Leaving Ottawa, I embarked on the sea of the prairie, and after proceeding a few miles came to a settlement of Norwegians, consisting of a little straggling village, encompassed by luxuriant fields of wheat and corn, showing forth the rich rewards of industry operating in a fertile soil. The buildings and other appendages indicated not only comfort but competency, and I could not avoid being struck with the singularity of a community from the remote regions of Northern Europe planting itself in this secluded spot in the very bosom of the New World. Yet this is by no means a solitary example. Go where we will in the great region of the West, we perceive new evidence of the proud and happy destiny of our country, in being above all others on the face of the earth, the land toward which the eager and longing eye of hope is cast from every corner of Christendom: the land to which poverty turns for relief from its sufferings, and the oppressed for the enjoyment of the rights bestowed by God and filched away by man; the land which alone yields an adequate reward to labor, and gives to honest enterprise its fair field for exertion; the land where pining wretchedness never descends as an heir-loom from generation to generation, and want is not, like wealth, hereditary; the New World, which a gracious Providence seems to have reserved as a refuge and a home to the swarms of industrious bees driven from the parent hive for want of room, want of employment, and want of bread.
This, after all, is the crowning chaplet that adorns the brow of our great republic, and long may it be before it withers. The triumphs of arms, art and literature fade in comparison with those of humanity, and that country which affords the greatest plenty of the necessaries and comforts of life to the greatest proportion of human beings, may justly challenge a pre-eminence over those which place their claims to that distinction merely on the ground of arts and refinements, whose influence is confined to a few, and contributes but little to the happiness, and less to the virtues even of those who make it the sole foundation of their assumptions of superiority. While our country continues to be the refuge of the honest, industrious poor of Europe, who cares for their boasts of those paltry refinements, those exquisite effeminacies, which in all past ages, and in every nation of the world, have been the sure precursors of decay and dissolution. When the descendants of those who were driven to the United States by the privations and discouragements they encountered at home, shall begin to leave the land of their refuge, and return to the bosom of the country of their forefathers in search of bread which they cannot procure here, then, and not till then, may the renovated Old World justly boast of that superiority which is now little more than a dream of long past times.
I have lately seen in some of the English papers exaggerated pictures of the condition of the United States, founded, probably, in the policy of encouraging emigration to her own possessions, or derived from the reports of some few disappointed emigrants who have returned home. It was proclaimed that the country was crushed with debts it never could repay without impoverishing the people by taxation; that labor could neither find employment nor receive adequate reward; that an universal blight had come over the land, and every where withered its prosperity; that the states were bankrupt and the people beggars. All this is sheer declamation. There never has been any thing like widely extended, much less general distress in the United States, arising from a deprivation or curtailment of the necessaries or comforts of life. There never was a time when any class, or any considerable proportion of a class, approached within a thousand degrees, that poverty and destitution which is the common lot of so large a portion of the laboring people of the Old World. The country has at all times been blessed with a plenty, a superfluity, an exuberance of every product essential to human existence, and those who could not obtain them, were either unwilling to make the necessary exertions, or unable to do so by sickness or some other untoward circumstance. The distress complained of is not positive, but comparative. We may be restricted in our luxuries, but the land, from one wide extreme to the other, is absolutely flowing with milk and honey, and it is little less than flying in the face of the bounties of Heaven to complain of hard times, which can only be traced to a superabundance of every thing, and shrink to the earth under the pressure of a debt, the whole of which could be paid is less time than it was contracted, without incurring one-fourth of the burden sustained by the people of England. But we have been spoiled by prosperity Fortuna nisirium quem foret stultum facit. Fifty years of almost uninterrupted prosperity had turned our heads, and it is to be hoped a few years of wholesome reaction will restore us to reason. The sudden cessation of a favorable gale often saves the vessel from running on the rocks and being dashed to pieces.
