DOWN THE RIVER.
Down the river went they
In and out among its islands,
Sailed through all its bends and windings,
Sailed through all its deeps and shallows.
HIAWATHA.
The morning came bright and warm as ever.
At the boat Norman was delighted to see his friend, the pilot of the
Grey Eagle, who introduced them to Captain Gray, of the Kate Cassel.
There he saw too the lady who brought with her memories of the early
dawn at St. Anthony. “You like to see everything that is to be seen,”
she said to Mrs. Lester; “under that bare spot you see on the bluff
south of the town is the grave of Dubuque, the Indian chief who once
owned all this land.”
“Mother,” said Norman, as their kindly informant left them, “Dubuque is
a very strange name for an Indian chief to have; he must have been named
by the French when he was a child.”
“Julien Dubuque,” replied his mother, “was not an Indian, but a
Frenchman, who bought all this valuable mining region, so rich in fine
lead ore, from the Indians, in 1788. They had been discovered two years
before by the wife of Peosta, an Indian warrior. Dubuque died in 1810.
The Julien House is named, I suppose, in his honor.”
For a hot and weary hour the deck hands were busy taking on freight:
first barrels from a warehouse on the Levee at Dubuque; then at
Dunleith, a number of reapers and mowers, very heavy and cumbersome to
be moved.
As soon as the boat was in motion Captain Gray asked Mrs. Lester if she
would go to the pilot-house, as that was the coolest part of the boat.
Very kindly he escorted her thither across the hurricane-deck. It was a
delightful change from the heated atmosphere below to the cool
refreshing breezes above.
“Two eagles at once,” said the captain. “There is something for you to
look at, my boy.”
There was the Grey Eagle, her paddles both in motion, and the War Eagle
following her in her northward course; a great sight for Norman.
The banks are well wooded, and of some elevation, and there are pretty
islands; but the scenery is more monotonous and not so grand as that of
the Upper Mississippi. The river is much more shallow, and can be
navigated only by a smaller class of steamboats.
The captain pointed out to them, on the banks of the river, the entrance
to a lead mine, and a hill-top called Pilot Knob.
At two o’clock they approached Fulton, and the captain courteously took
them on shore.
Fulton, the terminus of an air-line road from Chicago, is rather an
uninviting looking place, with a grand hotel, suitable for a great city;
a destiny Fulton does not seem likely to achieve.
Seated in the cars, Norman saw the sun set for the last time on the
great river that had become to him a familiar friend; saw the Rock River
gleam in the moonlight; and soon after the welcome lights of his uncle’s
home.
Norman had a great deal to tell his uncle and aunt about the
Mississippi, and Minnehaha, and the boats, and the little incidents of
their journey, and the week he was to spend at Dixon passed rapidly
away.
One day Norman’s aunt took Mrs. Lester to see Father Dixon, the
patriarch of the place to which his name is given. The hotel also bears
the name given to him by the Indians, Nachusah, or the White Haired. His
long flowing white hair makes him look very venerable; and there is an
expression of gentleness in his delicate features that wins the love of
the children of the town, who all call him Grandpapa. He established a
ferry over the Rock River thirty years ago, when there were no white
people in all the country round, and lived here in his solitary dwelling
by the river side.
He lives there still; and Mrs. Lester was very much interested in her
visit to him, and in his accounts of the Indians who formerly roamed
over these prairies, now the fruitful farms of the white men.
One day a gentleman, who lived on the opposite side of the river, sent
his two carriages over for Norman’s uncle and aunt, his mother and
himself. As Norman was in the woods with Herbert Waldorf, they went
without him. The bridge had been carried away by the flood, so they
crossed by the rope ferry. A very stout wire rope was stretched across
the river, and a scow was fastened to this by a rope which slipped by a
wheel along the iron cable. When they drove on the scow, the man turned
the prow of the boat up the current, which at once urged the boat
onward. It is a very pleasant and rapid way of crossing the river,
allowing one to have a near look of the swiftly flowing waters.
Mr. Dexter had a pretty cottage and fifty acres of prairie land just on
the edge of the town. Mrs. Lester went up stairs to see the extensive
view of prairie from Ernest Dexter’s window, and then she looked at a
cabinet of fossils, most of which he had collected himself in Illinois.
There were some very fine specimens, and he was kind enough to give Mrs.
Lester a number of them.
