EAIBLES AND SCKAMELES IN NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA. BY EDWARD SULLIVAN, ESQ. LONDON : RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET, ^Putlts^er ttt ©rtrinarg to |^er iJWajests. 1852. LOKDON : E. CLAY, PRINTER, BREAD STREET HILL. DEDICATED TO . . HEAR-ADMJEAL SIK CHARLES SULLIVAN, BART. BY HTS AFPECTIONATE SON, EDWARD SULLIVAN. CONTENTS. PAGE CHAPTER I. Feom England to 'New York — Hudson River — West Point . 9 CHAPTER II. From West Point to Niagara and Toronto 26 CHAPTER in. From Toronto to La Pointe 48 CHAPTER IV. La Pointe to Still- Water 65 CHAPTER V. From St. Paul's to Lao-qui-Paele 82 CHAPTER VL Lao-qui-Pakle — Prairie to Big-Stone Lake 101 CHAPTER VH. Prairie 117 CHAPTER VIII. Prairie — Source of St. Peter's River — Bear's Lodge to Fort Snelling • 139 CHAPTER IX. St. Paul's — Prairie du Chien — St. Louis . 164 CHAPTER X. American People — Dickens — Manners — Books — Steamers — Slaves -. 190 CHAPTER XI. Voyage down the Mississippi to New Orleans ..... 212 vi CONTENTS. PAGE CHAPTER XII. New Orleans — Embakk for the Havana 231 CHAPTER XIII. Slaves — Guines — Palm-trees — Winds — Moonlight — Buc- caneers 248 CHAPTER XIV. Bloodhounds — Garrote — Yacht — Bahamas — Flying Fish — Columbus 273 CHAPTER XV. Barbadoes— Snakes — Tobago — Birds 298 CHAPTER XVT. Georgetown —EssEQUiBO — Cuybni — Vampires 311 CHAPTER XVII. Ascend the Essequibo — Victoria Regia — Poisons .... 830 CHAPTER XVIII. Georgetown — Surinam — Paramaribo 353 CHAPTER XIX. Surinam — Plantations — Shooting — Snakes — Balls .... 359 CHAPTER XX. Voyage to Margaritta — New Barcelona — La Guayra . .375 CHAPTER XXI. Route to Caraccas — Valley op Chacao — Earthquakes . . 385 CHAPTER XXII. Valley of Aragua — Tuy — Lake of Valencia 393 CHAPTER XXIII. Valencia — Porto Cabello— Venezuela 406 CHAPTER XXIV. Blanco— St. Vincent's— Caribs— Indians— Pitch Lake— Home 417 PREFACE. There is no compulsion in book-reading : if a person is amused, he reads it on to the end ; if bored, he lays it down. Such being the case, an apology in a Preface is unnecessary ; it does not make a dry book less so, or a readable book more amusing. I shall therefore content myself with quoting the words of a writer of the olden time : " If I have done ill to write, let not others be so idle as to read." Although *' travels and notes," by giants of facetiae and learning, have recorded almost everything amusing or instructive in America, over and over again ; yet the " dwarf on the giant's shoulder" sees sometimes even further than the giant himself; and having taken my stand on the shoulders of their observation, I may h vi PREMCE. have been enabled to see some small objects that had escaped their notice. Moreover, giants do not in general go to the Prairies, as they require a good deal of creature comfort and nourishment, and the " hard doings " of those parts would hardly suit them. Besides, yachting in the West Indies is in its infancy, and the equinoctial forests of Guiana, and the unequalled scenery of the valleys of Chacao and the Aragua, and the lake of Valencia, although by no means " virgin scenes," yet have not been so often described by the pen of the tourist as the prairies and cities of North America. I never had the shghtest penchant ioix repub- lics ; I left England strongly biassed in favour of our government and institutions, and I returned with all my predilections strengthened by a comparison with those of our cousins in the West. Yet although such was my feeling, there is no denying that many of their institutions are admi- rable, and far better suited to their habits and wants than any engrafted from the old country could possibly have been ; and, on the other hand, most unprejudiced Americans admit that PREFACE. Vll though a republic such as they possess, orga- nized as it was, carefully and deliberately, by the most clear-headed and enlightened men the country has ever produced, and aided by the enthusiastic support of the entire nation, may suit their peculiar tastes and ideas, yet that it does not at all follow that it would succeed in England, where it would most probably be the handiwork of hot-headed zealots, acting in opposition to a large proportion of the people, and where it must inevitably rise on the ruins of a constitution which centuries have identified with us, and which has become endeared to a large majority of the nation by the blood and talents of its best and noblest, through succeed- ing generations. I had a strong prejudice against the American people, acquired by meeting very bad specimens on the Continent; but I have convinced myself it was unfounded ; and I do not hesitate to say, that I met as agreeable women and as gentlemanly men in America as the world can produce. I hope that any remarks I may have made galling to the amour propre of the American people, they will remember are entirely confined viii PREFACE. to their national peculiarities of taste and habit, (now, by the way, fast disappearing,) which are common to all nations, and to none more than ourselves, and which they themselves ridi- cule quite as much as strangers. In conclusion, I must observe, that I met with nothing but civility and hospitaUty during my stay in America ; and I cannot imagine that any one who has a year at his disposal, and two or three hundred pounds in his pocket, can spend them with more profit and enjoyment than in the United States. London, Juff. 25, 1852. 4 RAMBLES AND SCRAMBLES IN NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA. CHAPTER I. SAIL mOM ENGLAND TO WEST POINT. In the early part of 1850 I had planned a trip to Spain and the East, and had been lingering in Paris, detained by the lovely spring weather, and the de- light and enjoyment peculiar to that most delight- ful of all cities, when I received a letter from an old fellow-traveller and fellow-collegian, asking me to accompany him and his brother to the "Far West." It was an idea that just suited my fancy ; so giving up my projected Spanish trip, (which I did with the less regret, as I had aheady been there,) I started for England, saw my companions, made arrangements, and in a few days we were at Liverpool. We found that after a westerly gale of some weeks' duration, an easterly wind had sprung up, which the knowing ones said had every chance of lasting, so that having held lengthened consultations with some of the old " salts " of the place, we determined to B 10 SAIL FROM ENGLAND take our passage in a sailing vessel. We were the more induced to do tliis^ as we were in no particular hurry. And I was rather curious to witness the nature of the accommodation and treatment provided for the thousands that were daily crossing the Atlantic. After visiting several very fine vessels in the docks, we took our berths in a wholesome looking craft, advertised to sail in two or three days. As bad luck would have it, our friends the "salts" had been out in their reckoning, and we had no sooner got clear of the channel, than the wind shifted round dead in our teeth, and remained in that quarter most of the voyage. We had a very tedious one of forty- two days ; the monotony broken only by the regular number of black-fish and Mother Carey's chickens," so called I suppose because seen in fowl weather — (not mine) . I never could quite understand the origin of the sailor's superstition, that these restless little birds are the ghosts of shipwrecked sailors; one would have imagined they had seen too much of storms, and of the briny deep, during their life-time, to wish to see more of it in a future state. It would be a much more pleasing fancy to imagine the spirit of the storm-tossed mariner tenanting the warm fat little body of some barn-door sparrow, that stuff themselves with the best of corn " fixings " all day, and always have " all night in " under the warm barn thatch, than to suppose them for ever passing an existence of perpetual motion and saturation, living on fish and sea-weed, the sport of every gale that sweeps across the Atlantic. 'The captain (a Yankee) was a perfect specimen of his class, with the peculiarities of his nation in strong relief. He TO WEST POINT. 11 was tall and handsome, with a care-worn anxious face, and looked as if he had not been in bed for the last month. He wore patent leather boots, kid gloves, and blew his nose with his fingers ! He used remarkably strong language to his men, and to the emigrants, and administered what he called " very particular fits^^ with a rope's end to all indiscri- minately. The first officer had been in the United States navy, but had been obliged to leave in conse- quence of a " difficulty,'^ having shot his captain in a duel. There was no love lost between him and the captain, and I believe he would have shot the latter any day for half-a-crown ; indeed, as these feel- ings of respect and affection to those above them were shared by all the crew, down to the smallest boy, one can understand that the duty was not always carried on with the utmost coi'diality. We were well fed, and treated in every respect much better than I expected, — fresh meat, and fresh fish, milk and butter the whole voyage, thanks to an un- limited supply of American ice. The only drawback was a foul wind, and the misery and stench of the unfortunate emigrants, of whom there were 500 on board, men, women and children, mostly from the South of Ireland. They were huddled together, like a herd of pigs, in every stage of filth and sea-sickness. I believe no creatures but Irish could have existed in such confined air. They say you can cut the atmosphere on the lower deck of a line-of-battle-ship, after the ports have been closed for a few days, but I am confident you could not cut the atmosphere of an emigrant ship. Judging from the specimens I saw on board the Isaac Wright, there is no reason to suppose B 2 12 SAIL FROM ENGLAND Shakspeare was animated by any unsound preju- dices against the Irish of his day when he makes Eichard II. talk of them as " Those rough, rug-headed kerns, Which live like vermin, where no vermin else. But only they, have privilege to live." Seeing that the Irish of our day are very little better, I cannot imagine how it was that they did not generate some fever. We were, however, lucky, for the vessel we had intended taking our passage in lost fifty by cholera and ship fever, whilst in ours out of the number who were ill only two or three died. Happiness is said to be comparative, and to arise from the comparison of your present state with a former one, or with that of others, your equals ; and certainly it would appear to be so ; for one old lady I spoke to, said she never had been so comfortable in her life, and wished the voyage would last for ever I I could not divest myself of some uncomfortable ideas about fire; frequently I saw the emigrants smoking their short pipes on the heap of straw that formed their beds, and as this was only a few months after the burning of the Ocean Monarch the horror of a conflagration in the middle of the Atlan- tic, with a ship^s company amounting to nearly 600 souls, used to intrude itself upon my mind rather forcibly. The emigrants are carried for from 3Z. to 4/. a head, with tea, sugar, and biscuit, enough to keep body and soul together. The captain can flog them if he chooses, and not unfrequently does so. I heard some curious facts about the variation of the compass, on the west coast of Ireland : the variation TO WEST POINT. 