Letters of a Traveller Part 14

A farm wagon pa.s.sing at the moment, forded the ca.n.a.l without the least difficulty, and taking the female pa.s.sengers, conveyed them to the next farm-house, about a mile distant. We got out the baggage, which was completely soaked with water, set up the carriage on its wheels, in doing which we had to stand waist high in the mud and water, and reached the hospitable farm-house about half-past nine o'clock. Its owner was an emigrant from Kinderhook, on the Hudson, who claimed to be a Dutchman and a Christian, and I have no reason to doubt that he was either. His kind family made us free of their house, and we pa.s.sed the night in drying ourselves, and getting our baggage ready to proceed the next day.

We travelled in a vehicle built after the fas.h.i.+on of the English post-coach, set high upon springs, which is the most absurd kind of carriage for the roads of this country that could be devised. Those stage-wagons which ply on Long Island, in one of which you sometimes see about a score of Quakers and Quakeresses, present a much better model.

Besides being tumbled into the ca.n.a.l, we narrowly escaped being overturned in a dozen other places, where the mud was deep or the roads uneven.

In my journey the next day, I was struck with the difference which five years had made in the aspect of the country. Frame or brick houses in many places had taken the places of log-cabins; the road for long distances now pa.s.sed between fences, the broad prairie, inclosed, was turned into immense fields of maize, oats, and wheat, and was spotted here and there with young orchards, or little groves, and clumps of bright-green locust-trees, and where the prairie remained open, it was now depastured by large herds of cattle, its herbage shortened, and its flowers less numerous. The wheat harvest this year is said to have failed in northern Illinois. The rust has attacked the fields which promised the fairest, and they are left unreaped, to feed the quails and the prairie-hens.

Another tedious day's journey, over a specially bad road, brought us to Peru a little before midnight, and we pa.s.sed the rest of the night at an inn just below the bank, on the margin of the river, in listening to the mosquitoes. A Ma.s.sachusetts acquaintance the next morning furnished us with a comfortable conveyance to this pleasant neighborhood.

Letter x.x.xIII.

Return to Chicago.

Chicago, _August_ 8, 1846.

You may be certain that in returning to this place from Princeton I did not take the stage coach. I had no fancy for another plunge into the Illinois ca.n.a.l, nor for being overturned upon the prairies in one of those vehicles which seem to be set high in the air in order they may more easily lose their balance. We procured a private conveyance and made the journey in three days--three days of extreme heat, which compelled us to travel slowly. The quails, which had repaired for shade to the fences by the side of the road, ran from them into the open fields, as we pa.s.sed, with their beaks open, as if panting with the excessive heat.

The number of these birds at the present time is very great. They swarm in the stubble fields and in the prairies, and manifest little alarm at the approach of man. Still more numerous, it appears to me, are the grouse, or prairie-hens, as they call them here, which we frequently saw walking leisurely, at our approach, into the gra.s.s from the road, whither they resorted for the sake of scattered grains of oats or wheat that had fallen from the loaded wagons going to Chicago. At this season they are full fed and fearless, and fly heavily when they are started. We frequently saw them feeding at a very short distance from people at work in the fields.

In some neighborhoods they seem almost as numerous as fowls in a poultry-yard. A settler goes out with his gun, and in a quarter of an hour brings in half a dozen birds which in the New York market would cost two dollars a pair. At one place where we stopped to dine, they gave us a kind of pie which seemed to me an appropriate dessert for a dinner of prairie-hens. It was made of the fruit of the western crab-apple, and was not unpalatable. The wild apple of this country is a small tree growing in thickets, natural orchards. In spring it is profusely covered with light-pink blossoms, which have the odor of violets, and at this season it is thickly hung with fruit of the color of its leaves.

Another wild fruit of the country is the plum, which grows in thickets, plum-patches, as they are called, where they are produced in great abundance, and sometimes, I am told, of excellent quality. In a drive which I took the other day from Princeton to the alluvial lands of the Bureau River, I pa.s.sed by a declivity where the shrubs were red with the fruit, just beginning to ripen. The slope was sprinkled by them with crimson spots, and the odor of the fruit was quite agreeable. I have eaten worse plums than these from our markets, but I hear that there is a later variety, larger and of a yellow color, which is finer.

I spoke in my last of the change caused in the aspect of the country by cultivation. Now and then, however, you meet with views which seem to have lost nothing of their original beauty. One such we stopped to look at from an eminence in a broad prairie in Lee county, between Knox Grove and Pawpaw Grove. The road pa.s.ses directly over the eminence, which is round and regular in form, with a small level on the summit, and bears the name of the Mound. On each side the view extends to a prodigious distance; the prairies sink into basins of immense breadth and rise into swells of vast extent; dark groves stand in the light-green waste of gra.s.s, and a dim blue border, apparently of distant woods, encircles the horizon. To give a pastoral air to the scene, large herds of cattle were grazing at no great distance from us.

