The Overland Monthly/Volume 5/Less Recent Minnesota
LESS RECENT MINNESOTA.
IN a country so new as Minnesota,
the interest generally attaches either to the travels of the first discoverers and early settlers, or else to the very latest news in regard to the advancement of the country. From the very nature of the case, but few happen upon the first requisite. Yet to some a blue sky is as infinitely beautiful as if, each morning, they had newly discovered a work of Nature; and a river is as grand as if none but themselves stood by its brink. To be sure, we regret to miss the personal aggrandizement and vanity, but console ourselves that in other respects we are as fortunate as a first- comer. For myself, I confess to a fondness for such trifling appliances of modern civilization as steamboats and railroad cars. On the other hand, in the newest there is much that is frothy and evanescent. So I turn back to my travels midway of these extremes with a pleasant and mellow sort of an interest in the pictares of memory.
The spring of 1867 was an eventful one to lady travelers, for a reason that masculine readers would not be apt to remember. No; it was not that the war being ended, the "' woman question" took the field, and all eyes were directed to her importance, for the first time in history. The cause was more subtile and universal. Omnipotent Fashion had decreed that traveling dresses should be short. The news went like the wind through the length and breadth of the land, and a thousand pairs of scissors hacked into a time-honored custom. As the result of the labors of one pair, I stood, miserable and dejected, on the platform of one of the cars, as the train was about to leave one of our Atlantic cities.
"Well, what is it?" asked my traveling companion, noticing my air of perplexity.
"O, father!" I replied; "I am sure I have forgotten something of the greatest importance. I never in my life felt so incomplete."
It was not until some days had elapsed that I knew it was the train of my dress that I missed, and found out how to use my hands for other purposes than holding it up.
We reached Prairie la Crosse on the 1st of June. The town was so named by the French, from the Indians formerly resorting to it to playa game with racketsticks. It sits down on the edge of a marsh in a slovenly and half-desolate manner, as is the habit of towns in such uncongenial localities. The marsh is about two miles wide, and the "Father of Waters" perversely flows on the opposite side of it. Across the marsh is a long wharf, connecting the town with the river, and at certain, or rather uncertain, times of the day and night there is an appearance of chronic excitement among omnibus-drivers and expressmen, who mercilessly seize the wayfarers ..nd their belongings, assuming an appearance of superior knowledge and power. The traveler yields himself to them with a kind of vague belief that they have, from some inexplicable source, become possessed of his secret designs, and it will be all right in the end. It was midnight when we found ourselves among a crowd of other passengers, who had been conveyed from the cars to the end of the wharf, and who were to take the steamer up the Mississippi. The red glare from the pine - knots, contained in the wicker braziers, fell upon a motley
assemblage that night. The respectable travelers and tourists were making their first rush northward. There were, besides these, a full complement of immigrants, upon whose stolid countenances anticipation found no place, and to whom the means of travel were only forms assumed by an inscrutable Providence, to which they blindly acceded; and Government, too, happened at this time to be putting in force a recent benevolent impulse in regard to the aborigines, and was conveying a large party of them to a reservation, west of the Mississippi. They were dirty beyond belief, and seemed to add to the damp river air another portion of miasma. The missionary enterprise which shall establish a soap manufactory in their midst will perhaps succeed in converting them into moral and responsible beings. But such as we were, the steamer voraciously received its prey, gave a series of unearthly shrieks, and swung round with the current of the river. For the few remaining hours before daybreak, our steamer seemed to be constantly meeting and signaling her sister steamers coming down the river. These high-pressure steam-whistles found a nerve in my body which had hitherto remained dormant, and fairly indicated to what an unimagined and supreme degree a human being may be capable of being tortured. I was also haunted by the romantic desire of seeing the great river for the first time by sunrise. But as the sun took occasion to rise during the only ten minutes that I lost consciousness, it was shining with glittering and cheerful effulgence by the time that I reached the deck; and with, I could not help but fancy, an extra sparkle of amazement and good humor, to find that the clouds, whose gray mistiness it had been unable to penetrate for two days previous, had metamorphosed a winter into a summer landscape.
