A Week at Duluth
AS the two little steamers found their way out from among the windings of the St. Louis River (where half the time one boat appeared, to those on board the other, to be gliding about, not on any stream, but breastdeep in a grassy sea of flat meadows), and desperately puffing and panting, put their noses into the white teeth of an easterly gale on St. Louis Bay, a bleak cluster of new-looking wooden houses, on a southward-fronting hillside, was pointed out to us as the Mecca of our pilgrimage.
The first sight, to us shivering on deck, was not particularly cheering. But as we passed on into Superior Bay, and a stroke of light from a rift in the clouds fell like a prophetic finger on the little checkered spot brightening in the wilderness, the view became more interesting. The town lies on the lower terraces of wooded hills which rise from the water’s edge, by easy grades, to the distant background of a magnificent mountain range,— a truly imposing site, to one who can look beyond those cheap wooden frames, — the staging whereby the real city is built, — and see the civilization of the future clustering along the shore, and hanging upon the benches of that ample amphitheatre.
The two bays were evidently once an open basin of the lake, from which they have been cut off, one after the other, by points of land formed by the action of its waves meeting the current of the river. Between the lake and Superior Bay is Minnesota Point, — an enormous bar seven miles in length, covered by a long procession of trees and bushes, which appear to be marching in solid column, after their captain, the lighthouse, across the head of the lake, towards the land of Wisconsin. It is like a mighty arm thrust down from the north shore to take the fury of the lake storms on one side, and to protect the haven thus formed on the other. Seated on the rocky shoulder of this arm, with one foot on the lake, and the other on the bay, is the infant city of Duluth.
Approaching a wharf on the bay side of the narrow peninsula, we perceive a very large crowd for so small a town awaiting our arrival. On landing, we are made fully aware of the hospitable intent of the citizens. They not only sent the two steamers up the river to fetch us, but here they are crowding to welcome and carry us off to their homes. As there is no hotel in the place (though spacious ones are building), we are glad to fall into the hands of these new friends, some of whom have hastened the completion of their summer-built houses on our account. We are regarded as no ordinary guests, the real fathers of the city being of our party. A few papers signed in Philadelphia have made a great Northwestern port and market possible —nay, inevitable— at this point. The idea of such a city had long been in the air ; but it was these men who caught the floating germ and planted it here. In other words, it is the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad that builds Duluth, and they are the builders of the railroad.
The “ avenue ” laid out on Minnesota Point is not yet the remarkably fine thing it looks on paper, and is no doubt destined to be in the future, — a grand thoroughfare extending some seven miles along this natural breakwater, betwixt lake and bay. At present one sees but a rough, pebbly road, which looks more like a line of very tremendous handwriting, italicized by a wooden sidewalk drawn under it. It is flanked by a few stores, dwellings, and Indian huts, and by a good many trees in the neighborhood of the wharf; and it leads up thence to the real city front, half or three quarters of a mile above. As we walk up thither (that is, such of us as are not lodged on the Point), under a strong escort of citizens on foot (carriages are still scarce in Duluth), we can hear the roar of the great lake on the other side of the bar, and catch glimpses of its white breakers and blue distance through openings among the trees.
Civilization is attracted to the line of a railroad like steel-filings to a magnet; and here appears to be the point of a magnet of more than ordinary power. “ Four months ago,” our guide tells us, as we mount the wooden steps which lead up to Superior Street, “ there were only half a dozen houses in Duluth ; now there are over a hundred.” These are not mere shanties either, but substantial wooden buildings, for the most part. We look up and down Superior Street, and sec stores, shops, dwellings, a church, a school-house, a post-office, a bank, a big hotel, and, strangest sight of all, a large jewelry store going up in the woods. In the midst of all which visible preparations for an early influx of trade an astonishing quiet reigns. There are unfinished roofs and open house-sides all round us, yet not a sound is heard.
Our first thought was that business had been suspended in honor of our arrival. Then we remembered that it was Sunday,—a fact which had been constantly jostled out of our consciousness by the secular circumstance of travel on that day, and of which we had been particularly reminded, I think, but once ; that was, when a smile was raised by a worthy elderly gentleman going about in a very public manner, on the steamboat, innocently inquiring for a euchre pack.
