The opposition boat went up the night before, and had taken up the water with a blotting-paper, so that every little while I had to roll up my pants about nine feet, and go out into the channel, and luff up on the starboard watch of the barge with a jenny pole and bring her to, so that she could find moisture.
Then I had a good deal of fun going ashore after ferns when the boat was aground. While the crew went aft and close-reefed the smoke-stack and hauled abaft the top-gallant, or side-tracked the wheat barge, my wife would send me ashore to gather maiden-hair ferns, and soft, velvety mosses, and sad, yearnful wood-ticks. O how I love to crawl around through the underbrush, and tear my clothes, and wilt my collar, and gather samples of lichens, and ferns and baled hay and caterpillars to decorate my Western home.
At first I thought I would not mention the little domestic cloud that has shot athwart my sky, but I cannot smother it in my own breast any longer.
St. Croix Falls is on the Wisconsin side of the river and Taylor's Falls on the Minnesota side. They are connected by a toll-bridge which charges you one and a half cents each, way for passage. One can stand halfway across this bridge and see up and down the river, with the Devil's Arm Chair at his right and the Dalles at his left. After supper I took a couple of friends down to the bridge and without Jetting them know the treat that I had in store for them, I went up to the gate-keeper and paid for all three of us both ways. Then I told them to enjoy themselves. It was a novel treat perhaps to throw open a toll-bridge to the enjoyment of one's friends, but I did it with that utter disregard of expense which has characterized my mining developments in the Rocky Mountains.
Then I took the boys over across the river and gave them the freedom of St. Croix Falls.
Jutting out into the river south of Osceola, is a high, rocky promontory called Cedar Point. Lonely and proud like a sentinel of the forgotten past, there stands a tall cedar tree on this natural battlement, devoid of foliage for some distance up the trunk.
This tree was the old mark that stood upon the dividing line between the Chippewa and Sioux territory. Below it, in the water-worn rock, is a large semi-circle, made by the action of the river, and this it was stated had been the footprint of the horse upon which the Great Spirit had ridden across the stream when he drew the line between these two mighty nations, and set the tree upon it to show his children the boundary between their respective territories. This was the Indian Mason and Dixon's line.
What a wild, weird suggestion of the crude legislation and amateur statesmanship of these two nations rises up before me as I write, and how I yearn to go into the details and try to enter the free-for-all contest and match a bob-tail Caucasian lie against these moss-grown prevarications of the red-man.
At Stillwater, my first wild impulse was to visit the State Penitentiary.
When I go into a new place I register my name at the most expensive hotel, and after visiting the newspaper offices I hunt up the penitentiary, if there be one, and if not, I go to the cooler. I do not go there under duress, as the facetious reader might suggest, but I go there voluntarily to see how the criminal business of the place is looking.