13 which was formerly east is now 33 west ; but has for the last few years been gradually working back to east. In the Mozambique Channel the compass is so unsteady that no reliance can be placed on it. June 7th, — A mild kind of mutiny broke out amongst the emigrants^ commencing of course with a general scrimmage amongst themselves, and ending by a violent onslaught on some of the second cabin passengers, who had tried to settle the dispute. By the captain's request, we got up our weapons and col- lected in a body on the poop, when he addressed the rioters : nothing more serious than a few broken heads was the result; frequently lives are lost in these emigrant riots, June nth. — Reached soundings on the great Banks of Newfoundland — on the look-out all day for ice- bergs, knowing, from the sudden decrease in the temperature, that we were in their neighbourhood. Blowing fresh, and fog so thick that you could not see twenty yards a-head of you. It is nasty work slashing across the Banks, with a ten-knot breeze, in a thick fog, during the month of May, as independently of icebergs, which would make short work of the largest vessel that ever swam, the banks at this season are thronged with vessels from all parts of the world, anchored on the Banks for the cod-fishing. It must be most miserable work remaining at anchor three or four months, kicking about, many hundred miles from shore ; there is always a heavy sea, and generally a thick fog, and the nature of their employment prevents the men from having a dry stitch on ; more- over, from lying right in the great highway between Europe and North America, they are not unfrequently 14 SAIL FilOM ENGLAND run down and swamped. The captain told me an instance of individual intrepidity which, if true, is wonderful. At the close of the revolutionary war a doctor at Portsmouth, Massachusetts, built a boat, and sailed in her quite alone to England, thence to the West Indies, South America, and home. Not- withstanding the captain^s asseverations, I don^t believe it. The Banks of Newfoundland have been called the har of the Great Oceanic Ptiver — the gulf stream. The gulf stream and the Arctic current meet on the great banks of Newfoundland ; the Arctic cur- rent is three degrees colder than the surrounding ocean, and twelve degrees colder than the gulf stream : it is the evaporation arising from the mingling of streams of such different temperatures that causes the constant fogs on the great Banks of Newfoundland. Humboldt, who studied the direction and velocity of the gulf stream more than any other man living, or dead, has some very curious calculations on the subject. He says, "that a molecule of water, (supposing such a thing pos- sible,) leaving the coast of Florida by the gulf stream, would perform a detour of 3800 leagues, and return to the same spot in about three years. The stream would take it in forty or fifty days from the coast of Florida to the banks of Newfoundland, progressing at the rate of two or three miles an hour. Eleven months more, and a portion of the same gulf stream would take it from the banks of Newfoundland to the African coast. Thirteen months more, and it would enter the Caribbean Sea; and in ten months more, having made the detour of that almost Medi- TO WEST POINT. 15 terranean sea, and Mexican gulf, it would again join the Florida stream. Visionary as such calculations may appear, such are, without doubt, the slow but regular movements, which agitate the waters of the Atlantic. June 22d. — An old emigrant died of cholera, and was consigned to the great deep, the dirty old doctor mumbling some part of the Burial Service, to the intense disgust of the Irish Roman Catholics. Not the smallest sign of feeling or even interest for their late companion was evinced. I never saw more sot- tish, and less intellectual countenances than those of the men, who appeared but a very few degrees re- moved from the brute. Many of the women, on the other hand, were quite beautiful, with a Spanish cast of feature, and showing in many instances a great deal of breeding. There were several, who if washed, and dressed, might have taken their plane in any ball-room in England, so far as their appearance was concerned. It would seem as though our old emi- grant had been our Jonah, for no sooner had he found his resting-place in the mighty deep, than the wind changed, and we managed to make a fair wind of it. The good ship Argo, that carried Jason through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus to the Black Sea, equalled in size a vessel of 200 tons ; the miserable little Caraval, that bore Columbus to a new world, was only thirty, hardly equal to some of the Thames Yacht Club cutters. I don't exactly know the ton- nage of the twelve-oared galley which bore Csesar and his fortunes ; but the gallant craft that carried us and our fortunes was about 1100 tons, and about as ugly, slow, though as comfortable a vessel as sails out of the city of New York. The more one thinks 16 SAIL FROM ENGLAND over these voyages, made, when so little of navigation or seamanship was known, the more miraculous they appear. Fortune certainly favoured some of them in a most remarkable manner. Cabet, who was de- spatched to America with two vessels by Francis I, made the coast of that country in twenty-eight days from Havre, and returned in thirty-two days, — a voyage very hard to beat even in these days of "clippers," that are so fast they fly out of their copper, and have to " lay to " for the wind. At length, after a reckless consumption of beer, sherry, corned beef, and patience, and a daily rubber at whist, which generally ended in the skipper's losing his temper and his money, on the evening of the 29th of June, the forty-second day from our leaving England, we made the highlands of Neversink ; but though we stood in, and ' fired freely,' we did not get a pilot till the morning — not so ' excruciatingly smart ' after aU. The morning brought the pilot, and a sort of skeleton-looking tug, with all its works above deck, which made it look more like a daddy-long- legs, than our fat beetle-shaped tugs, that toil and puff up the Thames. However, it did its work well. New York city is beautifully situated at the extre- mity of a spacious bay, which is about nine miles in length, and four in breadth ; it is built on an island, formed by the Hudson, or North Eiver on the west, and Long Island Sound on the East. The Narrows at the south end of the bay, called Hell-Gates, are two miles broad, and open out into the ocean. The passage up the Hudson, from the projecting point of Sandy Hook to the city, (a distance of twenty-five miles,) is excessively beautiful. The trees and grass TO WEST POINT. 17 looke'd so green, the houses so white, the atmosphere so clear, and the ship and the emigrants so dirty, that one's anxiety to land, and disgust at all the annoying delays of quarantine, examination, &c., were very great. The Americans say that the Bay t)f New York is like the Bay of Naples, (Jenny Lind has decided the point by giving her vote in favour of the latter,) and the Hudson like the Bosphorus. I have never seen either the Bay of Naples or the Bosphorus, but cannot imagine there can he much similarity — all bays and straits are either like the Bosphorus or Bay of Naples. It certainly is very fine, but by no means equal to the Frith of Forth. The quays and warehouses are not at all equal to the amount of trade, and in that respect it contrasts un- favourably with Liverpool; and judging from the comparative number of vessels upon the Thames and upon the Hudson, I don't think the trade of the Hudson will eclipse that of London just yet ; though one is told in the Eastern States it will do so very •soon, and in the Western that it has done so already. June 2>^th. — Landed, at 9 P.M., with a tooth-brush and collar — too late to clear the customs. Went to the Astor House, the largest hotel, I imagine, in the world. The hotels in America are among the most remarkable of their institutions, and that is saying a good deal. They are conducted on the French table d'hote system ; and though not exactly suited to Eng- lish tastes, they are very well adapted to the wants of a travelling nation like the Americans, who know that from one end of the Union to the other they will always find a good hotel, with civility and comfort, if they don't mind three in a room, at one settled tariff, B 3 18 SAIL TEOM ENGLAND The accounts one reads in all the works on America, from Basil Hall and Mrs. Trollope down- wardsj of the desperate haste of the Americans in consuming their meals, are not at present so appli- cable to the Eastern States^ but are not in the least exaggerated as regards the Western. But still the " go-ahead " principle is so inherent a point of the Yankee character^ that it is often visible even at the table d'hote at New York and Boston, where, during the summer months, the diners are chiefly men tra- velling from place to place in search of amusement ; and at a time when one would imagine that any desperate hurry in swallowing one's dinner, especially such excellent ones as are usually provided, would be a cause of great discomfort, you see dozens of men eating as if their very lives depended on con- sum'ng a certain amount in a given time, as Dickens has naively observed, " snapping up whole blocks of meat like young ravens.' ' Before and after dinner, the men assemble in the bar^ or on the steps if in summer, and chew and drink bitters, and drink bitters and chew, till the bell rings, when they rush in, sans ceremonie, the majority mistrusting their neighbours' appetite and speed of consumption. Sometimes it is quite absurd to watch their nervous anxiety to get certain dishes ; and you see a man with his plate full of diflPerent kinds of condiments, stretch out his arm to add the contents of another dish to his mess, as if afraid that if he did not take it then, it would be seized by some other cormorant. Certainly their concentration of energy at meals is undeniable ; they never speak a word, unless to ask you for some dish, and if in your TO WEST POINT. 19 innocence you address some common-place obser- vation to your neighbour, instead of replying he only gobbles up his food the faster, and casts a furtive, alarmed glance at you, as if suspecting that you had some design in interfering with his gastronomic exertions. I never could quite understand the reason of the headlong speed in devouring their meals that is so remarkable amongst the Americans. It cer- tainly is not to be accounted for from the reason they assign, viz. that the dinner-time being in the middle of their business hours, they eat as fast as they can in order to return to their work, for the crowd is always collected twenty minutes before the bell rings, and at least the same amount of time is wasted after the food has been bolted ; so that there is no actual reason why they should not eat a little more leisurely, and with greater comfort to themselves and satisfac- tion to their friends. I expect it proceeds from the restless habits, become almost second nature, ac- quired by the excitement of continual competition and speculation, which prevents their enjoying the pleasures that are present from a continual looking forward to the future. The ladies, both before and after dinner, which is usually at two o'clock, assemble in the large " ele- gantly furnished " (elegant is a great word in Ame- rica) drawing-rooms, where they display their latest airs and newest fashions with great effect, talking to each other, or to any gentleman of their acquaint- ance, who prefers their company to that of his fellow men outside, or in playing, singing, and not unfre- quently in getting up a dance. Newly-married people almost invariably spend their honey-moon in travel- 20 SAIL FROM ENGLAND ling about from one city to another, and most of their time is passed in steamers, railway-cars, and hotels; not a comfortable idea. Another reason for the popu- larity of living at hotels, if it is not the effect of the cause, is the fact that American ladies dislike the occupations of housekeeping, paying butchers' bills, and weighing " members'' of mutton, and "bosoms" of veal. This is especially the case in the eastern states, where the rights of women are freely can- vassed, and their intellectual superiority to the lords of the creation openly professed, — where a knowledge of Homer, Euclid, &c. is considered of more moment than an acquaintance with Mrs. Glass or Mrs. Sweet's " Perfect Housekeeper." I don't know any country where the truth of Macaulay's remark about hotel-keepers, " that Eng- land is the only country where mine host is your servant, and not your master," is more apparent than in America. At a French, German, or American hotel, you have your meals at stated times, or not at all. The landlord is the best dressed man in the room, sits at the head of his table, and serves out his dinner with the air of a rich man keeping open house to his friends, and not as if he was deriving any benefit from the entertainment. One thing to be said in favour of American hotels is, that they are all held by companies, Avith plenty of capital, and not by individuals, often with very little, so that no expense is spared in providing the best of every- thing ; and as the amount of interest on the capital expended depends upon the popularity of the hotel, and the numbers of visitors, all idea of extortion or overcharge is prevented. TO WEST POINT- 21 On first landing in New York^ the trees lining both sides of the streets, and the decided French style of dress adopted by the ladies and gentlemen^ especially the latter, gives one the idea of being in a French town ; but this illusion is soon dispelled by the hur- ried and eager faces of the walkers, and the reckless driving of the vehicles. In Paris, pleasure and the enjoyment of the hour are visible on nearly all the countenances of the promenaders. In