“Mother,” said Norman, as their kindly informant left them, “Dubuque is a very strange name for an Indian chief to have; he must have been named by the French when he was a child.”
“Julien Dubuque,” replied his mother, “was not an Indian, but a Frenchman, who bought all this valuable mining region, so rich in fine lead ore, from the Indians, in 1788. They had been discovered two years before by the wife of Peosta, an Indian warrior. Dubuque died in 1810. The Julien House is named, I suppose, in his honor.”
For a hot and weary hour the deck hands were busy taking on freight: first barrels from a warehouse on the Levee at Dubuque; then at Dunleith, a number of reapers and mowers, very heavy and cumbersome to be moved.
As soon as the boat was in motion Captain Gray asked Mrs. Lester if she would go to the pilot-house, as that was the coolest part of the boat. Very kindly he escorted her thither across the hurricane-deck. It was a delightful change from the heated atmosphere below to the cool refreshing breezes above.
“Two eagles at once,” said the captain. “There is something for you to look at, my boy.”
There was the Grey Eagle, her paddles both in motion, and the War Eagle following her in her northward course; a great sight for Norman.
The banks are well wooded, and of some elevation, and there are pretty islands; but the scenery is more monotonous and not so grand as that of the Upper Mississippi. The river is much more shallow, and can be navigated only by a smaller class of steamboats.
The captain pointed out to them, on the banks of the river, the entrance to a lead mine, and a hill-top called Pilot Knob.
At two o’clock they approached Fulton, and the captain courteously took them on shore.
Fulton, the terminus of an air-line road from Chicago, is rather an uninviting looking place, with a grand hotel, suitable for a great city; a destiny Fulton does not seem likely to achieve.