I mentioned in my last letter that the wheat crop of northern Illinois has partially failed this year. But this is not the greatest calamity which has befallen this part of the country. The season is uncommonly sickly. We pa.s.sed the first night of our journey at Pawpaw Grove--so named from the number of pawpaw-trees which grow in it, but which here scarcely find the summer long enough to perfect their fruit. The place has not had the reputation of being unhealthy, but now there was scarce a family in the neighborhood in which one or more was not ill with an intermittent or a bilious fever. At the inn where we stopped, the landlady, a stout Pennsylvania woman, was just so far recovered as to be able, as she informed us, "to poke about;" and her daughter, a strapping la.s.s, went out to pa.s.s the night at the bedside of one of the numerous sick neighbors.

The sickness was ascribed by the settlers to the extremely dry and hot weather following a rainy June. At almost every place where we stopped we heard similar accounts. Pale and hollow-eyed people were lounging about.

"Is the place unhealthy," I asked one of them. "_I_ reckon so," he answered; and his looks showed that he had sufficient reason. At Aurora, where we pa.s.sed the second night, a busy little village, with mills and manufactories, on the Fox River, which here rushes swiftly over a stony bed, they confessed to the fever and ague. At Naperville, pleasantly situated among numerous groves and little prairies swelling into hills, we heard that the season was the most sickly the inhabitants had known. Here, at Chicago, which boasts, and with good reason, I believe, of its healthy site, dysenteries and bilious attacks are just now very common, with occasional cases of fever.

It is a common remark in this country, that the first cultivation of the earth renders any neighborhood more or less unhealthy. "Nature," said a western man to me, some years since, "resents the violence done her, and punishes those who first break the surface of the earth with the plough."

The beautiful Rock River district, with its rapid stream, its n.o.ble groves, its banks disposed in natural terraces, with fresh springs gus.h.i.+ng at their foot, and airy prairies stretching away from their summits, was esteemed one of the most healthy countries in the world as long as it had but few inhabitants. With the breaking up of the soil came in bilious fever and intermittents. A few years of cultivation will render the country more healthy, and these diseases will probably disappear, as they have done in some parts of western New York. I can remember the time when the "Genesee Country," as it was called, was thought quite a sickly region--a land just in the skirts of the shadow of death. It is now as healthy, I believe, as any part of the state.

Letter x.x.xIV.

Voyage to Sault Ste. Marie.

Sault Ste. Marie, _August_ 13, 1846.

When we left Chicago in the steamer, the other morning, all the vessels in the port had their flags displayed at half-mast in token of dissatisfaction with the fate of the harbor bill. You may not recollect that the bill set apart half a million of dollars for the construction or improvement of various harbors of the lakes, and authorized the deepening of the pa.s.sages through the St. Clair Flats, now intricate and not quite safe, by which these bulky steamers make their way from the lower lakes to the upper. The people of the lake region had watched the progress of the bill through Congress with much interest and anxiety, and congratulated each other when at length it received a majority of votes in both houses.

The President's veto has turned these congratulations into expressions of disappointment which are heard on all sides, sometimes expressed with a good deal of energy. But, although the news of the veto reached Chicago two or three days before we left the place, n.o.body had seen the message in which it was contained. Perhaps the force of the President's reasonings will reconcile the minds of people here to the disappointment of their hopes.

It was a hot August morning as the steamer Wisconsin, an unwieldy bulk, dipping and bobbing upon the small waves, and trembling at every stroke of the engine, swept out into the lake. The southwest wind during the warmer portion of the summer months is a sort of Sirocco in Illinois. It blows with considerable strength, but pa.s.sing over an immense extent of heated plains it brings no coolness. It was such an air that accompanied us on our way north from Chicago; and as the pa.s.sengers huddled into the shady places outside of the state-rooms on the upper deck, I thought of the flocks of quails I had seen gasping in the shadow of the rail-fences on the prairies.

People here expose themselves to a draught of air with much less scruple than they do in the Atlantic states. "We do not take cold by it," they said to me, when I saw them sitting in a current of wind, after perspiring freely. If they do not take cold, it is odds but they take something else, a fever perhaps, or what is called a bilious attack. The vicissitudes of climate at Chicago and its neighborhood are more sudden and extreme than with us, but the inhabitants say that they are not often the cause of catarrhs, as in the Atlantic states. Whatever may be the cause, I have met with no person since I came to the West, who appeared to have a catarrh.

From this region perhaps will hereafter proceed singers with the clearest pipes.

