It was Sunday afternoon when I stepped into the public room of the “William Tell,” in Buffalo, and seated myself in a corner to rest. The eyes of several respectable German operatives, who were all in hot political debate, were at first attracted with astonishment towards the armed stranger, but soon following up their dispute they forgot all listeners, and I think it might very likely have come to more than words, if the host, a little fat figure, had not rolled himself in amongst them, and restored peace with the conciliatory words: “You are all as foolish as so many stockfish.” In these words, the equality of persons was proclaimed, and their feelings were pacified. It was, however, no trifle that formed the subject of their dispute; for an honest shoemaker would by no means allow that the English could send any troops over, on account of the disturbances in Canada, because the Russian was sitting across their necks. A cabinet-maker, seated opposite to him, maintained that Russia was too far off from England to be able to make war so quickly; but the shoemaker proved to him so clearly that Russia was close to England on the north, and that there was only a broad strip of land between the two Principalities, that the astonished cabinet-maker was silenced by the overwhelming amount of solid learning; the shoemaker admitted that the march from Russia to England was difficult, as the soldiers had sometimes to wade up to their shoulders in sand. Whence the good man had obtained his idea of a march through sand, and his geographical knowledge, is more than I can say, but the debate was amusing enough; and when the shoemaker appealed to me for my opinion, I agreed with him of course, but told him that the Russians intended to lay down bear-skins on the sand to make the march easier, upon which he exclaimed, in astonishment, “What desperate fellows!”
I was up early on the following morning in order to see the town; it is a very pretty place, and contains many Germans; it must become, and in fact is already, the central point of all the interior commerce of the north, for railroads, canals, steamers, and sailing vessels rival each other in bringing and taking away produce.
CHAPTER III.
OHIO—INDIANA—ILLINOIS—MISSOURI.
Lake Erie—Cleveland—Double-beds—March through the forest—Canton—Cincinnati—Lawrencebourg—A burning forest—Deserted farm-house—Wet weather and swollen rivers—A drunken companion—Versailles—Intrepid German Jews—Vincennes—Fording a river—The prairies of Illinois—Shooting deer—Salem—An Illinois settler—Lebanon—Ague—Passage of the Mississippi—St. Louis—German emigrants—A week’s work in the forest—Lead mines of Missouri—Courant river, the boundary of Missouri.
About noon the steamer “North America” left for Cleveland, in Ohio State, and with it my worthy self. There was such a number of passengers in the steerage, that it was hardly possible to move, and the state of affairs was made worse by each of the American ladies[B] having a short pipe in her mouth. Yet worse was coming. Lake Erie, under the influence of a strong breeze, began to get very rough in its treatment of the boat; one pipe after another was extinguished, and the visages lengthened and whitened very suspiciously. I observed this change with horror, and took refuge in one of the uppermost of three rows of sleeping berths, to be out of range of shot.
[B] Two Englishmen travelling together in America, on board a steamer, one of them was thus accosted: “I am the gentleman that cleans the shoes, and that man (pointing to the other) says, you are to pay.”—Translator.
It was dark when we arrived at Cleveland, and I stood on the shore in some difficulty, not knowing exactly where to look for shelter, when a young German, who, by the light of a lantern, recognized me by my costume for a fellow countryman, asked me if I would like to pass the night in a German house: on my quickly agreeing to it, he led me to one, some hundred yards off, where I soon went to bed. The beds in America are all double, that is to say, so wide as easily to hold three, and indeed I have sometimes made a fourth. I was shown into this abode of dreams by a little hump-backed youth, and on my asking if I could sleep alone there, he replied that perhaps some stranger might come by the stage-coach. Towards midnight I was disturbed by a noise, and thought to myself “Oh, oh, here comes the stranger;” and as I was not yet accustomed to this American fashion, I took the trouble to look up to see what my bedfellow was like, and had the felicity to see that a negro as black as pitch was preparing his ebony members to occupy part of my bed. I moved to the extreme edge, leaving at least two-thirds of the space to this son of the night. I was at this time but little acquainted with American habits, and if this had happened to me later, the landlord would not have had a whole bone in his skin; for it is the greatest insult to a white man in North America, and more particularly in the slave states, to place a negro on equal terms with him.