OWAH-MENAH, THE FALLING WATER.
“In the land of the Dacotahs,
Where the Falls of Minnehaha,
Flash and gleam among the oak-trees,
Laugh and leap into the valley.”
St. Paul, “the diadem city of the northwest,” situated on high bluffs,
at a bend of the river, looked very imposing in the light of a glowing
sunset. The noisy cries of the hackmen and runners for the different
hotels filled the air as the boat touched the wharf. Fourteen of the
passengers took the stage for St. Anthony’s Falls. Norman was seated on
the top of the stage-coach. The glimmering twilight and the pale
moonlight were not, however, very favorable for distant views of a new
country. Companies of emigrants had pitched their tents and kindled
their fire to cook their evening meal. The light played upon the faces
of parents and children grouped around the fire, and fell upon the white
cover of the prairie wagons, near which the horses were tied.
There were glimpses of the Mississippi, of a large hotel and a high
observatory; and exclamations from sleepy children at the great
musquetos lighting upon their faces in the darkness. There was a sound
of waters in the air, and a great building loomed up in the dim light,
and they were at the Winslow House. Great halls, large parlors richly
furnished, and bed-rooms with velvet carpets and luxuriously stuffed
chairs. Very grand for the northwest. It was past eleven o’clock, and
the wearied travelers were glad to seek repose.
At four o’clock in the morning Mrs. Lester was awakened by a knock at
her door. It was from an untiring fellow-traveler, who wished to see all
that was to be seen in time to return to the Grey Eagle at ten. Mrs.
Lester thanked her, but said she could not get ready in time, and from
her window she watched the lady, her brother, and her niece on their way
to the falls and the bridge. Sightseeing seemed particularly
unattractive in that grey morning twilight that clothes the landscape
with a more sober livery than that of evening.
After some ineffectual attempts to arouse Norman, Mrs. Lester went to
the observatory, at the top of the great hotel, to see the sun rise. It
was a noble view; the town of St. Anthony immediately beneath the eye;
the Mississippi, with its falls, suspension bridge, and wooded island
above, and the rocky chasm below; Minneapolis, with its spires and fine
hotels, on the opposite side of the river, and the boundless prairie
meeting the sky in that encircling horizon.
[Illustration:
No. 666.
FALLS OF ST. ANTHONY.]
At length Norman was awakened, and after sundry calls from his mother to
hasten his movements, he sallied forth with her for a walk. Walking down
the street for some distance, they crossed a little bridge leading past
a large stone mill, and after scrambling over a stony path, they came to
the edge of the river and in view of the falls. Norman’s disappointment
was great. “Why, mother,” said he, “have we come all this distance to
see these falls?”
In truth they were not very imposing. The stream above was filled with
logs, floated down to be sawed in the mill, and many of them were lodged
above and below the fall, while a shingle-machine was built in the
center. Man’s work had taken away all the wild grace of nature.
The fall is only seventeen feet high, but the whole scene looks finely
from the bridge below, and from the Minneapolis side, whence it was seen
by the party that set out on their rambles at four o’clock in the
morning.
It was a very warm morning, but near the river the air was cool and
refreshing, and Norman gathered wild roses and rose-buds in all their
dewy freshness. The charm of early birds, too, was not wanting at
_Owah-Menah_, the musical Indian name, changed by Father Hennepin, a
French missionary, who visited this spot in 1680, to St. Anthony’s
Falls.
As the falls of a mighty river, they are worth seeing; and they are at
the point of transition from the prairies of the Upper Mississippi, to
the rugged limestone bluffs below; oaks growing above, and cedars and
pines below.
On their way to the hotel Norman gathered some purple flowers growing in
great profusion, while his mother wandered to the suspension bridge so
gracefully thrown over the river, looked at the pretty wooded island,
and at the mass of drift logs collected in the boom.
After a nice and beautifully served breakfast, Norman and his mother got
into a carriage to return to St. Paul and the Grey Eagle. They would
have liked to spend the day at St. Paul, but Mrs. Lester was anxious to
return home, as she thought she would be able to do, before the Sabbath.
They crossed the suspension bridge, drove through Minneapolis, called to
say good-by to Mrs. Lisle and the children, who had added so much to the
pleasure of their river travel, and then rapidly over the broad prairie.
Their attention was attracted by a lonely tomb, deeply shaded with
trees, on the banks of the Minnehaha, and the driver told them that it
was the tomb of the young wife and child of an officer of the army, who,
when stationed at Fort Snelling, buried his beloved ones on the banks of
this romantic stream.
The driver stopped; they were on the prairie, with nothing to excite
expectation.