The prairies have already been described as well perhaps as they ever will be, because they are a sort of lusus naturæ, and there is nothing with which to compare them. To tell of what ingredients they are composed is easy enough, but to give a just idea of the effects of their combination, requires analogies not to be found in the other productions of nature, nor in the imagery of the mind. Although substantial realities, they present nothing but deceptions, and I believe it is beyond the power of language, almost imagination, to exaggerate the strange and beautiful combination of what is, and what is not, sporting together in perfect harmony on these boundless plains. The eye becomes at length wearied with being thus perpetually the dupe of imaginary forms, and imaginary distances, while the mind involuntary revolts at the deceptions practiced on the senses. Mr. Bryant in poetry, and Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Catlin in prose, have done all that can be done to convey to those who have never seen them an impression of the effect of these happy eccentricities of nature, and the beautiful phantasmagoria they exhibit forth to the senses and the imagination.
If ever miser were pardoned for coveting his neighbors land, it might be such land as the prairies of Illinois, where man labors almost without the sweat of his brow, and the crops are so abundant that all I heard the good people complain of was having more than they knew what to do with. This is indeed a lamentable state of things, and it were I think much to be wished that some of our philosophical lecturers would discuss the relative advantages of having too much and too little of a good thing. The case of an individual being overburthened with superfluity, is easily disposed of, as he has only to turn it over to his neighbors who may be in want; but when entire communities, states and confederations of states, labor under this inconvenience, where nobody wants, and all have plenty to bestow; in other words, where all wish to sell and nobody cares to buy, it must be confessed there occurs a crisis of such deplorable difficulty, that I can conceive no effectual remedy except two or three years of famine like those which succeeded the seven years of plenty in Egypt. This would consume the mischievous surplus, and rid them of an evil which as it never before occurred, has never been provided against by the wisdom of legislation, which most people believe can perform impossibilities. But be this as it may, I passed over a vast region where the table of every man groaned under superfluities, and every brood of swine wasted more corn than would supply bread to a family of English manufacturers. Yet I found all, without exception, in the last stage of hopeless despondency, until one day I entered the log-cabin of an old negro woman, a slave, who was enjoying her pipe at ease, and upon asking the usual commonplace question of “how times went with her,” was answered with the most cheerful alacrity—“O bravely, massa. Hens ’gin to lay finely.” We hear of nations suffering from famine, but my unfortunate countrymen complain of nothing but plenty. Whence comes this strange paradox? Is it because men have sought to invent artificial means of prosperity which act in direct opposition to the great general laws of Providence, and are thus punished for their presumptuous folly by a new, unheard of infliction?
After riding a distance of some seventy or eighty miles on the prairie, over the best natural roads in the world, I halted at the house of a Dutch farmer from the banks of the Hudson, where I heard that old patriarchal language spoken for the first time in many years. There are several descendants of the ancient Hollanders settled in this quarter, to which they are tempted by the broad rich flats, and the easiness of their cultivation. I have observed that those who partake largely in this blood, though almost uniformly steady and industrious in their habits, don’t much like hard, fatiguing work. They prefer labor where there is no violent exertion or straining, no heavy burthens to lift or carry, and no call for extraordinary efforts to achieve what may be accomplished in the ordinary way without them. Hence they are great amateurs in good land, easy to cultivate and yielding liberal returns. In this I think they are perfectly right. Without doubt, it is the destiny of civilized man to labor, that is in moderation. But to labor without the rewards of labor; to be for ever toiling, and panting, and sweating over a piece of rough, stony land, on which the malediction of eternal barrenness has been denounced ever since the creation of the world; to be ever sowing wheat and reaping nothing but tares, is in my opinion, utterly unphilosophical, and unworthy of all men who can go farther and fare better.
