Nearer and nearer crept the fire, and hotter and hotter grew the choking air. There was no other choice. McMurray threw water on the gowns of his wife and Mrs. Dalton until they were drenched; then wrapping the baby in a blanket and enveloping their heads in shawls, the whole party abandoned their house to destruction, and ran the gauntlet of the flames. They passed the spot of ordeal in safety, reached the canoe and embarking pushed off into the lake. From this point of security they caught glimpses of the element as it crept steadily on its way towards the cabin. Through the rifts in the smoke they saw the fiery tongues licking the lower timbers and darting themselves into the cracks between the logs like some gluttonous monster preparing to gorge himself. The women clasped their hands and looked up. Both were supplicating the Father of All that their home might be spared.
A rescue was coming from an unlooked for source. While Mrs. Dalton's face was upturned to heaven in silent prayer, a large drop splashed upon her brow; another followed—the first glad heralds of a pouring rain which extinguished the fire just as it had begun to feed on that unlucky habitation.
After such an almost unbroken series of disasters and losses, we might well inquire whether the subsequent life of Mrs. Dalton was saddened and darkened by similar experiences.
"Every cloud has a silver lining." The hardest and saddest lives have their hours of softness, their gleams of sunshine. It is a wise and beautiful arrangement in the economy of Divine Providence that the law of physical and moral compensation is always operating to equalize the pains and the pleasures, the hardships and the comforts, the joys and the sorrows of human life. Before continuous, patient, and conscientious endeavors, the obstacles that fill the pathway of the pioneer through the wilderness are surmounted, the rough places are made smooth, and the last days of the dwellers in the desert and forest become like the latter days of the patriarch, "more blessed than the beginning."
We may truly say of Mrs. Dalton, that her "latter days were more blessed than the beginning." A happy marriage which she entered into the following spring, and a long life of prosperity and peace after her escape from the last great danger, as we have narrated, were the fitting reward of the courage, diligence, and devotion displayed during the two first summers and winters which she passed in the northern wilderness.
The wide region, lying between the sources of the Mississippi and the bends of the Missouri in Dakota, and stretching thence far up to the Saskatchewan in the north, has been appropriately styled "the happy hunting ground." The rendezvous to which the mighty nimrods of the northwest return from the chase are huge cabins, built to stand before the howling blasts, and give shelter against the arctic regions of the winter. In these abodes dwell the wives and children of many of those rugged men, and create even there, by their devoted toils and gentle companionship, at least the semblance of a home. Almost whelmed in the snow, and when even the mercury freezes in the bulb of the thermometer, these anxious and loving housewives feed the lamp and keep the fire burning on the hearth. Dressing the skins of the deer, they keep their husbands well shod and clothed. The long winter of eight months passes monotonously away; the men, accustomed to a life of excitement, chafe and grow surly under their enforced imprisonment; but the women, by their kind offices and sweet words, act as a constant sedative upon these morose outbreaks. The hunters, it is said, grow softer in their manners as the winter wanes. They are unconscious scholars in the refining school of woman.
Among the diversions which serve to while away the tediousness of those winter nights are included the narration of personal adventures passed through by the different hunters in their wild life. Tales of narrow escapes, of Indian fights, of desperate encounters with beasts of the forests; and through the rough texture of these narratives now and then appears a pathetic incident in which woman is the prominent figure. Sometimes it is a hunter's wife who is the heroine, and again the scene is laid in the home of the settler, where woman faces some dreadful danger for her loved ones, or endures extraordinary suffering faithfully to the end. Such an incident as the following was preserved in the memory of a hunter, who recently communicated the essential facts to the writer.
Minnesota well deserves the name of the pioneer's paradise. Occupying as it does that high table-land out of which gush into the pure bracing air, the thousand fountains of the Father of waters and of the majestic Red river; studded with lakes that glisten like molten silver in the sunshine; shadowed by primeval forests; now stretching out in prairies which lose themselves in the horizon; now undulating with hills and dales dotted with groves and copses, nature here, like some bounteous and imperial mother, seems to have prepared with lavish hand a royal park within which her roving sons and daughters may find a permanent abode.
The country through which the Red river flows from Otter Tail lake towards Richville, is unsurpassed for rural beauty. Trending northward it then passes along towards Pembina, a border town on our northern boundary, through a plain of vast extent, dotted with groves of oak planted as if by hand. Voyaging down this noble river in midsummer, between its banks embowered with wild roses we breathe an air loaded with perfume and view a scene of wild but enchanting loveliness. Here summer celebrates her brief but splendid reign, then lingering for a while in the lap of dreamy, balmy autumn, flies at length into southern exile, abdicating her throne to winter, which stalks from the frozen zone and rules the region with undisputed and rigorous sway.
In the month of March, 1863, a party of four hunters set out from Pembina, where they had passed the winter, and undertook to reach Shyenne, a small trading post on the west bank of the Red river, in the territory of Dakota. A partial thaw, followed by a cold snap, had coated the river in many places with ice, and by the alternate aid of skates and snow-shoes, they reached on the third evening after their departure, Red Lake river in Minnesota, some eighty miles distant from Pembina. Clearing away the snow in a copse, they scooped a shallow trench in the frozen soil with their hatchets, and kindling a fire so as to cover the length and breadth of the excavation, they prepared their frugal repast of hunters' fare. Then removing the fire to the foot of the trench and piling logs upon it, they lay down side by side on the warmed soil, and wrapping their blankets around them slept soundly through the still cold night, until the sun's edge showed itself above the rim of the vast plain that stretched to the east. As the hunters rose from their earthy couch and stretched their cramped limbs, casting their eyes hither and thither over the boundless expanse, they descried upon the edge of a copse some quarter of a mile to the south a bright-red object, apparently a living thing, crouched upon the snow as if sunning itself. Rising simultaneously and with awakened curiosity they approached the spot. Before they had taken many steps the object disappeared suddenly. Fixing their eyes steadily on the point of its last appearance, they slowly advanced with cocked rifles until they reached a large tree with arching roots, around which were the traces of small shoeless feet. An orifice barely large enough to admit a man showed them beneath the tree a cave. One of the hunters, peering through the aperture, spied within, a girl of ten years crouched in the farthest corner of the recess, covered with a thick red flannel cloak, and shivering with cold and terror. Speaking kind words to the little stranger they succeeded at length in reassuring her. She came out from her hiding-place, and the hunters with rugged kindness wrapped her feet and limbs in their coats and bore her to the fire. The first words she uttered were, "mother! go for mother!" She had gone away to shoot game the night before, the little girl said, and had not returned.