Western Towns--Surrounding Country--Scene as viewed from the
Chamber's House--Salubrity of the Climate--Water--Soil--
Markets--Roads--Hogs and Cattle--Dairies--Sheep--Grass
fatted meat--Horses--Choice of Markets--Scarcity of Timber--
Morals and Society--Former difficulties of the Emigrant--
Present Condition.
What ambitious communities these western towns are, to be sure! How they
do chirp when they once get their bills through the shell, and while the
greater portion yet adheres to their backs! What laughable contortions
they make in their efforts to crow, strut and clap their wings! Eastern
people must understand that there are no villages in the West. Every
aggregation of a half dozen houses, a blacksmith shop and tavern is a
city, and their name is Legion. A meeting house and school house--so
necessary in the East to constitute a village--are not necessary
appendages of a city in the West. Clapboard shells, with their gables
to the street, embellished with square battlements to the ridge, are
emblazoned with "City Drug Store," "City Saloon," "City Hard Ware
Store," &c. There are "first class hotels," too, between which and the
rail road depot, gorgeous omnibuses run. When the cars stop, what a din
the runners set up of "Metropolitan Hotel," "St. Nicholas," "Reviere
House," "St. Charles," &c. Wo, to the unlucky traveler who falls into
their clutches. He will find when he comes to settle his bill, that in
respect to charges, they are determined to do no discredit to their sea
board prototypes.
Here and there, one of these clapboards "cities" emerge into one of
brick and stone. Then three, four and five story structures rise like an
exhalation. Enormous turrets, bay windows, lofty ceilings, gold and
vermillion, marble, iron and gewgaws, without end, without order,
without taste, and without regard to adaptability, business or
convenience meet the eye on every side. Plate glass windows disclose a
profusion of costly and variegated wares and merchandise, and enormous
mirrors entice unsophisticated rustics down endless avenues. Turning
your eye upwards along these aspiring structures, you behold broken
windows and other evidences of dilapidation, denoting the utter
uselessness of these lofty creations; and your amazement is no way
lessened when you learn, that from twelve to twenty per cent. interest
is paid for the money to erect them, secured by trust deeds upon the
building itself, upon "out lots," and upon broad acres of "wild lands."
Then what palatial residences are reared in the suburbs! Palaces,
cottages, temples, pavilions, pagodas and mosques adorn valley and hill
top. Domes, steeples, spires, turrets and minarets, gleam in the sun
light, peer out of clumps of foliage, and struggle upwards at every
unexpected point. Porticos, verandas, observatories, pillars, are here,
there, everywhere, in endless profusion.--Tuscan, Doric, Ionic,
Corinthian, Composite, Gothic and Yankee architecture are every where
attempted, sometimes several of them on the same building, and sometimes
all jumbled together.--Around them are close shaven lawns, graveled
walks, arbors, climbing vines, summer houses, green houses, and flower
plats, all under the care of one, two, three or more Patricks. Within,
frescos and gilding, paint and upholstery, marble and porcelain, rose
wood and mahogany vie, in their power to please, with magnificent
toilets and languid ladies. Carriages, drawn by thousand dollar bays,
groomed by blue coated Hibernians, flash upon the vision like the gleam
of a meteor. But alas, for the inevitable revulsion! Down on the
"business street," in front of premises where deposits are received and
ten or fifteen per cent. interest allowed thereon, and exchange is sold
on all eastern and European cities, a motley crowd of anxious and
excited people--merchants, farmers, mechanics, seamstresses,
laundresses, draymen, and laborers--are assembled. What brings them
there? Why, Messrs. Dash & Splurge have "suspended"--that's all.
What weazen-faced, moustachioed abortion is that who declares upon "his
honaw, the place is almost equal to New Yawk." Why, that's Mr. Hound,
junior partner in the eminent firm of De Laine, Brocade & Co., of New
York. He is the same individual whose acquaintance we made six or eight
months ago, when he visited this locality and was introduced to us as
Mr. Drummer. What a capital fellow he was! How bland! How civil! How
polite! How he amused us with stories of the splendor and grandeur of
the metropolis! How delightfully he sang! What a superb game of
billiards he played! How he insisted upon paying for all the Hiedsieck!