Two of us are taken into custody by a dealer in hardware ; and it is like getting home, after our journey through the wilderness, to find ourselves in comfortable quarters, with the prospect of a real bed to sleep in, dinner awaiting us, and the kind faces of Mr. N— and his sister beaming upon us as if we were old friends, for whom enough cannot be done. We have front rooms, the windows of which command a view that can hardly be beaten by any windows in the world ; on the left, the stormy lake tumbling shoreward its white surges; and in front, just across the dividing bar of Minnesota Point, the comparatively tranquil bay, studded with “floating islands,” and stretching far off yonder, between forest-fringed shores, to Superior City, in Wisconsin, eight miles away.
The next morning (Monday, August 16th) shows a changed aspect of things. The wind has gone down, the weather is inviting, and we go out to view the town, which, so quiet the day before, is ringing now with the noise of axes and hammers and saws, and clanking wheels, and flapping boards flung down, and scenes of busy life on every side. Wood-choppers are cutting trees, piling sticks and brush, and burning logheaps,— clearing the land, not for wheat and potatoes, but for the planting of a city. The streets have not yet been graded, but the rude wagon-tracks go curving over hillocks and through hollows, amid rocks and stumps and stones, and the plank sidewalks span many a deep gully and trickling stream.
The plan of the town well befits its really superb situation. Superior Street occupies the front of the lower terrace of the hills. Behind this, and parallel with it, are the numbered streets,— First, Second, Third, and so on,—rising step by step on the gentle acclivity. Crossing the streets are the avenues, which go cutting their tremendous gaps through the dense forest growth, up the wild mountain-side.
Going down to the lake shore, I am surprised to find under the cliff an old wharf and warehouse in the angle formed by Minnesota Point. I afterwards meet the owner and learn of him how they came here. Included in what is now Duluth is the old town of Portland, which had a name and a location at this point, but never any real existence. Here was an Indian agency, and that was about all. Good maps of the States show several such towns scattered along the north shore, — Clifton, Buchanan, Burlington, — like flies on the back of that monstrous forefinger of the lake, which is seen pointing in a southwesterly direction across the continent. Of these paper towns Portland was always deemed the most important. Situated at the western extremity of the grandest lake and river chain in the world,—that vast freshwater Mediterranean which reaches from the Gulf of St. Lawrence almost to the centre of North America,—it required no great degree of sagacity to perceive that here was to be the key to the quarter of a hemisphere, — here or hereabouts. Wherever was established the practical head of navigation between the northern range of States and the vastly more extensive undeveloped region beyond, there must be another and perhaps even a greater Chicago.
“ This,” said Mr. L—, “looked to me to be the spot. There ’s no good natural harbor here ; neither is there anywhere about the end of the lake. But here is the best chance to make a harbor. Superior Bay is deep enough for small vessels, and dredging will make it deep enough for large ones. On the lake side of the Point we have depth of water enough to float a navy ; and it only needs a breakwater thrown out from the north shore, parallel with the Point, to make as much of a haven as is wanted. There are rocks on the hills that will dump themselves into the lake, only help ’em a little. I knew the expense of the thing was n’t going to stand in the way of a good harbor here many years. My mistake was in thinking the millennium was coming so soon. There began to be talk of a railroad here fifteen years ago, and I thought we were going to have it right away. So I went to work and built a wharf and warehouse. I expected great quantities of lumber would be shipped and supplies landed at once. But the railroad did n’t come, and the lumber didn’t go. It cost me two hundred dollars a year to keep my wharf in repair, exposed, as you see it, to the lake storms, and I never got a cent for it.”
Then it appeared that the railroad was not coming to the north shore at all, but to the other end of Superior Bay, in the State of Wisconsin. This was the project of Breckenridge and his Southern associates, who got a landgrant through Congress, and founded Superior City, and were going to have a stronghold of the slave power in the enemy’s country, — a Northern metropolis to which they could bring their servants in summer, and enjoy the cool breezes of the great lake. Superior grew up at once to be a town of considerable size and importance, and stupendous hopes. But the war of the Rebellion came and put an end to schemes of that sort. The new city grew dejected, and fell into a rapid decline ; if true, what its friends still loudly claimed for it, that it was “looking up,” it must have been (like that other city a fellow-traveller tells of) because, lying flat on its back, it could not look any other way.
