wind and helm, swept by a powerful current and twisted about on the black eddies which I (a mere landlubber, after all, used only to plain sailing) did not calculate upon sufficiently. I port the helm just in time to run inside the rocks ; conclude that the boat has no keel; “ down sail,” and resort ingloriously to the oars.
Crossing over, we are followed by a barge, picturesquely laden with the rest of our party, and swinging in the current from a long line, at the other end of which an insignificant row-boat is irregularly pulling. We embark, some on a little tug which a steamer of any size could put into its side-pocket (if steamers had side-pockets), the rest on a crank side-wheeler of somewhat larger dimensions ; and are soon on our winding way, among the islands and curves of the low green shores of the river, to Duluth and the lake.