In Shanty Town, Astor, and Navarino there yet remain many dwellings and trading warehouses of the olden time,—unpainted, gaunt, poverty-stricken, but with their hand-hewed skeletons of oak still intact beneath the rags of a century's decay. A hundred years is a period quite long enough in our land to warrant the brand of antiquity, although a mere nothing in the prolonged career of the Old World. In the rapidly developing West, a hundred years and less mark the gap between a primeval wilderness and a complete civilization. Time, like space, is, after all, but comparative. In these hundred years the Northwest has developed from nothing to everything. It is as great a period, judging by results, as ten centuries in Europe,—perhaps fifteen. America is said to have no history. On the contrary, it has the most romantic of histories; but it has lived faster and crowded more and greater deeds into the past hundred years than slow-going Europe in the last ten hundred. The American centenarian of to-day is older by far than the fabled Methuselah.
Green Bay, classic in her shanty ruins, has been somewhat halting in her advance, for the creoles hamper progressiveness. But as the voyageurs and their immediate progeny gradually pass away, the community creeps out from the shadow of the past and asserts itself. The ancient town appears to be taking on a new and healthy growth, in strange contrast to the severe and battered architecture of frontier times. Socially, Green Bay is delightful. There are many old families, whose founders were engaged in superintending the fur-trade and transportation lines, or holding government office, civil or military, at the wilderness post. This element, well educated and reared in comfort, gives a tone of dignified, old-school hospitality to the best society,—it is the Knickerbocker Colony of the Bay Settlement.
At four o'clock we pushed into a canal in front of the Fort Howard railway depot, and half an hour later had crossed the bridge and were registered at a Green Bay hotel. The Doctor, called home to resume the humdrum of his hospital life, will leave for the South to-morrow noon. I shall remain here for a week, reposing in the shades of antiquity.
THE WISCONSIN RIVER.