“The falls of Minnehaha[2]
Did not call them from a distance;
Did not cry to them afar off.”
Footnote 2:
See Frontispiece.
Then getting out of the carriage, and descending a narrow path, the fall
was before them, perfectly satisfying in its beauty; a gem of a fall, at
once stamping its image on the memory; “a thing of beauty” to be “a joy
forever.”
The fall is sixty feet high, and makes one graceful leap over an
amphitheater of rock, that recedes far enough to enable one to walk
round behind the fall, beneath the overhanging cliff. One large tree
grew on the steep bank on which they stood, sufficiently near to make a
fine foreground to the picture, and throw its masses of foliage across
the fall. There was nothing to mar the perfect loveliness of the scene.
A stir in the branches of the great tree against which Norman leaned
induced him to look up, and there, upon the bough,
“With tail erected
Sat the squirel, Adjidanmo;
In his fur the breeze of morning
Play’d as in the prairie grasses.”
Norman watched him leap surely from branch to branch, over the deep
abyss below, and then gathered some pretty flowers within reach, and
asked the guide to gather some graceful hare-bells that hung over the
steep cliff.
Another look from the head of the falls, and a few more flowers
gathered, which they pressed, together with the rose-buds from
Owah-Menah, and they got into the carriage.
Soon they reached Fort Snelling, in which Norman was very much
interested. They drove round the deserted barracks, no longer astir with
“the pomp and circumstance of war.” Norman would have enjoyed seeing the
sentinel on duty and the soldiers on parade. His mother thought of the
lonely lives the officers and their families must have led on that
frontier post, far, far as it then was from the center of civilized
life.
The fort commands a noble view, placed as it is on a commanding bluff at
the junction of the Mississippi and the St. Peters rivers. The valley of
the St. Peters, sloping upward, with its sunny fields, its aromatic
grasses, and noble groves, stretches onward in its beauty as far as the
eye can reach. In this valley is found the fine red stone of which the
Indians make the bowls of their pipes; the red paint the Sioux use so
much, and the blue and green clay used in painting, are also found here.
This lovely valley had recently been the scene of a bloody battle
between the Sioux and Chippewas, and the driver told Norman that he had
seen some of wounded Indians carried through St. Anthony by some of
their tribe.
From the earliest times these two nations have been at war; a feud
transmitted from generation to generation.
How few of these Indians have learned the great lessons of loving
kindness which the white men ought to have taught them. Steadily
retreating from their broad prairies, their great lakes and rivers,
before the advancing tread of the white man, they have not, as they gave
up their beautiful homes, got a title to a grander and more glorious
inheritance in the spirit land. How many have received firewater and
fire-arms, at the hand of the white man! how few have taken from him the
cup of salvation! Some of the customs of the Sioux seem to indicate that
they have come from Asia, across the narrow straits that divide the two
continents. They offer sacrifices and prayers to an unknown God; they
have feasts of thanksgiving after deliverance from danger; they offer
meat and burnt-offerings; they burn incense. These customs, together
with their peculiar countenances and utterances, their own traditions,
and the testimony of other nations, have convinced careful observers
that they are descendants of a race of Asiatics.[3]
Footnote 3:
Pike’s Expedition.
The road winds around the hill on which the fort is built, and Norman
saw many swallows flying into nests excavated in the banks of white
sand-stone.
Crossing the river by a rope ferry, they ascended the opposite bank, and
drove rapidly onward till they stopped to visit Carver’s Cave.
There are several large rooms rounded in the white sand-stone, which
crumbles at the touch. The floor was of pure white fine sand, powdered,
while through the cave flowed a stream clear as crystal. Norman stooped
and drank freely of the cool refreshing water. He was delighted. “How
beautiful these arched walls are,” he exclaimed; “how curious to have
such rooms hollowed out of the earth.”
There were other apartments to be reached, through a narrow passage, but
the driver had no torch with him, and it was not advisable to venture in
the darkness. Norman broke off a piece of the sand-stone as a memorial
of the cave, and then hastened to the carriage.
Over the prairie, with its abundant blossoms; along the high bluffs upon
which St. Paul is built; through a long busy street; a pause at the door
of a gentleman whom Mrs. Lester had known in her old home in the East,
and they were once more on the Grey Eagle.
And there was the lady whom they had left at the Winslow House, just
getting out of the stage. Her face brightened as she heard of Fort
Snelling, the lovely Minnehaha, and Carver’s Cave; but then she had had
a very satisfactory view of St. Anthony’s Falls, and had been able to
verify, in the truth-telling daylight, the vague and indistinct
impressions of a moonlight drive.