New York, business and money-seeking have stamped an anxious, eager, almost hungry look, by no means so agreeable, on the face of nearly every one one meets. Thermometer 98° in the- shade — rather a sudden change from the fogs and icebergs of the banks. We heard afterwards that we had a lucky time of it, in avoiding the icebergs. More than forty vessels were lost on the banks in the month of June. One field of floating ice extended more than one hundred miles. Ice in the eastern states is as cheap as dirt ; not our dirty ditch ice, but Yankee " smile,'' as it is caUed — ^the purest, most transparent blocks of Wenham and Silver Lake ice. The effect of drinking " Sherry Cobblers," " Mint Juleps,'' "Brandy Smasher," " Gin Slings," and other exhilarating liquors, of an average temperature of 10° below zero, under a sun of 100° in the shade, although perfectly heavenly at the time, is to put one in a melting mood with a vengeance. July 4th. — Glorious 4th of July, seventy-sixth anniversary of the declaration of Independence, and of the expulsion of the British. Kept awake all night by the explosion of crackers and pistols, an- nouncing the advent of the day — dear to every true- born American, (that is, about one in every 1,000 of 22 SAIL FROM ENGLAND the population of the Union.) As Sam SHck says, it is a glorious sight to see twenty millions of free- men, and five millions of slaves, a celebrating the anniversary of their freedom, their enlightenment, and their contempt of the British ! All the militia of the State of New York, in all about 8,000 men, all volunteers, marched up Broadway. Most of them were foreigners, retaining as much as possible their national costumes. The Irish (Mitchell's Brigade) in green ; the Scotch in kilts ; the Austrian in the white uniform of their guards ; and so on. Some very fine horses amongst the cavalry. Three companies in the old revolutionary uniforms (tliree-cornered hats, yellow- knee breeches, and top boots) were immensely cheered. Every boy from five to twenty years of age thinks it his duty to supply himself with a gun, pistol, or crackers, on this day, which he discharges in the face or over the shoulder of passers-by. It is con- sidered a capital joke to tap a man on the shoulder, and when he turns round to discharge a pistol in his face, fire a gun over his shoulder, or pin a bunch of crackers to his coat-tails. The city of New York is very well supplied with water from the Croton liiver, by the Croton Aque- duct : the consequence of water being so plentiful is that every sleeping-room, in most of the newer houses, has a bath-room with hot or cold water, and shower- baths laid on, which is a great comfort, and an ex- ample we should do well to follow, when possible. Walked up the top of Broadway, three miles the extreme length, instead of seven, according to the inhabitants : went in the evening to the Broadway Theatre — stupid performance, — saw a ballet which TO WEST POINT, Avould have astonished the oldest habitues at the opera, and would have been thought rather remark- able, to say nothing of miserable, dancing — even in England, where we are certainly not very squeamish ; all this time, the figures supporting the candelabras, Hercules, Mercmy, &c., were swathed in gauze trow- sers and chemises ! Nothing like consistency. After remaining in New York for a few days, and consulting numerous authorities, both living and dead, as to the best route to take for the Prairies, and re- garding our chance of sport there, we found that we must relinquish our original plan of starting from St. Louis, as in consequence of the extraordinary tide of overland emigration to California, horses and mules, and all the other Prairie necessities, had more than quadrupled in price, to say nothing of the panic existing in that portion of the Western States from the continued ravages of the cholera; and we deter- mined to try the North West Prairies, and to reach the Mississippi by way of the Hudson River, Niagara, and the Lakes. The river boats on the Hudson and Connecticut rivers, are, I should imagine, as well suited to the navigation and to the habits of the people, as any that could be invented, much more so than any I have seen. The " Empire State,^^ the one we travelled in, was a new boat, and the finest in the States, 370 feet long by 40 feet wide, and berths for 700 people; two funnels, one on each side, very far forward ; four masts, with no sails, support- ing the cabins (which are all on deck) by iron ropes. All the machinery is on deck; and the shafts and beam, working up and down, give it the appearance of a gigantic spider. SAIL fROM ENGLAND The Hudson River boats (very different from those on the vrestern waters) are well commanded; the greatest method and regularity exist on boards and every word of command is regulated by a small bell. The "gentlemen" who manage the machinery, and feed the fire, far from being the " dirty, moist, un- pleasant'' -looking bodies that come dripping on deck in our vessels, are dandies, with black dress "pants," patent leather boots, and habiliments to match. They consume anthracite coal, which does not emit a tithe so much smoke. The Hudson boats are low pressure, the western ones high pressure. We ran up to West Point, fifty-two miles, against a ten-knot breeze, in three hours exactly. The scenery from New York to West Point is very fine — the Americans say finer than the Rhine ; but except that there is water in both, there is no similarity from which to form a comparison. The first twenty-five miles, the river narrows from five to two miles. It is a splendid deep stream, and rushes into the ocean without any of the deltas, or mud banks, which generally disfigure the mouths of rivers. Thinking of it now — having seen the Mississippi, the Ohio, Missouri, and the mighty rivers of South America — I am inclined to give it the palm over all but the Upper Mississippi. For the first ten miles from the town, the banks are studded with the snuggest little snow-white wooden cottages, with the brightest green verandahs and window shutters, nestled in the glens and nooks of a most luxuriant forest. (It is in one of these glens that the scene of Rip Van Winkle's dream is laid.) Above the Palisades (a rocky cliff from 300 to 500 feet high, extending about twenty miles, and clothed TO WEST POINT. 25 to the very edge of the stream with splendid trees), the river narrows to less than half a mile ; both banks are mountainous, and from 800 to 1,000 feet high. It is here that the Catskill mountains, a spur of the Alleghany range, cross the Hudson. The scenery about this spot reminded me of Loch Long, and slightly of the Lake of Thun. The splendid weather — such a clear sunshine as you hardly ever see in England — the fresh green of the grass (almost the first we had seen since landing), the varied hues of the dense foliage — fir, oaks, beech, &c., — the im- mense flocks of rooks, that I could almost fancy be- longed to the paternal rookery, — all contributed to render the afternoon, with its train of ideas, one of the most pleasurable I ever passed. 26 FROM WEST POINT CHAPTER 11. FROM WEST POINT TO NIAGARA AND TORONTO. We arrived at West Point at nine o'clock. Found the hotel crowded. Two in a bed is what the Ameri- cans call a double-bedded room ; and I heard an amusing story of one Yankee^ who arriving at a crowded hotel, was told by the landlord that there was only one place in the hotel to sleep in, and that in a double-bedded room, but, by-the-bye,^' said the landlord, " it is occupied by a Russian, and per- haps you would not hke to sleep with a Russian." " I guess I should," returned the American, "1 have slept with most of God's critturs, but never with a Russian — I swear I should like to sleep with a Russian." It being Sunday, we went to the church parade of the cadets. West Point is the Woolwich of America, and the Americans maintain it is the finest military school in the world. I believe it is very good, and very strict — no holidays, no pocket-money — would not suit affectionate mothers in England. Their light blue and grey uniform is not very handsome, and being no soldier myself, I could give no opinion as to the manoeuvres or appearance of the future de- fenders of the republic. Started for Albany; got out short of that, and landed at Hudson city, where we took the cars to Boston, passing through some fine rocky country, enough cleared to make it more TO NIA.GARA AND TOEONTO. 27 picturesque, and crossing some magnificent looking salmon-rivers, thougli I could not find out on inquiry that there were any salmon in tliem. Went to the Revere House, said to be the best kept hotel in the Union. It was full of very fierce-looking, moustached and bearded militia. New Yorkers, come to spend the 4th July with their brothers in arms at Boston. I expect Bacchus was more honoured than mighty Mars by the meeting of two such distinguished corps ; and I would back the Boston and New York warriors to consume more liquor in a given time than any band of invincibles of these degenerate days. It is very much the fashion for Citizens, Freemasons, Odd Fellows, Freemen, and other corporate bodies, to go and spend a week or so with similar societies in the neighbouring cities : it is a practice attended, I think, with some few advantages; it tends to keep up a kindly feeling of good-will between the cities, and is a godsend to all the hotels and oyster-shops. Boston is a clean, neat, puritanical-looking little town, where it is forbidden to smoke in the streets, drink, or sell liquors — laws which it would break the hearts of the Pilgrim Fathers, their founders, to see more honoured in the breach than in the observance. It is curious that in the "land of liberty " so many absurd and tyrannical old laws should be retained, and still not be treated as dead letters. Walking in Boston, par excellence the freest city in the Union, it is very startling to be brought up by a policeman, and told to put your cigar out. Many of the social and moral oiFences which with us are either cases of pecuniary recompense, or are not at all recognised by the law, are in Boston liable to be treated with the 28 J?ROM WEST POINT greatest severity. Swearit?g, drinking, smoking in the streets, are all finable offences ; and the punish- ment for depriving a citizen of his worldly goods by forgery is not half so severe as that for depriving him of the affection of his wife, which is, or used to be, death. Boston was one of the earliest cities founded by the Pilgrim Fathers of the seventeenth century, and it still in some measure retains the impress of their stern, unworldly character. I think it must be con- fessed that our admiration for the fortitude and lofty principle of these men, who, to secure a liberty of conscience which they professed not to be able to enjoy in England, left all they had, or at least all they could not carry with them, and crossed the great Atlantic to find a refuge on the bleak shores of New England, sustains no inconsiderable diminution, when we consider that, so far from displaying any of that toleration which they demanded for themselves towards those who differed from them in any whit on religious matters, they would not admit any to the rights or advantages of citizenship who had not been formally baptized into their communion ; and more- over, their cruelty and persecution exercised against the Quakero and some other dissenting bodies, was of the most unmitigated nature, far exceeding any experienced by the martyred (?) nonconformists of Mr. Macaulay. It is strange that in all arguments and discussions on religious subjects, where men are supposed to be animated by the purest motives, and consequently every allowance should be made for the strength of their convictions, charity, that essence of all Christian virtues, the " bond of perfectness," is TO NIAGARA AND TORONTO. 