The Ice-Wigwam Of Minnehaha.
The winter of 1855-56, memorable for its excessive and prolonged cold, while it brought suffering to many a household throughout the land, and is recalled by that fact almost solely, is fixed in my memory by its verification of an old Indian legend of the ice-wigwam of Minnehaha. Longfellow has made this name familiar to the English-speaking world, and beyond. A little waterfall, whose silvery voice is for ever singing a love-song to the mighty Father of Waters, and into whose bosom it hastens to cast itself, bears the name and personates the Indian maiden.
On the right bank of the Mississippi, between the Falls of St. Anthony and the mouth of the Minnesota, is a broad, level prairie, starting from the high bluffs of the Mississippi, and running far out in the direction of sundown. In the month of June this prairie is profusely decked with bright flowers, forming a carpet which the looms of the world will never rival. Stretching far into the west is a tortuous ribbon of rich, dark green, marking the path of a stream which stealthily glides beneath the shadows of the long grass. As it nears the eastern border of the prairie, this stream becomes more bold. Its expanded surface glistens in the noon-day sun. Here it passes slowly under a rustic bridge, upon an almost seamless bed of rock. Then its motion quickens, as if in haste to reach the ledge which overhangs the broad valley of the Mississippi, when, with one bound, it plunges into its basin sixty feet below. This is Minnehaha, the little hoiden who throws herself upon the outstretched arm of the great Father of Waters with a merry laugh that wins the heart of every comer. Beautiful child of the plain! How many have sought you in your flower-decked home, and loved you! Hoiden you may be; but coquette, never. Your life is freely given to be absorbed in the life of him you seek.
But Minnehaha is at times the ward of another—an old man whose white locks are so often the sport of the winds, whose very presence makes the limbs of mortals tremble, and their teeth chatter at his approach. Yet he is wondrous kind to his beautiful ward—touchingly kind is the Ice-King of the North. When the blasts from his realms, freighted with the chill of death, scourge the lands over which they pass, and a silence awe-inspiring and complete falls on all; when the flowers are being buried beneath the snow, and the mighty river bound with ice, then it is the ice-king exhausts his powers to build for Minnehaha a palace worthy of her. The summer through (and spring and autumn scarce are known where Minnehaha dwells) the maid [pg 425] has worn about her, as a veil, a cloud of mist and spray. O wondrous architect! Of mist and spray you build a palace even Angelo might not conceive in wildest dreams, were marbles, opals, pearls, all gems and stones and precious metals, cut and fashioned ready to his hand! Thy breath, O ice-king! fashions mist and spray into grand temples, palaces, more chaste and cold than any stuff Italian quarries yield! Behold the ice-king build! He breathes upon the mist, and on all sides strong-based foundations fix about the space he would enclose. The walls on these rise up, as mist and spray are gathered there and set with his chill breath. Height on height they rise, until the arch is sprung; and then the dome is gathered in to meet the solid rock above, and all the outer work is done. Within, the decorations form as do the stalactites within the caves. Then these are covered with the diamond frost, such as December's shrubs and trees so oft put on to greet the rising sun. And Minnehaha, so the legend says, sings here the winter through. This is the masterpiece of the great ice-king. Solomon in all his glory possessed no temple to compare with this, nor Queen of Sheba ever saw its counterpart.
A party of four started from St. Paul in the latter part of March, 1856, to visit this wonder of the North. For many years the winters had not been protracted enough to permit the planting of a Maypole upon the ice of Lake Pepin, nor had eye seen the ice-wigwam of Minnehaha. Marquette, Hennepin, Lesueur, and the early Catholic missionaries had carried with them their love for the month of Mary into that cold region, and settlers and Christian Indians made the opening day of this month one of joyful festivity. To plant a May-pole upon the ice of Lake Pepin (which is always the last point on the Upper Mississippi where the ice breaks up, as no current helps to cut or break it) was quite an event. The May-pole, decked with garlands of green and dotted with the many-colored crocuses that spring up and bloom at the very edge of the melting snow, and long before the drifts and packs have disappeared, if planted on the ice, permitted dancing on its smooth surface, and pleasanter footing than the loose, moistened soil. May-day can seldom be pleasantly celebrated in that region out-of-doors, except upon the ice. Ice on Lake Pepin, then, is to the young folk of that latitude as important an event as a bright, sunny day in latitudes below.
