A Pacific Coast Vacation

by Mrs. James Edwin Morris

At the foot of this rugged cliff lies Devil’s lake. At the head of this fathomless body of water is a mound built in the form of an eagle with wings outspread. Here, no doubt, lies buried a great chief. Nothing is left in Wisconsin to-day of the Indian but footprints,—mounds, graves, legends and myths.

At Devil’s Lake lived a manitou of wonderful power. This lake fills the crater of an extinct volcano. Now this manitou, so the tale runs, piled up those heavy blocks of stone, which form the Devil’s Doorway. He also set up Black Monument and Pedestaled Bowlder for thrones where he might sit and view the landscape o’er when on his visits to the earth. These visits have ceased, since the white man possesses the country. One day this wonderful manitou aimed a dart at a bad Indian and missing him, cleft a huge rock in twain, which is now known as Cleft Rock. At night, long ago, he might have been seen sitting on one of his thrones or peeping out of the Devil’s Doorway watching the dance of the frost fairies or gazing at the aurora flaming through the night.

Every night at midnight Gitche Manitou appears in the middle of the lake.

In days gone by a strange, wild creature, known as the Red Dwarf, roamed the region of the great lakes, haunting alike the lives of red man and white.

The snake god, the stone god, the witch of pictured rocks, were-wolves and wizards held sway in that charméd region where San Souci, Jean Beaugrand’s famous horse, despite his hundred years, leaped wall of fort and stockade at pleasure.

JUNCTION OF THE MISSISSIPPI AND BLACK RIVERS.

At LaCrosse we crossed Black river into Minnesota and shortly after crossed the Mississippi. LaCrosse, although French, originally, means a game played by the Indian maidens on the ice. The heights on either side of the Mississippi river remind one of the Catskills along the Hudson. Indeed, the scenery is very similar. You easily imagine yonder cliffs to be the palisades. Here, a spur of the Catskills range and the little valley between might be Sleepy Hollow. But you miss the historic places—Washington’s headquarters, Tarrytown, West Point and others. Like forces produce like results. When you have seen the Hudson river and its environs you have seen the upper Mississippi.

St. Paul and Minneapolis form the commercial center of the North. Although the ground freezes from fifteen to sixteen feet, the concrete sidewalks and pavements show no effect of the touch of Jack Frost’s icy fingers. The street-cars here are larger and heavier than any I have ever seen. Then, too, they have large wheels, and that sets them up so high. This is on account of the snow, which lasts from Thanksgiving to Easter, good sleighing all the time.

The French and Indian have left to this region a nomenclature peculiarly its own. There is Bear street and White Bear street. In the shop windows are displayed headgear marked Black Bear, White Bear and Red Cloud. There are on sale Indian dolls, Indian slippers, French soldier dolls, Red Indian tobacco, showing the influence still existing of the two peoples. One sees many French faces and hears that language quite often on the streets and in the cars.