Portland, quite overshadowed for a while by the mushroom-umbrella of its rival, now peeped forth and took courage. Minnesota was determined, after all, to have the railroad which had so nearly fallen into the hands of her fair neighbor, Wisconsin. By running it from St. Paul to the north shore, crossing the St. Louis River at its falls, above Fond du Lac, she could keep it entirely within her own borders. But while the young State had abundant enterprise, she lacked the financial resources of her older sisters, fortunately, when the project seemed on the point of failure, the attention of eminent capitalists of Pennsylvania was Called to it, and its success insured. The bonds of the newly organized Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad Company — amounting to four and a half million dollars, secured by a lien upon its magnificent land-grant of over sixteen hundred thousand acres — were put upon the market by Jay Cooke, and sold within a week’s time, so great was the confidence of financial men in the scheme and its supporters. An immense force of laborers was in the mean while thrown upon the line of the road, and the work was poshed forward rapidly towards completion.
Then the three or four faithful ones, who had held on so long here under all discouragements, began to see their reward. A new town had been laid out, including Portland and that part of the township of Duluth lying on Minnesota Point and the head of the bay, and called Duluth (pronounced Doolooth), after the adventurous Frenchman, Daniel Greysolon Du Luth (or De Luth, or De Lut, or even Delhut, for his name appears spelled in various ways), a native of Lyons, — soldier, Indian-trader, and explorer, — whose canoes scraped the gravel on these shores nearly two hundred years ago. The land-owners made liberal grants to the railroad, and it has enriched them in retutn. One who came here fifteen years ago as an “ Indian farmer ” (sent out by the government to teach the Indians the cultivation of the soil) sells to-day, of land he “pre-empted" then, a single house-lot on Superior Street for forty-five hundred dollars.
The coast scenery is very fine. The waves break upon a beach of red shingle and sand, which stretches for miles along Minnesota Point (like an edge to that sickle), and crops out again in beautiful colored coves and basins under the jutting rocks and romantic wood-crowned cliffs of the north shore.
The water is deep and transparent, and it is delightful in calm weather, afloat in a skiff, or lying on the shelf of a projecting ledge, to look down through the softly heaving, indolent, cool, crystal waves, and see the curiously tinted stones and pebbly mosaic at the bottom. The beaches abound in agates, which are constantly gathered, and which are as constantly washed up afresh by every storm. This shore is noted for them ; and it is amusing to see newly arrived tourists run at once to the water, and, oblivious of all the grander attractions of the place, go peering and poking in the shingle for these not very precious stones.
Returning from a ramble on the rocks, I am attracted by a crowd on a street corner, discussing a murder committed on the spot a couple of days ago. Some Philadelphia roughs employed on the railroad got into a row at the door of a saloon from which they had been ejected, and made an attack upon a young man passing by, pursued him, crying, “ Kill him ! kill, him ! ” and did kill with a stab from a knife his brother who came to his rescue. The victim was a brave young man, belonging to a highly respected family living here ; his death created an intense excitement, and I hear stern-faced men talk with dangerous, settled calmness of tone of taking out the offenders and promptly hanging them,—justice being as yet scarcely organized in the place.
Nine of the rioters had been arrested, and were having an examination in the office of a justice of the peace close by. I look in, and see a hard-visaged set of fellows with irons on their legs, listening with reckless apathy to the testimony of the murdered man’s brother. The history of one of the prisoners would serve to point the moral of a tale. Sitting there on the rude bench, in coarse, soiled clothes, one of the villanous-looking row, he is recognized by some of our party as the son of a wealthy and respectable Philadelphian, — a youth who might now be enjoying the advantages which money and social position can give, had he not preferred the way of the transgressor. The fable of Poor Tray does not apply to the case of one who can hardly have gone into company worse than himself. His father had given him up as irreclaimable ; and here he was, at last, a daylaborer on a railroad, and the companion of assassins.
