Once more, with the eye of fancy, we saw our white-coated soldiers mounting guard on those ramparts, whence their gaze must have wandered over the confluence of the three great lakes and the immense empire they had won for France, while the Indian tribes hurried from all quarters to bend the knee to the Great Chief of the Pale Faces. It was a great and glorious epoch; and what traveller would not feel deeply stirred when he comes upon such bitter memories of the vanished grandeur of his country?
Our good ship Columbus got to Green Bay at last, and, stirring up the mud which obstructs the entrance to Fox River, bore us up that fine stream and deposited us in front of a large store, surrounded by fifty houses, there or thereabouts. This settlement was not in the United States, but on Wisconsin Territory, an embryo State, not populous enough as yet, nor sufficiently organised, to be called a State, nor have a voice in the deliberations of the American Union. The country on the left bank of the Fox River was not even a Territory; it was a No-Man's Land, where any man might settle where and how he pleased. Like all the places I had passed through, Green Bay, the "Baie Verte" of our forefathers (and it still deserves its title) was occupied in the first instance by the French. After Father Marquette's exploring journey, twenty soldiers, two sergeants, and four bandsmen, under the command of Lieutenant du Roussel, were sent thither in 1684 by M. de Beauchamptrelle, commanding the king's troops at Mackinaw. Now, as I have said, it possessed a hotel and about fifty houses, inhabited for the most part by merchants trading with the Redskins. Everybody talked French, and everybody hastened forward when the boat arrived to ask for news from the civilised world.
A few Indians, silent and motionless, wrapped in their blankets, looked on indifferently at the bustle. Squaws shod with moccasins, and the toes of their little feet turned in, passed by without raising their heads, their papooses sitting astride on their backs. The somewhat numerous Indian tribes inhabiting the country were the Menomenis, the Winnepeg Indians, and the Iroquois, which last had emigrated from Canada to escape the English yoke. I much regretted not having time to pay a visit to their wigwams. To the very last they were our most devoted allies in our wars with the English. I had a talk with one of the chiefs sons, who told me he still had Montcalm's sword in his possession, and preserved it as a sacred relic. According to his story, during the battle of Quebec, probably just at the moment when Montcalm was mortally wounded, his sword was hung up in a tree, whence it was taken by one of his faithful Indian followers, and it has always remained with his tribe. After a great deal of difficulty we succeeded in procuring saddle horses for ourselves, and a farmer's waggon for our baggage, and we set forth for the Mississippi. The whole journey was most interesting. There were no roads—the merest track through woods interspersed with prairies—along which we went to the lake and fort of Winnepeg. Beyond that lake we knew there would be nothing but prairie, stretching far and wide, over which we must steer as though we were at sea, or else be guided by the mysterious instinct of some trapper. We met many Redskins in the woods, all busy hunting. Game was very abundant—waterfowl on the streams, flights of prairie hens (a sort of grouse), and herds of buck, which constantly crossed our line of march Here and there was a clearing or first attempt at cultivation, round a squatter's log cabin.
We were following the first skirmishing line of that army of civilisation which is overrunning in its steady advance all that wild country which was once the Indian's sole domain. When this advance guard collects at any given point, a hotel rises, and beside it the store where a trader will deal in every kind of merchandise, and especially in brandy, that most destructive of poisons to all indigenous races. After the hotel will come the bank, and then the church and school, and before long the whole will grow into a village or town, of which the United States will take possession by law. As for the original squatters, they will make over their log cabins and their bits of cultivation to new arrivals, of more sedentary tastes than their own, and will move on further, with their wives and children, to make a fresh settlement, often exchanging rifle shots with the Redskins the while, in some spot where they can find that absolute independence which they prize above all other goods. Thus does the tide of civilisation, which shall soon cover the whole American continent, move ceaselessly onward.
But on our own particular road we had got no further than the squatters, and of them, after the day's march was over, we asked a hospitality which was always cordially granted.
They were an energetic and a singular race. Here you might come on a pupil from West Point (the military and polytechnic school of the United States), a former captain in the army, who had married an Indian wife, and had to learn French to make himself understood by her and the other Indians in the neighbourhood, who could speak no other language. A whole family of little half-breeds, more red than white, swarmed about him. There again, both father and mother would be white-skinned, witn splendid children, whom the mother rocked to sleep in the intervals of preparing an excellent dinner for us with a haunch of venison we had bought from an Indian who had just killed a buck. Their log cabin, like all the others, indeed, consisted of one large room below, with a big fireplace on which perfect tree trunks were burning, and a loft above it. In these lofts passing travellers like ourselves slept. And they were not over warm, for the doors and windows only fitted tolerably, and the weather was frosty. In the evening the sons of the house—huge fellows who crushed your hand when they shook it, and who used their axes as well as they used their guns—would come in from work, and the evenings would be spent sitting smoking and talking round the fire.
