The same evening, at twelve o'clock, we were at Detroit. "You must lock

your state-rooms in the night," said one of the persons employed about

the vessel, "for Detroit is full of thieves." We followed the advice,

slept soundly, and saw nothing of the thieves, nor of Detroit either, for

the steamboat was again on her passage through Lake St. Clair at three

this morning, and when I awoke we were moving over the flats, as they are

called, at the upper end of the lake. The steamer was threading her way in

a fog between large patches of sedge of a pea-green color. We had waited

several hours at Detroit, because this passage is not safe at night, and

steamers of a larger size are sometimes grounded here in the day-time.

I had hoped, when I began, to bring down the narrative of my voyage to

this moment, but my sheet is full, and I shall give you the remainder in

another letter.

Letter XXXI.

A Trip from Detroit to Mackinaw.

Steamer Oregon, Lake Michigan, _July_ 25, 1846.

Soon after passing the flats described in my last letter, and entering the

river St. Clair, the steamer stopped to take in wood on the Canadian side.

Here I went on shore. All that we could see of the country was a road

along the bank, a row of cottages at a considerable distance from each

other along the road, a narrow belt of cleared fields behind them, and

beyond the fields the original forest standing like a long lofty wall,

with its crowded stems of enormous size and immense height, rooted in the

strong soil—ashes and maples and elms, the largest of their species.

Scattered in the foreground were numbers of leafless elms, so huge that

the settlers, as if in despair of bringing them to the ground by the ax,

had girdled them and left them to decay and fall at their leisure.

We went up to one of the houses, before which stood several of the family

attracted to the door by the sight of our steamer. Among them was an

intelligent-looking man, originally from the state of New York, who gave

quick and shrewd answers to our inquiries. He told us of an Indian

settlement about twenty miles further up the St. Clair. Here dwell a

remnant of the Chippewa tribe, collected by the Canadian government, which

has built for them comfortable log-houses with chimneys, furnished them

with horses and neat cattle, and utensils of agriculture, erected a house

of worship, and given them a missionary. "The design of planting them

here," saidth esettler, "was to encourage them to cultivate the soil."

"And what has been the success of the plan?" I asked.

"It has met with no success at all," he answered. "The worst thing that

the government could do for these people is to give them every thing as it

has done, and leave them under no necessity to provide for themselves.

They chop over a little land, an acre or two to a family; their squaws

plant a little corn and a few beans, and this is the extent of their

agriculture. They pass their time in hunting and fishing, or in idleness.

They find deer and bears in the woods behind them, and fish in the St.

Clair before their doors, and they squander their yearly pensions. In one

respect they are just like white men, they will not work if they can live

without."

"What fish do they find in the St. Clair?"

"Various sorts. Trout and white-fish are the finest, but they are not so

abundant at this season. Sturgeon and pike are just now in season, and the

pike are excellent."

One of us happening to observe that the river might easily be crossed by

swimming, the settler answered:

"Not so easily as you might think. The river is as cold as a well, and the

swimmer would soon be chilled through, and perhaps taken with the cramp.

It is this coldness of the water which makes the fish so fine at this

season."

This mention of sturgeons tempts me to relate an anecdote which I heard as

I was coming up the Hudson. A gentleman who lived east of the river, a

little back of Tivoli, caught last spring one of these fish, which weighed

about a hundred and sixty pounds. He carried it to a large pond near his

house, the longest diameter of which is about a mile, and without taking

it out of the net in which he had caught it, he knotted part of the meshes

closely around it, and attaching them to a pair of lines like reins, put

the creature into the water. To the end of the lines he had taken care to

attach a buoy, to mark the place of the fish in the pond. He keeps a small

boat, and when he has a mind to make a water-excursion, he rows to the

place where the buoy is floating, ties the lines to the boat and, pulling

them so as to disturb the fish, is drawn backward and forward with great

rapidity over the surface. The pond, in its deepest part, has only seven

feet water, so that there is no danger of being dragged under.

We now proceeded up the river, and in about two hours came to a neat

little village on the British side, with a windmill, a little church, and

two or three little cottages, prettily screened by young trees.

Immediately beyond this was the beginning of the Chippewa settlement of

which we had been told. Log-houses, at the distance of nearly a quarter of

a mile from each other, stood in a long row beside the river, with

scattered trees about them, the largest of the forest, some girdled and

leafless, some untouched and green, the smallest trees between having been

cut away. Here and there an Indian woman, in a blue dress and bare-headed,

was walking along the road; cows and horses were grazing near the houses;

patches of maize were seen, tended in a slovenly manner and by no means

clear of bushes, but nobody was at work in the fields. Two females came

down to the bank, with paddles, and put off into the river in a birch-bark

canoe, the ends of which were carved in the peculiar Indian fashion. A

little beyond stood a group of boys and girls on the water's edge, the

boys in shirts and leggins, silently watching the steamer as it shot by

them. Still further on a group of children of both sexes, seven in number,

came running with shrill cries down the bank. It was then about twelve

o'clock, and the weather was extremely sultry. The boys in an instant

threw off their shirts and leggins, and plunged into the water with

shouts, but the girls were in before them, for they wore only a kind of

petticoat which they did not take off, but cast themselves into the river

at once and slid through the clear water like seals.

This little Indian colony on the edge of the forest extends for several

miles along the river, where its banks are highest and best adapted to the

purpose of settlement. It ends at last just below the village which bears

the name of Fort Saranae, in the neighborhood of which I was shown an

odd-looking wooden building, and was told that this was the house of

worship provided for the Indians by the government.

At Fort Huron, a village on the American side, opposite to Fort Saranae,

we stopped to land passengers. Three Indians made their appearance on the

shore, one of whom, a very large man, wore a kind of turban, and a white

blanket made into a sort of frock, with bars of black in several places,

altogether a striking costume. One of this party, a well-dressed young

man, stopped to speak with somebody in the crowd on the wharf, but the

giant in the turban, with his companion, strode rapidly by, apparently not

deigning to look at us, and disappeared in the village. He was scarcely

out of sight when I perceived a boat approaching the shore with a

curiously mottled sail. As it came nearer I saw that it was a quilt of

patchwork taken from a bed. In the bottom of the boat lay a barrel,

apparently of flour, a stout young fellow pulled a pair of oars, and a

slender-waisted damsel, neatly dressed, sat in the stern, plying a paddle

with a dexterity which she might have learned from the Chippewa ladies,

and guiding the course of the boat which passed with great speed over the

water.

We were soon upon the broad waters of Lake Huron, and when the evening

closed upon us we were already out of sight of land. The next morning I

was awakened by the sound of rain on the hurricane deck. A cool east wind

was blowing. I opened the outer door of my state-room, and snuffed the air

which was strongly impregnated with the odor of burnt leaves or grass,

proceeding, doubtless, from the burning of woods or prairies somewhere on

the shores of the lake. For mile after mile, for hour after hour, as we

flew through the mist, the same odor was perceptible: the atmosphere of

the lake was full of it.