29 invariably dropped over at the beginning, as an utterly useless appendage ; and whether we look at the haughty exacting persecution of the Roman Catholic prelates of Queen Mary, or the equally bitter persecutions of the canting Puritans of Crom- well, glorying in that pride that aped humility, we find them all animated by the same spirit of utterly uncharitable intolerance towards those who diftered from them. The atmosphere at Boston is said to be the clearest and driest in the world. The alternations of heat and cold are sudden and very trying. I have fre- quently known the thermometer fall from 80 to 40 in less than half-an-hour, and very likely this depres- sion in the atmosphere is accompanied by a piercing wind. The consiequence is that pulmonary complaints are common and very fatal ; more people are said to die annually of consumption at Boston, than of yellow fever at New Orleans. The Boston ladies are excessively pretty and fas- cinating, and rather more embonpoint than their New York rivals, and you often meet with a complexion so transparent as to be quite startling. From the intense cold of the winter they very seldom leave their houses (which are heated with stoves) for months together ; and to this circumstance I imagine a good deal of their delicate interesting appearance is to be attributed. There is a great difference be- tween the Boston and New York ladies. The former are inchned to be blue — attend anatomical lectures and dissections — prefer a new theory of geology or religion to a new fashion of dress or crochet-work. The New York ladies, on the contrary, have no 30 FROM WEST POINT tendency to blue-stockingism, and quite dread the character, wishing to be supposed capable of no more serious thought than that involved in the last new- polka or the last wedding, and professing that there is nothing worth living for but balls and operas ! The fair denjzens of both cities, however, agree to dress in very good taste and style, and make the most of that fleeting beauty which is so fascinating for a time, but which so soon passes away. They adopt the French fashions completely, but they Ameri- canize them rather too much, sometimes giving them the appearance of being overdressed — a mistake a French woman never makes — and the habit of wear- ing short sleeves (or rather no sleeves at all, but only a shoulder strap,) at an early dinner, at two o'clock, is very unbecoming. Directly a young lady leaves school at fourteen or fifteen, she " comes out,'' and is then a responsible agent, giving and accepting invitations to balls, &c. entirely on her own hook, without consulting mamma, who is only employed to find the ready. It is con- sidered quite correct for a nice young man to call and take a youug lady ou!: for a walk, or to the theatre, or to a ball, without any chaperone. The young ladies marry very young, often at fifteen or sixteen, and fade almost before they bloom ; at three- and-twenty they look three-and-thirty, and get very spare. A lady however handsome, once married, loses her place in society ; very little attention is paid her ; all is immediately transferred to the unmarried " angels however it is not so much the case as it used to be. One charming old lady of about sixty told me that I was the only young man who had TO NIAGARA AND TORONTO. 31 honoured her with teu minutes' conversation for the last ten years. The society of Boston is quite literary ; as one young lady told me afterwards in the West country, — " In Boston we have an aristocracy of soul ; in New York they have an aristocracy of money; in England of blood : — which is most worthy of an enlightened country?" The same young lady (a sraart one and no mistake) told me that Boston was the only place in the world where "the feast of reason could be enjoyed in perfection, combined with the proper amount of flow of soul.^' In New York and Paris, for instance, you can enjoy the flow of soul — in Cambridge or Oxford the feast of reason, (is that all you know of it ? thought I,) but Boston is the only true combination of the two. The young ladies in the Northern and Eastern States have an extra- ordinary fashion of visiting every corpse within reach. A gentleman I met, who resided at Boston, told me that his father-in-law had died and been laid out, when the next day he was surprised at the arrival of ten or fifteen young ladies at the door, and on asking their business they said : " Oh ! they only wanted to see the body and when they had gone many more came. The American ladies are generally possessed with the idea of the great robustness of the English, and imagine that almost every Englishwoman hunts, shoots, and plays at skittles, a striking contrast to their own fair dames, who are occasionally so die-away, and lackadaisical that they would not walk a hundred yards to pull their husbands or lovers -out of the water. A case of the kind really occurred at Boston quite lately, when a lady -like Pelham stood still and screamed for 33 FROM WEST POINT assistance, when with the slightest exertion she might have saved her husband a very lengthened immersion. There being no Established Church in America dissent and unbelief flourish in their rankest growth, and Boston takes the lead in the manufacture of new religions. Owing to the influence Dr. Channing exercised at Boston, the Unitarians compose a large majority; but as in arithmetic unity is next to no- thing, so in religion the belief of a Unitarian is very close to no belief at all. A new sect of Unitarians, calling themselves Transccndentalists, and embracing a majority of Unitarians, are nothing more nor less than Free-thinkers. They find it very easy, after reasoning themselves with a great deal of labour into a disbelief in the existence of Two Persons of the Trinity, to extend the doubt to the Third Person. The ease with which the Abbe Sidyes promulgated fresh constitutions is a joke to the celerity with which the popular preachers of Boston propound fresh religions. They are quite above following in the old paths of Christianity, and unless they have some new idea for their audience every Sunday their popularity would soon be on the wane. The Roman Catholic is the next most powerful sect — then Baptists, &c., the Episcopalian coming fifth or sixth. In America, the Baptist, Unitarian, and Episcopalian congregations appear to be com- posed equally of all classes of the community, and the preponderance of any one class is not remarked. I am quite convinced from what I have seen in America that an Established Church is the only, certainly the best means, of ensuring the proper amount of order and decency in the conduct of Divine service. TO NIAGARA AND TORONTO. 33 The length to Avhich this religious excitement some- times carries its professors is most absurd. Two years ago^ a Mr. Millar appeared, Avho said that he had had a revelation that the end of the world was at handj and that on the 15th of the next month, the pick of the faithful would be taken up into heaven : many believed, and supplied themselves with ascension clothes, and settled their worldly affairs, though it is whispered that some lent the money they had raised by the sale of their goods, at a good per cent, per annum. The young ladies had their ascension clothes made long, that their flight might be conducted with all due regard to decorum, and that they might not display too much ankle to the miserable sinners upon earth. One young lady had her sofa placed near the window, to avoid the chance of deranging her hair, by going through the ceiling. At length the 15th arrived, the faithful waited in their ascension clothes for the glorious moment, till their regular tea hour, when getting tired and hungry, it was determined to ask an explanation of Mr. Millar, when, alas ! it was discovered that he had departed — not into heaven, but by the railroad, with a lady, who, being fully convinced that her husband and family were going to ascend on that day, and feeling herself not quite worthy such a sudden elevation, thought it no wrong to take unto herself a fresh spouse. I left my letters of introduction, and walked to Bunker's-hill monument, a hideous concern. I also went to see the scene of Dr. Parkman^s murder. Br.Webster must have been a "hard case;'' he put the body of the murdered man, in two pieces, in two c 34 MOM WEST POINT wells, -uiider his lecture table, and lectured over it to his pupils twice ! His extraordinary composure before and during his execution was owing to the effect of opium, of which he took large quantities ; he was executed without the knowledge of his wife and daughters, who did not hear of it till all was over, although they knew the execution was to take place. I think it was a humane proceeding, as the agony of watching the clock, and knowing that a husband and father is being strangled must be greater than the mere shock of hearing that he is dead. He was a hardened villain, and but for his position in society, and the interest exerted in his favour, he would have been hung months before. We heard to-day of the death of General Taylor, — old Zack, as he was familiarly called. He was an illiterate rough old soldier, and but for the battle of Buena Vista (when he was in reality beaten, his troops running like riggers, when they were inter- cepted by the Mexicans, who had got to their rear, and being ca.ught in a cul-de-sac Mvere obliged to fight, whether they would or no, and were lucky enough to hold their own) he would never have been Pre- sident. It is a well-known political axiom in the States, that they never elect a first-rate man to the presidency ; they prefer a third or fourth-rate man ; and the last in the field and least known generally has the best chance of election. Neither Tyler nor Polk had been heard of, till a month before they were elected ; one beat Clay and the other beat Webster, the two cleverest men in the country. We went to Nahant, a very remarkable promon- tory of rock that juts out into the ocean, being nearly TO NIAGARA AND TORONTO. 35 an island — quite so I believe at higli water — and resembles the Rock of Gibraltar on a small scale. It is the favourite resort of the sea serpent, and it would be treason to doubt its existence at Nahant. I never did. We took the train to Springfield and on to Albany, passing through the Shaker village. The Shakers are a sect, I believe, peculiar to this side of the At- lantic, somewhat resembling the Plymouth brethren ; believing that the earth is too thickly populated, (they ought to pay a visit to the Western Wilder- ness,) they take a vow of perpetual celibacy, and reside en socialiste, having everything in common ; their worship consists in dancing in a meeting-house and chaunting the identical air that had such a fatal eflPect on the aged cow ; they dress themselves in a blue smock frock, fastened round the neck. Their dress and houses are remarkable for their excessive cleanliness, and altogether they are a harmless set. It is whispered by those who know them best, that their rules are more strict to the uninitiated than to the true believer, and that when once admitted more than half the bitterness is past. However, Honi soit qui mal y pense. Their principle is, that there is sin enough in the world to keep it peopled without the true believers troubling themselves about such trifling matters ! Ever since the days of Mrs. Hutchinson in 1635, when the State of Massachusetts was withina n ace of dissolution on the subject of the social superiority of the female over the male portion of creation, and the obligation of the community to respect the votes of the former as much as those of the latter, the ladies c 2 36 FROM WEST POINT of the North Eastern States have been continually agitating in the same direction, and various public and domestic fracas have been the result. Whilst I was at Springfield the walls were placarded with bills announcing that a public meeting of the ladies would be held that evening, to take into considera- tion " the rights of women in general, but their matri- monial rights in particular !" The former consist in the right of voting and of holding seats in the legis- lative assembly ; the latter tends to the legalization of a privilege which most of them exercise, viz. of keeping exclusive possession of the money bag, and of usurping the pettiloons at pleasure. What motions Avere made and what resolutions adopted I never heard ; perhaps the gallant though abortive attempt of Mrs. Bloomer was the result of that very meeting. From Albany we proceeded through Troy to Sara- toga, the Cheltenham of America. The Troy on the Hudson is the new one, I imagine, which ^Eneas pre- dicted would arise in a foreign land, and exceed the Scamandrian Troy in splendour. As the actual exist- ence of old Troy is absolutely doubted by learned men, and as the American Troy certainly does exist, and is built of brick, and has glaps windows, and moreover, has a railroad running down the main street, I have no doubt if ^Eneas could arise, he would be content with the completion of his ancient prophecy. I had no opportunity of judging of the beauty of the modern Trojan ladies, whether it equals that of " Troy's proud dames, whose dresses sweep the ground," that Homer mentions. TO NIAGARA AND TORONTO. 