Letters of a Traveller Part 13

I made my way to a street of shops: it had a busy appearance, more so than usual, I was told, for a company of circus-riders, whose tents I had seen from a distance on the lake, was in town, and this had attracted a throng of people from the country. I saw a fruit-stall tended by a man who had the coa.r.s.est red hair I think I ever saw, and of whom I bought two or three enormous "bough apples," as he called them. He apologized for the price he demanded. "The farmers," said he, "know that just now there is a call for their early fruit, while the circus people are in town, and they make me pay a 'igh price for it." I told him I perceived he was no Yankee.

"I am a Londoner," he replied; "and I left London twelve years ago to slave and be a poor man in Ohio." He acknowledged, however, that he had two or three times got together some property, "but the Lord," he said, "laid his hand on it."

On returning to the steamer, I found a party of country people, mostly young persons of both s.e.xes, thin and lank figures, by no means equal, as productions of the country, to their bough apples. They pa.s.sed through the fine s.p.a.cious cabin on the upper deck, extending between the state-rooms the whole length of the steamer. At length they came to a large mirror, which stood at the stern, and seemed by its reflection to double the length of the cabin. They walked on, as if they would extend their promenade into the mirror, when suddenly observing the reflection of their own persons advancing, and thinking it another party, they politely made way to let it pa.s.s. The party in the mirror at the same moment turned to the same side, which first showed them the mistake they had made. The pa.s.sengers had some mirth at their expense, but I must do our visitors the justice to say that they joined in the laugh with a very good grace.

The same evening, at twelve o'clock, we were at Detroit. "You must lock your state-rooms in the night," said one of the persons employed about the vessel, "for Detroit is full of thieves." We followed the advice, slept soundly, and saw nothing of the thieves, nor of Detroit either, for the steamboat was again on her pa.s.sage through Lake St. Clair at three this morning, and when I awoke we were moving over the flats, as they are called, at the upper end of the lake. The steamer was threading her way in a fog between large patches of sedge of a pea-green color. We had waited several hours at Detroit, because this pa.s.sage is not safe at night, and steamers of a larger size are sometimes grounded here in the day-time.

I had hoped, when I began, to bring down the narrative of my voyage to this moment, but my sheet is full, and I shall give you the remainder in another letter.

Letter x.x.xI.

A Trip from Detroit to Mackinaw.

Steamer Oregon, Lake Michigan, _July_ 25, 1846.

Soon after pa.s.sing the flats described in my last letter, and entering the river St. Clair, the steamer stopped to take in wood on the Canadian side.

Here I went on sh.o.r.e. All that we could see of the country was a road along the bank, a row of cottages at a considerable distance from each other along the road, a narrow belt of cleared fields behind them, and beyond the fields the original forest standing like a long lofty wall, with its crowded stems of enormous size and immense height, rooted in the strong soil--ashes and maples and elms, the largest of their species.

Scattered in the foreground were numbers of leafless elms, so huge that the settlers, as if in despair of bringing them to the ground by the ax, had girdled them and left them to decay and fall at their leisure.

We went up to one of the houses, before which stood several of the family attracted to the door by the sight of our steamer. Among them was an intelligent-looking man, originally from the state of New York, who gave quick and shrewd answers to our inquiries. He told us of an Indian settlement about twenty miles further up the St. Clair. Here dwell a remnant of the Chippewa tribe, collected by the Canadian government, which has built for them comfortable log-houses with chimneys, furnished them with horses and neat cattle, and utensils of agriculture, erected a house of wors.h.i.+p, and given them a missionary. "The design of planting them here," saidth esettler, "was to encourage them to cultivate the soil."

"And what has been the success of the plan?" I asked.

"It has met with no success at all," he answered. "The worst thing that the government could do for these people is to give them every thing as it has done, and leave them under no necessity to provide for themselves.

They chop over a little land, an acre or two to a family; their squaws plant a little corn and a few beans, and this is the extent of their agriculture. They pa.s.s their time in hunting and fis.h.i.+ng, or in idleness.

They find deer and bears in the woods behind them, and fish in the St.

Clair before their doors, and they squander their yearly pensions. In one respect they are just like white men, they will not work if they can live without."

"What fish do they find in the St. Clair?"

"Various sorts. Trout and white-fish are the finest, but they are not so abundant at this season. Sturgeon and pike are just now in season, and the pike are excellent."

One of us happening to observe that the river might easily be crossed by swimming, the settler answered:

"Not so easily as you might think. The river is as cold as a well, and the swimmer would soon be chilled through, and perhaps taken with the cramp.