Summer comes like a miracle to this
peculiar region. The deciduous trees, which remain entirely bare during April, and the entire or greater part of May, suddenly clothe themselves with a luxuriance of foliage. The bluffs which I now saw on either side of the river were high, and heavily-wooded. The foliage was of a tender, delicate green color, and imparted to the trees a sort of misty indistinctness, at strange variance with the clear air and sparkling sunshine. So uninterrupted were these bluffs, that the river seemed to be flowing between walls of hazy green, through which familiar forest forms could be faintly traced. We left the boat at Winona, which we reached about eight o'clock in the morning. The town, in spite of its newness, was rather pretty, and even interesting. It is situated high enough above the current of the Mississippi to keep itself clean from its muddy washings. The bluffs in the background have a protecting aspect, and undoubtedly shelter this embryo city from the violence of the north-west winds., Winona is not without the marked characteristic of new and rapidly growing towns—an air of conscious importance. The hotel bade defiance to criticism, because ten years before the traveler would only have found a wilderness, or an Indian wigwam, in its place. And the Doric pillars which support the roof of its piazza, and testify that a classic architecture has already reached this frontier, stand out like bristling exclamation points, to confront the traveler with such an assurance. The church-spires, a court-house, and school-houses, all add their testimony that the wilderness is beginning to "bloom and blossom," according to the usages of modern civilization. Even the people seem never to be rid of the vague consciousness that they are natural phenomena, from the mere fact of living in a town of such precocious growth. Half a dozen years before, most of the inhabitants were scattered
miscellaneously through the country, and the hope of bettering their condition has been the magnet which has drawn them to this centre; yet they are thoroughly imbued with the belief that such an act we pre-eminently magnanimous and noble. It can not be denied that there is a peculiar charm —rather poetic than practical, however—in living in a new and unsettledcountry. The verythought of being dependent upon one's own exertions and prudence, au being, at the same time, beyond the pale of recognized social customs, gives at least a marked individuality, and sometimes begets real kindness for others, and always thoughtful prudence for one's self. A thin veneering of civilization, however, dissipates this charm, and we see that vices are more easily cultivated than virtues, even on a virgin soil.
The sun was shining gloriously the morning that we left Winona. The rounded outlines of bluffs on the opposite side of the river were clearly, yet softly defined; the Mississippi rolled southward in the shimmer of a million scintillating sparkles, and the little town itself seemed to have a fresher impetus and energy than ever before. The shrill scream of the locomotive which bore our train westward, seemed quite in unison with the spirit of the place, and an appropriate way of bidding it an energetic "good-by." The three-miles' breadth of prairie was soon passed, and we found ourselves whizzing over a high trestlework above a deep and broad ravine, or rather series of ravines, among the bluffs. Far below us the tree-tops nodded and swayed to their clear reflections in the streams. The shadow of our own train as it passed, with its attendant train of hazy smoke, seemed like some cloudphantom weirdly traversing the fresh, verdant fields beneath us. At times we touched against the side of a bluff, and then again branched off across the valleys.
As we left the river, the bluffs
became more singular in character—the detached ones often bearing a quaint resemblance to the ruins of a fortified castle—and not unfrequently one more striking than the rest would be designated by the title of "Castle Rock." In one place, the cars wound for half a mile around a bluff whose sides seemed a colonnade, in das relief of pale-yellow sandstone. I have never seen in Nature a closer approximation to the artificial. Although it was not difficult to detect the natural causes which had acted upon the soft sandstone, the effect was as ifa Titan colony had fashioned this as a pattern for mortals to copy. Enthusiastic students of Nature have always asserted that Nature furnishes us patterns for every thing, and it is according as we accept or deviate from the model that we fail or succeed. Hugh Miller tells us that it has been proved by statistics from English print-factories that the pattern which has met with the greatest and most lasting success is almost a facsimile of the veins of a coralin the Old Red Sandstone.
On the road between Winona and Owatanna, a point fifty miles directly west, there were, in 1867, but few towns. Owatanna itself was at that time but little more than a railroad station. There were perhaps a dozen houses besides. The elegance of white paint was very sparingly introduced. We only stopped at this town for dinner, and it was gratifying to know that all of the inhabitants assembled to see us eat. A few were walking up and down the platform outside, and occasionally lolling over the window-sill for a nearer inspection; others crowded into the dining-room, and occasionally asked a question of a goodnatured-looking traveler, or volunteered information in regard to the growth and prospects of their city. Pauses in the conversation were filled up by the American pastime of expectoration. During my journey, I had been enraptured with the
clear water of the streams of Minnesota; but I here saw no evidences that it could be made useful for ablutions; and here, as elsewhere, I found "Nature's noblemen" were apt to be superior to the exigencies of clean linen.