Some forty miles beyond Chicago we stopped for half an hour at Little Fort, one of those flouris.h.i.+ng little towns which are springing up on the lake sh.o.r.e, to besiege future Congresses for money to build their harbors.

This settlement has started up in the woods within the last three or four years, and its cl.u.s.ter of roofs, two of the broadest of which cover respectable-looking hotels, already makes a considerable figure when viewed from the lake. We pa.s.sed to the sh.o.r.e over a long platform of planks framed upon two rows of posts or piles planted in the sandy shallows. "We make a port in this manner on any part of the western sh.o.r.e of the lake," said a pa.s.senger, "and convenient ports they are, except in very high winds. On the eastern sh.o.r.e, the coast of Michigan, they have not this advantage; the ice and the northwest winds would rend such a wharf as this in pieces. On this side too, the water of the lake, except when an east wind blows, is smoother than on the Michigan coast, and the steamers therefore keep under the shelter of this bank."

At Southport, still further north, in the new state of Wisconsin, we procured a kind of omnibus and were driven over the town, which, for a new settlement, is uncommonly pretty. We crossed a narrow inlet of the lake, a _creek_ in the proper sense of the term, a winding channel, with water in the midst, and a rough growth of water-flags and sedges on the sides.

Among them grew the wild rice, its bending spikes, heavy with grain, almost ready for the harvest.

"In the northern marshes of Wisconsin," said one of our party, "I have seen the Indian women gathering this grain. Two of them take their places in a canoe; one of them seated in the stern pushes it with her paddle through the shallows of standing water, while the other, sitting forward, bends the heads of the rice-plant over the sides of the canoe, strikes them with a little stick and causes the grain to fall within it. In this way are collected large quant.i.ties, which serve as the winter food of the Menomonies, and some other tribes." The grain of the wild rice, I was told, is of a dark color, but palatable as food. The gentleman who gave me this account had made several attempts to procure it in a fit state to be sown, for Judge Buel, of Albany, who was desirous of trying its cultivation on the gra.s.sy shallows of our eastern rivers. He was not successfull at first, because, as soon as the grain is collected, it is kiln-dried by the Indians, which destroys the vegetative principle. At length, however, he obtained and sent on a small quant.i.ty of the fresh rice, but it reached Judge Buel only a short time before his death, and the experiment probably has not been made.

On one side of the creek was a sloping bank of some height, where tall old forest trees were growing. Among these stood three houses, just built, and the s.p.a.ce between them and the water was formed into gardens with regular terraces faced with turf. Another turn of our vehicle brought us into a public square, where the oaks of the original forest were left standing, a miniature of the _Champs Elysees_, surrounding which, among the trees, stand many neat houses, some of them built of a drab-colored brick. Back of the town, we had a glimpse of a prairie approaching within half a mile of the river. We were next driven through a street of shops, and thence to our steamer. The streets of Southport are beds of sand, and one of the pa.s.sengers who professed to speak from some experience, described the place as haunted by myriads of fleas.

It was not till about one o'clock of the second night after leaving Chicago, that we landed at Mackinaw, and after an infinite deal of trouble in getting our baggage together, and keeping it together, we were driven to the Mission House, a plain, comfortable old wooden house, built thirty or forty years since, by a missionary society, and now turned into an hotel. Beside the road, close to the water's edge, stood several wigwams of the Potawottamies, pyramids of poles wrapped around with rush matting, each containing a family asleep. The place was crowded with people on their way to the mining region of Lake Superior, or returning from it, and we were obliged to content ourselves with narrow accommodations for the night.

At half-past seven the next morning we were on our way to the Sault Ste.

Marie, in the little steamer General Scott. The wind was blowing fresh, and a score of persons who had intended to visit the Sault were withheld by the fear of seasickness, so that half a dozen of us had the steamer to ourselves. In three or four hours we found ourselves gliding out of the lake, through smooth water, between two low points of land covered with firs and pines into the west strait. We pa.s.sed Drummond's Island, and then coasted St. Joseph's Island, on the woody sh.o.r.e of which I was shown a solitary house. There I was told lives a long-nosed Englishman, a half-pay officer, with two wives, sisters, each the mother of a numerous offspring.

This English polygamist has been more successful in seeking solitude than in avoiding notoriety. The very loneliness of his habitation on the sh.o.r.e causes it to be remarked, and there is not a pa.s.senger who makes the voyage to the Sault, to whom his house is not pointed out, and his story related. It was hinted to me that he had a third wife in Toronto, but I have my private doubts of this part of the story, and suspect that it was thrown in to increase my wonder.

