Mammoth Hot Springs, July 17, 1890.
We left Chicago by the Wisconsin Central Railroad for St. Paul. From the beginning the run was interesting, especially to one who remembers what the country was thirty-five years ago—an almost flat prairie of tangled grass, in which the water was held as in a morass, promising but little to the ambitious earth-tiller. I recall a remark of Senator Douglas when the future of our flat prairies was being discussed in my presence thirty-five years ago: "People do not realize that the drainage problem is being now daily solved. The leader of a herd of cattle browsing the prairies, is an engineer, and his followers faithful laborers in making ditches. When going to and from their grazing grounds, they march in line and tread down paths which make no mean drains. The cattle of Illinois are annually lifting millions of acres out of the swamp into good arable lands."
As soon as the Des Plaines was crossed, good farms began, and comfortable farm houses were always in sight; oats bent and waved in light green, and corn stood sturdy in emerald, where a third of a century ago, even in July, a pedestrian was compelled to step from ant-hill to ant-hill to keep his ankles dry. Copses of young wood relieved the monotony of too much flatness, and in a few hours after our start, pretty lakes shimmered in the sinking sun light, and sweetly homelike villas were ever in view. We crossed the Wisconsin line, and hill and vale or gentle undulations with wooded heights and flowing streams, and villages and saw mills enlivened the journey.
TERRACES AT MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS. (SEE PAGE 16.)
In the distant future when population shall become abundant, and tasteful homesteads shall replace somewhat speculative shanties, few countries of the world will be more pleasingly rural than southern and middle Wisconsin.
Books should be carried by the tourist in his trunk, and newspapers should be religiously discarded throughout the run to St. Paul. The country traversed opens many a pleasing page during the summer months, and glowing pictures are spread before him on nature's living canvass. He unfortunately loses much when the curtain of night is drawn over God's own impartial book: the book which never misleads if carefully read and studiously digested.
At St. Paul we had some hours to ride about the pretty town, before boarding the Northern Pacific railroad for our long journey to Puget's Sound. This great road has the singular characteristic of having double termini at each end, and between each of the twins there exists a feud rarely found except between cities engaged in actual war with each other.
Athens and Sparta hated each other not as do St. Paul and Minneapolis. Just now, owing to the taking of the census, there is blood in the eye of every St. Paulite. An elderly gentleman introduced himself to me the other day at the station. After a while he said: "It is a —— shame the way the United States is treating St. Paul. I am a Democrat, sir, and can stand a little stuffing of the ballot-box, but I draw the line there. I can't stand the stuffing of the census. We are willing to concede to Minneapolis 10,000 more population than we have, but Harrison ought to be turned out of office for running it up to 40,000. It is a fraud, sir—a miserable Republican fraud. We will be revenged, sir, and will show our teeth next fall and don't you forget it." I sympathized with him and felt like marching to Washington at once to send my cousin Ben back to Hoosierdom.
In the National Park I saw at four different hotels the names of Mr. —— Mrs. —— and two little blanks. There was a bracket after the names, but the writer had evidently forgotten to write in the address. The name preceding his on the first book was from Boston. At the next place the preceding person was from New York, and again from some other city. The fourth day at dinner I was introduced to the head of the family. He was from Seattle. I asked him why it was he had not put in his address, declaring I would tell it on him at Tacoma. "Good Heavens!" he exclaimed, "have I done that?" He rushed back to the register and wrote "Seattle" as big as a John Hancock. The next time we met in a crowd, I twitted him about the thing. He then declared he must have left out the address instinctively from a natural aversion to being known to come from any spot so close to Tacoma. Considerable jealousy of St. Paul on the part of her twin city is natural, for it is a beautiful town. Its residences on the hills are very fine, and their locations lovely beyond those of all but few cities. The entire town was very clean, and in the hill portion bright and cheerful. The residences are generally surrounded by considerable grounds, filled with trees and shrubbery, in much variety and in luxuriant growth. The young girl with me fell so completely in love with the clean, pretty place, that she declared, if she ever got married it would be to a St. Paul man.