Hunter. What I have to say of Lover’s Leap is a little melancholy. On the east side of Lake Pepin, on the Mississippi, stands a bold rock, lifting up its aspiring head some six or seven hundred feet above the surface of the lake. Some years since, as the story goes, an Indian chief wished his daughter to take a husband that she did not like. The daughter declined, but the father insisted; and the poor, distracted girl, to get rid of her difficulty, threw herself, in the presence of her tribe, from the top of the rock, and was dashed to pieces.
Basil. Poor girl, indeed! Her father was a very cruel man.
Hunter. The chief was cruel, and his daughter rash; but we must not be too severe in judging those who have no better standard of right and wrong than the customs of their uncivilized tribe. It was on the Upper Missouri river, towards the mouth of the Teton river, that I came all at once on a salt meadow. You would have thought that it had been snowing for an hour or two, for the salt lay an inch or two thick on the ground.
Austin. What could have brought it there?
Hunter. The same Almighty hand that spread out the wild prairie, spread the salt upon its surface. There are salt springs in many places, where the salt water overflows the prairie. The hot sun evaporates the water, and the salt is left behind.
Brian. Well, that is very curious.
Hunter. The buffaloes and other animals come by thousands to lick the salt, so that what with the green prairie around, the white salt, and the black buffaloes, the contrast in colour is very striking. Though Florida is, to a great extent, a sterile wilderness, yet, for that very reason, some of its beautiful spots appear the more beautiful. There are swamps enough, and alligators enough, to make the traveller in those weary wilds cheerless and disconsolate; but when, after plodding, day after day, through morasses and interminable pine woods, listening to nothing but the cry of cranes and the howling of wolves, he comes suddenly into an open plain covered with a carpet of grass and myriads of wild flowers, his eye brightens, and he recovers his cheerfulness and strength. He again feels that God is in the prairie.
Basil. Remember the alligators, Austin!
Brian. And the howling wolves! What do you think of them?
Hunter. The Red Pipe-stone Quarry is between the Upper Mississippi and the Upper Missouri. It is the place where the Indians of the country procure the red stone with which they make all their pipes. The place is considered by them to be sacred. They say that the Great Spirit used to stand on the rock, and that the blood of the buffaloes which he ate there ran into the rocks below, and turned them red.