Letters of a Traveller Part 16

We pa.s.sed a few minutes in the house of the missionary, to which Mrs.

Speight kindly invited us. She gave a rather favorable account of the Indians under her husband's charge, but manifestly an honest one, and without any wish to extenuate the defects of their character.

"There are many excellent persons among them," she said; "they are a kind, simple, honest people, and some of them are eminently pious."

"Do they follow any regular industry?"

"Many of them are as regularly industrious as the whites, rising early and continuing at their work in the fields all day. They are not so attentive as we could wish to the education of their children. It is difficult to make them send their children regularly to school; they think they confer a favor in allowing us to instruct them, and if they happen to take a little offense their children are kept at home. The great evil against which we have to guard is the love of strong drink. When this is offered to an Indian, it seems as if it was not in his nature to resist the temptation. I have known whole congregations of Indians, good Indians, ruined and brought to nothing by the opportunity of obtaining whisky as often as they pleased."

We inquired whether the numbers of the people at the mission were diminis.h.i.+ng. She could not speak with much certainty as to this point, having been only a year and a half at the mission, but she thought there was a gradual decrease.

"The families of the Indians," she said, in answer to one of my questions, "are small. In one family at the village are six children, and it is the talk of all the Indians, far and near, as something extraordinary. Generally the number is much smaller, and more than half the children die in infancy. Their means would not allow them to rear many children, even if the number of births was greater."

Such appears to be the destiny of the red race while in the presence of the white--decay and gradual extinction, even under circ.u.mstances apparently the most favorable to its preservation.

On Monday we left the Falls of St. Mary, in the steamer General Scott, on our return to Mackinaw. There were about forty pa.s.sengers on board, men in search of copper-mines, and men in search of health, and travellers from curiosity, Virginians, New Yorkers, wanderers from Illinois, Indiana, Ma.s.sachusetts, and I believe several other states. On reaching Mackinaw in the evening, our party took quarters in the Mansion House, the obliging host of which stretched his means to the utmost for our accommodation.

Mackinaw is at the present moment crowded with strangers; attracted by the cool healthful climate and the extreme beauty of the place. We were packed for the night almost as closely as the Potawottamies, whose lodges were on the beach before us. Parlors and garrets were turned into sleeping-rooms; beds were made on the floors and in the pa.s.sages, and double-bedded rooms were made to receive four beds. It is no difficult feat to sleep at Mackinaw, even in an August night, and we soon forgot, in a refres.h.i.+ng slumber, the narrowness of our quarters.

Letter x.x.xVII.

The Island of Mackinaw.

Steamer St. Louis, Lake Huron, _August_ 20, 1846.

Yesterday evening we left the beautiful island of Mackinaw, after a visit of two days delightfully pa.s.sed. We had climbed its cliffs, rambled on its sh.o.r.es, threaded the walks among its thickets, driven out in the roads that wind through its woods--roads paved by nature with limestone pebbles, a sort of natural macadamization, and the time of our departure seemed to arrive several days too soon.

The fort which crowns the heights near the sh.o.r.e commands an extensive prospect, but a still wider one is to be seen from the old fort, Fort Holmes, as it is called, among whose ruined intrenchments the half-breed boys and girls now gather gooseberries. It stands on the very crest of the island, overlooking all the rest. The air, when we ascended it, was loaded with the smoke of burning forests, but from this spot, in clear weather, I was told a magnificent view might be had of the Straits of Mackinaw, the wooded islands, and the sh.o.r.es and capes of the great mainland, places known to history for the past two centuries. For when you are at Mackinaw you are at no new settlement.

In looking for samples of Indian embroidery with porcupine quills, we found ourselves one day in the warehouse of the American Fur Company, at Mackinaw. Here, on the shelves, were piles of blankets, white and blue, red scarfs, and white boots; snow-shoes were hanging on the walls, and wolf-traps, rifles, and hatchets, were slung to the ceiling--an a.s.sortment of goods destined for the Indians and half-breeds of the northwest. The person who attended at the counter spoke English with a foreign accent. I asked him how long he had been in the northwestern country.

"To say the truth," he answered, "I have been here sixty years and some days."

"You were born here, then."

"I am a native of Mackinaw, French by the mother's side; my father was an Englishman."

"Was the place as considerable sixty years ago as it now is?"

"More so. There was more trade here, and quite as many inhabitants. All the houses, or nearly all, were then built; two or three only have been put up since."

I could easily imagine that Mackinaw must have been a place of consequence when here was the centre of the fur trade, now removed further up the country. I was shown the large house in which the heads of the companies of _voyageurs_ engaged in the trade were lodged, and the barracks, a long low building, in which the _voyageurs_ themselves, seven hundred in number, made their quarters from the end of June till the beginning of October, when they went out again on their journeys. This interval of three months was a merry time with those light-hearted Frenchmen. When a boat made its appearance approaching Mackinaw, they fell to conjecturing to what company of _voyageurs_ it belonged; as the dispute grew warm the conjectures became bets, till finally, unable to restrain their impatience, the boldest of them dashed into the waters, swam out to the boat, and climbing on board, shook hands with their brethren, amidst the shouts of those who stood on the beach.