It is this coldness of the water which makes the fish so fine at this season."

This mention of sturgeons tempts me to relate an anecdote which I heard as I was coming up the Hudson. A gentleman who lived east of the river, a little back of Tivoli, caught last spring one of these fish, which weighed about a hundred and sixty pounds. He carried it to a large pond near his house, the longest diameter of which is about a mile, and without taking it out of the net in which he had caught it, he knotted part of the meshes closely around it, and attaching them to a pair of lines like reins, put the creature into the water. To the end of the lines he had taken care to attach a buoy, to mark the place of the fish in the pond. He keeps a small boat, and when he has a mind to make a water-excursion, he rows to the place where the buoy is floating, ties the lines to the boat and, pulling them so as to disturb the fish, is drawn backward and forward with great rapidity over the surface. The pond, in its deepest part, has only seven feet water, so that there is no danger of being dragged under.

We now proceeded up the river, and in about two hours came to a neat little village on the British side, with a windmill, a little church, and two or three little cottages, prettily screened by young trees.

Immediately beyond this was the beginning of the Chippewa settlement of which we had been told. Log-houses, at the distance of nearly a quarter of a mile from each other, stood in a long row beside the river, with scattered trees about them, the largest of the forest, some girdled and leafless, some untouched and green, the smallest trees between having been cut away. Here and there an Indian woman, in a blue dress and bare-headed, was walking along the road; cows and horses were grazing near the houses; patches of maize were seen, tended in a slovenly manner and by no means clear of bushes, but n.o.body was at work in the fields. Two females came down to the bank, with paddles, and put off into the river in a birch-bark canoe, the ends of which were carved in the peculiar Indian fas.h.i.+on. A little beyond stood a group of boys and girls on the water's edge, the boys in s.h.i.+rts and leggins, silently watching the steamer as it shot by them. Still further on a group of children of both s.e.xes, seven in number, came running with shrill cries down the bank. It was then about twelve o'clock, and the weather was extremely sultry. The boys in an instant threw off their s.h.i.+rts and leggins, and plunged into the water with shouts, but the girls were in before them, for they wore only a kind of petticoat which they did not take off, but cast themselves into the river at once and slid through the clear water like seals.

This little Indian colony on the edge of the forest extends for several miles along the river, where its banks are highest and best adapted to the purpose of settlement. It ends at last just below the village which bears the name of Fort Saranae, in the neighborhood of which I was shown an odd-looking wooden building, and was told that this was the house of wors.h.i.+p provided for the Indians by the government.

At Fort Huron, a village on the American side, opposite to Fort Saranae, we stopped to land pa.s.sengers. Three Indians made their appearance on the sh.o.r.e, one of whom, a very large man, wore a kind of turban, and a white blanket made into a sort of frock, with bars of black in several places, altogether a striking costume. One of this party, a well-dressed young man, stopped to speak with somebody in the crowd on the wharf, but the giant in the turban, with his companion, strode rapidly by, apparently not deigning to look at us, and disappeared in the village. He was scarcely out of sight when I perceived a boat approaching the sh.o.r.e with a curiously mottled sail. As it came nearer I saw that it was a quilt of patchwork taken from a bed. In the bottom of the boat lay a barrel, apparently of flour, a stout young fellow pulled a pair of oars, and a slender-waisted damsel, neatly dressed, sat in the stern, plying a paddle with a dexterity which she might have learned from the Chippewa ladies, and guiding the course of the boat which pa.s.sed with great speed over the water.

We were soon upon the broad waters of Lake Huron, and when the evening closed upon us we were already out of sight of land. The next morning I was awakened by the sound of rain on the hurricane deck. A cool east wind was blowing. I opened the outer door of my state-room, and snuffed the air which was strongly impregnated with the odor of burnt leaves or gra.s.s, proceeding, doubtless, from the burning of woods or prairies somewhere on the sh.o.r.es of the lake. For mile after mile, for hour after hour, as we flew through the mist, the same odor was perceptible: the atmosphere of the lake was full of it.

"Will it rain all day?" I asked of a fellow-pa.s.senger, a Salem man, in a white cravat.

"The clouds are thin," he answered; "the sun will soon burn them off."

In fact, the sun soon melted away the clouds, and before ten o'clock I was shown, to the north of us, the dim sh.o.r.e of the Great Manitoulin Island, with the faintly descried opening called the West Strait, through which a throng of speculators in copper mines are this summer constantly pa.s.sing to the Sault de Ste. Marie. On the other side was the sandy isle of Bois Blanc, the name of which is commonly corrupted into Bob Low Island, thickly covered with pines, and showing a tall light-house on the point nearest us. Beyond another point lay like a cloud the island of Mackinaw.

