I have just returned from a brief visit to Duluth. After strolling
along the Bay of Naples and watching old Vesuvius vomit red-hot mud,
vapor and other campaign documents, Duluth is quite a change. The ice in
the bay at Duluth was thirty-eight inches in depth when I left there the
last week in March, and we rode across it with the utmost impunity. By
the time these lines fall beneath the eye of the genial, courteous and
urbane reader, the new railroad bridge across the bay, over a mile and
a half long, will have been completed, so that you may ride from Chicago
to Duluth over the Northwestern and Omaha railroads with great comfort.
I would be glad to digress here and tell about the beauty of the summer
scenery along the Omaha road, and the shy and beautiful troutlet,
and the dark and silent Chippewa squawlet and her little bleached out
pappooselet, were it not for the unkind and cruel thrusts that I would
invoke from the scenery cynic who believes that a newspaper man's
opinions may be largely warped with a pass.
Duluth has been joked a good deal, but she stands it first-rate and
takes it good naturedly. She claims 16,000 people, some of whom I met
at the opera house there. If the rest of the 16,000 are as pleasant as
those I conversed with that evening, Duluth must be a pleasant place to
live in. Duluth has a very pleasant and beautiful opera house that seats
1,000 people. A few more could have elbowed their way into the opera
house the evening that I spoke there, but they preferred to suffer on at
home.
Lake Superior is one of the largest aggregations of fresh wetness in the
world, if not the largest. When I stop to think that some day all this
cold, cold water will have to be absorbed by mankind, it gives me a
cramp in the geographical center.
Around the west end of Lake Superior there is a string of towns which
stretches along the shore for miles under one name or another, all
waiting for the boom to strike and make the Northern Chicago. You cannot
visit Duluth or Superior without feeling that at any moment the tide of
trade will rise and designate the point where the future metropolis
of the Northern lakes is to be. I firmly believe that this summer will
decide it, and my guess is that what is now known as West Superior is to
get the benefit. For many years destiny has been hovering over the
west end of this mighty lake, and now the favored point is going to be
designated. Duluth has past prosperity and expensive improvements in her
favor, and in fact the whole locality is going to be benefited, but if I
had a block in West Superior with a roller rink on it, I would wear
Iny best clothes every day and claim to be a millionaire in disguise.
Ex-President R. B. Hayes has a large brick block in Duluth, but he does
not occupy it. Those who go to Duluth hoping to meet Mr. Hayes will be
bitterly disappointed.
The streams that run into Lake Superior are alive with trout, and next
summer I propose to go up there and roast until I have so thoroughly
saturated my system with trout that the trout bones will stick out
through my clothes in every direction and people will regard me as a
beautiful toothpick holder.
Still there will be a few left for those who think of going up there.
All I will need will be barely enough to feed Albert Victor and myself
from day to day. People who have never seen a crowned head with a peeled
nose on it are cordially invited to come over and see us during office
hours. Albert is not at all haughty, and I intend to throw aside my
usual reserve this summer also--for the time. P. Wales' son and I will
be far from the cares that crowd so thick and fast on greatness. People
who come to our cedar bark wigwam to show us their mosquito bites, will
be received as cordially as though no great social chasm yawned between
us.
Many will meet us in the depths of the forest and go away thinking that
we are just common plugs of whom the world wots not; but there is where
they will fool themselves.
Then, when the season is over, we will come back into the great
maelstrom of life, he to wait for his grandmother's overshoes and I to
thrill waiting millions from the rostrum with my "Tale of the Broncho
Cow." And so it goes with us all. Adown life's rugged pathway some must
toil on from daylight to dark to earn their meagre pittance as kings,
while, others are born to wear a swallow-tail coat every evening and
wring tears of genuine anguish from their audiences.
They tell some rather wide stories about people who have gone up there
total physical wrecks and returned strong and well. One man said that he
knew a young college student, who was all run down and weak, go up there
on the Brule and eat trout and fight mosquitoes a few months, and when
he returned to his Boston home he was so stout and well and tanned
up that his parents did not know him. There was a man in our car who
weighed 300 pounds. He seemed to be boiling out through his clothes
everywhere. He was the happiest looking man I ever saw. All he seemed
to do in this life was to sit all day and whistle and laugh and trot his
stomach, first on one knee and then on the other.
He said that he went up into the pine forests of the Great Lake region
a broken-down hypochondriac and confirmed consumptive. He had been
measured for a funeral sermon three times, he said, and had never used
either of them. He knew a clergyman named Bray-ley who went up into that
region with Bright's justly celebrated disease. He was so emaciated that
he couldn't carry a watch. The ticking of the watch rattled his bones so
that it made him nervous, and at night they had to pack him in cotton so
that he wouldn't break a leg when he turned over. He got to sleeping
out nights on a bed of balsam and spruce boughs and eating venison and
trout.
When he came down in the spring, he passed through a car of lumbermen
and one of them put a warm, wet quid of tobacco in his plug hat for a
joke. There were a hundred of these lumbermen when the preacher began,
and when the train got into Eau Claire there were only three of them
well enough to go around to the office and draw their pay.
This is just as the story was given to me and I repeat it to show how
bracing the climate near Superior is. Remember, if you please, that I do
not want the story to be repeated as coming from me, for I have nothing
left now but my reputation for veracity, and that has had a very hard
winter of it.