With no grand jury, and no jail in the State nearer than St. Paul, but with a powerful gang of railroad laborers at hand threatening the rescue of their comrades, it was certainly a strong temptation to a hot-blooded young town to solve the difficulty by the simple device of a vigilance committee and a rope. Better counsels prevail, however, and five of the nine, proved to have been concerned in the murder, are imprisoned in a lager-beer brewery back of the town, where they spend a thirsty night, — lager, lager everywhere, and not a drop to drink. To prevent a rescue, the streets are patrolled after dark by a strong guard of citizens, who can be heard walking up and down on the sidewalks all night long, and challenging each other under our windows.
“ Who goes there ?”
“ Friend.”
“ Advance, friend, and give the countersign.”
The countersign is whispered loud enough to let any one within easy earshot know that it is the popular name of the aforementioned innocent beverage ; and once it is bawled out prematurely by an inexperienced sentinel.
“ Who goes there ? ” is the challenge.
“ Lager ! ” is the bold response ; followed by the rather unmilitary rejoinder, “Advance, Lager, and give us a drink, will you ? ”
There is happily no rescue attempted ; and the next day the five are sent off, under a sufficient escort, to be lodged in prison at St. Paul. I hope that when they come to be tried and sentenced, the jolt through the woods will be taken into merciful consideration, as something that should mitigate their final punishment.
While our business-men are conferring with the citizens, and discussing plans for dredging the inner harbor, building a breakwater for the outer harbor, and making one grand harbor of the two by cutting a canal across Minnesota Point, the rest of us have ample time to enjoy ourselves. One day we accompany them on a trip up the St. Louis River, to inspect the grade of the railroad at various points. Now it is a steamboat excursion down the bay to the end of Minnesota Point, where it tosses the seas upon the curved horn of a breakwater thrown out into the lake for the protection of Superior Harbor ; and a visit to Superior City itself, lying on a low plateau across the channel, — a desolate-looking town of deserted wharves, broken-windowed warehouses, dilapidated shops and dwellings, and one hopeful newspaper which keeps up a constant warfare with the rival sheet at Duluth. Then it is a fishing excursion up the trout streams of the north shore, a morning or moonlight row upon lake or bay, and a visit to the “ floatingislands.”
These are among the most interesting curiosities of the place. They lie in full view of the town, mostly off Rice’s Point, which separates Superior Bay from the bay of St. Louis, — a pretty sisterhood of greep-wooded islets, each gracefully topped by the shaggy spires of its little group of tamaracks. They are actually floating, though anchored apparently by the roots of trees reaching down through them to the bottom of the shallow basin in which they rest. They undulate and rock in storms, and are sometimes moved from their moorings by high winds and seas, when they float about till lodged in some new position. Not long ago one of these green-masted ships parted its cables in a westerly gale, crossed the bay under a full sail of tamarack boughs, and grounded on Minnesota Point, where it still remains. We touched at it in one of our excursions, and found it to all appearances a mere raft of living roots imbedded in an accumulation of vegetable mould. It is overgrown with moss and bushes, and trees twenty or thirty feet high. We did not land upon it (if setting foot on such an amphibious, swampy mass could be called landing), but satisfied ourselves with thrusting our oars under it, as we rowed about its edge.