I had seen it once before, but now the hazy atmosphere magnified it into a lofty mountain; its limestone cliffs impending over the water seemed larger; the white fort--white as snow--built from the quarries of the island, looked more commanding, and the rocky crest above it seemed almost to rise to the clouds. There was a good deal of illusion in all this, as we were convinced as we came nearer, but Mackinaw with its rocks rising from the most transparent waters that the earth pours out from her springs, is a stately object in any condition of the atmosphere. The captain of our steamer allowed us but a moment at Mackinaw; a moment to gaze into the clear waters, and count the fish as they played about without fear twenty or thirty feet below our steamer, as plainly seen as if they lay in the air; a moment to look at the fort on the heights, dazzling the eyes with its new whiteness; a moment to observe the habitations of this ancient village, some of which show you roofs and walls of red-cedar bark confined by horizontal strips of wood, a kind of architecture between the wigwam and the settler's cabin. A few baskets of fish were lifted on board, in which I saw trout of enormous size, trout a yard in length, and white-fish smaller, but held perhaps in higher esteem, and we turned our course to the straits which lead into Lake Michigan.

I remember hearing a lady say that she was tired of improvements, and only wanted to find a place that was finished, where she might live in peace. I think I shall recommend Mackinaw to her. I saw no change in the place since my visit to it five years ago. It is so lucky as to have no _back-country_, it offers no advantages to speculation of any sort; it produces, it is true, the finest potatoes in the world, but none for exportation. It may, however, on account of its very cool summer climate, become a fas.h.i.+onable watering-place, in which case it must yield to the common fate of American villages and improve, as the phrase is.

Letter x.x.xII.

Journey from Detroit to Princeton.

Princeton, Illinois, _July_ 31, 1846.

Soon after leaving the island of Mackinaw we entered the straits and pa.s.sed into Lake Michigan. The odor of burnt leaves continued to accompany us, and from the western sh.o.r.e of the lake, thickly covered with wood, we saw large columns of smoke, several miles apart, rising into the hazy sky.

The steamer turned towards the eastern sh.o.r.e, and about an hour before sunset stopped to take in wood at the upper Maneto island, where we landed and strolled into the forest. Part of the island is high, but this, where we went on sh.o.r.e, consists of hillocks and hollows of sand, like the waves of the lake in one of its storms, and looking as if successive storms had swept them up from the bottom. They were covered with an enormous growth of trees which must have stood for centuries. We admired the astonis.h.i.+ng transparency of the water on this sh.o.r.e, the clean sands without any intermixture of mud, the pebbles of almost chalky whiteness, and the stones in the edge of the lake, to which adhered no slime, nor green moss, nor aquatic weed. In the light-green depths, far down, but distinctly seen, shoals of fish, some of them of large size, came quietly playing about the huge hull of our steamer.

On the sh.o.r.e were two log-houses inhabited by woodmen, one of whom drew a pail of water for the refreshment of some of the pa.s.sengers, from a well dug in the sand by his door. "It is not so good as the lake water," said I, for I saw it was not so clear. "It is colder, though," answered the man; "but I must say that there is no purer or sweeter water in the world than that of our lake."

Next morning we were coasting the western sh.o.r.e of Lake Michigan, a high bank presenting a long line of forest. This was broken by the little town of Sheboygan, with its light-house among the shrubs of the bank, its cl.u.s.ter of houses just built, among which were two hotels, and its single schooner lying at the mouth of a river. You probably never heard of Sheboygan before; it has just sprung up in the forests of Wisconsin; the leaves have hardly withered on the trees that were felled to make room for its houses; but it will make a noise in the world yet. "It is the prettiest place on the lake," said a pa.s.senger, whom we left there, with three chubby and healthy children, a lady who had already lived long enough at Sheboygan to be proud of it.

Further on we came to Milwaukie, which is rapidly becoming one of the great cities of the West. It lies within a semicircle of green pastoral declivities sprinkled with scattered trees, where the future streets are to be built. We landed at a kind of wharf, formed by a long platform of planks laid on piles, under which the water flows, and extending to some distance into the lake, and along which a car, running on a railway, took the pa.s.sengers and their baggage, and a part of the freight of the steamer to the sh.o.r.e.