During the month of March, 1856, a bright, warm sun melted the snows to such an extent as to cover the level prairies with several inches of water, confined within banks of melting snow. Wheels were taking the place of runners. Our party drove over the undulating prairie to St. Anthony, crossed the Mississippi by the first suspension bridge which spanned its waters just above the Falls of St. Anthony, and from Minneapolis, on the west bank, moved out into the dead level which extends south and west toward the Minnesota River. A splashing drive of four miles brought us to the bridge above the Falls of Minnehaha, from which we could see on our left a cone of dirty ice, disfigured here and there with sticks and stones and clods of earth; its base far down within an ice-lined gorge, its top close pressed upon an overhanging ledge. Was this the wonder we had come to [pg 426] see? A wonder, then, we came. But we did not turn back at this unsightly scene. There was a charm about this legend of Minnehaha's ice-wigwam that surely did not have its source in the charmless thing before us. Nor could we believe the imagination of the red man capable of drawing so poetic an inspiration from so prosaic a source. We therefore set to work to discover the hidden things, if such there were. With large stones we broke away the ice about the top of the cone, hoping to peer through the opening by which the water of the stream entered. We failed in this, but let in the western sun through the opening we had made. Then we descended to the bottom of the gorge, over ice and snow, to seek a new point of observation. Here, to the east, lay the broad, snow-covered valley of the Mississippi; before us, at the west, rose the cone of ice full sixty feet in height, its wrinkled surface all discolored and defaced, inspiring naught of poetry, stifling imagination. Moving northward around the ungainly mass, and part way up the north side of the gorge, we reached a terrace which led behind the cone and underneath the overhanging ledge. We enter from the north (by broad steps of ice, each rising three or four inches above the other) a hall twelve by twenty feet, floored, columned, curtained, arched, and walled with ice. At somewhat regular intervals elliptical columns of ice rose from floor to spring of arch. Between these columns curtains hung, with convolutes and folds and borders, filling all the space—and all of ice. Above us was the ledge of rock overhanging the basin of the fall, behind us the bluff, and under our feet the terrace of earth midway the cone; and all was paved and curtained and ceiled with ice. Before us stood the upper half of the cone, meeting the ledge above.
While giving play to admiration of the architectural beauties of the place, our ears were greeted with a sound muffled or distant, as of falling water. Whence could this come? Could there be life or motion within that frozen mass? In the chill of that drear winter was not the laughing voice of Minnehaha hushed?
The sun was dropping down the western sky, and a shadow lengthened in the gorge below. The broken edges of the ice which overhung the quiet stream gave back the borrowed rays of sunlight more brilliant than they came.
One of the party had, slung to his side, the customary long-knife of those days. With it in hand he started in search of the creature whose voice lured him on, not, as the siren, to destruction, but to a scene of beauty, brilliance, glory, with which the fabled cave of Stalacta was but as shadow. Between him and the voice he sought a wall of ice imposed. The knife at once was called to play its part. Between two columns this wall was cut away, a window opened, through which we saw the glories of the wigwam. Our eyes were dazzled and our senses mazed. The curtain rent exposed to view the inner surface of a dome high-arched and perfect in its curves. From base, through all its height, it was hung with myriad stalactites of ice, which seemed to point us to the laughing voice still rippling on the waters far below. These stalactites were covered thick with richest frost-work; and from ten thousand upon thousand points the glinting light fell off in floods. Near to the centre of the [pg 427] upper dome the waters of the stream pour in in one broad sheet. An instant only is such form preserved. The sheet of water breaks, and countless globes, from raindrops to a sphere the hand would scarcely grasp with ease, come down, and break still more in passing through the air, until within the basin all is mist and spray. These globes at first arrange themselves in systems not unlike the planetariums of the schools, where sun and planets, with their satellites, are shown the youths, to aid such minds as seek to learn the grander works of God in space. These systems, as they fall, are countless; and by common impulse, which means law, the smaller range themselves about a greater central orb. And so they pass through space, to fall upon the bosom of the pool in mist. Is there no emblem here of life and God?
And as we look, behold! the walls and dome are striped and slashed with silver and with gold; then barred; and then again are panelled with this silver sheen and gold. The gold and silver interchange positions, fade, return, as the Northern Lights dissolve or chase each other here and there. The mystery of this party-colored scene was soon resolved. The ice we broke away with stones had let the sun shine through the opening, and the waters, flowing in, disputed passage with the light. There is an ebb and flow in running water so like to pulse-beats that it may not seem strange to those who stop to think, that ruder men have worshipped streams as gods. This ebb and flow upon the ledge so changed the depth of water there that the sunlight, as it struggled through these different depths (for ever changing), cast the light in silver or in gold upon the walls and dome.