"Will it rain all day?" I asked of a fellow-passenger, a Salem man, in a

white cravat.

"The clouds are thin," he answered; "the sun will soon burn them off."

In fact, the sun soon melted away the clouds, and before ten o'clock I was

shown, to the north of us, the dim shore of the Great Manitoulin Island,

with the faintly descried opening called the West Strait, through which a

throng of speculators in copper mines are this summer constantly passing

to the Sault de Ste. Marie. On the other side was the sandy isle of Bois

Blanc, the name of which is commonly corrupted into Bob Low Island,

thickly covered with pines, and showing a tall light-house on the point

nearest us. Beyond another point lay like a cloud the island of Mackinaw.

I had seen it once before, but now the hazy atmosphere magnified it into a

lofty mountain; its limestone cliffs impending over the water seemed

larger; the white fort—white as snow—built from the quarries of the

island, looked more commanding, and the rocky crest above it seemed almost

to rise to the clouds. There was a good deal of illusion in all this, as

we were convinced as we came nearer, but Mackinaw with its rocks rising

from the most transparent waters that the earth pours out from her

springs, is a stately object in any condition of the atmosphere. The

captain of our steamer allowed us but a moment at Mackinaw; a moment to

gaze into the clear waters, and count the fish as they played about

without fear twenty or thirty feet below our steamer, as plainly seen as

if they lay in the air; a moment to look at the fort on the heights,

dazzling the eyes with its new whiteness; a moment to observe the

habitations of this ancient village, some of which show you roofs and

walls of red-cedar bark confined by horizontal strips of wood, a kind of

architecture between the wigwam and the settler's cabin. A few baskets of

fish were lifted on board, in which I saw trout of enormous size, trout a

yard in length, and white-fish smaller, but held perhaps in higher esteem,

and we turned our course to the straits which lead into Lake Michigan.

I remember hearing a lady say that she was tired of improvements, and only

wanted to find a place that was finished, where she might live in peace. I

think I shall recommend Mackinaw to her. I saw no change in the place

since my visit to it five years ago. It is so lucky as to have no

_back-country_, it offers no advantages to speculation of any sort; it

produces, it is true, the finest potatoes in the world, but none for

exportation. It may, however, on account of its very cool summer climate,

become a fashionable watering-place, in which case it must yield to the

common fate of American villages and improve, as the phrase is.

Letter XXXII.

Journey from Detroit to Princeton.

Princeton, Illinois, _July_ 31, 1846.

Soon after leaving the island of Mackinaw we entered the straits and

passed into Lake Michigan. The odor of burnt leaves continued to accompany

us, and from the western shore of the lake, thickly covered with wood, we

saw large columns of smoke, several miles apart, rising into the hazy sky.

The steamer turned towards the eastern shore, and about an hour before

sunset stopped to take in wood at the upper Maneto island, where we landed

and strolled into the forest. Part of the island is high, but this, where

we went on shore, consists of hillocks and hollows of sand, like the waves

of the lake in one of its storms, and looking as if successive storms had

swept them up from the bottom. They were covered with an enormous growth

of trees which must have stood for centuries. We admired the astonishing

transparency of the water on this shore, the clean sands without any

intermixture of mud, the pebbles of almost chalky whiteness, and the

stones in the edge of the lake, to which adhered no slime, nor green moss,

nor aquatic weed. In the light-green depths, far down, but distinctly

seen, shoals of fish, some of them of large size, came quietly playing

about the huge hull of our steamer.

On the shore were two log-houses inhabited by woodmen, one of whom drew a

pail of water for the refreshment of some of the passengers, from a well

dug in the sand by his door. "It is not so good as the lake water," said

I, for I saw it was not so clear. "It is colder, though," answered the

man; "but I must say that there is no purer or sweeter water in the world

than that of our lake."

Next morning we were coasting the western shore of Lake Michigan, a high

bank presenting a long line of forest. This was broken by the little town

of Sheboygan, with its light-house among the shrubs of the bank, its

cluster of houses just built, among which were two hotels, and its single

schooner lying at the mouth of a river. You probably never heard of

Sheboygan before; it has just sprung up in the forests of Wisconsin; the

leaves have hardly withered on the trees that were felled to make room for

its houses; but it will make a noise in the world yet. "It is the

prettiest place on the lake," said a passenger, whom we left there, with

three chubby and healthy children, a lady who had already lived long

enough at Sheboygan to be proud of it.

Further on we came to Milwaukie, which is rapidly becoming one of the

great cities of the West. It lies within a semicircle of green pastoral

declivities sprinkled with scattered trees, where the future streets are

to be built. We landed at a kind of wharf, formed by a long platform of

planks laid on piles, under which the water flows, and extending to some

distance into the lake, and along which a car, running on a railway, took

the passengers and their baggage, and a part of the freight of the steamer

to the shore.

"Will you go up to town, sir?" was the question with which I was saluted

by the drivers of a throng of vehicles of all sorts, as soon as I reached

the land. They were ranged along a firm sandy beach between the lake and

the river of Milwaukie. On one side the light-green waters of the lake, of

crystalline clearness, came rolling in before the wind, and on the other

the dark thick waters of the river lay still and stagnant in the sun. We

did not go up to the town, but we could see that it was compactly built,

and in one quarter nobly. A year or two since that quarter had been

destroyed by fire, and on the spot several large and lofty warehouses had

been erected, with an hotel of the largest class. They were of a fine

light-brown color, and when I learned that they were of brick, I inquired

of a by-stander if that was the natural color of the material. "They are

Milwaukie brick," he answered, "and neither painted nor stained; and are

better brick besides than are made at the eastward." Milwaukie is said to

contain, at present, about ten thousand inhabitants. Here the belt of

forest that borders the lake stretches back for several miles to the

prairies of Wisconsin. "The Germans," said a passenger, "are already in

the woods hacking at the trees, and will soon open the country to the

prairies."

We made a short stop at Racine, prettily situated on the bank among the

scattered trees of an oak opening, and another at Southport, a rival town

eleven miles further south. It is surprising how many persons travel, as

way-passengers, from place to place on the shores of these lakes. Five

years ago the number was very few, now they comprise, at least, half the

number on board a steamboat plying between Buffalo and Chicago. When all

who travel from Chicago to Buffalo shall cross the peninsula of Michigan

by the more expeditious route of the railway, the Chicago and Buffalo line

of steamers, which its owners claim to be the finest line in the world,

will still be crowded with people taken up or to be set down at some of

the intermediate towns.