Who would have expected to see him transformed into the morose,
sinister, vindictive looking personage which he now appears? Who would
have expected to see his jocund, rounded physiognomy, where a bland and
perpetual smile sat enthroned, distorted into a shape as angular as a
problem in Euclid? We find, on enquiry, that his present business here
is to look after a little matter between his house and one of our
leading firms who have also "suspended." He made the acquaintance of
this firm on his late visit, took tea at the house of one of them, sang
an accompaniment to the piano with the daughters, bade them adieu with
his hand on his heart, took a lunch and a "smash" with the "old man" at
the "saloon," and left with a long order for silks, calicos, &c. Mr. De
Laine, the head of the house, being a little more cautious, consulted
the Commercial Agency and found them set down as "reliable--rather
extravagant in living, indulge a little in horse racing, but generally
attentive to business," and concluded that it was "all right." Hound
finds it "aint all right." Mother-in-law owns the house, furniture,
horses and carriage; brothers are preferred creditors; clerks and
servants are charged with the collection of debts, from the proceeds of
which they are to retain arrearages due them for wages; and the landlord
has sued out a distress, and home creditors an attachment, which will
surely cover every thing, should there be any little flaws in the
assignment. Hound comes to the conclusion that he is taken
in--sold--done--and that it will not pay even to employ a lawyer in the
premises. In fact, his settled conviction is that there is a collusion
between all the residents of this portion of the Earth, and that he will
not trust any of them again--never.
The writer hopes that he will not be understood as attempting to
ridicule western towns, as a whole, or to throw discredit upon western
merchants and bankers, as a class. Thriving villages are springing up
all over the country, and many towns and cities are great centers of
trade, justly depending for their future advancement upon their great
advantages for interior communication, upon the matchless wealth of the
soil, and upon the enlightened enterprise of their citizens. The
merchants, bankers and real estate owners, are, as a class, shrewd and
intelligent men, holding their credit and characters sacred and
inviolable, and many families live in elegant luxury, fully justified by
a permanent and reliable income. Many, here as elsewhere, have been
overtaken by the recent monetary calamities, and are suffering from
causes which ordinary foresight could not have foreseen.
But whatever may be thought of the advantages offered by the towns of
Peru and La Salle--for their destiny is one--for settlement and the
investment of capital, there can be no doubt about the inducements
presented to farmers and others by the surrounding country. The climate
is genial and salubrious, the atmosphere invigorating and free from
miasma, and the scenery delightful--alternating from green and billowy
swells of prairie, varied by cultivation and improvement, to wild and
romantic dells and ravines. Looking eastward up the valley of the
Illinois from the observatory on the Chamber's House, no lovelier scene
can be presented. The fair and beautiful city of La Salle, joined to
her westerly neighbor by continuous streets and structures; the graceful
spire of her cathedral rising clear and sharp against the sky; the
wooded outline of the Little Vermillion, indicating its sinuous course
northward until lost in the blue haze of the distance; the cultivated
fields, yellow with waving wheat and oats, or dark with luxuriant corn;
the quiet farm houses nestling in their bowers of foliage--homes of
those whose "lines have fallen in pleasant places"--the verdant and
undulating stretch of prairie bounding the vision as the waters do upon
the ocean; the delicate tracery of the Central Rail Road bridge,
spanning the broad chasm of the Illinois from bluff to bluff, nearly a
mile in length; the silvery thread of the river, now hid by majestic
elms and cotton woods, now divided by islands, and now gleaming in sun
light, in the far distance; the jagged sand stone ramparts of the
southern shore, in some places rearing their perpendicular sides more
than an hundred feet above the waters that lave their base; the rounded
and cone like tower of Buffalo Rock, rising abrupt and isolated from the
valley below--all present a panorama of exceeding beauty and
loveliness. Unlike some other landscapes, fair and pleasing to the eye,
no deadly or unwholesome exhalations arise from the dank and luxuriant
vegetation. The breezes which fan this scene come laden with health and
exhilaration, pure as the icy breath of the Arctic Sea. No portion of
the United States is more favorable to health than the counties of La
Salle, Bureau and Putnam. No means are at hand to enable a positive
statement concerning the mortality of these counties to be made, but
observation from almost their earliest settlement, and a residence in
many other different localities, justify the assertion that it will fall
short of most portions of New York, Pennsylvania or New England. It is
true that in the early settlement, bilious fevers, of a mild form,
rarely resulting in death, prevailed to some extent, as they have in the
early settlement of all parts of the country. These have almost entirely
disappeared, and have not been succeeded by the more acute forms of
disease, as has been the case in other localities. The climate is
particularly favorable to recovery from all complaints of a pulmonary
character. Consumption--the scourge of New England--hardly exists
here.--No doubt but that in a few generations, it will be eradicated
from families where it is hereditary. No nepenthe can reconstruct the
consumed, vital, human organ; but it is believed that where no
considerable inroads have been made, a residence here, with proper
precautions, will do much towards staying, if it does not completely
baffle the destroyer. It is also true that the country did not escape
the ravages of the cholera. What country did? A few elevated,
mountainous regions may have enjoyed immunity from that slow, never
wearied, implacable traveller, who comes as the wind comes and "bloweth
where it listeth, and thou hearest the sounds thereof, and canst not
tell whither it cometh, and where it goeth."
