OLD FORT SNELLING, ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER.—This grim and grizzled relic of the past is named in honor of a brave soldier, Colonel Josiah Snelling, who served his country faithfully and bravely in many well-fought battles with the Indians in the early part of the present century. When the fort was first erected it was on the uttermost borders of civilization, in the midst of many surrounding dangers, and it served its purpose as a nucleus and protection for the gathering settlements of a later period.
CHAPTER X.
SCENIC MARVELS OF THE GREAT NORTHEAST.
STARVED ROCK, ON ILLINOIS RIVER, NEAR OTTAWA, ILLINOIS.
Our circuit of the West had now been completed, and having surrendered the camera car which we had chartered, we made hasty preparations for a grand tour of all that section lying east of the Mississippi. Before departing for the East, however, we made a flying trip over the St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad to Eureka Springs, a popular health resort in Northern Arkansas, surrounded by some very beautiful scenery that spreads away through the Ozark and Boston Mountains in picturesque grandeur, diversified by swift-flowing streams, deep gorges, terrible bluffs and immense caves that are gorgeously embellished with gigantic stalactite and stalagmite formations. If these magnificent scenes were not so conveniently near a large city, they would be a hundred-fold more famous, for it is human nature to yearn for the least accessible and the most difficult of attainment. In short, we rarely appreciate the things that we have, and exaggerate the importance and attractiveness of places which are remote. It is this peculiarity of the human mind that makes heaven a necessity and immortality a natural deduction, the irresistible conclusion of human reason.
We tarried one week in St. Louis before departing for the East, and then again divided our party, one of our photographers proceeding to Pittsburgh, and thence through Pennsylvania and Virginia, taking views of the famous scenery of those States, while the other two whose travels we will now describe, passed northward to Chicago, and thence east by way of Niagara. Having heard much of a celebrated point known as Starved Rock, on the Illinois River, a place of commanding interest in the history of La Salle and his adventurous companions, we resolved to stop at Ottawa, en route to Chicago, and make a photograph of the historic rock. We reached Ottawa by the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Road, and thence by driving ten miles in a spring wagon we gained the spot made celebrated through a tradition which is as romantic as it is tragic.