When we awoke the next morning our steamer was at Chicago. Any one who had

seen this place, as I had done five years ago, when it contained less than

five thousand people, would find some difficulty in recognizing it now

when its population is more than fifteen thousand. It has its long rows of

warehouses and shops, its bustling streets; its huge steamers, and crowds

of lake-craft, lying at the wharves; its villas embowered with trees; and

its suburbs, consisting of the cottages of German and Irish laborers,

stretching northward along the lake, and westward into the prairies, and

widening every day. The slovenly and raw appearance of a new settlement

begins in many parts to disappear. The Germans have already a garden in a

little grove for their holidays, as in their towns in the old country, and

the Roman Catholics have just finished a college for the education of

those who are to proselyte the West.

The day was extremely hot, and at sunset we took a little drive along the

belt of firm sand which forms the border of the lake. Light-green waves

came to the shore in long lines, with a crest of foam, like a miniature

surf, rolling in from that inland ocean, and as they dashed against the

legs of the horses, and the wheels of our carriage, the air that played

over them was exceedingly refreshing.

When we set out the following day in the stage-coach for Peru, I was

surprised to see how the settlement of Chicago had extended westward into

the open country. "Three years ago," said a traveller in the coach, "it

was thought that this prairie could neither be inhabited nor cultivated.

It is so level and so little elevated, that for weeks its surface would

remain covered with water; but we have found that as it is intersected

with roads, the water either runs off in the ditches of the highways, or

is absorbed into the sand which lies below this surface of dark vegetable

mould, and it is now, as you perceive, beginning to be covered with

habitations."

If you ever go by the stage-coach from Chicago to Peru, on the Illinois

river, do not believe the glozing tongue of the agent who tells you that

you will make the journey in sixteen hours. Double the number, and you

will be nearer the truth. A violent rain fell in the course of the

morning; the coach was heavily loaded, nine passengers within, and three

without, besides the driver; the day was hot, and the horses dragged us

slowly through the black mud, which seemed to possess the consistency and

tenacity of sticking-plaster. We had a dinner of grouse, which here in

certain seasons, are sold for three cents apiece, at a little tavern on

the road; we had passed the long green mound which bears the name of Mount

Joliet, and now, a little before sunset, having travelled somewhat less

than fifty miles, we were about to cross the channel of the Illinois canal

for the second or third time.

There had once been a bridge at the crossing-place, but the water had

risen in the canal, and the timbers and planks had floated away, leaving

only the stones which formed its foundation. In attempting to ford the

channel the blundering driver came too near the bridge; the coach-wheels

on one side rose upon the stones, and on the other sank deep into the mud,

and we were overturned in an instant. The outside passengers were pitched

head-fore-most into the canal, and four of those within were lying under

water. We extricated ourselves as well as we could, the men waded out, the

women were carried, and when we got on shore it was found that, although

drenched with water and plastered with mud, nobody was either drowned or

hurt.

A farm wagon passing at the moment, forded the canal without the least

difficulty, and taking the female passengers, 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 passed the night in drying

ourselves, and getting our baggage ready to proceed the next day.

We travelled in a vehicle built after the fashion 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 canal, 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

passed 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 passed the rest of the night at an

inn just below the bank, on the margin of the river, in listening to the

mosquitoes. A Massachusetts acquaintance the next morning furnished us

with a comfortable conveyance to this pleasant neighborhood.

Letter XXXIII.

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 canal, 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 passed,

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 grass 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 passed 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 passes 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 grass, 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

passed 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 lass, went out

to pass 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 passed 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 noble

groves, its banks disposed in natural terraces, with fresh springs gushing

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 XXXIV.

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 passages 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, nobody 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 passing 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 passengers 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 flourishing little towns which are springing up on the

lake shore, 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 cluster of roofs, two of the broadest of which cover

respectable-looking hotels, already makes a considerable figure when

viewed from the lake. We passed to the shore 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 shore

of the lake," said a passenger, "and convenient ports they are, except in

very high winds. On the eastern shore, 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 quantities, 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 grassy 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 quantity 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 space 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 Elysées_, 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

passengers 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 passed Drummond's Island, and then

coasted St. Joseph's Island, on the woody shore 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 shore

causes it to be remarked, and there is not a passenger 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 passed 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 fishing. There were

none in sight as we passed, but we frequently saw on either shore 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 passage, 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 passenger, 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 passage 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 passed 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 assemblage 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 fishing, his dogs and cats, and finds a home

wherever he finds poles for a dwelling. A tornado had recently passed 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 carcasses 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 passed the humble cabins of the half-breeds on either shore,

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 XXXV.

Falls of the St. Mary.

Sault Ste. Marie, _August_ 15, 1846.

A crowd had assembled 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 fashion, 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 pass 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 mass 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 masses 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 masses, 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.

Two or three years ago this settlement of the Sault de Ste. Marie, was but

a military post of the United States, in the midst of a village of Indians

and half-breeds. There were, perhaps, a dozen white residents in the

place, including the family of the Baptist Missionary and the agent of the

American Fur Company, which had removed its station hither from Mackinaw,

and built its warehouse on this river. But since the world has begun to

talk of the copper mines of Lake Superior, settlers flock into the place;

carpenters are busy in knocking up houses with all haste on the

government lands, and large warehouses have been built upon piles driven

into the shallows of the St. Mary. Five years hence, the primitive

character of the place will be altogether lost, and it will have become a

bustling Yankee town, resembling the other new settlements of the West.

Here the navigation from lake to lake is interrupted by the falls or

rapids of the river St. Mary, from which the place receives its name. The

crystalline waters of Lake Superior on their way through the channel of

this river to Lake Huron, here rush, and foam, and roar, for about three

quarters of a mile, over rocks and large stones.

Close to the rapids, with birchen-canoes moored in little inlets, is a

village of the Indians, consisting of log-cabins and round wigwams, on a

shrubby level, reserved to them by the government. The morning after our

arrival, we went through this village in search of a canoe and a couple of

Indians, to make the descent of the rapids, which is one of the first

things that a visitor to the Sault must think of. In the first wigwam that

we entered were three men and two women as drunk as men and women could

well be. The squaws were speechless and motionless, too far gone, as it

seemed, to raise either hand or foot; the men though apparently unable to

rise were noisy, and one of them, who called himself a half-breed and

spoke a few words of English, seemed disposed to quarrel. Before the next

door was a woman busy in washing, who spoke a little English. "The old

man out there," she said, in answer to our questions, "can paddle canoe,

but he is very drunk, he can not do it to-day."

"Is there nobody else," we asked, "who will take us down the falls?"

"I don't know; the Indians all drunk to-day."

"Why is that? why are they all drunk to-day?"

"Oh, the whisky," answered the woman, giving us to understand, that when

an Indian could get whisky, he got drunk as a matter of course.

By this time the man had come up, and after addressing us with the

customary "_bon jour_" manifested a curiosity to know the nature of our

errand. The woman explained it to him in English.

"Oh, messieurs, je vous servirai," said he, for he spoke Canadian French;

"I go, I go."

