The scenery all along had been wonderfully grand. It showed the same high wooded bluffs and steep bare rocks they had so much admired at their camp on Inspiration Point.
This grand striking scenery continues some hundred miles into Iowa.
A large region in southern Minnesota, southern Wisconsin, and northern Iowa has never been glaciated and is known as the driftless area. In this region the great river and its tributaries have cut deep valleys through layers of limestone, dolomite, and sandstone. The sides of the valleys have never been rounded off by creeping glaciers, and the cliffs of dolomite stand up straight and bold like the well-known Maiden Rock and Sugar Loaf near Winona.
This stretch of the Mississippi from St. Paul and Minneapolis to Dubuque, some four hundred miles long, is the greatest scenic river highway in the world. Every American should travel over it before he goes to see the rivers of Europe, most of which are insignificant streams compared with the Mississippi. The whole navigable distance on the Rhine is no greater than the great scenic course of the Mississippi, and this course is less than one-fifth of the whole navigable length of our great American river. He who has not traveled on the Mississippi has not seen America.
Even several great tributaries of the Mississippi, like the Missouri and the Ohio and the Red River, are larger than any river in Europe.
The boys soon learned to find good camping-places, and vied with each other in selecting the best ones.
As far as they could, they camped a few miles above the larger river towns. The supplies they needed they bought of farmers or in small towns, two men generally going after the supplies and the other two staying at the camp. Many interesting incidents occurred to them all, but it would make our story too long to tell of them.
The river now became alive with all kinds of steamboats, some carrying passengers and merchandise, others guns, ammunition, and soldiers, and it often taxed Bill’s skill to avoid danger from the swell of the big boats.
Spring was advancing apace. When they reached the northern boundary of Missouri, about the first of May, it was summer. The trees were green, birds were in full song, and the woods were full of flowers.
Spring advances up the river at the rate of something like fifteen miles a day. About the first of March poplars and hazel hang out their pollen-laden catkins at St. Louis; while at the Twin Cities, the first spring flowers appear about a month later, but as the party was rapidly traveling southward, the season to them advanced three or four days in twenty-four hours.