The existence of these islands appears a great mystery to most people ; and it is amusing to hear the ingenious theories suggested regarding their origin, The phenomenon is not, however, peculiar to this region. Pliny the Younger noted, on a lake near Rome, reed-overgrown islands which sometimes floated off with sheep that had ventured upon them from the shore. The “ floating gardens ” of Mexico, seen by the Spanish discoverers, were similar formations, which the natives had put to a picturesque use, by covering them with rich sediment from the lake bottom, planting them with the luxurious fruits of the tropics, and even building huts upon them. There are now on a lake in Prussia floating islands of sufficient size and solidity to give pasturage to herds of cattle. The great rivers of the world — those of South America, the Ganges, the Mississippi —frequently send forth from their mouths wandering islands, which are sometimes seen bearing out to sea the serpents, alligators, or wild animals that had found a home upon them. To these last the commonly received theory as to the origin of floating islands, — namely, that rafts of drift-wood became covered with flying dust and sand, forming a deposit in which plants could take root — may be applicable. But how about such curious appearances in waters where drift-wood is out of the question ? There they must have had a very different beginning. I have myself witnessed, in the State of Vermont, a phenomenon which seems to afford a simple key to the riddle. There is in Rutland County a small lake or pond, at one end of which is a cove entirely overgrown, to the extent of two or three acres, I should say, by a substance very similar to that which forms the base of these islands of Superior Bay. It is very spongy, it heaves and shakes as you tread or jump upon it, and I have thrust a fish-pole through it into a greater or less depth of shallow water beneath. There are no large trees upon it, but it is covered with various water-loving shrubs and plants, whose roots form a compactly quilted mass, thinnest at the outer edge, where it appears still to be in process of formation. One can easily imagine how such a mass grew out from the land, pushing forward first perhaps a vegetable scum, “ the green mantle of the standing pool,” on which falling and drifting leaves lodge and decay, and which the minute fibres of shore plants soon penetrate and attach. The march of vegetation tends in the direction in which it finds sustenance ; and soon, following the little foragers, an army of reeds and rushes and bushes advances even upon the unstable surface of the water, mortality in the ranks helping yearly to build the bridge on which the small feet find support, and so gradually preparing it for the approach of heavier battalions. This is no unfrequent phenomenon; and doubtless many ponds are at last quite quilted over in this way. If shallow, they may soon be filled by the thickening and sinking of the mass ; or a subterranean lake may remain to astonish some future digger of well or cellar. But let the deposit take place on the borders of a larger body of water, let trees root themselves in it, then let fragments of it be torn off by storms, or the lifting and wrenching power of thick ice, and you have something very like the floating islands of DuluthCrossed by a forest road a little way northeast of the town are two mountain streams, — one of considerable size, — which fill the deep-wooded solitudes with their enticing music and pictures. They come down from the heights beyond, and fall into the lake through wild gorges, whose leaning rocks and trees overhang many a dark pool of fascinating depth and coolness, many a chasm of rushing rapids tumbling over ledges and stones, many a white cascade leaping clear from some high shelf, through an embroidered gateway of green boughs. A summer residence here, commanding a view of the lake on one side, and having a bit of nature’s own park, with two or three of these delicious waterfalls in the rear, would not be very objectionable. Methinks one could hang up his hat here very contentedly during two or three months of the year.
The hillside immediately back of the town is not quite so enchanting, as I discover one morning, somewhat to my cost. Over the hummocks and hollows and springy places of the new clearing, where hammers resound on the roofs of hotel, church, and dwellings, I pass on, —amid stumps and rocks and piles of lumber and cord-wood, — and enter a solitary “avenue,” opened by the axe, and extending up the mountain slope. On each side is a perfect wall of woods, which it is not hard to fancy a wall of grand house-fronts twenty years hence. The morning is soft and still, a few birds twitter among the trees, but otherwise the silence of the place is broken only by the far-off hammers of the carpenters and the echoing strokes of axes at the upper end of the avenue. There wood-choppers are at work cutting still farther into the forest their gigantic swath. Straight, smooth stems of pale poplar and birch, of pine and cedar and spruce, fall before them, letting in sunlight upon the overgrown thicket. My way lies over cut boughs, strips of birch bark curled up on the ground, fresh chips, moss-covered, rotten trunks, a trickling brook bridged by a fallen fir-tree, and a few delicate, shade-loving plants nestled beside rocks and roots, —all soon to be swept from the pathway of a great thoroughfare.