We told him that we doubted whether he was quite sober enough.

"Oh, messieurs, je suis parfaitement capable—first rate, first rate."

We shook him off as soon as we could, but not till after he had time to

propose that we should wait till the next day, and to utter the maxim,

"Whisky, good—too much whisky, no good."

In a log-cabin, which some half-breeds were engaged in building, we found

two men who were easily persuaded to leave their work and pilot us over

the rapids. They took one of the canoes which lay in a little inlet close

at hand, and entering it, pushed it with their long poles up the stream in

the edge of the rapids. Arriving at the head of the rapids, they took in

our party, which consisted of five, and we began the descent. At each end

of the canoe sat a half-breed, with a paddle, to guide it while the

current drew us rapidly down among the agitated waters. It was surprising

with what dexterity they kept us in the smoothest part of the water,

seeming to know the way down as well as if it had been a beaten path in

the fields.

At one time we would seem to be directly approaching a rock against which

the waves were dashing, at another to be descending into a hollow of the

waters in which our canoe would be inevitably filled, but a single stroke

of the paddle given by the man at the prow put us safely by the seeming

danger. So rapid was the descent, that almost as soon as we descried the

apparent peril, it was passed. In less than ten minutes, as it seemed to

me, we had left the roar of the rapids behind us, and were gliding over

the smooth water at their foot.

In the afternoon we engaged a half-breed and his brother to take us over

to the Canadian shore. His wife, a slender young woman with a lively

physiognomy, not easily to be distinguished from a French woman of her

class, accompanied us in the canoe with her little boy. The birch-bark

canoe of the savage seems to me one of the most beautiful and perfect

things of the kind constructed by human art. We were in one of the finest

that float on St. Mary's river, and when I looked at its delicate ribs,

mere shavings of white cedar, yet firm enough for the purpose—the thin

broad laths of the same wood with which these are inclosed, and the broad

sheets of birch-bark, impervious to water, which sheathed the outside, all

firmly sewed together by the tough slender roots of the fir-tree, and when

I considered its extreme lightness and the grace of its form, I could not

but wonder at the ingenuity of those who had invented so beautiful a

combination of ship-building and basket-work. "It cost me twenty dollars,"

said the half-breed, "and I would not take thirty for it."

We were ferried over the waves where they dance at the foot of the rapids.

At this place large quantities of white-fish, one of the most delicate

kinds known on our continent, are caught by the Indians, in their season,

with scoop-nets. The whites are about to interfere with this occupation of

the Indians, and I saw the other day a seine of prodigious length

constructing, with which it is intended to sweep nearly half the river at

once. "They will take a hundred barrels a day," said an inhabitant of the

place.

On the British side, the rapids divide themselves into half a dozen noisy

brooks, which roar round little islands, and in the boiling pools of which

the speckled trout is caught with the rod and line. We landed at the

warehouses of the Hudson Bay Company, where the goods intended for the

Indian trade are deposited, and the furs brought from the northwest are

collected. They are surrounded by a massive stockade, within which lives

the agent of the Company, the walks are graveled and well-kept, and the

whole bears the marks of British solidity and precision. A quantity of

furs had been brought in the day before, but they were locked up in the

warehouse, and all was now quiet and silent. The agent was absent; a

half-breed nurse stood at the door with his child, and a Scotch servant,

apparently with nothing to do, was lounging in the court inclosed by the

stockade; in short, there was less bustle about this centre of one of the

most powerful trading-companies in the world, than about one of our

farm-houses.

Crossing the bay, at the bottom of which these buildings stand, we landed

at a Canadian village of half-breeds. Here were one or two wigwams and a

score of log-cabins, some of which we entered. In one of them we were

received with great appearance of deference by a woman of decidedly Indian

features, but light-complexioned, barefoot, with blue embroidered leggings

falling over her ankles and sweeping the floor, the only peculiarity of

Indian costume about her. The house was as clean as scouring could make

it, and her two little children, with little French physiognomies, were

fairer than many children of the European race. These people are descended

from the French voyageurs and settlers on one side; they speak Canadian

French more or less, but generally employ the Chippewa language in their

intercourse with each other.

Near at hand was a burial ground, with graves of the Indians and

half-breeds, which we entered. Some of the graves were covered with a low

roof of cedar-bark, others with a wooden box; over others was placed a

little house like a dog-kennel, except that it had no door, others were

covered with little log-cabins. One of these was of such a size that a

small Indian family would have found it amply large for their

accommodation. It is a practice among the savages to protect the graves of

the dead from the wolves, by stakes driven into the ground and meeting at

the top like the rafters of a roof; and perhaps when the Indian or

half-breed exchanged his wigwam for a log-cabin, his respect for the dead

led him to make the same improvement in the architecture of their narrow

houses. At the head of most of these monuments stood wooden crosses, for

the population here is principally Roman Catholic, some of them inscribed

with the names of the dead, not always accurately spelled.

Not far from the church stands a building, regarded by the half-breeds as

a wonder of architecture, the stone house, _la maison de pierre_, as they

call it, a large mansion built of stone by a former agent of the Northwest

or Hudson Bay Company, who lived here in a kind of grand manorial style,

with his servants and horses and hounds, and gave hospitable dinners in

those days when it was the fashion for the host to do his best to drink

his guests under the table. The old splendor of the place has departed,

its gardens are overgrown with grass, the barn has been blown down, the

kitchen in which so many grand dinners were cooked consumed by fire, and

the mansion, with its broken and patched windows, is now occupied by a

Scotch farmer of the name of Wilson.

We climbed a ridge of hills back of the house to the church of the

Episcopal Mission, built a few years ago as a place of worship for the

Chippewas, who have since been removed by the government. It stands remote

from any habitation, with three or four Indian graves near it, and we

found it filled with hay. The view from its door is uncommonly beautiful;

the broad St. Mary lying below, with its bordering villages and woody

valley, its white rapids and its rocky islands, picturesque with the

pointed summits of the fir-tree. To the northwest the sight followed the

river to the horizon, where it issued from Lake Superior, and I was told

that in clear weather one might discover, from the spot on which I stood,

the promontory of Gros Cap, which guards the outlet of that mighty lake.

The country around was smoking in a dozen places with fires in the woods.

When I returned I asked who kindled them. "It is old Tanner," said one,

"the man who murdered Schoolcraft." There is great fear here of Tanner,

who is thought to be lurking yet in the neighborhood. I was going the

other day to look at a view of the place from an eminence, reached by a

road passing through a swamp, full of larches and firs. "Are you not

afraid of Tanner?" I was asked. Mrs. Schoolcraft, since the assassination

of her husband, has come to live in the fort, which consists of barracks

protected by a high stockade. It is rumored that Tanner has been seen

skulking about within a day or two, and yesterday a place was discovered

which is supposed to have served for his retreat. It was a hollow, thickly

surrounded by shrubs, which some person had evidently made his habitation

for a considerable time. There is a dispute whether this man is insane or

not, but there is no dispute as to his malignity. He has threatened to

take the life of Mr. Bingham, the venerable Baptist missionary at this

place, and as long as it is not certain that he has left the neighborhood

a feeling of insecurity prevails. Nevertheless, as I know no reason why

this man should take it into his head to shoot me, I go whither I list,

without the fear of Tanner before my eyes.