A particular occasion had drawn together at this spot a large cavalcade of both sexes, gayly caparisoned and well-mounted, many of the females being equipped in riding-habits, hats with feathers, and all more or less picturesque in their appearance. They chose to accompany the carriage to a little town about six or seven miles distant, over a beautiful expanse of prairie, or as it might be aptly termed, “faerie land,” exhibiting a succession of grassy lawns and beds of flowers of hundreds of acres, marshaled under different colors, some were red, some blue, and others entirely yellow. It is difficult to imagine a more gay and beautiful spectacle than that presented on this occasion. The sky was sufficiently obscured to temper the glare of sunshine, which is sometimes here painful to the eye, and the playful cavalcade, consisting of perhaps an hundred, indulged in a thousand careless, graceful evolutions on the level greensward, that seemed without beginning or end, and offered no obstruction in any direction. Sometimes a pair of riders of both sexes would dash out from the throng, and scamper away until they appeared like shadows against the distant horizon; and at others, the whole mass would separate in different directions, skimming over the plain like Arabs on their winged steeds, their different colored dresses and picturesque costumes rendering the scene indescribably gay and animating. The females all without exception sat and managed their horses with that perfect skill and grace arising from constant habit, and upon the whole, I never witnessed any exhibition that could compare with this ride on the prairie of Illinois in romantic interest and novelty.
Thus, toward evening, I reached the pleasant town which was to be my resting-place for the night. By some strange perversion of ignorance, or freak of vanity, it is nicknamed Juliet, instead of Joliet, from the old pioneer of that name, who established his quarters here in olden time on a mount, which, fortunately, has escaped being travestied into Juliet, and still preserves his name. This mount is one of the most remarkable, as well as beautiful objects in nature. It rises directly from the prairie to the height, I should judge, of more than an hundred feet; is clothed with a rich velvet coat of grass on all sides, as well as at the summit; is entirely distinct from any other eminence; comprises an area of six or eight acres, and is as regular and perfect in construction, form, and outline, as any work of art I ever saw. It has been generally taken by travelers for a creation of those mysterious mound-builders, whose name and history have passed into oblivion, and who have left no memorials of their existence but such as render it only more inexplicable. It is, however, as I ascertained, a production of the cunning hand of Nature, who sometimes, it would seem, amuses herself by showing how much she can excel her illegitimate sister, Art, even in her most successful attempts at imitation. The canal connecting the Illinois with the lakes, runs directly at the foot of this mount, which with something like Gothic barbarity has been deeply excavated on one side, in order to form the outward bank. This process has disclosed a succession of different strata of earth, clay, and gravel, all regularly defined, and evidently not the work of man, but of the world of craters, which beyond doubt covered all the surrounding country, long posterior to the subsiding of the great deluge.
The Sieur Joliet, who tradition says, once resided on the top of this mount, which is flat and comprises several acres of rich meadow, was one of the adventurous heroes who first found their way from Canada to the Valley of the West. Little is known of him, except that he preceded or accompanied La Salle in some of his discoveries on the Mississippi, for which, says Charleroix, “he received a grant of the island of Anticosti, which extends about forty degrees north-west and south-east, and lies at the mouth of the River St. Lawrence. But they made him no great present; it is absolutely good for nothing. It is poorly wooded, its soil is barren, and it has not a single harbor where a ship can lie in safety.” I regret to differ with the good father, whose description shows it to be eminently calculated for the site of a great emporium, and am surprised that it has hitherto escaped the notice of our illustrious founders of cities in places where it is all rocks and no water. But be this as it may, the Sieur Joliet is particularly unfortunate in having been rewarded for his services by an island worth nothing, and defrauded by ignorance or vanity of the honor of giving his name to a beautiful and thriving town.
Some fifteen years ago the place occupied by the town of Joliet was the seat of Black Hawk’s power. It now contains twelve or fifteen hundred white people, and is a busy, growing place, with reasonable anticipations of becoming considerably larger in good time. The frank, hospitable, spirited, and intelligent people of this noble region of the West, must not, however, calculate too confidently on all their towns becoming great cities because they grow with astonishing rapidity at the first starting. Great cities, like great men, do not spring up in all places and every where. A large portion of these towns, like children, will probably increase in size the first few years, more than in all their lives afterward. Many will stop short in their growth, and many will gradually be swallowed up by some neighboring rival, whose natural advantages, or some fortunate concurrence of circumstances, will enable it to secure the ascendancy, and render all the others tributary to its prosperity. When this ascendency is permanently acquired, nothing but inferior towns can flourish in its immediate vicinity, and like all great bodies, they will become the centre of attraction.