A lady among the lookers-on chanced to find a former acquaintance in one of my fellow-travelers, and sat down near me to recount her experience of frontier life. She was pretty, or would have been so but for an expression of discontent and habitual ill-humor on her countenance. Her dress, of some cheap material, was supernaturally fashionable, even in the minutest particular. I was tormented by a vague suggestion that I had seen her somewhere before; but, after watching her for a few moments, I found there was nothing in her conversation or manner to justify the feeling. I gathered from her conversation that Owatanna was a free-and-easy place, which was soon to be a city. Already there was an astonishingly polite and intelligent society—bright, smart, goahead business men, and gallant withal. Her business, which was in the millinery line, was at that season of the year dull; but when the farmers came in from the back-country with their crops, it would be more flourishing. In the meantime— with a conscious look—she always kept up with the fashions. But the conversation could not be prolonged beyond our allotted "twenty minutes for dinner." As the train started, I saw the pretty milliner apparently playing an approved ré/e of the coquette with two devoted cavaliers in soiled linen. Two or three hours afterward, as I was listlessly turning over the pages of a magazine, which the "paper-boy" had persistently left in my seat at intervals of an hour and a half during the day, my attention was arrested by a gorgeously colored fashion-plate, which purported to be the correct 'morning costume for a watering-place." The recognition this time
was instantaneous—the Owatanna milliner was a faultless, but cheap imitation of this pattern. The modern traveler unweariedly chants the praises of the march of progress: the locomotive is the first great civilizer; the woodman's axe, or the farmer's plow, are the next to assail the wilderness or prairie; but when fashion takes the field, civilization is secure and triumphant.
The direction of the railroad from Owatanna to St. Paul is northward, with a slight inclination toward the east. The scene was a charming one. The smooth, green, slightly rolling prairie, across which we were riding, had for its eastern horizon the broken bluffs, and, toward the west, gently sloping, wooded eminences. The towns, too, grew more frequent, and were better built. Indeed, the towns of Minnesota differed in this respect from new towns generally throughout the West. Perhaps this was due as much to climatic influences as to the character of the settlers. To be sure, the country bears a strong impress of New England; for New Englanders form a good proportion of the population; but even they, in a milder climate, grow lax and careless. In a country characterized by extremes of climate, the things of to-day can not be put off until to-morrow. The houses must not only be well built, but kept in constant repair, to secure the occupant against actual suffering, or even death, from the intense cold. And what he does for himself he is also obliged to do for his cattle, and even for the productions of the soil; in consequence, we see the house of the Minnesota farmer surrounded by well-built barns and many of the appointments of a New England farm, and every thing characterized by the same neatness and thrift. There was hard work evinced in it all—work with the brains, as well as with the hands; a forethought required, in the necessity of preparing in one season for
the emergencies of another. This had already developed well-built villages, with a certain primness and practicality about them. Perhaps they were exponents of the people.
Everywhere the evidences of skilled labor were visible. Great fields of growing wheat stretched away on either side, in faint, dimpled indentations. Men were at work in their fields and gardens; and occasionally a stout Norwegian woman shared their labors. At one time, we passed a wayside school-house, at the auspicious moment of "girls' recess." Eight or ten stout-limbed, chubby little creatures had climbed to the topmost rail of the fence, and sat there as we passed—some gazing gravely at us, others chattering together like young magpies. Whether it was a gala-day, or whether the Minnesota mothers had been studying economy by purchasing calico by the wholesale, I do not know; but all of these young damsels were arrayed in pink calico. They shone out brilliantly from their background of vivid green, like new and wonderful flowers of the prairie.
As we again neared the Mississippi, the bluffs became bolder, often standing in singular isolation upon the level plain. Before reaching the Minnesota River, the train was divided, a part of it going to St. Paul, and the remainder continuing up the banks of the Mississippi to Minneapolis. Having decided to first visit the latter place, I watched, from our high embankment, the cars descending, in curious, zigzag contortions, to the plains below. We crossed the Minnesota near its mouth, opposite Fort Snelling, and then hugged the rocks for a circling mile, midway between the sombre fort above us and the dark Mississippi beneath. Soon, however, we passed the rocky borders, came to the high, level prairie on which Minneapolis is situated, and reached that brightest little city of the North-west in mid-afternoon.
At the east, the great Falls of St. Anthony thundered in our ears; toward the south, the broken bluffs indicated the course of the Mississippi, and toward the north and west, long stretches of grain-covered prairies, varied here and there by clumps and zones of trees, met the horizon. The city itself is substantially built, and has no external appearance of its rapid growth. Public buildings are usually either of pale- yellow brick, or buff-stone from quarries near the city; the factories, which are numerous—supplied by the immense water- power of the falls —are built of the bluish-gray limestone from the bluffs.