37 Ancient Troy was noted for wooden (rocking ?) horses. Modern Troy is famous for its wooden rocking-chairs ! Sic transit, &c. Saratoga, the Chel- tenham of America, — though from the vulgarisms one sees perpetrated there it reminded one more of Rams- gate in August, — is the paradise of snobs, and is, without exception, the most odious place I ever spent twenty-four hours in. It is famous for some mineral springs, and crowded during three or four months of the year with New York and Boston shop-keepers, and snobs, dressed within an inch of their lives ; women in excess of Parisian fashion with short sleeves, men in extra ISIewmarket and bad Parisian style, crammed to the number of three and four thousand in five or six large hotels, breakfasting together, dining together at two o'clock, smirking and flirting the whole time. The men smoke all day, swinging in rocking chairs, and squirting to- bacco juice between their feet, or over their neigh- bours' shoulders. The ladies promenade before them, talking loud, and making eyes — altogether it is the most forced and least natural state of society I ever saw. It is the quintessence of snobbism, beating Ramsgate or Margate in August. In the latter places the cockneys have no pretence whatever, but eat shrimps out of strawberry pottles, and bury themselves in the sand, because they really enjoy it, and don't care sixpence what other people think of them ', whereas at Saratoga, if a lady were to go to dinner in a morning dress, or a gentleman walk about in a shooting jacket, public opinion would be so strong against them, that their friends, if they had any, would have to cut them. The hurry of public 38 FKOM WEST POINT meals (which I have before, and in common with every Enghsh traveller, already commented upon) was more remarkable here amongst a people who had no object whatever to hurry for, and whose only pursuit was pleasure, than even at New York. The ladies, being the weaker party, are seated first, when at the ringing of a small bell, the men, to the num- ber of three or four hundred, rush in, pushing and scrambling for seats; those who are not active or energetic CDOUgh to secure them having to wait for the next dinner. When the tables are filled, and the work of carnage has commenced, you see unfortunate individuals, unwilling to leave the scene of their defeat, walking round the tables, as the French cuirassiers did the British squares at Waterloo, try- ing to discover a vulnerable point where to effect an entrance. It was here we saw the paper containing the an- nouncement of Sir Eobert Peel's death; it seemed to create some sensation ; but the other, and only other portion of European news, the account of Miss Lawrence's presentation at court, and dress on the occasion, created much more. The death of Sir Eobert Peel and old Zack, each the man in whom their country placed the greatest confidence, and at whose death alarmists predicted frightful calamities, so close together, is somewhat singular. In England Sir Robert Peel's death was to be immediately fol- lowed by a Protectionist ministry, and consequent resumption of protective policy, manufacturing riots, and the spread of republican principles. In America General Taylor was said to be the only man who could heal or even cement the breach between north TO NIAGARA AND TORONTO. 39 and south, on the extension of the Slavery question ; and at his death a separation of the Union was deemed inevitable. Hitherto the croakers have been disappointed. America, since the death of " Old Z'dck/' and during the Presidency of Mr. Fillimore, has passed through by far the most dangerous agitations she has known since the Revolution ; and far from losing anything by the death of the late President, they have discovered that it was a most fortunate thing for the country, for that his obstinacy (in his lifetime they called it, his admirable firmness) would have prevented all those compromises by which alone his successor lias been enabled to reconcile the two parties. We proceeded by rail to Shenectady, crossing a long, rickety, wooden bridge, over the junction of the Hudson and the Mohawk rivers : — last week a train with sixty passengers fell through ; most of them were drowned : the waters very much swollen, and rushing along at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, did not add to the pleasure of the transit. From Shenectady we proceeded by rail, along the banks of the Mohawk, to a town called Palestine. The Mohawk is a very fine, rapid^ rocky river, totally unnavigable even for small boats, except at Ferry^s. It was much swollen, and had overflowed its banks for a mile on either side, and done incalculable damage to the maize and corn, of which immense quantities are grown in the valley of the Mohawk. The Mohawks, once the most powerful of all the Red men, are now totally extinct. In the railway car I fell into conversation with a Boston shop-keeper : he talked very loud about lite- 40 rROM WEST POINT rature in general, and at last, bringing out a small well -thumbed " Burke on the Sublime," asked if it was not a splendid book, and how proud the English ought to be of the Elizabethan age, that produced in the same era a Bacon and a Burke : — his reading had done him some good anyhow ! From Palestine we crossed the foaming flood, curling like the mane of a chestnut steed, to Canajahira, (all the Indian names are pretty^) and so on to Sharon, a much prettier place than Saratoga, and famous for sulphur springs, which are good for scorbutic complaints. The water tastes like bad eggs and gun-washings, and the smell of it can be winded a mile off, which circumstance gave rise to the remark of an elderly gentleman I met at Niagara, that when he went to Sharon, he smelt brimstone, but when he got his bill at the hotel, he smelt hell. The latter is a very common expression with Americans when anything happens they do not like, and is not to be judged of, as such a remark would be in England : I once, but only once, heard it proceed from the honeyed lips of a fair and lovely young lady, but then it was lisped so softly and so prettily, that the most particular could hardly have had heart to object to it. We walked to visit Cherry Valley, distant about nine miles, and from whence there is a beautiful view of the valley of the IMohawk, • and part of the Hudson. The immense masses of wood, and the tiny appearance of the clearings in this, the most thickly populated state of the Union, impressed me with the idea of the millions the con- tinent is destined to support, more than anything else I saw in America. We started back again in the *rO NIAGARA AND TORONTO. 41 morning, through Canajahira and PalestinGj to Utica, the birth-place of Cato, or rather, I beheve, the scene of his death. If the great stoic could rise from his grave and visit the neighbouring abodes of fashion and luxury, Saratoga and Sharon, I "calculate^^ he would think an " Oppian law'^ more necessary now than even when Hannibal was approaching the gates of Rome. The town of Utica is built on rock-salt, which the river has washed away till it has endangered the safety of the town, many buildings having already fallen. We took a carriage and pair, to visit Trenton Falls, distant fifteen miles ; they are indeed some of the finest I ever saw, and are second only to Niagara, in the world. A river, with a bulk of water equal to the Thames at Richmond, rushes through a gorge or rather trough of rock, varying from two to three hundred feet high, for a distance of about three quarters of a mile ; during its passage through this gorge, there are three falls, each about fifty feet high: in many places the river is compressed into a trough not ten feet broad, but of unfathomable depth. The river was in a heavy flood, and of a deep porter colour, (heavy wet !) The regular pathway along the side of the gulley was covered by the flood ; and we scrambled along the face of the bank, or cliff above it ; no man had ever been there before, and I should advise him never to try it, for the water rushes through the gorge beneath at such a pace, that the strongest head would get giddy with one glimpse, and our thoughts were so engrossed with the pleasant idea of slipping, that any admiration of the scene was impossible. It was the excitement of c3 42 FEOM WEST POINT the moment which led us to attempt it, and we would willingly have returned if we could ; but once started, we had no choice but to go on, or over ; we were not sorry to get to the end of it, and I don't think we should be easily induced to attempt such an exploit again. On by train next morning to Buffalo, the most rising city in the north-west. All the corn that is exported from America has to pursue one of three routes ; either down the Mississippi, to New Orleans ; through the lakes to Buffalo, thence by canal to New York ; or through Buffalo, by the Welland Canal, to Lake Ontario, and thence down the St. Lawrence. Thus, at least one half of the corn shipped to Europe passes through Buffalo. It is an unhealthy town, but not badly laid out, and the quickness of its growth must cover all defects. We steamed from thence on Lake Erie, down to Niagara, (a bad imitation of the Indian name, Oniawgara, the Thunder of Waters ;) we took up our quarters on the Canada side, immediately facing the American, and nearly facing the Horse- shoe Fall. People are gene- rally disappointed with the first sight of Niagara. I don't think I was — in some respects it was quite what I had expected, and still quite different. To attempt a description of this oft-described wonder, would be superfluous j indeed aU. description fails to give the slightest idea of the grandeur of the Horse-shoe Falls ; nothing but actual seeing and hearing Can impress upon the imagination the mys- terious bewilderment caused by the thundering roar of the enormous body of falling water. As I heard a young lady say, " Well now ! that does beat all TO NIAGARA. AND TORONTO. 43 jumps, and no mistake \ " The thunder of the falls, that with a favourable wind is heard twenty miles off, the clouds of spray, looking at a distance like some enormous phantom, illuminated by rainbows of the gaudiest hues, and rising like an eternal incense to its great Creator, — the pure white of the foam clearly visible through the smooth upper layer of dazzling green, as it hurries down a mile of rapids, and then, gradually abating its speed, rolls majes- tically over a fall of 150 feet, the milky (literally) whiteness of the river at the bottom, as it seethes round the huge cauldron, and then flows slowly away, as if stunned and confused, and glad to escape, gradually quickening its pace, as if with recovered animation, — form a tout ensemble that no imagination can picture, and no description exaggerate. It is as impossible to describe Niagara as to describe an avalanche, or anything else where you have to give the idea of noise and motion besides its other glories. The enormous bulk of water and width of the falls, and the large scale of the surrounding scenery, detract at first sight from the apparent height and size altogether, but it grows upon one, and after being absent from it for a few days and returning to it, you realize its magnitude, and it becomes quite fasci- nating. Shakspeare^s splendid description of Dover Cliff continually recurred to my mind — " How fearful And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low 1 The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce as gross as beetles," &c. I am never giddy on precipices, and even whilst chamois hunting in Switzerland, where I had to cross 44 MOM WEST POINT the most ticklish passes, never felt disposed to try an aeronautic leap j but sitting with my feet dangling from the Table E-ock, and gazing into the abyss below, 1 more than once, like Lear, felt, — " I'll look no more, Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight Topple down headlong." We took a guide, and went under the Falls two hundred and fifty yards, and reached Termination Rock, the Ultima Thule, which no living wight ever has or will pass. Going under the Falls is a foolish undertaking, as you get soaked, and cold, and stunned, and see nothing whatever, having to move with your face to the cliff and back to the Falls, on account of the spray and whirlwind. It is not in the least dangerous, and, after Trenton, was mere child's-play. Votive offerings of pipes and tomahawks, left by the Indians for the Manitou, or Great Spirit of the Falls, are frequently found in the neighbourhood. The Americans are a practical people, and have small respect for the genius loci of any place — Niagara amongst the number. The river above the Falls on the American side is studded with all kinds of fac- tories, which are daily increasing. It would seem as though they were acting on Sam Slick's hint, given some years back : " The whole world might be stumped to produce such a factory stand as Niagara. What a sight of machinery it would hold ! " The idea of the Yankee is not so bad, who, on seeing Vesuvius, said, " Well now ! it is a tarnation big fire, and no mistake ; but I opine we have a small water- power that would souse it in rather less than no time — and that's a fact ! " TO NIAGARA AND TORONTO. 