I have sat on the deck of a little steamer and drawn pictures for the Indians, who took them and marched off with the smile of a schoolboy getting a prize chromo, and in less than five years from that time I have at the same place sat down in a hotel lighted with electricity, and a menu equal to any in the country, with a bronze portrait of General Grant embossed on the top. Within ten years I have preached, with an Indian chief for an interpreter, in a log house in which a half-brother of Riel of North-Western fame was a hearer, where to-day there are self-supporting churches and flourishing schools.
Less than sixteen years ago I stopped at the end of the Michigan Central Railway, northern division; every lot was filled with stumps. A school was being rapidly built, while the church had a lot only. The next time I visited the town it had fine churches and schools. The hotel had a beautiful conservatory filled with choice flowers. I could take my train, pass on over the Straits of Mackinaw, on by rail again, and clear to the Pacific, with sleeper and dining-car attached.
VIEW NEAR PETOSKEY, MICHIGAN.
Page 20.
But once leave your railway, and soon you can get to settlements twenty years old which saw the first buggy last year come into the clearings. Here are deep forests where the preacher on his way home from church meets the panther and the wild-cat, and where as yet he must ford the rivers and build his church, the first in nine thousand square miles.