The wood-choppers show me a track by which they say I can reach the end of another avenue west of them, and I think it will be pleasant to return to town that way. But there is some mistake ; it is soon evident that the path is carrying me too far up the mountain-side. I quit it at length, and, plunging into the intricacies of the untrodden woods, make for a light space which seems to indicate the opening I am in search of. After a terrible scramble over and about tangled treetops and trunks fallen and crossed, gullies and rocks and springs, I reach the space, which turns out to be no avenue, but a forest windfall. Here the tweaking forefinger of a tornado had uptorn by the roots and thrown into twisted heaps a few acres of trees, to which fire had afterwards been set, leaving a melancholy waste of ruins. I now find that I have passed to the westward of the town, far above the reach of its avenues. The spot is the haunt of hawks, pigeons, crossbills, small birds, and mosquitoes. The birds are there for the raspberries, which have sprung up profusely all about the windfall; and the hawks are after the birds. The mosquitoes seem to be there chiefly on my account. But for their too persistent attentions, I should be content to pass the residue of the morning in this spot. The berries are abundant and sweet; and from the summit of a ledge I look out upon a wondrous picture of the world, — the windings of the St. Louis River, the sister bays, the great lake itself, with floating islands, dividing points of land, and blue lines of forest sweeping round distant shores, all lying enchanted under a misty spell. A steamer coming up the bay, an idle schooner, and a canoe on the lake, appear suspended in the glassy stillness. With which exquisitely lovely scene before my eyes, I sit on a half-burnt log, and fight mosquitoes, and think what a fine place this would be to have a Rip Van Winkle nap, and wake up some years hence, when all this jungle shall have been displaced by the paved and spacious streets of a city overlooking a harbor thronged with shipping. Then what gentle and easy way of descent will there be, where now to reach the town by a short cut I am forced to pass through the fanged jaws of a wild beast of a thicket!
There linger about Duluth a few degenerate Indians, who hunt with white man’s powder, fish with white man’s nets, and drink white man’s whiskey. The most distinguished figure among them is a young brave with heroically painted features and a feather in his hat, who gets a living by picking blueberries, and selling them for white man’s money.
It is a region of mirages. Nearly every day we discover baseless promontories across the lake, and forests magnified or growing downwards ; and I am told that it is no very uncommon thing to see two or three steamers when only one is approaching, — the real steamer on the water, another inverted above that, and perhaps still another in the clouds. Wonderful sundogs and moon-dogs are seen here and throughout the State. “ You think the sun is rising in two or three places at once,” said a lady to me; who also told of having seen five moons in the heavens on a winter’s night. Around the real moon was a luminous circle, and this was quartered by a cross formed by four bright bars extending to four mock moons through which the circle was drawn. That is, the central orb appeared as the hub of a wonderful celestial wheel with four spokes, and a mock moon at the juncture of each spoke with the rim.
The winters are milder and the summers cooler at Duluth than at St. Paul, — the immense body of the lake water serving to modify the extremes of temperature. The lake is not always closed over with ice in winter, and it opens to navigation quite as early in the spring as Huron and Michigan.
I have already intimated my belief that here is to be one of the foremost cities of the West. Not even the infancy of Chicago gave such promise of early greatness, for Chicago had no settled country behind it, whereas Duluth will enjoy at once, on the completion of its railroad, an immense traffic with the Upper Mississippi and the region beyond. All the railroads radiating from St. Paul, penetrating the State in every direction, will be tributary to this grand trunk, which is to unite, by a brief connecting link, the two great navigable fresh - water systems of North America. The head of Lake Superior lies four degrees of longitude farther west than the head of Michigan, yet it is practically no farther (by water communication) from New York and the ports of Europe. On the other hand, it is only one hundred and fifty miles distant, while the head of Michigan is near four hundred and fifty miles distant, by railroad from St. Paul. At least four fifths of the grain of Minnesota, which now seeks the markets of the East through other channels, — by railroad to Milwaukee or Chicago, or by water to some point of transshipment down the river, or by the hot and tedious passage of the Gulf,— will naturally find this easier and cheaper outlet. The shortening of the route, especially at the railroad end of it, — for it is the railroad transportation that costs, — will tend to raise the price of wheat in Minnesota, and to lower the price of flour in Boston ; while the great returning tide of Eastern merchandise flowing to the far Northwest will be sure to pass this way.