Beyond the island of St. Joseph we pa.s.sed several islets of rock with fir-trees growing from the clefts. Here, in summer, I was told, the Indians often set up their wigwams, and subsist by fis.h.i.+ng. There were none in sight as we pa.s.sed, but we frequently saw on either sh.o.r.e the skeletons of the Chippewa habitations. These consist, not like those of the Potawottamies, of a circle of sticks placed in the form of a cone, but of slender poles bent into circles, so as to make an almost regular hemisphere, over which, while it serves as a dwelling, birch-bark and mats of bulrushes are thrown.

On the western side of the pa.s.sage, opposite to St. Joseph's Island, stretches the long coast of Sugar Island, luxuriant with an extensive forest of the sugar-maple. Here the Indians manufacture maple-sugar in the spring. I inquired concerning their agriculture.

"They plant no corn nor squashes," said a pa.s.senger, who had resided for some time at the Sault; "they will not ripen in this climate; but they plant potatoes in the sugar-bush, and dig them when the spring opens. They have no other agriculture; they plant no beans as I believe the Indians do elsewhere."

A violent squall of wind and rain fell upon the water just as we entered that broad part of the pa.s.sage which bears the name of Muddy Lake. In ordinary weather the waters are here perfectly pure and translucent, but now their agitation brought up the loose earth from the shallow bottom, and made them as turbid as the Missouri, with the exception of a narrow channel in the midst where the current runs deep. Rocky hills now began to show themselves to the east of us; we pa.s.sed the sheet of water known by the name of Lake George, and came to a little river which appeared to have its source at the foot of a precipitous ridge on the British side. It is called Garden River, and a little beyond it, on the same side, lies Garden Village, inhabited by the Indians. It was now deserted, the Indians having gone to attend a great a.s.semblage of their race, held on one of the Manitoulin Islands, where they are to receive their annual payments from the British government. Here were log-houses, and skeletons of wigwams, from which the coverings had been taken. An Indian, when he travels, takes with him his family and his furniture, the matting for his wigwam, his implements for hunting and fis.h.i.+ng, his dogs and cats, and finds a home wherever he finds poles for a dwelling. A tornado had recently pa.s.sed over the Garden Village. The numerous girdled-trees which stood on its little clearing, had been twisted off midway or near the ground by the wind, and the roofs had, in some instances, been lifted from the cabins.

At length, after a winding voyage of sixty miles, between wild banks of forest, in some places smoking with fires, in some looking as if never violated either by fire or steel, with huge carca.s.ses of trees mouldering on the ground, and venerable trees standing over them, bearded with streaming moss, we came in sight of the white rapids of the Sault Sainte Marie. We pa.s.sed the humble cabins of the half-breeds on either sh.o.r.e, with here and there a round wigwam near the water; we glided by a white chimney standing behind a screen of fir-trees, which, we were told, had belonged to the dwelling of Tanner, who himself set fire to his house the other day, before murdering Mr. Schoolcraft, and in a few minutes were at the wharf of this remotest settlement of the northwest.

Letter x.x.xV.

Falls of the St. Mary.

Sault Ste. Marie, _August_ 15, 1846.

A crowd had a.s.sembled on the wharf of the American village at the Sault Sainte Marie, popularly called the _Soo_, to witness our landing; men of all ages and complexions, in hats and caps of every form and fas.h.i.+on, with beards of every length and color, among which I discovered two or three pairs of mustaches. It was a party of copper-mine speculators, just flitting from Copper Harbor and Eagle River, mixed with a few Indian and half-breed inhabitants of the place. Among them I saw a face or two quite familiar in Wall-street.

I had a conversation with an intelligent geologist, who had just returned from an examination of the copper mines of Lake Superior. He had pitched his tent in the fields near the village, choosing to pa.s.s the night in this manner, as he had done for several weeks past, rather than in a crowded inn. In regard to the mines, he told me that the external tokens, the surface indications, as he called them, were more favorable than those of any copper mines in the world. They are still, however, mere surface indications; the veins had not been worked to that depth which was necessary to determine their value with any certainty. The mixture of silver with the copper he regarded as not giving any additional value to the mines, inasmuch as it is only occasional and rare. Sometimes, he told me, a ma.s.s of metal would be discovered of the size of a man's fist, or smaller, composed of copper and silver, both metals closely united, yet both perfectly pure and unalloyed with each other. The ma.s.ses of virgin copper found in beds of gravel are, however, the most remarkable feature of these mines. One of them which has been discovered this summer, but which has not been raised, is estimated to weigh twenty tons. I saw in the propeller Independence, by which this party from the copper mines was brought down to the Sault, one of these ma.s.ses, weighing seventeen hundred and fifty pounds, with the appearance of having once been fluid with heat.

It was so pure that it might have been cut in pieces by cold steel and stamped at once into coin.