Historic Waterways—Six Hundred Miles of Canoeing Down the Rock, Fox, and Wisconsin Rivers

Transcriber's Note:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved.
REUBEN GOLD THWAITES
SECRETARY OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN
Other roads do some violence to Nature, and bring the traveller to stare at her; but the river steals into the scenery it traverses without intrusion, silently creating and adorning it, and is free to come and go as the zephyr.—Thoreau; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY 1888
Copyright By A. C. McClurg and Co. a.d. 1888.
This Little Volume
IS INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR
TO HIS WIFE,
HIS MESSMATE UPON TWO OF THE THREE VACATION VOYAGES HEREIN RECORDED, AND HIS FELLOW-VOYAGER DOWN THE RIVER OF TIME.
There is a generally accepted notion that a brief summer vacation, if at all obtainable in this busy life of ours, must be spent in a flight as far afield as time will allow; that the popular resorts in the mountains, by the seaside, or on the margins of the upper lakes must be sought for rest and enjoyment; that neighborhood surroundings should, in the mad rush for change of air and scene, be left behind. The result is that your average vacationist—if I may be allowed to coin a needed word—knows less of his own State than of any other, and is inattentive to the delights of nature which await inspection within the limits of his horizon.