Water, pure, clear and cold, is everywhere found trickling through the
subformation of gravel, at a depth of from twenty to forty feet. It is
generally slightly impregnated with lime, but otherwise holds but little
mineral in solution.--Many of the early cases of fever and ague were no
doubt to be attributed to the necessity which compelled the settlers to
content themselves with the surface water, putrid with decaying
vegetable matter, to be found at a short distance below the surface in
sloughs and other depressions. Running streams are not infrequent,
though not so common, as in hilly and mountainous regions.
The soil. What shall be said of it? The Delta of the Nile, in its
original opulence, was not more fertile. It consists of a rich, black,
vegetable mould, from one to six feet in depth, resting upon a sub-soil
of stiff clay. Its surface has as yet been only scratched. When this
shall be expended, the wealth below can be brought to light by the
sub-soil plow, an instrument as unfamiliar here as the Koo-i-noor. An
intelligent farmer in La Salle County--an old resident--has been
experimenting upon a piece of land of a few acres, by planting and
harvesting a succession of corn crops, without fertilizers, for a series
of years.--As yet he has found no diminution of yield. All the cereals,
fruits and esculent roots, adapted to the climate, produce in perfection
and abundance.--Winter blight and rust are incident to wheat culture
every where, here as well as in other sections; but insects--the
grasshopper, army worm, midge and weavel--have never yet made their
appearance. The corn crop never fails. In two seasons out of the last
twenty, a slight diminution of yield occurred--in one year by protracted
rains preserving the esculency of the plant until the season of frost,
and in another by drought.--With these exceptions, it has grown and
ripened in all its perfection. Of course, crops are "short" with some
people always. The Hibernian said that he believed that "if the
steamboat never sailed somebody would be left;" so if the frost never
comes, somebody's corn will be caught. So, too, the disposition among
farmers to complain of short crops is chronic, here as elsewhere. If the
statistics, gathered by means of agricultural fairs or otherwise, do not
exhibit so large yields per acre, as in places where land is dearer, it
must be recollected that cultivation is as yet conducted only in a very
rude manner. No application to the soil of materials whereof it is
deficient, for the production of certain crops, was ever dreamed of.
None of the high cultivation, adopted where that practice is a
necessity, is ever resorted to.
No portions of the three counties named are more than ten miles distant
from some rail road station, or river, or canal landing, at all of which
a cash market is found for every kind of farm produce, and a supply of
all kinds of "store goods" is for sale. Leading to these are roads
whereon the low places have been turnpiked, and the sloughs and streams
bridged, and which, if not so solid and smooth, in wet weather, as those
over the flinty or gravelly soil of some portions of the eastern States,
are infinitely superior to those corduroy affairs, running through the
timbered regions of Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. In dry weather, no
McAdam, no pavement, no Imperial causeway is so smooth, so even, so
easy, so noiseless as the slightly elastic prairie road bed. Talk of
two-forty on the Avenue! A natural prairie road is the paradise of
Jehus.
Horses, cattle, hogs--those whales of the prairies--sheep and fowls
thrive and are profitable. The high price and great average yield of
grain have, of late years, induced farmers, to a great degree, to
neglect the dairy. The ruling price of cheese, in the towns, for several
years past has been from ten to fifteen cents, and of butter from
fifteen to twenty-five cents per pound. Think of that, you dairymen and
dairywomen of the Western Reserve, New York and New England!--Cows,
grazing through the long summer upon common prairie pasture, and
requiring to be fed only through the short winter, and the product of
their udders bringing those prices at your doors! Wool growing, too, for
the same reason has been neglected. No country offers greater
inducements to raise sheep, were it not for the gangs of worthless dogs
which most farmers persist in keeping. The carcasses were formerly of
but little value. Now the cost of getting them to the great eastern
markets is so small, that for that purpose alone their production would
be profitable. What delicious lamb, mutton and beef grace our market
stalls! How hidden and buried are the kidneys beneath the white, thick,
oleaginous covering! How the layers of fat and lean alternate through
rib and sirloin! How the rich juices follow the carving knife as it
slides, almost of its own weight, through the roasted haunch! Oh, you
benighted Vegetarians! Have you no music in your souls? Do no
involuntary drops ooze from the caverns of your mouths, as you
contemplate the gastronomic treasure, and inhale the rich fragrance
which rises like a halo? Oh, you unfortunate denizens of inland eastern
towns, who are compelled to essay mastication upon the blue, stringy,
tenacious substance which you call butchers meat! What wonder that the
dental art flourishes in your vicinity! How would you like to luxuriate
upon these grass-fed fatlings of the prairie?
