|I AM up here in River Falls, Wisconsin, and patiently waiting for the
snow-banks to wilt away and gentle spring to come again. Gentle spring,
as I go to press, hath not yet loomed up. Nothing in fact hath loomed
up, as yet, save the great Dakota boom. Everybody, from the servant
girl with the symphony in smut on her face and the boundless waste of
freckles athwart her nose, up to the normal school graduate, with enough
knowledge to start a grist mill for the gods, has "a claim" in the
promised land, the great wild goose orchard and tadpole aquarium of the
new Northwest.
The honest farmer deserts his farm, around which clusters a thousand
memories of the past, and buckling on his web feet, he flees to the frog
ponds of the great northern watershed, to make a "tree claim," and be
happy.
Such is life. We battle on bravely for years, cutting out white-oak
grubs, and squashing army worms on a shingle, in order that we may dwell
beneath our own vine and plum tree, and then we sell and take wings
toward a wild, unknown country, where land is dirt cheap, where the
wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.
That is where we get left, if I may be allowed an Americanism, or
whatever it is. We are never at rest. The more we emigrate the more
worthless, unsatisfied and trifling we become. I have seen the same
family go through Laramie City six times because they knew not of
contentment. The first time they went west in a Pullman car "for their
health." The husband rashly told a sad-eyed man that he lied, and in a
little while the sun was obscured by loose teeth and hair. The ground
was torn up and vegetation was killed where the discussion was held.
Then the family went home to Toledo. They went in a day coach and said a
Pullman car was full of malaria and death. Their relatives made sport
of them and lifted up their yawp and yawped at them insomuch that the
yawpness thereof was as the town caucus for might. Then the tourists on
the following spring packed up two pillows, and a pink comforter, and
a change of raiment, and gat them onto the emigrant train and journeyed
into the land which is called Arizona, where the tarantula climbeth up
on the innerside of the pantaloon and tickleth the limb of the pilgrim
as he journeyeth, and behold he getteth in his work, and the leg of that
man is greater than it was aforetime, even like unto the leg of a piano.