Duluth has not immediately surrounding it the fertile prairies which attracted emigration, and fed the infant Chicago ; but back of it lies a magnificent forest belt, invaluable in the first place for its timber, and next for its soil, which appears peculiarly adapted to grazing and wool-growing, and the cultivation of winter wheat. In the midst of the lumber district, where the railroad crosses the river, some twenty miles from its mouth, are the falls of the St. Louis, — the dalles of the French voyageurs, — which afford a water-power not inferior to that of St. Anthony. The dalles — flag-stones or steps over which the river falls — are the outcrop of one of the most extensive bodies of valuable slate in the world. It is available for all purposes to which slate is ordinarily applied ; and experienced men, who have visited the quarries opened on the line of the road, declare that the whole surrounding country, and the entire valley of the Mississippi, may here be supplied with this useful material for centuries to come. Then there are the adjacent regions of copper and iron, whose importance in the future development of this now remote district cannot be calculated by any array of figures. With all which advantages of position, it is incvitable, as I see, that here must soon be built up a great commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing centre.
Yet here we are but just on the threshold of the great new empire of the Northwest. Here is the summit of the water-shed of near half a continent, the hills of Northeastern Minnesota pouring from their slope streams that flow to the lakes and the Atlantic on the east, to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico on the south, and to Hudson’s Bay on the north. The head of Lake Superior is about equidistant from Boston, New Orleans, and the sources of the Saskatchewan, towards which the course of empire is fast taking its way. Not far from this geographical centre we may look with Mr. Seward for the ultimate political centre of America ; and it will not be many years before the frontier State of Minnesota will wake up and find herself in the heart of the Union.
A few landmarks show how powerfully the tide of human affairs is tending in this direction. In 1854 Minnesota had a population of twenty-four thousand. In 1864 she had sent more than that number of soldiers to the war. As late as 1858 she imported her breadstuffs. In 1868 she exported twelve million bushels of wheat, and was reckoned the fifth “wheat State” in the Union. This year (1869), with a population of near half a million, and more than a million acres of wheat under cultivation, — promising a crop of at least twenty million bushels, sixteen or seventeen millions of which will be for exportation, —she will take rank as the second or third wheat State; in a few years she will be the first, and that position she will retain until outstripped in her turn by some more youthful rival.
Rivals all about her she is destined soon to have. The North Pacific Railroad is now speedily to be built, running from the head of Lake Superior almost due westward to Puget Sound, through the most favored region of all the proposed transcontinental routes. It will sow cities on its borders, and link new States to the old. Already the St Paul and Pacific Railroad — of which I have spoken in a former paper, and which is to unite with the North Pacific at Breckenridge — is penetrating the valley of the Red River of the North, and opening a way of communication with Lake Winnepeg, and our uneasy neighbors of the Selkirk settlement. Westward from this now isolated outpost of civilization lies by far the most fertile portion of British America, farther north indeed than Canada, but with a milder climate, which assimilates more and more closely to that of the same latitudes in Europe as we approach the Rocky Mountain spurs. Northward from the proposed line of the North Pacific Road one must travel some six hundred miles before he reaches the parallel of Edinburgh. What a region is here ! rich in soils, rivers, forests, remote from the mother country, and adjoining our own, of which it must before many years form a part. Of the future of America, when all this old and new territory, stretching from Lake Superior to the Pacific coast, shall have become, with Minnesota, a cluster of populous and powerful States, who shall venture to prophesy ?
It is Sunday again (August 22d), just a week after our arrival, when the larger of the two little steamers that brought us to Duluth is once more thronged, together with the wharf at which she lies, with a crowd of people. There is much cordial hand-shaking, and hurrying ashore, and hurrying aboard ; and the crowd separates, one half remaining on the wharf, the other moving slowly away from it on the steamer’s deck. A mutual waving of hats and fluttering of handkerchiefs, and adieu to Duluth, and its week-old friendships, and its never-to-be-forgotten hospitalities !
Down the bay we go tipsily staggering ; the crank little “side-wheeler” rolling over first on one paddle-box and then on the other, to the breakwater at the end of Minnesota Point, where is moored a long, black-hulled lake steamer, the St. Paul, awaiting us ; we are soon transferred on board of her ; before us lies a dim horizon of waters, and soon behind us is trailing an endless black flag of smoke, miles away, over the darkening waves ; and we are homeward bound.