Many a fine farm, just cleared and broken, attracted us here, and hence along the prairie road into St. Paul, where we arrived at the close of the following day, which proved to be, as we kept no calendar, Thursday, the 9th of August.
Our drive this last day led past numerous linked lakes, with their borders of the tall Minnesota rice grass in flower, the home of the canvas back, pelican, and swan. Passing through the village of Little Canada, we rode on to Minnehaha Prairie along its gentle, verdant slope, and lapse of shining waters of Twelve Lakes, graced with the names of Como, Garda, etc., and adorned with many a pretty boat and sail. A few miles further brought us to the upper terrace of beautiful St. Paul.
As pioneers of this wilderness route, we met with marked attention from all, and passed some agreeable days at St. Paul, Fort Snelling, Minneapolis, St. Anthony, and their numerous points of interest. Our homeward route was by the Mississippi River to Prairie du Chien, where old Fort Crawford, then a mere tenement, commands the confluence of the Wisconsin River with the Father of Waters. This sail of three hundred miles consumed forty-eight hours.
The river banks recede and advance in lake-like expanses along its winding course, and their richly wooded heights, crowned with red sandstone, resemble the ruined Rhine castles. The sail through Lake Pepin, and between the States of Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin, was varied by frequent and thriving towns and villages.
From Prairie du Chien—a picture of straggling despair—by the Milwaukie and Prairie du Chien Railroad, and the Northwestern Railroad, two hundred and twenty-two miles, we reached Chicago, and passed through a crowd of beautiful towns, in a State scarce a generation since reclaimed from the Indians. Familiar railroads transported us from Chicago to Detroit, Niagara, Albany, and New York.
Our whole distance of travel in three weeks was thirty-four hundred and forty-one miles. It was brief, but spiced with adventure, and over a field of vast interest, present and future.
Our beautiful country, made one and indivisible by the great and good Author of its existence, through its mighty natural features, has, among its chief grandeurs, this water system of the great northern lakes, the frontier of the ever-progressive and patriotic West and North. In dimensions, sublimity, and beauty, by the consent of all, it is without parallel on earth.
A volume of the purest fresh water is gathered in Lake Superior, without visible, adequate supply, to a depth of one thousand feet, with a length of near five hundred miles, and average breadth of one hundred and sixty miles, on a bottom lifted six hundred feet above sea level.
This incalculable mass of water moves its limpid wave through the Saut Sainte Marie into its twin seas, Lakes Michigan and Huron, then by St. Clair and Detroit Rivers is poured through Lake Erie, ever gradually descending, till, at great Niagara, 'The Thunder of the Waters,' it tosses in fury along its rapids, leaps the cataract in glory, at a rate of one hundred millions of tons of water the hour, and then sweeps away into Lake Ontario, to form that northern Mississippi, the River St. Lawrence, which, for over one thousand miles, holds on its ever increasing and widening current, in majesty to the broad Atlantic. By the canals at the Falls and Saut Sainte Marie, direct and continuous ship and steam navigation for sea-going vessels from the Atlantic to Superior City, the extreme Northwest, or Chicago on the Southwest, over three thousand miles through the heart of the continent, is open, while the American coast line along these great waters, exceeds thirty-two hundred miles. Complete in itself, the source of life, health, fine climate, fertility, wealth, and countless blessings to all its shores and valleys, it is divided by lofty barriers from all the other chief water systems of the United States. The Mississippi rises in the highlands of Minnesota at Lake Itasca, more than one hundred miles west of Lake Superior, and gathers in its course all the rivers of its valley. Still loftier mountains separate the sources of the Hudson and Connecticut, and the other rivers of the Atlantic slope.
Blessed with soil and climate unsurpassed, and a Government the nearest to perfection, this region, watered by a mighty inland ocean, is already the chief granary of the world, as well as its great mineral store, although its railway system is not yet extended to its utmost limits; and beyond Michigan it is scarce thirty years since the Americans gained a settlement in its borders.