The average estimate of a large number of intelligent farmers is that it
costs about thirty-five dollars to raise a colt to the age of four
years. For years past the price of a good work colt, at that age, has
been one hundred and fifty dollars.
The choice of markets, enjoyed by agriculturists here, is of great
advantage. It often happens that the eastern markets are depressed while
the southern markets are buoyant, and vice versa.--The location upon the
navigable waters of a tributary of the Mississippi, and upon the canal
connecting with the Lakes, gives a valuable option to farmers.
One great bug bear of the prairies was formerly the scarcity of timber.
The early settlers skirted with their farms and homesteads the borders
of timber, and deemed the central parts of the prairie as valueless as
an African desert. Experience has shown that these are the most valuable
lands, and that no serious inconvenience is felt on account of
remoteness from timber. Lumber from Michigan, transported by canal or
rail road, is cheaper for fencing than rails, though the timber were at
hand. Wire is also used to considerable extent. The abundance,
cheapness, contiguity, and excellent quality of the bituminous coal,
underlying portions of all three of these counties, obviate all
necessity of wood for fuel.
Society is already established and settled, as in older communities. The
present race of farmers is as intelligent and enterprising, as a class,
as those of the eastern States. The tone of morals and integrity is as
high as elsewhere. Schools are everywhere sustained and fostered, and
are no where so remote as to render their advantages unavailable.
Churches, of all the several Christian denominations, are in reasonable
proximity. The price of land varies from five to fifty dollars per acre.
What a difference in the condition of the emigrant farmer now and twenty
years ago! Then, having bade good bye to the home and scenes of his
childhood, having sold a portion and packed a portion of his household
goods, and having exchanged the last sad and faltering salutations with
kindred and early and life long friends--each believing that never more
on earth should they meet--with wife and children who tore themselves
reluctantly from each cherished face and object, he set his face towards
the setting sun. A long and tedious journey by land, through primeval
forests; over gullied and precipitous roads and paths; across bog, and
morass, and fen, and unbridged torrents, and dreary wastes of sand, and
scarcely less desolate prairie; with wearied and jaded animals, and
lagging and loitering gait; camping out by night and pacing through its
long watches, by turns, as sentries; or by canal boat, steamboat, stage
and wagon, at length terminated in a bleak and lonely prairie. Miles
across an ocean of verdure or a charred and blackened waste, as the
season was summer or late autumn, glistened the roof of a settlers
cabin; or if this were hidden by the swells of prairie or the convexity
of the earth, rose a small, faint column of smoke against the sky. Away
on the furthest verge of vision stretched a blue and indistinct thread,
like the first glimpse of coastline, as caught from the deck of a vessel
at sea. This was the timber which skirted some distant water course. No
other object relieved the eye, as it wandered around the circle. The
loneliness of ocean--the wearisome expanse of sea and sky--had here its
counterpart. The few articles of furniture and clothing, of prime
necessity, were hastily unpacked; a rude and uncomfortable domicil was
extemporized; a stable, covered with long grass, to shelter a horse and
cow, was erected; and a hole was dug in the nearest slough, whence was
obtained a limited supply of dirty and impure water. These were the
comforts and accessories which welcomed the early emigrant. No running
brooks, no trees, no shade, no merry children frolicking to school, no
music of Church bells, no decorous and well dressed people, wending
their way to the edifice, where the organ's diapason and the solemn
chant, in memory, rose with their stately swell, no cheerful faces of
neighbors and friends, no kind voices to congratulate in good fortune
and console in bad, surrounded and cheered the saddened pilgrims. Soon,
fatigue, exposure, privations, bad water, unwholesome diet, repining and
discontent brought on the inevitable "ager." Doctors, calomel, quinine,
yellow and jaundiced faces, emaciated forms, broken spirits and general
misery followed.
