August the third, 1892, found me installed in a cottage, at Cottagewood, at the eastern end of Lake Minnetonka. My plans were simple. I had a gun, a boat and fishing tackle, but of these I intended to make small use. I would rest most of the time, and lie under the trees and read or loaf as I saw fit. I would buy my food of such kind and in such condition as to take but little time for its preparation, for I intended to “keep bach” for which I was qualified by more or less previous experience. If at any time I wanted a square meal, I could take a row around to the St. Louis hotel, or if the wind were favorable could sail over to the Lafayette, or to Excelsior. In short, I meant to rest and take it easy; do nothing at all to-day, that I could put off till to-morrow. I thought this all over the first day and in accordance with the programme proceeded to make myself as lazy as possible. I succeeded well. It requires but little effort to become lazy when one is in the afternoon of life. During a week my activity was reduced to a minimum; I saw but few people, although I had neighbors only a few rods away concealed by the thick brush, that grew between us. Once a dog came and after looking around, trotted away. As I sat or lolled on a rustic bench near the lake, the drowsy monotonous lapping of the water against the shore kept me for hours on the border land of sleep, just in that condition in which one does not know whether the motions of his brain are dreams or waking thoughts, and in which he often dreams that he is dreaming. The sound of the distant puffing of a steam yacht or the merry laughter of a sailing party, that occasionally ricocheted to the shore rather directed than disturbed the train of these passive activities.
The exhausted body or brain is like a machine that has run too long without being oiled. It goes with reluctance and with damaging wear and tear. But when we are thoroughly rested, the motives that before were unable to move us, now set us going with the greatest facility.
After the rest and quiet of a week, I began to feel an impulse to do something or to go somewhere; and a short debate settled that I would take a trip by sail and oar to the upper lake. As I did not intend to hurry and might be gone two or three days, I laid in a stock of provisions accordingly; with such cooking apparatus as a coffee pot and frying pan. Nowhere is a cup of coffee, a slice of ham, crackers and cheese so relishable as when they satisfy real thirst and hunger alongside a camp-fire of dry sticks. Then perhaps I might shoot a duck or hook a croppy. At night the sail stretched over a fishing pole could be formed into a shelter tent, something like the “dog tents” Uncle Sam gave us for shelter in the southern campaigns in the early sixties. In short I intended to make a regular cruise, and as my boat was named Sally Ann, this trip should be known in history as the cruise of the Sally Ann.
It was a fine morning when, all things ready, I hoisted sail. The wind was from the southeast and I started off before it at an exhilarating speed, steering northwest. In a short time I came abreast of Big Island, when turning west skirting its north shore, I soon got becalmed, the island cutting off the wind. I was obliged to take the oars, but as I dallied and loitered along, it was a full hour before I passed the island and caught my breeze again. I was here steering southwest across the wind and heading for the narrows, and the canal leading into the upper lake. Nothing can exceed the beauty of this lake, no matter at what point the view is taken. At this place looking northeast over the stern of the boat, the village of Wayzata partly obscured by Spirit Island, appeared as if seated in the water half a mile away, though in reality it is five miles. On the southeast within a mile, was the Lake Park hotel and beyond it, half a mile further and across the entrance to Gideon’s Bay, a part of Excelsior could be seen climbing its picturesque hills, while along the piers at the bottom of their slopes, were numerous steam and sailing crafts of various kinds, besides a fleet of row boats.
As I approached the entrance to the canal, I observed standing on the south bank, a man with a gun in his hand and dressed in outing costume, whose figure and attitude reminded me of someone I had seen before. “Can it be possible,” I said to myself, “that that is Allan Ocheltree?” By the time the boat touched the land, I had made sure that it was and I sprang ashore to greet him. The recognition and gratification at meeting were mutual. Our friendship for each other, was always the closest friendship either of us had. We had been room-mates and class-mates for four years at college, and our temperaments and tastes were like complementary colors, of such harmonious contrast as to fit each other to a T. In our class we were to each other like the two end men of a minstrel troup; he at one end—the head end—and I at the other. It is singular how people, like drift wood on the stream of time, are at times drifted toward each other and float along together till some eddy or obstruction in the current separates them, and hurries them off in diverging directions, perhaps to meet again farther down the stream, it may be more than once. Sometimes a leave-taking under circumstances, that seem to forebode it to be the last and clothe it in gloom, and sorrow, is nevertheless not the last by many; while a cheerful good-by with a light hearted “ta-ta-old-fellow-see-you-to-morrow,” may prove the beginning of a separation destined to endure for years—perhaps forever.