Letter XXXVI.

Indians at the Sault.

Mackinaw, _August_ 19, 1846.

We were detained two days longer than we expected at the Sault de Ste.

Marie, by the failure of the steamer General Scott to depart at the proper

time. If we could have found a steamer going up Lake Superior, we should

most certainly have quieted our impatience at this delay, by embarking on

board of her. But the only steamer in the river St. Mary, above the falls,

which is a sort of arm or harbor of Lake Superior, was the Julia Palmer,

and she was lying aground in the pebbles and sand of the shore. She had

just been dragged over the portage which passes round the falls, where a

broad path, with hillocks flattened, and trunks hewn off close to the

surface, gave tokens of the vast bulk that had been moved over it. The

moment she touched the water, she stuck fast, and the engineer was obliged

to go to Cleveland for additional machinery to move her forward. He had

just arrived with the proper apparatus, and the steamer had begun to work

its way slowly into the deep water; but some days must yet elapse before

she can float, and after that the engine must be put together.

Had the Julia Palmer been ready to proceed up the lake, I should

certainly have seized the occasion to be present at an immense assemblage

of Indians on Madeleine Island. This island lies far in the lake, near its

remoter extremity. On one of its capes, called La Pointe, is a missionary

station and an Indian village, and here the savages are gathering in vast

numbers to receive their annual payments from the United States.

"There were already two thousand of them at La Pointe when I left the

place," said an intelligent gentleman who had just returned from the lake,

"and they were starving. If an Indian family has a stock of provisions on

hand sufficient for a month, it is sure to eat it up in a week, and the

Indians at La Pointe had already consumed all they had provided, and were

living on what they could shoot in the woods, or get by fishing in the

lake."

I inquired of him the probable number of Indians the occasion would bring

together.

"Seven thousand," he answered. "Among them are some of the wildest tribes

on the continent, whose habits have been least changed by the neighborhood

of the white man. A new tribe will come in who never before would have any

transactions with the government. They are called the Pillagers, a fierce

and warlike race, proud of their independence, and, next to the Blackfeet

and the Camanches, the most ferocious and formidable tribe within the

territory of the United States. They inhabit the country about Red River

and the head-waters of the Mississippi."

I was further told that some of the Indian traders had expressed their

determination to disregard the law, set up their tents at La Pointe, and

sell spirits to the savages. "If they do, knives will be drawn," was the

common saying at the Sault; and at the Fort, I learned that a requisition

had arrived from La Pointe for twenty men to enforce the law and prevent

disorder. "We can not send half the number," said the officer who

commanded at the Fort, "we have but twelve men in all; the rest of the

garrison have been ordered to the Mexican frontier, and it is necessary

that somebody should remain to guard the public property." The call for

troops has since been transferred to the garrison at Mackinaw, from which

they will be sent.

I learned afterward from an intelligent lady of the half-caste at the

Sault, that letters had arrived, from which it appeared that more than

four thousand Indians were already assembled at La Pointe, and that their

stock of provisions was exhausted.

"They expected," said the lady, "to be paid off on the 15th of August, but

the government has changed the time to nearly a month later. This is

unfortunate for the Indians, for now is the time of their harvest, the

season for gathering wild rice in the marshes, and they must, in

consequence, not only suffer with hunger now, but in the winter also."

In a stroll which we made through the Indian village, situated close to

the rapids, we fell in with a half-breed, a sensible-looking man, living

in a log cabin, whose boys, the offspring of a squaw of the pure Indian

race, were practicing with their bows and arrows. "You do not go to La

Pointe?" we asked. "It is too far to go for a blanket," was his answer—he

spoke tolerable English. This man seemed to have inherited from the white

side of his ancestry somewhat of the love of a constant habitation, for a

genuine Indian has no particular dislike to a distant journey. He takes

his habitation with him, and is at home wherever there is game and fish,

and poles with which to construct his lodge. In a further conversation

with the half-breed, he spoke of the Sault as a delightful abode, and

expatiated on the pleasures of the place.

"It is the greatest place in the world for fun," said he; "we dance all

winter; our women are all good dancers; our little girls can dance single

and double jigs as good as any body in the States. That little girl

there," pointing to a long-haired girl at the door, "will dance as good as

any body."

The fusion of the two races in this neighborhood is remarkable; the mixed

breed running by gradual shades into the aboriginal on the one hand, and

into the white on the other; children with a tinge of the copper hue in

the families of white men, and children scarcely less fair sometimes seen

in the wigwams. Some of the half-caste ladies at the Falls of St. Mary,

who have been educated in the Atlantic states, are persons of graceful and

dignified manners and agreeable conversation.

I attended worship at the Fort, at the Sault, on Sunday. The services were

conducted by the chaplain, who is of the Methodist persuasion and a

missionary at the place, assisted by the Baptist missionary. I looked

about me for some evidence of the success of their labors, but among the

worshipers I saw not one male of Indian descent. Of the females, half a

dozen, perhaps, were of the half-caste; and as two of these walked away

from the church, I perceived that they wore a fringed clothing for the

ankles, as if they took a certain pride in this badge of their Indian

extraction.

In the afternoon we drove down the west bank of the river to attend

religious service at an Indian village, called the Little Rapids, about

two miles and a half from the Sault. Here the Methodists have built a

mission-house, maintain a missionary, and instruct a fragment of the

Chippewa tribe. We found the missionary, Mr. Speight, a Kentuckian, who

has wandered to this northern region, quite ill, and there was

consequently no service.

We walked through the village, which is prettily situated on a swift and

deep channel of the St. Mary, where the green waters rush between the

main-land and a wooded island. It stands on rich meadows of the river,

with a path running before it, parallel with the bank, along the velvet

sward, and backed at no great distance by the thick original forest,

which not far below closes upon the river on both sides. The inhabitants

at the doors and windows of their log-cabins had a demure and subdued

aspect; they were dressed in their clean Sunday clothes, and the peace and

quiet of the place formed a strong contrast to the debaucheries we had

witnessed at the village by the Falls. We fell in with an Indian, a quiet

little man, of very decent appearance, who answered our questions with

great civility. We asked to whom belonged the meadows lying back of the

cabins, on which we saw patches of rye, oats, and potatoes.

"Oh, they belong to the mission; the Indians work them."

"Are they good people, these Indians?"

"Oh yes, good people."

"Do they never drink too much whisky?"

"Well, I guess they drink too much whisky sometimes."