Above all of the sounds of city life I heard the heavy throbbing of the cataract, and about sunset walked out to see it. The Falls of St. Anthony, I had been told, were little more than rapids, and in comparison with other American cataracts were of but little interest. But when I saw the vast volume of water pouring over the curved outline of rocks, and dashing against a huge pinnacle which some flood had imbedded in its current, and thence scattering the spray far back upon its course, I knew for the first time the sublimity of power. At first this impression held and overpowered me; but gradually I came to see that there was also great beauty of detail: huge masses of white or tawny foam advanced, receded, and changed at every moment, with an infinite variety of play that dazzled and bewildered the mind. Even the fragment of the densely wooded island which interrupts the line of the cascade, affords in its sombre stillness a pleasing contrast to the incessant motion of the water. And yet the perpendicular fall is of only about sixteen feet. Father Hennepin, who traveled untrammeled by actual measurements, assigned to them a height of from fifty to sixty feet. But this traveler went through America royally, unhampered by tape-line or quadrant. He
stated the Falls of Niagara to be six hundred feet high; and one can not help thinking a little curiously of what would have been the effects of the wonders of California upon such an imagination. How delicious, too, must have been the travels of that ambitious Yankee, Jonathan Carver, in 1766, who could indulge in a perfect abandon of inaccurate numerical values without the fear of a moral flagellation by an Argus-eyed press! At such a time all things might be measured sublimely by a comparative guess. For instance, I should say that yonder rock was as big as the village meeting-house, and that patch of corn just showing tiny forks of green above the brown soil was as large as Mr. Jonesfarm. In that forest across the river, beyond and through which the village of St. Anthony peers, hundreds of trees might bear the palm from the stately Northampton elms. So one might have traveled a hundred years ago—an artist fostering a love of the picturesque, and filling the galleries of the mind with a thousand pictures awakened by a natural sequence. One travels to-day a mathematical automaton, a slave to the moral rectitude of numbers, which happily in my own case usually vanish with the first profound sleep, leaving me the option of utter vacuity or some out-ofdate comparative measurement. Yet I acknowledge the necessity of public accuracy, and can only wonder if other travelers have in such a submission lost sight of individuality. While I was watching the infinite force and varied play of the rushing water, I did not fora moment lose consciousness that a waterfall must have an altitude expressed by at least three numerals to justify a thrill, although I have experienced the opposite sensation from being thousands of feet above the sea upon level land. In the one case the numbers limited the imagination, and in the other unduly excited it. I have reproved or incited my feel ings by something like the following considerations: This water-fall, which has awakened new ideas of sublimity and power, is not the proper subject for admiration, because others are higher. Or in a country whose monotony is only broken here and there by slight elevations, I have said to myself, "Think of being six thousand feet above the level of the sea!" In your cozy library you read the gigantic figures with a thrill; but often these numerical values have no visible meaning, and from the, top of a respectable hill in New England, not only an infinitely greater variety of country might be seen, but often of a greater extent. The opaline sky glowed pale and pure above and beneath the wire suspension - bridge, which hung across the river above the falls, connecting Minneapolis with a large island near the opposite shore. The bridge was a pretty work of art, uniting great strength with extreme delicacy of appearance. As I gazed a moment before at the surging waters, it seemed that power could only through them find a fitting expression. But here art was also triumphant, and the science of numbers looked proudly down from properly adjusted angles and curves.
The next day we took a carriage-ride to some of the celebrated places in the vicinity. The placarded lists, which were distributed through the hotel for the convenience of strangers, showed a large proportion of AZinnes (the Sioux term for water). This was used as a prefix, while the remainder of the word was descriptive, and suggested that the aboriginal mind had vexed itself in order to vary the characteristics. Even then there was a chain of lakes left to be honored by poetry, politics, and early settlers: Lake of the Isles, Lake Calhoun, and Lake Harriet; the last being named for Mrs. Snelling, the wife of the first Commandant of the old frontier fort. Whether or not Indian ingenuity succeeded in diversifying the characters
of these lakes, I do not know; they were certainly all alike, pellucid and bright, and the shores of each were often a mosaic of the most brilliant pebbles. They find an outlet in the calmest and clearest of creeks, which wanders about the prairie between its level banks, and at last surprises itself by plunging over a precipice sixty feet high. There is a kind of Jack Horner exultation in its merriment as it touches bottom, as if such an act of bravery was unprecedented in the annals of streams.
