ON THE SKUNK RIVER.
The Lady of Shalott, looking into the mirror which reflected the highway "a bowshot from her bower-eaves," saw the villagers passing to their daily labor in the barley-fields; market-girls in red cloaks and damsels of high degree; curly shepherd-boys and long-haired pages in gay livery; an abbot on an ambling pad and knights in armor and nodding plumes; and her constant pastime was to weave these sights into the magic web on which she wrought. I undertake, in a modest way, to follow her example, and weave a series of pictures from the sights that daily meet my eyes.
The highway which runs a bowshot from my bower-eaves is a much-travelled road, leading from the farms of a prairie country into a prairie town. It is a stripe of black earth fifteen or twenty feet wide, the natural color of the soil, ungraded, ungravelled, and just now half a foot deep in mud from the melting February snows. Looking in the direction from which it comes, a mile or two of rolling prairie-land is visible, divided into farms of one hundred, one hundred and forty or one hundred and sixty acres. Just now it is faded yellow in hue, with patches of snow in the hollows, and bare of trees, stumps or fences, except the almost invisible wire-fences which separate the fields from the road and from each other. Here and there, at wide intervals, a few farm-houses can be seen, sheltered on the north and west by a thickly-set row of cottonwood or Lombardy poplar trees, which serve in a great measure to break the sweep of the pitiless Iowa winds. Most of the houses are large and comfortable, and are surrounded by barns, haystacks and young orchards, denoting a long residence and prosperity; but two or three, far off on the horizon, are small wooden structures, set on the bare prairie, without a tree or outbuilding near them, and looking bleak and lonely. To one who knows something of the straitened lives, the struggles with poverty, that go on in them, they seem doubly pitiful and desolate.
The town into which the highway leads lies straight before my window, flat, unpicturesque, uninteresting, marked by the untidiness of crudeness and the untidiness of neglect. The ungraded streets are trodden into a sticky pudding by horses' feet, the board sidewalks are narrow, uneven and broken, and the crossings are deep in mud. In the eastern part of the town the dwellings are large, comfortable, even elegant, with well-kept grounds filled with trees and shrubbery, and there are a few of the same character scattered here and there throughout the town; but the large majority of houses, those that give the place its discouraged, unambitious look, are small wooden dwellings, a story or a story and a half high, with the end facing the street and a shed-kitchen behind. Those that are painted are white or brown, but many are unpainted, have no window-shutters and are surrounded by untidy yards and fences that need repair.
The centre of the town, both in position and importance, is "The Square." This is an open space planted thickly with trees, which have now grown to a large size and cast a refreshing shade over the crowd that gathers there in summer to hear political speeches or to celebrate the Fourth of July. It is surrounded by hitching-racks, and on Saturdays and other unusually busy days these racks, on all the four sides of the Square, are so full of teams—generally two-horse farm-wagons—that there is not room for another horse to be tied. Facing the Square and extending a block or two down adjacent streets are the business-houses—stores, banks, express-office, livery-stables, post-office, gas-office, the hotels, the opera-house, newspaper and lawyers' offices. Many of the buildings are of brick, three stories high, faced or trimmed with stone, but the general effect is marred by the contiguity of little wooden shanties used as barber-shops and meat-markets.
Except in the north-east, where the land is rolling and densely wooded, the horizon-line is flat and on a level with our feet. The sun rises from the prairie as he rises from the ocean, and his going down is the same: no far-off line of snowy mountains, no range of green hills nor forest-crest, intercepts his earliest and his latest rays. Over this wide stretch of level land the wind sweeps with unobstructed violence, and more than once in the memory of settlers it has increased to a destructive tornado, carrying buildings, wagons, cattle and human beings like chaff before it. Just now, a sky of heavenly beauty and color bends over it, and through the wide spaces blow delicious airs suggestive of early spring.
Nearly every day, and often many times a day, farm-wagons drawn by two horses pass along the highway in front of my window. The wagon-bed is filled with sacks of wheat or piled high with yellow corn, and on the high spring-seat in front sits the farmer driving, and by him his wife, her head invariably wrapped in a white woollen nubia or a little shawl, worn as a protection against the catarrh-producing prairie winds. Cuddled in the hay at their feet, but keeping a bright lookout with round eager eyes, are two or three stout, rosy children, and often there is a baby in the mother's arms. When "paw" has sold his wheat or corn the whole family will walk around the Square several times, looking in at the shop-windows and staring at the people on the sidewalk. When they have decided in which store they can get the best bargains, they will go in and buy groceries, calico and flannel, shoes for the children, and perhaps a high chair for the baby. Later in the day they rattle by again, the farmer sitting alone on the spring-seat, the wife and children, as a better protection against the wind, on some hay in the now empty wagon-bed behind. So they jolt homeward over the rough, frozen road or toil through sticky mud, as the case may be, well pleased with their purchases and their glimpse of town, and content to take up again the round of monotonous life on their isolated prairie farm.
Sometimes on spring-like days, when the roads are good, two women or a woman and one or two half-grown children drive by in a spring-wagon, bringing chickens, eggs, and butter to market. Heavy wagons loaded with large clear blocks of ice go by every day, the men walking and driving or seated on a board seat at the extreme rear of the wagon. The great crystal cubes look, as they flash in the sunshine, like building-material for Aladdin's palace quarried from some mine of jewels, but they are only brought from the Skunk River, three miles distant, to the ice-houses in town, and there packed away in sawdust for summer use. On two days of the week—shipping days for live-stock—farm-wagons with a high railing round the beds go by, and inside the railing, crowded as thickly as they can stand, are fat black or black-and-white hogs, which thrust their short noses between the boards and squeal to get out. They are unloaded at the cattle-pens near the railroad, and thence shipped to pork-packers at Chicago.