There was a single wigwam in the village, apparently a supplement to one

of the log-cabins. We looked in and saw two Indian looms, from which two

unfinished mats were depending. Mrs. Speight, the wife of the missionary,

told us that, a few days before, the village had been full of these

lodges; that the Indians delighted in them greatly, and always put them up

during the mosquito season; "for a mosquito," said the good lady, "will

never enter a wigwam;" and that lately, the mosquitoes having disappeared,

and the nights having grown cooler, they had taken down all but the one we

saw.

We passed a few minutes in the house of the missionary, to which Mrs.

Speight kindly invited us. She gave a rather favorable account of the

Indians under her husband's charge, but manifestly an honest one, and

without any wish to extenuate the defects of their character.

"There are many excellent persons among them," she said; "they are a kind,

simple, honest people, and some of them are eminently pious."

"Do they follow any regular industry?"

"Many of them are as regularly industrious as the whites, rising early and

continuing at their work in the fields all day. They are not so attentive

as we could wish to the education of their children. It is difficult to

make them send their children regularly to school; they think they confer

a favor in allowing us to instruct them, and if they happen to take a

little offense their children are kept at home. The great evil against

which we have to guard is the love of strong drink. When this is offered

to an Indian, it seems as if it was not in his nature to resist the

temptation. I have known whole congregations of Indians, good Indians,

ruined and brought to nothing by the opportunity of obtaining whisky as

often as they pleased."

We inquired whether the numbers of the people at the mission were

diminishing. She could not speak with much certainty as to this point,

having been only a year and a half at the mission, but she thought there

was a gradual decrease.

"The families of the Indians," she said, in answer to one of my

questions, "are small. In one family at the village are six children, and

it is the talk of all the Indians, far and near, as something

extraordinary. Generally the number is much smaller, and more than half

the children die in infancy. Their means would not allow them to rear many

children, even if the number of births was greater."

Such appears to be the destiny of the red race while in the presence of

the white—decay and gradual extinction, even under circumstances

apparently the most favorable to its preservation.

On Monday we left the Falls of St. Mary, in the steamer General Scott, on

our return to Mackinaw. There were about forty passengers on board, men in

search of copper-mines, and men in search of health, and travellers from

curiosity, Virginians, New Yorkers, wanderers from Illinois, Indiana,

Massachusetts, and I believe several other states. On reaching Mackinaw in

the evening, our party took quarters in the Mansion House, the obliging

host of which stretched his means to the utmost for our accommodation.

Mackinaw is at the present moment crowded with strangers; attracted by the

cool healthful climate and the extreme beauty of the place. We were packed

for the night almost as closely as the Potawottamies, whose lodges were on

the beach before us. Parlors and garrets were turned into sleeping-rooms;

beds were made on the floors and in the passages, and double-bedded rooms

were made to receive four beds. It is no difficult feat to sleep at

Mackinaw, even in an August night, and we soon forgot, in a refreshing

slumber, the narrowness of our quarters.

Letter XXXVII.

The Island of Mackinaw.

Steamer St. Louis, Lake Huron, _August_ 20, 1846.

Yesterday evening we left the beautiful island of Mackinaw, after a visit

of two days delightfully passed. We had climbed its cliffs, rambled on its

shores, threaded the walks among its thickets, driven out in the roads

that wind through its woods—roads paved by nature with limestone pebbles,

a sort of natural macadamization, and the time of our departure seemed to

arrive several days too soon.

The fort which crowns the heights near the shore commands an extensive

prospect, but a still wider one is to be seen from the old fort, Fort

Holmes, as it is called, among whose ruined intrenchments the half-breed

boys and girls now gather gooseberries. It stands on the very crest of the

island, overlooking all the rest. The air, when we ascended it, was loaded

with the smoke of burning forests, but from this spot, in clear weather, I

was told a magnificent view might be had of the Straits of Mackinaw, the

wooded islands, and the shores and capes of the great mainland, places

known to history for the past two centuries. For when you are at Mackinaw

you are at no new settlement.

In looking for samples of Indian embroidery with porcupine quills, we

found ourselves one day in the warehouse of the American Fur Company, at

Mackinaw. Here, on the shelves, were piles of blankets, white and blue,

red scarfs, and white boots; snow-shoes were hanging on the walls, and

wolf-traps, rifles, and hatchets, were slung to the ceiling—an assortment

of goods destined for the Indians and half-breeds of the northwest. The

person who attended at the counter spoke English with a foreign accent. I

asked him how long he had been in the northwestern country.

"To say the truth," he answered, "I have been here sixty years and some

days."

"You were born here, then."

"I am a native of Mackinaw, French by the mother's side; my father was an

Englishman."

"Was the place as considerable sixty years ago as it now is?"

"More so. There was more trade here, and quite as many inhabitants. All

the houses, or nearly all, were then built; two or three only have been

put up since."

I could easily imagine that Mackinaw must have been a place of consequence

when here was the centre of the fur trade, now removed further up the

country. I was shown the large house in which the heads of the companies

of _voyageurs_ engaged in the trade were lodged, and the barracks, a long

low building, in which the _voyageurs_ themselves, seven hundred in

number, made their quarters from the end of June till the beginning of

October, when they went out again on their journeys. This interval of

three months was a merry time with those light-hearted Frenchmen. When a

boat made its appearance approaching Mackinaw, they fell to conjecturing

to what company of _voyageurs_ it belonged; as the dispute grew warm the

conjectures became bets, till finally, unable to restrain their

impatience, the boldest of them dashed into the waters, swam out to the

boat, and climbing on board, shook hands with their brethren, amidst the

shouts of those who stood on the beach.

They talk, on the New England coast, of Chebacco boats, built after a

peculiar pattern, and called after Chebacco, an ancient settlement of

sea-faring men, who have foolishly changed the old Indian name of their

place to Ipswich. The Mackinaw navigators have also given their name to a

boat of peculiar form, sharp at both ends, swelled at the sides, and

flat-bottomed, an excellent sea-boat, it is said, as it must be to live in

the wild storms that surprise the mariner on Lake Superior.

We took yesterday a drive to the western shore. The road twined through a

wood of over-arching beeches and maples, interspersed with the white-cedar

and fir. The driver stopped before a cliff sprouting with beeches and

cedars, with a small cavity at the foot. This he told us was the Skull

Cave. It is only remarkable on account of human bones having been found

in it. Further on a white paling gleamed through the trees; it inclosed

the solitary burial ground of the garrison, with half a dozen graves.

"There are few buried here," said a gentleman of our party; "the soldiers

who come to Mackinaw sick get well soon."

The road we travelled was cut through the woods by Captain Scott, who

commanded at the fort a few years since. He is the marksman whose aim was

so sure that the western people say of him, that a raccoon on a tree once

offered to come down and surrender without giving him the trouble to fire.