The Ocheltree family and my ancestors, were from the same Scotch-Irish stock, were friends and neighbors near Belfast and emigrated to Maryland about two hundred and thirty years ago, settling at first in Somerset County. A few years later they moved north into Cecil County, and from there in 1760 a large emigration took place to Mechlenburg County, North Carolina. Among these emigrants, were Duncan Ocheltree and my grandfather’s Uncle John. These two were friends and neighbors in the new settlement and when the revolutionary war broke out, they both adopted the patriotic cause. The Mechlenburg declaration of independence was adopted and signed May 20th or 31st, 1775, by a convention of which John was secretary, and it was supported by Duncan. But in 1780, Lord Cornwallis overran the state and captured Charlotte, the county seat of Mechlenburg, and Duncan, believing all was lost, hastened to turn Tory and make his submission to his lordship in order to save his wealth of which he had acquired a goodly share. This was a bad break and he made it worse by the supererogatory zeal of a new convert, in harassing his former friends and piloting the red-coated foragers to their hay stacks, hen roosts and pig pens, not sparing his old friend John. But the triumph of Cornwallis was short; in a few days, he was obliged to evacuate Charlotte and then Duncan realized that he had placed himself in a very bad position. As the British troops were packing their knapsacks preparatory to decamping from Charlotte between two days, Duncan determined to throw himself upon the generosity of his former friend John, and so under cover of the darkness he rode out to his farm-house nine miles in the country. John, who was two miles off in the patriot camp, was sent for. Duncan surrendered his sword and begged his old friend to forgive bygones and advise him what to do. John’s sympathy for him at that stage of affairs was not particularly tender as may be supposed, but nevertheless his advice was no doubt the best possible. He said: “Ocheltree, neither your life nor your property is safe in Mechlenburg. The Whigs will take both. Your only safety is in instant flight. I advise you to reach the Yadkin before daylight.” He took the advice. And so they parted. Four generations later like two stray straws on a flood, Allan Ocheltree and I were floated into the same class room at school. Did it make any difference to me or to him that his great grandfather, made a bad guess seventy years before? Not a bit. Every man’s ancestral tree is just the same height as all the rest, his lineage is just as long and his pedigree must contain practically the same number of terms whether we reckon back to Adam or to the Ascidian or to original protoplasm. Not a member of the long line made himself or the circumstances surrounding him, and in no two cases were these precisely the same. The circumstances that made Confucius or Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar, or Columbus, or Washington never happened to anybody else. It was no fault of the obscure ancestors or descendants or cousins near and remote of those worthies that these circumstances never surrounded them. On the other hand it cannot be ascribed to the merit of the long line of those belonging to the dead level of the average, in size and in quality, that they have been missed by the untoward circumstances that selected certain individuals to be in one respect or another conspicuously below that dead level.
After quitting college, Allan and I occasionally ran across each other, but the last meeting before this, occurred in 1876 on Arch Street, Philadelphia. He was interested in an exhibit in the great exposition, and being then in a great hurry made an appointment to meet me next morning. I kept the engagement, but he was not there. I knew urgent business had turned up to prevent him, and after I returned to my home I received his letter saying so, and appointing another hour. This letter had missed me at my hotel and followed me to Illinois. Here then, we were having our reunion sixteen years after it was due. But now we could make up for lost time for neither had engagements that required attention for a week at least. It was speedily arranged that Allan should accompany me and that we should carry out together the plan I had proposed for myself. He wrote a note for his boarding house keeper in Excelsior, saying he would be gone some days, and gave it to a rowing party going to Excelsior, that we shortly after fell in with, and who cheerfully consented to deliver it. The wind was still from the southeast, but light and we slowly sailed westerly and south-westerly passing successively the state fruit farm and Sampson’s place lying on our left, and Spring Park on our right, had in a short time reached Howard’s Point that juts a third of a mile into the lake from the south shore. We sailed through the strait between this and picturesque Rockwell’s Island with its attractive summer hotel, and restful looking surroundings, and turned southwest toward Smithtown Bay.
We entered Smithtown Bay, but did not go to the end of it, for the wind was not favorable, and as we turned west toward the highlands of the upper lake I fell into a reminiscent mood. Up to this time we had occupied ourselves in admiration of the delightful scenery and in such careless chat as occurred to us, sometimes taking a pull at the oars, when we entered a locality becalmed by being screened from the wind, and sometimes pulling in the fish line that dragged over the stern of the boat to see why we never got a bite. But here the memories that crowded upon me completely absorbed my attention and I became silent. I had tramped all over this country in 1877 in the selection of a route for the Minneapolis and Northwestern Narrow Gauge Railroad, and so was familiar with the topography, not only of the upper lake, but of the whole route from Minneapolis to Hutchinson. The first preliminary line surveyed from Hutchinson to Minneapolis in the latter part of November, 1877, passed along the foot of the high bluff just in front of us, but the line was not finally located till October, 1879.
When I explained to my friend how the line passed south-easterly along the foot of the bluff, at the edge of the water, except where it dodged behind Hoflin’s headland, and then swept around the head of Smithtown Bay turning north-easterly toward Excelsior, “I declare,” he exclaimed, “there never was so romantic a place to locate an excursion railroad. So attractive a line ought surely to have been built. Why wasn’t it?”
“Well,” I replied, “it was a case of infanticide.”