"Will you go up to town, sir?" was the question with which I was saluted by the drivers of a throng of vehicles of all sorts, as soon as I reached the land. They were ranged along a firm sandy beach between the lake and the river of Milwaukie. On one side the light-green waters of the lake, of crystalline clearness, came rolling in before the wind, and on the other the dark thick waters of the river lay still and stagnant in the sun. We did not go up to the town, but we could see that it was compactly built, and in one quarter n.o.bly. A year or two since that quarter had been destroyed by fire, and on the spot several large and lofty warehouses had been erected, with an hotel of the largest cla.s.s. They were of a fine light-brown color, and when I learned that they were of brick, I inquired of a by-stander if that was the natural color of the material. "They are Milwaukie brick," he answered, "and neither painted nor stained; and are better brick besides than are made at the eastward." Milwaukie is said to contain, at present, about ten thousand inhabitants. Here the belt of forest that borders the lake stretches back for several miles to the prairies of Wisconsin. "The Germans," said a pa.s.senger, "are already in the woods hacking at the trees, and will soon open the country to the prairies."

We made a short stop at Racine, prettily situated on the bank among the scattered trees of an oak opening, and another at Southport, a rival town eleven miles further south. It is surprising how many persons travel, as way-pa.s.sengers, from place to place on the sh.o.r.es of these lakes. Five years ago the number was very few, now they comprise, at least, half the number on board a steamboat plying between Buffalo and Chicago. When all who travel from Chicago to Buffalo shall cross the peninsula of Michigan by the more expeditious route of the railway, the Chicago and Buffalo line of steamers, which its owners claim to be the finest line in the world, will still be crowded with people taken up or to be set down at some of the intermediate towns.

When we awoke the next morning our steamer was at Chicago. Any one who had seen this place, as I had done five years ago, when it contained less than five thousand people, would find some difficulty in recognizing it now when its population is more than fifteen thousand. It has its long rows of warehouses and shops, its bustling streets; its huge steamers, and crowds of lake-craft, lying at the wharves; its villas embowered with trees; and its suburbs, consisting of the cottages of German and Irish laborers, stretching northward along the lake, and westward into the prairies, and widening every day. The slovenly and raw appearance of a new settlement begins in many parts to disappear. The Germans have already a garden in a little grove for their holidays, as in their towns in the old country, and the Roman Catholics have just finished a college for the education of those who are to proselyte the West.

The day was extremely hot, and at sunset we took a little drive along the belt of firm sand which forms the border of the lake. Light-green waves came to the sh.o.r.e in long lines, with a crest of foam, like a miniature surf, rolling in from that inland ocean, and as they dashed against the legs of the horses, and the wheels of our carriage, the air that played over them was exceedingly refres.h.i.+ng.

When we set out the following day in the stage-coach for Peru, I was surprised to see how the settlement of Chicago had extended westward into the open country. "Three years ago," said a traveller in the coach, "it was thought that this prairie could neither be inhabited nor cultivated.

It is so level and so little elevated, that for weeks its surface would remain covered with water; but we have found that as it is intersected with roads, the water either runs off in the ditches of the highways, or is absorbed into the sand which lies below this surface of dark vegetable mould, and it is now, as you perceive, beginning to be covered with habitations."

If you ever go by the stage-coach from Chicago to Peru, on the Illinois river, do not believe the glozing tongue of the agent who tells you that you will make the journey in sixteen hours. Double the number, and you will be nearer the truth. A violent rain fell in the course of the morning; the coach was heavily loaded, nine pa.s.sengers within, and three without, besides the driver; the day was hot, and the horses dragged us slowly through the black mud, which seemed to possess the consistency and tenacity of sticking-plaster. We had a dinner of grouse, which here in certain seasons, are sold for three cents apiece, at a little tavern on the road; we had pa.s.sed the long green mound which bears the name of Mount Joliet, and now, a little before sunset, having travelled somewhat less than fifty miles, we were about to cross the channel of the Illinois ca.n.a.l for the second or third time.

There had once been a bridge at the crossing-place, but the water had risen in the ca.n.a.l, and the timbers and planks had floated away, leaving only the stones which formed its foundation. In attempting to ford the channel the blundering driver came too near the bridge; the coach-wheels on one side rose upon the stones, and on the other sank deep into the mud, and we were overturned in an instant. The outside pa.s.sengers were pitched head-fore-most into the ca.n.a.l, and four of those within were lying under water. We extricated ourselves as well as we could, the men waded out, the women were carried, and when we got on sh.o.r.e it was found that, although drenched with water and plastered with mud, n.o.body was either drowned or hurt.