We passed a farm surrounded with beautiful groves. In one of its meadows

was fought the battle between Colonel Croghan and the British officer

Holmes in the war of 1813. Three luxuriant beeches stand in the edge of

the wood, north of the meadow; one of them is the monument of Holmes; he

lies buried at its root. Another quarter of a mile led us to a little bay

on the solitary shore of the lake looking to the northwest. It is called

the British Landing, because the British troops landed here in the late

war to take possession of the island.

We wandered about awhile, and then sat down upon the embankment of pebbles

which the waves of the lake, heaving for centuries, have heaped around the

shore of the island—pebbles so clean that they would no more soil a

lady's white muslin gown than if they had been of newly polished

alabaster. The water at our feet was as transparent as the air around us.

On the main-land opposite stood a church with its spire, and several roofs

were visible, with a background of woods behind them.

"There," said one of our party, "is the old Mission Church. It was built

by the Catholics in 1680, and has been a place of worship ever since. The

name of the spot is Point St. Ignace, and there lives an Indian of the

full caste, who was sent to Rome and educated to be a priest, but he

preferred the life of a layman, and there he lives on that wild shore,

with a library in his lodge, a learned savage, occupied with reading and

study."

You may well suppose that I felt a strong desire to see Point St. Ignace,

its venerable Mission Church, its Indian village, so long under the care

of Catholic pastors, and its learned savage who talks Italian, but the

time of my departure was already fixed. My companions were pointing out on

that shore, the mouth of Carp River, which comes down through the forest

roaring over rocks, and in any of the pools of which you have only to

throw a line, with any sort of bait, to be sure of a trout, when the

driver of our vehicle called out, "Your boat is coming." We looked and saw

the St. Louis steamer, not one of the largest, but one of the finest boats

in the line between Buffalo and Chicago, making rapidly for the island,

with a train of black smoke hanging in the air behind her. We hastened to

return through the woods, and in an hour and a half we were in our clean

and comfortable quarters in this well-ordered little steamer.

But I should mention that before leaving Mackinaw, we did not fail to

visit the principal curiosities of the place, the Sugar Loaf Rock, a

remarkable rock in the middle of the island, of a sharp conical form,

rising above the trees by which it is surrounded, and lifting the stunted

birches on its shoulders higher than they, like a tall fellow holding up a

little boy to overlook a crowd of men—and the Arched Rock on the shore.

The atmosphere was thick with smoke, and through the opening spanned by

the arch of the rock I saw the long waves, rolled up by a fresh wind, come

one after another out of the obscurity, and break with roaring on the

beach.

The path along the brow of the precipice and among the evergreens, by

which this rock is reached, is singularly wild, but another which leads to

it along the shore is no less picturesque—passing under impending cliffs

and overshadowing cedars, and between huge blocks and pinnacles of rock.

I spoke in one of my former letters of the manifest fate of Mackinaw,

which is to be a watering-place. I can not see how it is to escape this

destiny. People already begin to repair to it for health and refreshment

from the southern borders of Lake Michigan. Its climate during the summer

months is delightful; there is no air more pure and elastic, and the winds

of the south and southwest, which are so hot on the prairies, arrive here

tempered to a grateful coolness by the waters over which they have swept.

The nights are always, in the hottest season, agreeably cool, and the

health of the place is proverbial. The world has not many islands so

beautiful as Mackinaw, as you may judge from the description I have

already given of parts of it. The surface is singularly irregular, with

summits of rock and pleasant hollows, open glades of pasturage and shady

nooks. To some, the savage visitors, who occasionally set up their lodges

on its beach, as well as on that of the surrounding islands, and paddle

their canoes in its waters, will be an additional attraction. I can not

but think with a kind of regret on the time which, I suppose is near at

hand, when its wild and lonely woods will be intersected with highways,

and filled with cottages and boarding-houses.

Letter XXXVIII.

An Excursion to the Water Gap.

Stroudsberg, Monroe Co., Penn. _October_ 23, 1846.

I reached this place last evening, having taken Easton in my way. Did it

ever occur to you, in passing through New Jersey, how much the northern

part of the state is, in some respects, like New York, and how much the

southern part resembles Pennsylvania? For twenty miles before reaching

Easton, you see spacious dwelling-houses, often of stone, substantially

built, and barns of the size of churches, and large farms with extensive

woods of tall trees, as in Pennsylvania, where the right of soil has not

undergone so many subdivisions as with us. I was shown in Warren county,

in a region apparently of great fertility, a farm which was said to be two

miles square. It belonged to a farmer of German origin, whose comfortable

mansion stood by the way, and who came into the state many years ago, a

young man.

"I have heard him say," said a passenger, "that when his father brought

him out with his young wife into Warren county, and set him down upon what

then appeared a barren little farm, now a part of his large and productive

estate, his heart failed him. However he went to work industriously,

practicing the strictest economy, and by applying lime copiously to the

soil made it highly fertile. It is lime which makes this region the

richest land in New Jersey; the farmers find limestone close at hand, burn

it in their kilns, and scatter it on the surface. The person of whom I

speak took off large crops from his little farm, and as soon as he had any

money beforehand, he added a few acres more, so that it gradually grew to

its present size. Rich as he is, he is a worthy man; his sons, who are

numerous, are all fine fellows, not a scape-grace among them, and he has

settled them all on farms around him."

Easton, which we entered soon after dark, is a pretty little town of seven

thousand inhabitants, much more substantially built than towns of the same

size in this country. Many of the houses are of stone, and to the sides of

some of them you see the ivy clinging and hiding the masonry with a veil

of evergreen foliage. The middle of the streets is unpaved and very dusty,

but the broad flagging on the sides, under the windows of the houses, is

sedulously swept. The situation of the place is uncommonly picturesque. If

ever the little borough of Easton shall grow into a great town, it will

stand on one of the most commanding sites in the world, unless its

inhabitants shall have spoiled it by improvements. The Delaware, which

forms the eastern bound of the borough, approaches it from the north

through high wooded banks, and flows away to join the Susquehanna between

craggy precipices. On the south side, the Lehigh comes down through a

deep, verdant hollow, and on the north the Bushkill winds through a glen

shaded with trees, on the rocky banks of which is one of the finest drives

in the world. In the midst of the borough rises a crag as lofty as that on

which Stirling Castle is built—in Europe, it would most certainly have

been crowned with its castle; steep and grassy on one side, and

precipitous and rocky on the other, where it overhangs the Bushkill. The

college stands on a lofty eminence, overlooking the dwellings and streets,

but it is an ugly building, and has not a tree to conceal even in part its

ugliness. Besides these, are various other eminences in the immediate

vicinity of this compact little town, which add greatly to its beauty.

We set out the next morning for the Delaware Water Gap, following the road

along the Delaware, which is here uncommonly beautiful. The steep bank is

mostly covered with trees sprouting from the rocky shelves, and below is a

fringe of trees between the road and the river. A little way from the

town, the driver pointed out, in the midst of the stream, a long island of

loose stones and pebbles, without a leaf or stem of herbage.