The music of the piano called forth the rival notes of the mocking bird,
and, accompanied by several canaries, he made the air vocal with sweet
sounds. Mrs. Lester forgot what she was playing, so charmed was she with
these delicious songsters. Strawberries and ice-cream were fully
appreciated after the music, and the evening’s entertainment concluded
with a magnificent sunset on the prairie. Golden clouds were penciled
softly on the clear amber sky, while rugged wild clouds towered up in
stern contrast with this calm serenity. One could imagine the cliffs of
Sinai in those gray clouds, so bold and lofty, while through a torn rift
gleamed the soft blue sky. It was a memorable sunset even in the West,
where they claim for their sunsets a peculiar beauty.
Norman was very sorry when he heard how much he had missed, especially
as Mr. Dexter had been kind enough to send over twice for him. So he
told Harold Dexter, when he saw him at church the next day, that he
would walk over with Herbert Waldorf on Monday morning.
After breakfast Norman and Herbert walked over to Mr. Dexter’s, where
they found the boys waiting for them. After a careful survey of Ernest’s
treasury, and of a smaller cabinet belonging to Harold and his brother,
they set off, with baskets and hammers, in search of minerals. They went
to a quarry and found a very fine fossil, a portion of a petrified
snake. They hammered at this for a long time, but they broke it all to
pieces in endeavoring to get it out. Harold found, however, a large
stone filled with petrified shells, which he kindly gave to Norman, who
came home in the afternoon with his basket filled with pieces of rock.
One afternoon Norman saw three “prairie schooners” in the street before
his uncle’s door. These are the emigrant wagons with their white tops,
which look not unlike sails as you see them quietly moving on over the
far reaches of the prairie. A number of horses and boys were standing
near them. The party were hesitating as to their course; wishing to
cross the river, and seeing no bridge but the railroad bridge, they were
making their way to that, when they found they could not cross it. Hence
the halt and the consultation.
“Norman,” said his mother, “do go and find out where those emigrants are
going.”
“O mother,” said Norman, “I would not ask them for anything.”
“I will go then,” replied his mother, as she opened the garden gate, and
walked up to the last prairie wagon, in which a woman was seated with
her four children.
She seemed pleased to hear the accents of a friendly voice, and soon
told her simple story.
Eight years before she had been left a widow, with six children. The
boys of twelve and fourteen did not wish to learn a trade, and farming
was not very profitable in the part of Pennsylvania where she lived; so
she had come to seek, in the fertile fields of Iowa, bread for her
children. She had worked hard, and days of toil were still before her,
but there was more hope in that virgin soil of securing a competence.
The rich deep black loam of these prairies often, at its first sowing,
bears a golden harvest, that gives back to the farmer the amount he has
paid for the land, and the expense of its cultivation.
Mrs. Lester asked the emigrant, in whose patient face she had taken much
interest, if she had any friends in the new and strange country to which
she was going.
“O yes,” she replied; she had a married daughter there, and a church and
Sunday school for her children. She was a Methodist, as were the two
families with whom she was journeying; and she would have been unwilling
to go where her children would be deprived of their religious
privileges.
There were fifteen persons in the company. They had driven from
Pennsylvania to Cleveland, where they had taken the cars for Chicago.
The wagon was lifted on the car, the cover taken off, and the woman said
she had had the pleasantest ride she had ever taken in her life, looking
over the lake and the prairie from her elevated position. From Chicago
they had journeyed on, sometimes sleeping in their wagons, and sometimes
on the floor of some house opened for them. There were bright,
black-eyed children peeping from the recesses of the covered wagon, as
their mother was talking to Mrs. Lester, and one little girl sat
intently reading. Mrs. Lester bade her goodspeed, and the woman, with
brightened face, thanked her for her words of kindness and sympathy.
The last day of their stay in Dixon at length arrived, and with it came
Aunt Clara, whom Norman had never seen before, but whom he very soon
learned to love. She showed him his picture when a baby, which his
mother had sent her, and she found it difficult to trace any resemblance
to the tall boy before her.
Norman stayed with her and his uncle in the evening, while his mother
went out with a gentleman and lady to take a drive on the prairies. The
day had been very warm, but there was a cool breeze on those boundless
meadows that undulated peacefully, in their rounded swells, to the far
horizon. The corn was laughing in rich abundance, the wheat standing
thick on the fields, after the sun had set, leaving its luminous track
of light in wavy radiance; one huge cloud towered up in solitary
grandeur, its bold outline gilded by those parting rays.