Twenty years! Presto, what a change! Rip Van Winkle has awoke! Where
stood the lonely hovel, now stands the commodious and comfortable farm
house. Orchards, barns, granaries, flowers, luxuriant foliage, pure
water, broad fields of grain and grass, lowing herds, good roads,
schools, churches, neighbors, friends, cheerful and smiling faces,
happiness and contentment have replaced the former surroundings. The
poor and dejected emigrant is now the independent possessor of a domain
a prince might envy. The disconsolate and almost broken hearted mother
who, during long and weary days and nights, in solitude and loneliness,
watched and nursed her puny and sickly brood, is now the happy, comely
and dignified matron, whose children and grand-children are clustered
around her. The friends and kindred with whom she parted so sorrowfully
twenty years ago--those of them who are yet spared to earth--are again
her neighbors. With them she frequently exchanges visits--from fifty to
sixty hours only, at most, being necessary to bring them together. If
Old Rip had actually gone to sleep, twenty years ago upon the prairies,
upon awaking now, it is opined, his amazement would far exceed that
inspired by the neighborhood of the Catskills. Who will now complain of
the hardships incident to a removal from the most favored regions to a
country, already so far advanced in all that contributes to the comfort,
enjoyment and embellishment of life?
* * * * *
On the 6th August the world was astounded by the announcement that the
Atlantic Cable was successfully laid. Previous failures had left no hope
in the minds of any, even the most sanguine, of such a result. The
short, laconic, simple dispatch of Mr. Field--the world renowned
projector and master spirit of the work--flew with lightning wings
throughout America and fell upon minds, where skepticism for a long time
repelled and resisted conviction. Slowly the possibility of its truth
gained the ascendency over disbelief and doubt, till at length, the
amazing reality of the achievement began to be comprehended. The
dispatch to his family of Capt. Hudson, of the United States' Steam
Frigate Niagara, from which the cable was laid, was telegraphed over the
country and dispelled all doubt. That dispatch, beautiful in its
epigrammatic terseness, and sublime in its devout thankfulness and
gratitude, will be carried down the coming centuries, as long as the
remembrance of the great feat shall survive. "God has been with us! The
telegraph cable is laid, without accident, and to Him be all the Glory.
We are all well." In its first efforts at comprehension, the mind
utterly fails to grasp and measure the terrible sublimity of Niagara,
the awful majesty of Mont Blanc, or the colossal proportions of a vast
cathedral, which
"Defy at first our nature's littleness,
Till, growing with their growth, we thus dilate
Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate."
So with the Atlantic Telegraph. The mind is bewildered and baffled when
it undertakes to contemplate either the consequences which are to flow
from it, or the simple extent of the cable, and the mysterious regions
which it traverses.
Far down along the groined and vaulted caverns of the Ocean's bed;
along the slimy pathway, strewed with the wrecks of sunken argosies,
their treasures darkling in oozy dungeons, and the forms of their once
living, breathing, human freight, stark and ghastly in eternal sleep;
along rayless and gloomy depths, where silence and solitude, profound
and supreme, unending and eternal, encompass, pervade and encircle as
with an atmosphere; along submarine alpine peaks, vainly struggling
upwards towards the regions of light and warmth; beneath where the storm
Fiend rides on the billow's crest, where the tempest howls the hoarse
refrain of its anthem, and where sweeps the ice berg, congealed,
perhaps, when the morning stars first sang together; stretches a
metallic thread no bigger than your finger, uniting lands two thousand
miles asunder in bonds of harmony and brotherly love; along which glides
a subtle fluid, conveying thought and intelligence--those mysterious
emanations of the human brain--and writes them in distant lands as
rapidly as they are engendered. A thought is born, and instantly it is
stamped upon a human mind two thousand miles away, across the pathless
waste of ocean! A human heart beats, and its throb is felt before the
blood returns for another circuit. A word is spoken, and it is
re-uttered before the sound has died upon the ear of the first speaker!
A question is asked, and its answer comes back as the shuttle returns
with the woof! A boon is craved, and the heart leaps in exultation as it
is granted, or sinks in despair as it is denied, almost as soon as the
lips have closed upon its utterance! Stupendous achievement! Is there no
limit to the conquests of man over the forces of nature, tangible or
invisible? Shall he yet find means, by the clarity of his messengers and
the invincibility of his power, to overtake and reclaim the lost and
wandering Pleiad, and restore the fugitive to its celestial companions?
Shall he go on, step by step, into the shadowy realms of the Impossible,
until he shall claim affinity with Supreme Intelligence? Shall he
advance, in the order of progressive creation, until he shall be
developed in a being more nearly allied to Ultimate Destiny? Shall the
curtains which conceal the arcana of hidden knowledge be gradually drawn
aside, and his eye rest, with unflinching gaze, upon the secrets of the
Infinite? Thoughts like these crowd upon the brain, stupefied and
amazed by the announcement of an event, more wonderful, as a triumph
over Nature's obstacles, than was ever proclaimed since the world
began.