45 The stranger need never be ennuyed for want of society here ; for at the hotels as elsewhere, there is a public room Avhere the ladies sit, " got up in their gayest attire, and which any gentleman is allowed to enter. By sitting next her at table, I became acquainted with a young lady from Boston, about fourteen, but with the manners of a matron of forty : she told me the Bosting ladies were very literary, and that she herself knew mathematics, Greek, and several of the Latin languages. Strictly speaking, she was right, if she meant languages derived from the Latin ; but I don't fancy she in- tended it in that sense. During my fortnight's stay at Niagara, we drove one Sunday to hear service at the village of Tuscarora Indians, eight miles distant. They Avere a gipsy- looking lot of scoundrels, especially the men. The squaws retained more of their national costume and appearance than the men, and behaved very decently during service. The men slept and snored the whole time. They lead a quiet kind of life ; the men culti- vating a little corn, and the women making mocassins and other curiosities, which command a ready sale. The clergyman preached in English, every sentence being translated by an old Indian ; but as the whole discourse was made up of prophecies and abstruse quotations, without any practical advice or direction, I think the amount understood must have been very small. We visited Toronto, per steam — a remarkably well laid-out town — broad streets, and good shops — rather larger than Buffalo. The original Indian name of Toronto was changed some years back for 46 FROM "WEST POINT the less euphonious one of Little York ; but it has since become the general opinion that the Indian name was the prettiest, and it is now universally adopted. Lord Elgin has made it the seat of govern- ment instead of Montreal, where he was treated so badly. He is not popular : I expect he is too much of a gentleman for his Houses of Assembly, and he is rather friendly to the French annexationists. For some days before the opening of the House of Representatives at Montreal, after passing the bill for the indemnification of the rioters in the last revolt, not an egg was to be bought for love or money — all bought up to pelt him on his return. During a fortnight^s residence at Niagara, one Yankee steamer was blown up on Lake Erie, with a hundred and fifty passengers ; every soul lost but two, who escaped by diving under the sinking mass of passengers, (who stuck to each other like frog- spawn,) and swimming half a mile to shore. One of the two had lost mother, wife, and five children, so had to begin life quite afresh. Another steamer burst her boiler, killing eight outright ; other ten were drowned, and thirty were boiled, scalded, and skinned, in such a way they were not expected to survive. Another steamer ran on a rock in Nia- gara river, and sank in twenty feet water; her passengers were saved by another steamer. Tre- mendous fires, that consume three or four square miles of buildings, as at Philadelphia, three or four hundred lives, or three or four millions sterling, are mentioned quite as matters of fact in American papers, and do not call for any larger type or " latest par- ticulars from the editor. Inquests on persona TO NIAGARA AND TORONTO. 47 killed by accident, (even when notoriously caused by gross neglect,) or the responsibility of the directors and proprietors of the public means of conveyance, are quite unknown. These accidents I have men- tioned were predicted last year at Buffalo : the season had been bad, and the proprietors of the vessels said they could not afford to examine and replace the worn-out boilers. A fellow-traveller told me that a few days before, on leaving the steamer, he had missed some portion of his luggage, and on giving the porter a little of his mind for his carelessness, he raised his voice rather higher than was necessary, for he heard a moustached American say to a milk- and-water-looking young lady, ''Ain't you alarmed, miss, at the roar of the British lion?" "No, sir," said she, looking hard at my friend, " for I hear that when the animal is the most afraid, he roars the loudest." Smart young woman, that, sir — make a good wife, I should think. 48 mOM TORONTO CHAPTER in. FROM TORONTO TO LA POINTE. From Toronto we went by sea to Hamilton^ on Lake Ontario, a nice, clean, well laid-out town, and thence in tlie evening proceeded by stage to Wood- stock. Woodstock is by far the most agreeable part of Upper Canada that I saw, and nearly all the fami- lies of any standing reside in the neighbourhood. The gentry keep up the old English fashions and games — cricket, steeple-chases, &c. ; but as they also imitate old country tastes by giving grand din- ners, and drinking champagne, they frequently find the pace too good for them, and have to remove to some less jovial neighbourhood. After going out shooting, — a very green trick to perform in Canada during the summer, — and having a narrow escape of being devoured by mosquitoes, my head and hands swelling up to a monstrous size, I went on to London, the capital of the western division of Upper Canada. It is situated on the banks of the Thames, and not very far from Oxford, which is on the Isis. The road was excessively pretty, and reminded me much of some of the English counties. The country is cleared for some distance back on both sides of the road from Hamilton to London. There are three ways of clearing in Canada, all equally disfiguring to the country ; the TO LA POINTE. 49 first is by setting fire to the forest, and trusting to Providence to extinguish it, — (these fires frequently extend two or three hundred miles) ; — the second method is by "ringing/' or dividing the bark all round, which causes the trees to die immediately ; the third is by cutting them down altogether : this latter operation is performed in winter, when the snow is four or five feet deep, and a stump of a corresponding height is left. I don't know which of these three methods gives the country the most desolate and untidy appear- ance, — whether the scorched and blackened tracks that have been burned— the spectral forests that have been ringed^ which, leafless, but with no other signs of decay, make one almost fancy they had been blasted by the breath of some destroying angel, rather than by the hand of man — or the four or five feet high stumps of those that had been cut down. There is hardly a green field in Upper Canada that has not numbers of the latter. London, like all the towns in this part of the country, is a clean wholesome looking town, chiefly built of wood, and not very progressive. A regiment of infantry and a battery of artillery are stationed here, and a short time before my visit rather an absurd incident occurred. Lord Elgin being expected, the radicals had made a triumphal arch to welcome him at the entrance of the town ; but whilst they went forward a few miles to meet him and escort him in triumph, the opposite party pulled it down, so that the Governor General drove over instead of under it. The commanding officer of artillery had been requested to defend the arch, but not being a very 50 FROM TORONTO keen politician, or perhaps having rather a tendency the other way, he did not feel inclined to comply. After remaining a night at Loudon, I started in a gig for Port Talbot on Lake Erie, and, more from good luck thau good management, I arrived there about the middle of the day. The roads throughout the whole distance were " corduroy," or planked — the latter, if at all out of repair, is quite as dis- agreeable as the former, and my horse running away twice, I was pretty nearly jolted to pieces. (Corduroy roads are formed by entire trunks of trees laid transversely across the track.) It is a curious fact, that neither in Canada nor in America do you meet with cream, except now and then perhaps at a private house in the former country, but I never once met with it in America ; the only place of public entertainment where cream was offered to me was during this trip to Port Talbot, at a small way-side inn. The residence of Colonel Talbot, about four miles from the port of that name, is by far the most beautifully situated of any house I saw in Canada. It is placed on a cliff some hundred feet high, overhanging Lake Erie : from the drawing- room windows the view stretches as far as the eye can reach over the lake, and from the dining-room you gaze on the dark, silent, seemingly interminable forest. Altogether it is as delightful a situation for a summer residence as North America can produce. Lake Erie is of a very light blue colour, the con- sequence of the white sand that forms its bottom, and its extreme shallowness, the depth not averaging more than seventy feet. From this same cause, the navigation of Lake Erie is very dangerous and diffi- TO LA POINTE. 81 cult, as, besides the shoals, &c., half an hour's sharp breeze raises the most disagreeable, short, rough sea imaginable. The lakes differ very much in depth. Lake Erie is not more than one-thirteenth part of the depth of Lake Michigan : the average depths, as ascertained by a recent American survey, are, Ontario 270 feet, Erie 70 feet, Huron 600 feet, Michigan 1000 feet, and Superior 900 feet. I remained for some time watching a pair of ospreys fishing; it was curious to see how instantaneously as one came to a point the other joined company. Their sense of vision must be very acute, judging from the immense height at which they soared, and the smallness of the fish that every now and then they brought out of the lake. The osprey is very common on all the lakes, and is an exceedingly handsome bird, some sizes larger, as far as I could judge, than our now almost extinct English species. After a most enjoyable visit of two days to the hospitable owner of Port Talbot, from whom I learned more about farming in Canada than I should have done from most men in a month, I returned to London, and thence by stage to Woodstock and Hamilton, where I took ship to Toronto : there was a very heavy sea running, and everybody was more or less indisposed. In accordance with our plan of going to the Mississippi, via Lakes Superior and Huron, and making an attempt to reach the Buffalo in that direction, we started, in company with about forty persons, not all belonging to our party, in two stages, for Lake Simcoe. The road lay through the district of Richmond, by far the most valuable and 52 FROM TOUONTO most highly cultivated land in Upper Canada. We embarked on board a pigmy steamer at the head of a small creek which ran up about four miles from the lake. The creek was only just wide enough to allow of the vessel's passings and the passage meandered in so remarkable a degree that the captain was afraid to use the steam, consequently the crew pushed the vessel on with long poles. Such a miserable, aguish, foetid swamp I never saw. It is said to swarm with large water-snakes, and is so quaking that even the ripple caused by the passing vessel made it tremble for several hundred yards in every direction . Lake Simcoe is a very pretty little lake, of about twenty or thirty miles in length, and full of islands grouped in very picturesque style, said to be almost equal in beauty to the " Thousand Islands on the St. Law- rence. We disembarked about 9 p.m. at a wooden village called Holland's Landing, where we expected to find conveyances to take us across the isthmus of twenty miles that separated us from Lake Huron ; however, as by 10 o'clock none had made their ap- pearance, I made a start with six others to walk to Sturgeon Bay. The night was so pitch-dark, and the road so infamously bad, that, at the end of the first six miles, five of the number shut up, and stopped at a small log-hut till some vehicle should arrive ; but I and another, not relishing the notion of sitting with wet feet and pantaloons for an unlimited period, determined to push on. My companion was a very cheery, agreeable fellow, and, from having resided some years in Canada, had some knowledge of forest walking and of keeping to the same track, which by great good luck we did. We scrambled on for several TO LA POINTE. 