They talk, on the New England coast, of Chebacco boats, built after a peculiar pattern, and called after Chebacco, an ancient settlement of sea-faring men, who have foolishly changed the old Indian name of their place to Ipswich. The Mackinaw navigators have also given their name to a boat of peculiar form, sharp at both ends, swelled at the sides, and flat-bottomed, an excellent sea-boat, it is said, as it must be to live in the wild storms that surprise the mariner on Lake Superior.

We took yesterday a drive to the western sh.o.r.e. The road twined through a wood of over-arching beeches and maples, interspersed with the white-cedar and fir. The driver stopped before a cliff sprouting with beeches and cedars, with a small cavity at the foot. This he told us was the Skull Cave. It is only remarkable on account of human bones having been found in it. Further on a white paling gleamed through the trees; it inclosed the solitary burial ground of the garrison, with half a dozen graves.

"There are few buried here," said a gentleman of our party; "the soldiers who come to Mackinaw sick get well soon."

The road we travelled was cut through the woods by Captain Scott, who commanded at the fort a few years since. He is the marksman whose aim was so sure that the western people say of him, that a racc.o.o.n on a tree once offered to come down and surrender without giving him the trouble to fire.

We pa.s.sed a farm surrounded with beautiful groves. In one of its meadows was fought the battle between Colonel Croghan and the British officer Holmes in the war of 1813. Three luxuriant beeches stand in the edge of the wood, north of the meadow; one of them is the monument of Holmes; he lies buried at its root. Another quarter of a mile led us to a little bay on the solitary sh.o.r.e of the lake looking to the northwest. It is called the British Landing, because the British troops landed here in the late war to take possession of the island.

We wandered about awhile, and then sat down upon the embankment of pebbles which the waves of the lake, heaving for centuries, have heaped around the sh.o.r.e of the island--pebbles so clean that they would no more soil a lady's white muslin gown than if they had been of newly polished alabaster. The water at our feet was as transparent as the air around us.

On the main-land opposite stood a church with its spire, and several roofs were visible, with a background of woods behind them.

"There," said one of our party, "is the old Mission Church. It was built by the Catholics in 1680, and has been a place of wors.h.i.+p ever since. The name of the spot is Point St. Ignace, and there lives an Indian of the full caste, who was sent to Rome and educated to be a priest, but he preferred the life of a layman, and there he lives on that wild sh.o.r.e, with a library in his lodge, a learned savage, occupied with reading and study."

You may well suppose that I felt a strong desire to see Point St. Ignace, its venerable Mission Church, its Indian village, so long under the care of Catholic pastors, and its learned savage who talks Italian, but the time of my departure was already fixed. My companions were pointing out on that sh.o.r.e, the mouth of Carp River, which comes down through the forest roaring over rocks, and in any of the pools of which you have only to throw a line, with any sort of bait, to be sure of a trout, when the driver of our vehicle called out, "Your boat is coming." We looked and saw the St. Louis steamer, not one of the largest, but one of the finest boats in the line between Buffalo and Chicago, making rapidly for the island, with a train of black smoke hanging in the air behind her. We hastened to return through the woods, and in an hour and a half we were in our clean and comfortable quarters in this well-ordered little steamer.

But I should mention that before leaving Mackinaw, we did not fail to visit the princ.i.p.al curiosities of the place, the Sugar Loaf Rock, a remarkable rock in the middle of the island, of a sharp conical form, rising above the trees by which it is surrounded, and lifting the stunted birches on its shoulders higher than they, like a tall fellow holding up a little boy to overlook a crowd of men--and the Arched Rock on the sh.o.r.e.

The atmosphere was thick with smoke, and through the opening spanned by the arch of the rock I saw the long waves, rolled up by a fresh wind, come one after another out of the obscurity, and break with roaring on the beach.

The path along the brow of the precipice and among the evergreens, by which this rock is reached, is singularly wild, but another which leads to it along the sh.o.r.e is no less picturesque--pa.s.sing under impending cliffs and overshadowing cedars, and between huge blocks and pinnacles of rock.

I spoke in one of my former letters of the manifest fate of Mackinaw, which is to be a watering-place. I can not see how it is to escape this destiny. People already begin to repair to it for health and refreshment from the southern borders of Lake Michigan. Its climate during the summer months is delightful; there is no air more pure and elastic, and the winds of the south and southwest, which are so hot on the prairies, arrive here tempered to a grateful coolness by the waters over which they have swept.