"There are a great many Indians still," I was told, "and they are rather turbulent; they killed a white man quite lately. The squatters are very far apart too. But then we haven't to bother our heads or put ourselves out because of anybody."
At one place, called Fond du Lac, the house was somewhat less primitive than at our previous halting-places. Our host was a doctor of cultivated mind, living alone with his family, of whom two, girls, were very pretty. They made us a cranberry tart, on the memory of which my grateful palate lingers yet. The worthy doctor was armed to the teeth, for he had no white neighbours, and over two hundred Indians, so he told me, prowling around him. He lent me a gun, with which I went out shooting, and as a matter of fact I did meet a considerable number of Redskins. As long as they can find game, and here it was plentiful, they are, as a rule, tolerably inoffensive. Yet these were the remnant of warlike tribes which had never been thoroughly subjugated, and there was a hill, not very far off, called "Deadman's Butts," in memory of a fight waged between them and the French army, backed by three thousand Chippewa Indians, which ended in a terrible massacre. Notwithstanding the presence of such neighbours, my host had chosen the spot where he had pitched his tent right well, for I saw on a map of Wisconsin, which I chanced to look at many years later, that Fond du Lac had become a town, with railways running to and from it.
Leaving Fond du Lac, we found ourselves on the prairie, stretching wide as far as the eye could see; dry yellowish grass (it was the end of October) covered the slightly undulating plain, with here and there a scanty clump of trees. It constitutes the plateau (not a very high one) which separates the Mississippi river system from that of the St. Lawrence. Our horses cantered gaily over the frozen ground. All at once we saw a big animal running away from us at a kind of amble. We urged forward our mounts in pursuit, and got up just in time to see it enter a clump of brushwood, not fifty paces across. An Indian, who acted as our guide, went into the thicket after it, gun in hand. A dreadful roar, which terrified our horses, was followed by the appearance of the infuriated animal. It was a puma, or panther without spots, which galloped in a circle round M. de Montholon's horse, and then retreated into a larger clump of trees, where we thought it prudent to leave it, as our only arm was a single-barrelled small-bore rifle. Somewhat further on we saw a big cloud gather on the horizon and rapidly approach us. The prairie was on fire. We then took the well-known plan of setting it on fire ourselves just where we were. Within less than five minutes our fire had run a mile before the wind, going as fast as a horse can gallop, with a noise like a distant rattle of musketry. We and our horses entered the space we had set on fire ourselves, while the big conflagration in the distance, finding no food in front, fled away to our right and left. I afterwards saw the same sight at night. It was most beautiful.
As we neared the Mississippi we got into less wild country. I remember the first hotel where the host said to me, "You have come just in good time. You'll have something out of the common for dinner. We have been killing a sheep." Since leaving Green Bay we had been living exclusively on venison and prairie hens and wild duck. A sheep was a great rarity. We came upon the Mississippi at Galena in Illinois, so called on account of its lead mines. When I say mines, I use an expression which was quite inappropriate at the time of my visit, for the galena, or lead-ore, lay on the surface of the soil. You saw its metallic brightness shining out everywhere, and so rich was the ore, that it yielded seventy-five per cent. of lead, even under the most summary of processes. Added to this fact, the expense of transport being infinitesimal, as the huge artery of the Mississippi River ran a few paces from the beds, the working of them was so profitable that nobody took the trouble to extract the silver from it. But the result of this mineral wealth was that everything one eat and drank at Galena was impregnated with lead, so much so, indeed, that one of my companions had a fainting fit, caused by the sediment which the eau de Botot he used for his toilet deposited in his glass. He thought he had been poisoned. I had not time, when I got to the Mississippi, to go down it to New Orleans, like our soldiers and explorers, when they made their first journey across this splendid country, and by it united a French Canada with a French Louisiana. The journey I had just taken had lasted longer than I had thought for, and as my duty as a sailor recalled me imperiously to my ship, my only thought was to rejoin her as soon as possible. But means of communication in the West were few and far between—railroads were unknown, roads hardly laid out. We were fain to go down the Mississippi to where the Ohio falls into it, go up that river to Cincinnati, and thence get by mail-coach to the railroads in the older Atlantic States. This return journey was not altogether uneventful. Our boat, ran aground several times during the descent of the Upper Mississippi. On one of these occasions we were delayed for some time near the confluence of that stream with the DesMoines River, flowing through an exquisite country called Iowa, which in those days had not yet been annexed by the Union. It swarmed with game. I remember one shooting expedition I made with the ship's engineer, a young Kentuckian of colossal stature. We flushed thousands of prairie hens and other creatures, on whom we poured a hot but harmless fire. In our own justification I must add that the Kentuckian was shooting with a bullet, using a huge carbine, so heavy that it took him half a minute to aim with it, and I with a single-barrelled gun, lent me by a bar-keeper, with this information, "The barrel is all twisted. You must aim three or four yards to the right, if you want to hit anything!"