53 hours along a narrow track, with holes large enough to bury one : there was no moon ; the stars gave us very little assistance, and we were beginning to get rather tired, and our feet rather cold, from having walked so long in the water. We arrived at Sturgeon Bay about 4 A.M., to the great wonder and astonishment of the captain and crew, who could scarcely understand our having found our way during the night. About 8 A.M. the waggon containing our fellow-passengers arrived; they had passed a miserable night, nine hours going twenty miles, with four horses, and ruts that nearly dislo- cated every bone in their bodies. During the day we got under weigh for the Saulte de Ste. Marie, distant 4C0 miles due west. Our course lay through Georgian Bay, which is the northern end of Lake Huron, or rather separated from it by Manitoulin Island. We called at several places to pick up pas- sengers for the Saulte, or Sou, as the Yankees call it. Manitoulin is the residence of the west tribes of Canadian Indians, who have parted with the land reserved to them by treaty. At present, Ojibbeways, Chippewas, Potowahannies, and Senecas, to the num- ber of four or five thousand, are located there; they pass a miserable half-starved existence, living on what small suppHes of game or fish they can pick up for themselves, but trusting chiefly to the generosity of Government. They are a dirty, lazy, gipsy-look- ing lot of scoundrels, much given to drinking and smoking, and to the beating of their squaws and dogs ; and though every facility is afforded them for acquiring a certain knowledge of farming, and they are purposely allowed to feel the pangs of hunger ; yet 54 FROM TOEONTO the old leaven is so strong in them, that they actually prefer to starve rather than work. 1 heard a stoiy in America, but v^'hether it is old or new I don't remember, in illustration of how fre- quently Missionary labours are thrown away. An Episcopalian missionary who came to reside amongst the Indians, not being sufficiently acquainted with their language, was forced to employ an interpreter, who explained each sentence of his discourse as he proceeded. His subject was the Fall of Man, and he said that as a punishment for his disobedience, God had condemned man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. When this sentence was inter- preted to the Indians, they seemed much pleased, and grunted out their acquiescence, which rather surprised the Clergyman, as he fancied that any doctrine of that nature would be quite as much at variance with their feelings as he knew it to be with their actions. On inquiring the reason of this strange behaviour, the interpreter told him that he knew it was of no use telling the men that they should labour, for that they would pay no attention to it, and that therefore he had told them instead, that God was very much displeased, and had condemned the squaws to hoe corn ! It was this sentiment, so very congenial to their ideas, which gave rise to their expressions of assent. The scenery of Georgia Bay is very beautiful ; there are no less than 36,000 islands, varying in length from five feet to fifty miles, dispersed over it, between its extreme ends; for the most part they are beautifully wooded and rocky, with the water of great depth between them, of the deepest blue. TO LA POINTE. 55 The passage is frequently so intricate and laby- rinthine that you cannot see your course for more than three hundred yards before you^ and you are continually conjecturing how you are to get on, and expecting that this time, at least, you will run ashore or be obliged to back astern, when almost as the vessel touches the trees which fringe the water's edge, some unexpected little passage opens, barely wide enough to admit the steamer, and you shoot through into some other miniature lake, only to experience the same amount of surprise in getting out of it. I don't doubt it is the finest fresh-water archipelago in the world. The storms on Lake Huron are very severe and dangerous, and wrecks frequently occur. We arrived at the Saulte towards evening, and on landing found a very comfortable hotel on the Ame- rican side. The Riviere de Ste. Marie, which is some thirty or forty miles long, connects Lakes Superior and Huron ; the first half mile is a rapid, hence the name. There is a very good town, considering it is an infant, on the American side, but nothing but a Hudson's Bay trading fort on the Canadian. The Saulte is, generally speaking, a remarkably dull place, depending entirely, both for its ready money and its visitors, on the copper mines of Lake Superior ; but during our visit it was gayer than had ever been remembered even by the " oldest inhabitant," who had been there nearly three years ! The reason was^ that the Chippewas had some months before occupied some copper mines on the Canadian shore, expelling the miners and committing other improprieties, under the plea that they had not been paid for the land. In consequence of these insubordinate pro- 56 FROM TOUONTO ceedings^ a company of Rifles was sent up at a moment's notice from Toronto^ late in the fall of the year, and, after escaping deaths by water, and frost, and snow, a great deal more by luck than manage- ment, they arrived at the Saulte in the course of the winter. This of course added to the gaiety of the place ; and our steamer bringing up thirty rattling tourists and speculators besides, the small town saw such days as I don't think it will see again in a hurry. The Americans always have a company of infantry at the Saulte, consequently there were two small armies, one occupying the Canadian, the other the American side, and as these hostile armies had to be supplied with corn and meat fixings entirely from the little town, the amount of business down was greater than usual. We mustered a very jovial party at the Saulte : five or six British officers from Canada, en route to Chicago and the Western Prairies to shoot prairie hen ; an Indian Commissioner, several bankers, fisher- men, speculators in corn and copper, Hudson^s Bay agents, and divers others, — swelled our party at the Clinton House to about fifteen Britishers and ten or twelve Americans. The fishing was good; the bathing good ; the weather and season perfectly deli- cious ; and, moreover, the world-renowned, or rather Canada-renowned white-fish, is only found in per- fection in Lake Superior. It is certainly a very fine well-flavoured fish, more resembling a jack in flavour than any other I can think of, but by no means, in my opinion, equalling a " curdy " salmon of Tweed- side remembrance. We generally passed the day over at the Hudson's Bay store, where the English TO LA POINTE. 67 soldiers were quartered. During the winter, there had been a " difficulty " between the civil authorities on the American shore and the British officers, and there were writs out in consequence against the latter, which although of course harmless so long as they remained on their own bank, would ensure their arrest the instant they touched the American side — a consummation devoutly to be avoided ; and, con- sequently, as they could not join the gay and festive throng at the Agapemone in the evening, we went over to them. The " difficulty" was honourable to both nations, and to the individuals concerned in it, therefore I donH suppose I shall be doing wrong by mentioning it. During the winter, when the Riviere de Ste. Marie was frozen over, the desertions from the English company became very numerous; but although it was very easy to get to the Saulte, it was very difficult to leave it ; for the only route to the States during the winter lay through Canada; the deserters were therefore obliged to remain till the spring. The officer in command, a high-spirited, determined man, had told his men when they commenced deserting, that though they could cross the river they could not escape, and that he would bring them back, or lose his commission. Accordingly, when the number had amounted to twelve, he made preparations to seize them, having previously communicated with the American officer, and informed him of his deter- mination. The American was not behind-hand with him in frank and generous courtesy, and promised all the assistance in his power, procuring also a plan D 58 FROM TORONTO of the liouse where the men were lodged all togeth^er for greater safety^ as they knew of the intention to seize them, and being provided with arms, weie determined to resist to the last. It was thouglit better to delay the attack till the ice had broken np, as, if the communication between the two shores were uninteiTupted, the Americans might commence reprisals, and bad feelings might arise, which it would be very difficult to allay. Accordingly, two or three days after the ice had broken up, Captain C , his subaltern, and twenty volunteers, em- barked about 3 A.M. in two large boats for the Ame- rican shore. All their plans had been fally matured, and marching straight to the house, they burst the door with the crow-bars they had prepared, seized all the deserters, and took them down to the boats, the whole proceeding not having occupied more than five minutes, and not a shot fired, or a man hurt. The American officer, although he could not person- ally assist, was present, and thoroughly approved of Captain C conduct. Not so, however, the free and enlightened citizens of Ste. Marie ! They were almost demented ; nothing was talked of but the insult to the " Everlasting Eagle !" — " Infringement of territory ! " — " Violation of sanctuary,'^ &c. succeeded by vows of dire revenge ; blood, and blood alone could wipe out the disgrace, and blood they would have. A petition was immediately sent to Congress, and the General commanding the district was sent down to make inquiries. However, there is no love lost between the civil and military autho- rities in America, and the General, looking at the TO LA POINTE. 59 whole affair with the eye of a soldier, said that Captain C had acted well ; it was pluckily done, and his ownofficer had done right in supporting him. The English General in command expressed the same opinion, and the matter between the military powers was thus virtually at an end, although a correspondence of some months was carried on between the two Governments. There is no doubt that it was well and gallantly done, and had a very good effect on the rest of the men; but still Captain C ran a great risk of losing his commission. If he had failed, he would most likely have done so ; and if the American Ge- neral had not taken it exactly in the light he did, his position would have been equally unpleasant. A Government Commissioner had come with us from Toronto to inquire into the Indian dispute regarding the mines, and the justice of their de- mands. A large number of Chippewas from the shores of Lake Superior, and further north, had con- sequently assembled to meet him, and a few days after our arrival at the Saulte we accompanied him to a " big talk," that was to be held on the Canadian shore. The leader and spokesman of the Indians was a Chief, called " Peau de Chat," or " Racoon Skin."— He was the lithest looking scoundrel I ever saw, and would, I am sure, have enacted the character of Magna, in the "Last of the Mohicans," to perfection. He had been educated by the Jesuits, and spoke French with fluency ; his costume was not a very becoming one — a black evening dress coat, fittmg D 2 • 60 FROM TORONTO very tightly, a dress shirt and mocassins. His second in command was an old Chief, dressed in a soiled and faded general officer's uniform, a present from the Hudson's Bay Company. Peau de Ch«it spoke long and well, but Mr. Robinson told us that his demands were ridiculous and unjust, and that he was altogether a mauvais sujet, and not to be trusted. Talking of the Jesuits — that wonderful society has stations in Canada and North America, and, as is generally the case, they exercise extra- ordinary influence amongst their proselytes, Nand also amongst several tribes of Indians. In the year 1684, two Missionaries, Father Hennepin and another, were despatched by the General of the day, to North America : they penetrated through Canada to Lake Superior, and from thence to the Mississippi, where they discovered and gave names to several of the most remarkable features in the country, which they retain to this day — St. Peter's, St. Paul's, St. Anthony's, &c.: and the Jesuits resided some years at the end of Lake Superior, at "La Pointe," one of the Twelve Apostle Islands. We made a party of seven or eight to canoe down the Riviere Ste Marie some distance to Mud Lake, a spot famous for its quantity of wild-fowl : there we re- mained camping out and feeding on ducks for three days ; our party shot any number of them, and several bitterns " bumbling in the mire," as Chaucer has it : they are very good eating. Mud Lake is rather remarkable in its nature, for although about twenty miles square, it is in no place more than five feet deep, and is covered with reeds which grow TO LA POINTE. 