The nights are always, in the hottest season, agreeably cool, and the health of the place is proverbial. The world has not many islands so beautiful as Mackinaw, as you may judge from the description I have already given of parts of it. The surface is singularly irregular, with summits of rock and pleasant hollows, open glades of pasturage and shady nooks. To some, the savage visitors, who occasionally set up their lodges on its beach, as well as on that of the surrounding islands, and paddle their canoes in its waters, will be an additional attraction. I can not but think with a kind of regret on the time which, I suppose is near at hand, when its wild and lonely woods will be intersected with highways, and filled with cottages and boarding-houses.

Letter x.x.xVIII.

An Excursion to the Water Gap.

Stroudsberg, Monroe Co., Penn. _October_ 23, 1846.

I reached this place last evening, having taken Easton in my way. Did it ever occur to you, in pa.s.sing through New Jersey, how much the northern part of the state is, in some respects, like New York, and how much the southern part resembles Pennsylvania? For twenty miles before reaching Easton, you see s.p.a.cious dwelling-houses, often of stone, substantially built, and barns of the size of churches, and large farms with extensive woods of tall trees, as in Pennsylvania, where the right of soil has not undergone so many subdivisions as with us. I was shown in Warren county, in a region apparently of great fertility, a farm which was said to be two miles square. It belonged to a farmer of German origin, whose comfortable mansion stood by the way, and who came into the state many years ago, a young man.

"I have heard him say," said a pa.s.senger, "that when his father brought him out with his young wife into Warren county, and set him down upon what then appeared a barren little farm, now a part of his large and productive estate, his heart failed him. However he went to work industriously, practicing the strictest economy, and by applying lime copiously to the soil made it highly fertile. It is lime which makes this region the richest land in New Jersey; the farmers find limestone close at hand, burn it in their kilns, and scatter it on the surface. The person of whom I speak took off large crops from his little farm, and as soon as he had any money beforehand, he added a few acres more, so that it gradually grew to its present size. Rich as he is, he is a worthy man; his sons, who are numerous, are all fine fellows, not a scape-grace among them, and he has settled them all on farms around him."

Easton, which we entered soon after dark, is a pretty little town of seven thousand inhabitants, much more substantially built than towns of the same size in this country. Many of the houses are of stone, and to the sides of some of them you see the ivy clinging and hiding the masonry with a veil of evergreen foliage. The middle of the streets is unpaved and very dusty, but the broad flagging on the sides, under the windows of the houses, is sedulously swept. The situation of the place is uncommonly picturesque. If ever the little borough of Easton shall grow into a great town, it will stand on one of the most commanding sites in the world, unless its inhabitants shall have spoiled it by improvements. The Delaware, which forms the eastern bound of the borough, approaches it from the north through high wooded banks, and flows away to join the Susquehanna between craggy precipices. On the south side, the Lehigh comes down through a deep, verdant hollow, and on the north the Bushkill winds through a glen shaded with trees, on the rocky banks of which is one of the finest drives in the world. In the midst of the borough rises a crag as lofty as that on which Stirling Castle is built--in Europe, it would most certainly have been crowned with its castle; steep and gra.s.sy on one side, and precipitous and rocky on the other, where it overhangs the Bushkill. The college stands on a lofty eminence, overlooking the dwellings and streets, but it is an ugly building, and has not a tree to conceal even in part its ugliness. Besides these, are various other eminences in the immediate vicinity of this compact little town, which add greatly to its beauty.

We set out the next morning for the Delaware Water Gap, following the road along the Delaware, which is here uncommonly beautiful. The steep bank is mostly covered with trees sprouting from the rocky shelves, and below is a fringe of trees between the road and the river. A little way from the town, the driver pointed out, in the midst of the stream, a long island of loose stones and pebbles, without a leaf or stem of herbage.

"It was there," said he, "that Gaetter, six years ago, was hanged for the murder of his wife."

The high and steep bank of the river, the rocks and the trees, he proceeded to tell us, were covered on that day with eager spectators from all the surrounding country, every one of whom, looking immediately down on the island, could enjoy a perfect view of the process by which the poor wretch in the hands of the hangman was turned off.

About five miles from Easton we stopped to water our horses at an inn, a large handsome stone house, with a chatty landlord, who spoke with a strong German accent, complaining pathetically of the potato disease, which had got into the fields of the neighborhood, but glorying in the abundant crops of maize and wheat which had been gathered. Two miles further on, we turned away from the river and ascended to the table-land above, which we found green with extensive fields of wheat, just springing under the autumnal sun. In one of the little villages nestling in the hollows of that region, we stopped for a few moments, and fell into conversation with a tolerably intelligent man, though speaking English with some peculiarities that indicated the race to which he belonged. A sample of his dialect may amuse you. We asked him what the people in that part of the country thought of the new tariff.

"Oh," said he, "there are different obinions, some likes it and some not."