THIRD LETTER
THE MASCOUTINS.
Oshkosh, Wis., June 9, 1887.
My Dear W——: As we passed out of Berlin this morning, a government dredger was at work by the river-side. We paused on our paddles for some time, to watch the workings of the ingenious mechanism. There was something demoniac in the action of the monster, as it craned its jointed neck amid a quick chorus of jerky puffs from the engine and an accompaniment of rattling chains. Reaching far out over the bubbling water, it would open its great iron jaws with a savage clank and, pausing a moment to gather its energies, dive swiftly into the roily depth; after swaying to and fro as if struggling with its prey, it soon reappeared, bearing in its filthy maw a ton or two of blue-black ooze, the water escaping through its teeth in a score of hissing torrents; then, turning aside to the heap of dredge-trash, suddenly vomited forth the foul-smelling mess, and returned for another charge. It was a singularly fascinating sight, though wofully uncanny.
From Berlin down to Omro, pleasant prairie slopes come down at intervals to the water's edge, on the south bank; the feature of the north side being wide expanses of bog, the home of the cranberry, for which this region is famous. The best marshes, however, are the pockets, back among the ridges; from these, great drainage-ditches, with flooding gates, come furrowing through the peat, in dark lines as straight as an arrow, and empty into the river. It was somewhere about here, nearer Berlin than Omro,—but exactly where, no man now knoweth,—that the ancient Indian "nation" of the Mascoutins was located over two centuries ago; their neighbors, if not their village comrades, being the Miamis and the Kickapoos. Champlain, the intrepid founder of Quebec, had heard of their warring disposition as early as 1615. In 1634 Jean Nicolet, the first white man known to have set foot upon territory now included in the State of Wisconsin, came in a bark canoe as far up the Fox River as the Mascoutins, and after stopping a time with them, journeyed southward to the country of the Illinois.[4] Allouez and his companions also came hither in 1670, and the good father, in the official report of his adventurous canoeing trip, says the fort of these people was located a French league (2.4 English miles) "over beautiful prairies" to the south of the river. Joliet and Marquette, on their way to discover the Mississippi River, arrived at the fort of the Mascoutins on June 7, 1673, and the latter gives this graceful sketch of the oak openings hereabouts, which have not meanwhile perceptibly changed their characteristics: "I felt no little pleasure in beholding the position of this town; the view is beautiful and very picturesque, for from the eminence on which it is perched, the eye discovers on every side prairies spreading away beyond its reach, interspersed with thickets or groves of lofty trees."
The Mascoutins are now a lost tribe. As the result of warring habits, they in turn were crowded to the wall, and a generation after Marquette's visit the banks of their river knew them no more; the Foxes, from whom the stream ultimately took its name, were then predominant, and long continued the masters of the highway.
Sacramento—"as dead as a door-nail, sir"—lies sprawled out over a pleasant riverside slope to the south. There is the customary air of fallen grandeur at Sacramento,—big hopes gone to decay; battlement-fronts, houseless cellars, a universal lack of paint. The railroads, the real highways of our present civilization, have killed these little river towns that are away from the track, and they will never be resurrected. The day of inland water navigation, except for canoeists, is nearing its close. Settlement clings to the neighborhood of the rails, and generally avoids rivers as an obstruction to free transit. The towns that have to be reached by a country ferry are rotting,—they are off the line of progress. Sacramento boasts a spouting well by the river-bank, a mammoth village ash-leach, and fond memories of the day when it was "a bigger town than Berlin." As we stood in the spray of the fountain, filling our canteen with the purest and coldest of water, I speculated upon the strong probability of Sacramento being on the identical bank where the Jesuits beached their canoes to walk across country to the old Indian village. And the Doctor, apt to be irreverent as to aboriginal lore, suggested that the defunct Sacramento should have written over its gate this motto: "Gone to join the Mascoutins!"
Eureka, a few miles farther down, is also paintless, and her river-front is artistic with the crumbling ruins of two or three long-deserted saw-mills. A new Eureka appears, however, to be slowly building up, to one side of the dead little hamlet,—for there are smart steam flouring-mill and a model little cheese-factory in full swing here. The cheese man, an accommodating young fellow who appeared quite up to the times, and is a direct shipper to the London market, took a just pride in showing us over his establishment, and stocked our mess-box with samples of his best brands.
Omro spreads over a sandy plain, upon both sides of the river,—an excellent wagon-bridge crossing the stream near that of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul railway. Omro, which is the headquarters of the Wisconsin Spiritualists, who have quite a settlement hereabouts, is growing somewhat, after a long period of stagnation, having at present a population of fifteen hundred.