"It was there," said he, "that Gaetter, six years ago, was hanged for the

murder of his wife."

The high and steep bank of the river, the rocks and the trees, he

proceeded to tell us, were covered on that day with eager spectators from

all the surrounding country, every one of whom, looking immediately down

on the island, could enjoy a perfect view of the process by which the poor

wretch in the hands of the hangman was turned off.

About five miles from Easton we stopped to water our horses at an inn, a

large handsome stone house, with a chatty landlord, who spoke with a

strong German accent, complaining pathetically of the potato disease,

which had got into the fields of the neighborhood, but glorying in the

abundant crops of maize and wheat which had been gathered. Two miles

further on, we turned away from the river and ascended to the table-land

above, which we found green with extensive fields of wheat, just springing

under the autumnal sun. In one of the little villages nestling in the

hollows of that region, we stopped for a few moments, and fell into

conversation with a tolerably intelligent man, though speaking English

with some peculiarities that indicated the race to which he belonged. A

sample of his dialect may amuse you. We asked him what the people in that

part of the country thought of the new tariff.

"Oh," said he, "there are different obinions, some likes it and some not."

"How do the democrats take it?"

"The democratic in brinciple likes it."

"Did it have any effect on the election?"

"It brevented a goot many democrats from voting for their candidate for

Congress, Mr. Brodhead, because he is for the old tariff. This is a very

strong democratic district, and Mr. Brodhead's majority is only about a

sousand."

A little beyond this village we came in sight of the Water Gap, where the

Blue Ridge has been cloven down to its base to form a passage for the

Delaware. Two lofty summits, black with precipices of rock, form the gates

through which the river issues into the open country. Here it runs noisily

over the shallows, as if boasting aloud of the victory it had achieved in

breaking its way through such mighty barriers; but within the Gap it

sleeps in quiet pools, or flows in deep glassy currents. By the side of

these you see large rafts composed of enormous trunks of trees that have

floated down with the spring floods from the New York forests, and here

wait for their turn in the saw-mills along the shore. It was a bright

morning, with a keen autumnal air, and we dismounted from our vehicle and

walked through the Gap.

It will give your readers an idea of the Water Gap, to say that it

consists of a succession of lofty peaks, like the Highlands of the Hudson,

with a winding and irregular space between them a few rods wide, to give

passage to the river. They are unlike the Highlands, however, in one

respect, that their sides are covered with large loose blocks detached

from the main precipices. Among these grows the original forest, which

descends to their foot, fringes the river, and embowers the road.

The present autumn is, I must say, in regard to the coloring of the

forests, one of the shabbiest and least brilliant I remember to have seen

in this country, almost as sallow and dingy in its hues as an autumn in

Europe. But here in the Water Gap it was not without some of its

accustomed brightness of tints—the sugar-maple with its golden leaves,

and the water-maple with its foliage of scarlet, contrasted with the

intense green of the hemlock-fir, the pine, the rosebay-laurel, and the

mountain-laurel, which here grow in the same thicket, while the ground

below was carpeted with humbler evergreens, the aromatic wintergreen, and

the trailing arbutus. The Water Gap is about a mile in length, and near

its northern entrance an excellent hotel, the resort of summer visitors,

stands on a cliff which rises more than a hundred feet almost

perpendicularly from the river. From this place the eye follows the Water

Gap to where mountains shut in one behind another, like the teeth of a

saw, and between them the Delaware twines out of sight.

Before the hotel a fine little boy of about two years of age was at play.

The landlord showed us on the calf of the child's leg two small lurid

spots, about a quarter of an inch apart. "That," said he, "is the bite of

a copper-head snake."

We asked when this happened.

"It was last summer," answered he; "the child was playing on the side of

the road, when he was heard to cry, and seen to make for the house. As

soon as he came, my wife called my attention to what she called a scratch

on his leg. I examined it, the spot was already purple and hard, and the

child was crying violently. I knew it to be the bite of a copper-head, and

immediately cut it open with a sharp knife, making the blood to flow

freely and washing the part with water. At the same time we got a yerb"

(such was his pronunciation) "on the hills, which some call lion-heart,

and others snake-head. We steeped this yerb in milk which we made him

drink. The doctor had been sent for, and when he came applied hartshorn;

but I believe that opening the wound and letting the blood flow was the

most effectual remedy. The leg was terribly swollen, and for ten days we

thought the little fellow in great danger, but after that he became better

and finally recovered."

"How do you know that it was a copper-head that bit him?"

"We sent to the place where he was at play, found the snake, and killed

it. A violent rain had fallen just before, and it had probably washed him

down from the mountain-side."

"The boy appears very healthy now."

"Much better than before; he was formerly delicate, and troubled with an

eruption, but that has disappeared, and he has become hardy and fond of

the open air."

We dined at the hotel and left the Water Gap. As we passed out of its jaws

we met a man in a little wagon, carrying behind him the carcass of a deer

he had just killed. They are hunted, at this time of the year, and killed

in considerable numbers in the extensive forests to the north of this

place. A drive of four miles over hill and valley brought us to

Stroudsburg, on the banks of the Pocano—a place of which I shall speak in

my next letter.

Letter XXXIX.

An Excursion to the Water Gap.

Easton, Penn., _October_ 24, 1846.

My yesterday's letter left me at Stroudsburg, about four miles west of the

Delaware. It is a pleasant village, situated on the banks of the Pocano.

From this stream the inhabitants have diverted a considerable portion of

the water, bringing the current through this village in a canal, making it

to dive under the road and rise again on the opposite side, after which it

hastens to turn a cluster of mills. To the north is seen the summit of the

Pocano mountain, where this stream has its springs, with woods stretching

down its sides and covering the adjacent country. Here, about nine miles

to the north of the village, deer haunt and are hunted. I heard of one man

who had already killed nine of these animals within two or three weeks. A

traveller from Wyoming county, whom I met at our inn, gave me some account

of the winter life of the deer.

"They inhabit," he said, "the swamps of mountain-laurel thickets, through

which a man would find it almost impossible to make his way. The

laurel-bushes, and the hemlocks scattered among them, intercept the snow

as it falls, and form a thick roof, under the shelter of which, near some

pool or rivulet, the animals remain until spring opens, as snugly

protected from the severity of the weather as sheep under the sheds of a

farm-yard. Here they feed upon the leaves of the laurel and other

evergreens. It is contrary to the law to kill them after the Christmas

holidays, but sometimes their retreat is invaded, and a deer or two

killed; their flesh, however, is not wholesome, on account of the laurel

leaves on which they feed, and their skin is nearly worthless."

I expressed my surprise that the leaves of the mountain laurel, the

_kalmia latifolia_, which are so deadly to sheep, should be the winter

food of the deer.