The Falls of Minnehaha is an ideal to the lovers of the romantic, who find an indefinable charm in the light, musical plashing of its waters. And in spite of what philologists, superfluously learned in the Sioux language, may say in regard to the popular misinterpretation, it will still continue to be a favorite goal of bridal parties, and of enthusiastic ladies of a poetic temperament. A favorite goal, I might say, to any one who could enjoy the dolce far niente of a summer afternoon, and recklessly dream it out to the accompaniment of such a light, fantastic measure. One is inclined to laugh, too, when one thinks how the contagion of its merriment and fantasy has led civilized humanity. A year before a romaniic couple, from New England, came and stood beneath the spray while the marriage ceremony was being performed. During the previous winter a merry party, from St. Paul, had burning pine-knots placed on the rocks behind the frozen cascade, which shone out into the stilly chill of the winter night with a weirdly magnificent brilliancy. So potent is the influence of the place, that one hears innumerable anecdotes of hilarious merriment, into which the visitors are betrayed. Indeed, Minnehaha seemed a sort of sfirituelle embodiment of the pagan myth of Silenus marching at the head of his troup of merry-makers, and infecting them all with his own caprices.
I remember the visit to old Fort Snelling with a peculiar interest. It is about a two-hours' drive from Minneapolis, past the Falls co: Minnehaha, and about six miles beyond them. There was a mild, decaying, disused air about even the exterior; and when we entered the quadrangle, the one solitary sentinel paced his dreary rounds with an air of melancholy resignation that quite went to my heart. A frontier fort, hemmed in on every side by a peaceable and thrifty community, had need to look dejected. It seemed like a great chief-mourner, who had come by mistake to the rejoicings of a baptismal service, and found the dignity of its funereal trappir gs quite lost amid its gayer surroundings; and so it had turned introspective, and quietly lived upon its own memories. The nine square miles which it once held as a military reserve, had dwindled down to a few hundred acres, and cities and towns had sprung up within its former limits. There was little to interest one now in the interior of the fort; and soon I found my way through a passage cut through the buildings on one side of the quadrangle, and thence up two or three short flights of stairs to an observatory, overhanging the river.
From here one sees mountain - tops, rivers, and prairies. The sombre outline of bluffs on the east cut the edge of the shining, blue sky into grotesque shapes; the Mississippi, stretching in a nearly direct line north and south, throbs beneath your feet; toward the west the Minnesota extends its sinuous length over the level plain, and the prairie itself, in great green reaches, meets and mingles with the pale sky at the farwestern horizon. A couple of brighteyed children, daughters of an officer at the fort, had converted the observatory into a play-room, and a gigantic doll had her face turned toward the proper angle, and was mildly contemplating the scene. A hospital of maimed and wounded in fantry reposed softly beneath one of the seats. The gay prattle of the children, who, after the first few moments, were oblivious to our presence, broke in singularly, but not unpleasantly, with the solemnstillness of the surroundings. We yielded to the fascinations of the spot, and lingered there for hours. Shortly after our arrival, a gentleman in civil costume, byt with an unmistakable military air, joined us. There was something about him which reminded me of the old fort itself: perhaps as much as any thing the absence of hurry and the air of calm introspection. A half-hour of silent sympathy made us all acquainted. I can not tell who began the conversation, or how it was introduced; but we soon found that our new friend had been one of the military command who had built the fort—not the present one, but one of logs—nearly half a century before. As he related incident and anec
dote, I forgot the steamers snorting up and down the river, and the cars thundering beneath our feet, and went back to the scenes which he described so vividly, and with just a touch of that pleasant sadness which belongs to the
past. Their nearest White neighbors were at the military post at Prairie du Chien, four hundred miles distant; and their only excitement the arrival of the mail, once a month.
The celebrated Keokuk was sometimes the mail-carrier; and his infinite versatility a great source of amusement to the soldiers. He was swift, agile, a natural gymnast, a wonderful imitator,
and, withal, possessed of a retentive memory. He delighged to watch the drill of the soldiers, and on one occasion surprised them by floating past the fort erect in his bark-canoe, and going through an exact manual exercise. He always presented the letters to the persons to whom they were addressed, apparently reading the address from the envelope. This, however, was a mere act of memory, as he insisted upon hearing the address of each one before receiving it.
The winters were bitter-cold, and they often suffered from insufficient supplies. On one occasion, they abandoned the fort entirely, and walked down the river on the ice to Prairie du Chien. There were days and nights of suffering, and they at last arrived at their destination nearly perished with cold and hunger. "Ah!" said the narrator, turning to me, "the telling of these things seems only a summer's-day romance; but, my dear young lady, the actual experience takes much of the romance from frontier life." We bade him a pleasant "Good-by," and left him gazing out upon the river and plain, filled with memories whereof the pain had gone and what was pleasant remained, undimmed by time.
Here and there, above the purple haze of the violet-covered prairie over which we rode, the stately cone-flowers lifted their golden heads, like glowing suns. This is as it was years ago. Far beyond, the sun sank beneath the horizon, leaving a joy which civilization neither will give nor take away.