61 to a considerable height above the surface ; a stranger paddling about alone would as infallibly lose himself as in a forest, and with little more chance of ex- tricating himself. The wind being fair for our return, we hoisted our blankets for sails, and spanked along merrily at the rate of four or five knots an hour, enlivened by the French patois Chansons of the Canadian boatmen. One of our men had been laid up most of the time with cholera, and when we arrived at the Saulte, we found it had broken out there, and that three persons out of the small community had " gone under." The ravages of the cholera in America that year (1850) were frightful, especially amongst the emigrants on the Prairies. At the Saulte, I met one of the Hudson Bay Company's employes — he had just returned from the Mackenzie River, where he had been for thirty years, not leaving for a day : he was a Shetlander, but had very nearly forgotten his native tongue, and the few words of English he did speak were perfectly unintelligible. He had never seen or even heard of a steamboat, and his exclamations of wonder and surprise at seeing one were very amusing. The summers in the latitude of ; Mackenzie River are never of more than ten weeks^ duration, and during the whole of his residence there, he had only tasted vegetables twice, and fresh meat not quite so often. He had lived entirely on pemmican, fish, grease, &c. After remaining about ten days at the Saulte, our missing companion having rejoined us, we chartered a propeller to take us down Lake 62 FEOM TOEONTO Superior to La Pointe : our party had been a very friendly and pleasant one, and we parted, 1 believe, with mutual regret, and with reiterated warnings regarding our " hair fixings," and the " snow and starvation doings " which we should have to encoun- ter before our return to civilization, to which we responded by promises of presents of savoury hump and dried tongues. We arrived at La Pointe in four days, steaming nearly the whole way, and calling at three of the Mining Establishments on the American shore. The Cliff copper-mine is the richest in the world ; the copper is so pure and the veins so large, that it is cut out in blocks with the cold chisel, the smelting process being entirely dispensed with. I have seen blocks of upwards of a ton weight so pure, that you might cut off the weight of a penny piece, and it would be Avorth more than a penny. In some of the specimens its excessive purity is a disadvantage, .as the working by cold chisel is a very expensive operation. The Burra-Burra mines of South Australia pay the original shareholders 800 per cent.! and the copper is not found in such purity, nor in such abundance, nor is the market so near at hand, as at Lake Superior. The only reason why the latter do not answer is, that however well the Yankee prin- ciple of " every man on his own hook " may answer in many of the walks of life, in war and in mining operations, when a combination of power is wanted, it does not answer, and till a Company starts forward, with large capital and under proper direction, the TO LA POINTE. 63 American mines will never pay : when that is the case, I have no doubt money will be coined in the mining districts. Embarked on board the Independence, screw-pro- peller, for La Pointe, with tents, ammunition, pro- visions, &c. Propelled down the lake at the rate of four knots, stopping at Eagle Harbour and Carp Bay. The water of Lake Superior is the purest and coldest I ever tasted, — a deep blue colour, like the Atlantic 1,000 miles from land; it has an average depth of 900 feet. Storms arise very quickly, and the seas run as high as any ocean, and, moreover, there is no sea-room ; but there is no winter sailing on account of the ice. During a hurricane, three months after we left, three of the propellers with all their crews were lost. We were propelled along about twenty miles, from rather a fine coast, towards La Pointe. The end- less black masses of forest give the country a very sombre appearance ; large trees are rarities in North American forests, on account, I imagine, of their gro>ving so close together, and the want of suflScient sun and air. La Pointe, the Indian settlement, and residence of the American Chippeway agent, is situ- ated at the most southern extremity of the most southern of the Twelve Apostle islands. As I before mentioned, it was once the residence of Father Lewis Hennepin, a Jesuit, the first white man who disco- vered Lake Superior, and who lived there with the Indians for many years. We had a letter for Mr. Oakes, the Indian agent, and were hospitably received by him, at La 64 FROM TOUONTO Pointe^ and put into a proper train for our projected canoeing expedition of three weeks to the Missis- sippi. His naive, pretty little wife, a Chippewa half- breed, reminded me much of the Spanish beauty of Andalusia. The half-breeds of different tribes vary considerably in beauty; those of the Chippewa nation are invariably good-looking, while the Sioux are almost as invariably hideous. There is a very re- markable difference between the features and general appearance of the men and women of the different Indian tribes ; the latter seem to be almost of another race, shorter, squarer, with broad low foreheads, and long eyes placed far apart ; these peculiarities are not nearly so remarkable in the men. TO LA POINTE. 65 CHAPTER IV. FROM LA POINTE TO STILL-WATER. We bouglit a birch-bark canoe for eighteen dollars, and hired an old half-bred Canadian voyageur and his son at a dollar per day. The old fellow ("old Souverain," as he was called) was the most cheery- old individual I ever met ; he was upwards of sixty, very thin and small, and, with a red flannel shirt I gave him, looked exactly like a monkey you see going about with an organ. His excessive restless- ness gave one the idea that he was hung on wires and had been fed on sparrows. He Avas a most extraordinary specimen of muscle and endurance, condensed into the smallest possible space. He worked from morning till night, and then never slept, singing the greater part of it, eating hardly anything but tobacco, and never once complained of fatigue. He was a regular Frenchman ; at one mo- ment throwing up his arms and tearing what little hair he had with passion, and the next dancing, laugh- ing, and singing, as if he had never known what care was ; he was one in a thousand, and the best voyageur for pluck, endurance, and civility, from Lake Superior to Mackenzie River. He reminded me very much of some of the Chamouni guides : he spoke a sort of demi-semi-intelligible French ; his son, nothing but Chippeway. Mr. Oakes advised us not to go to St. D 3 66 FilOM LA JPOINTE PauPs by the route we proposed, viz. by tbe Uivi^re des Bois Brules and by the Lake of Ste Croix, as it lay through the neutral country where the Chippeways and Siouxs generally met ; and as he knew that eact nation had a war party out, either of whom would rol us, or even " raise " our hair, with the greatest com- placency, if they got good opportunity, he advisee us to go by the St. Louis River instead. At Li. Pointe, Mr. Oakes introduced us to three Chippeway braves, " The Blackbird," "The Eagle that Swoops,^' and " The White Beaver." They had each taken several scalps. No Indian can wear a war eagle's plume till he has struck a coup, and then he may wear one for each coup struck. Some months bad; the Sioux made a "raise'' of thirteen Chippeway scalps, most of them women and children. The " Eagle that Swoops " was distinguished for a very splendid (?) action performed against his heredi- tary enemies, the Sioux : he and some of his party had been on the war-path in the Sioux country, and arriving at a village where all the Sioux warriors were absent, they amused themselves with scalping and torturing the squaws and children. "When they had had sufficient amusement they started on their return, and the " Eagle " wishing to take some little play- thing to his lodge for his squaw and children, had spared a young Sioux child, which he strapped upon his back and carried for some short time ; but the child beginning to be tiresome and to cry, he laid its head on a fallen tree, and cut it oflF with his scalping knife ; then, sticking head and all its appendages into his girdle, he strode on to join his companions, as if nothing had happened. He relates this story with TO STILL-WATER. great apparent satisfaction, and I have no doubt would be too bappy to do it again. All the Indians prefer the English to the Ameri- cans, as the English Government has acted much more honourably with regard to the land and annuities secured to them by treaties. The Americans have no respect whatever for Indian treaties, and drive the Indians before them whenever they feel so inclined, forcing them either into their enemies' land, where they are scalped — or into some miserable neutral ground, where they starve. The Chips and Sioux have the same name for the English, Shagenach, which, spoken in a guttural voice, sounds very like the Gaelic word Sassenach. We started in the canoe at eight o'clock on the morning of the 2d of September, a party of seven, including the old French Canadian and his son. The day was drizzly, and we paddled along the shores of some of the Twelve Apostles. They form altogether a remarkable knot of islands, some of them as large as the Isle of Wight, with precipitous variegated sand- stone cliffs, fifty or sixty feet high ; they are beauti- fully striated, and after a shower of rain the colours are very bright (the same formation as Alum and Freshwater bays in the Isle of Wight), Avhence they are called the Painted Rocks. The storms of the lake have scooped the rocks into all kinds of graceful arches, caves, Corinthian columns, &c. ; they are covered on the top with a rank growth of black fir-trees and cypress. About mid-day we stopped to mend the canoe, and I took my gun and tried to follow what I thought was a covey of grouse till I was quite lost. I wandered about in a most unenviable state of mind for two or FROM LA POINTE three hours, wheajust as I was getting tired out, and had made up my mind to sleep amongst bears and jrattlesnakes in the wood, to my no small relief I heard some shots ; but now was the difficulty to find out the direction they were in, for every fresh shot seemed to come from a different quarter, and it was most aggravating hearing the shots approaching within a mile of me, and then again retreating till almost out of hearing. My gun and I had both fallen into a pool of water, so that I could not return the shots to enable my companions to find me. I yelled myself hoarse, with as much effect as if yelling to the ocean. The shots at last seemed to move steadily in the direc- tion in which I was. I remained perfectly stationary, and at last had the satisfaction of hearing a shout. I shouted in return, and hurrying towards the voice, I came to the river and found the old guide and the canoe. They had found me quite by chance, follow- ing their own instincts, not having heard my gun once. Last year an American from the mines lost his way in this part of the forest, and his body was only discovered in the winter by the number of wolves and bears infesting the spot. We canoed a mile or two further on, and camped on a " silver strand,^' on the Lake shore. The cool fresh breezes that sweep across Lake Supe- rior are too sharp for the mosquitos, who never approach within 200 or 300 yards of the lake ; conse- quently, by camping at the very edge, we avoided their delicate attentions, and had nothing more annoying to cope with than the little black fly ; however, they were bad enough, in all conscience. TO STELL-WATER. 69 The forests between Lake Superior and the Mis- sissippi, where the country is very flat and wet, are composed almost entirely of black cypress ; they grow so thick that the tops get intermixed and interlaced, and form almost a matting over head, through which the sun scarcely ever penetrates. The trees are covered with unwholesome looking mosses, which ex- hale a damp earthy smell, like a cellar. The ground is so covered with a rank growth of elder and other shrubs, many of them with thorns an inch long, and with fallen and decayed trunks of trees, that it is impossible to take a step without breaking one's shins ; not a bird or animal of any kind is to be seen, and a deathlike silence reigns through the forest, which is only now and then interrupted by the rattle of the rattlesnake, (like a clock going down), and the chirrup of the chitnunck or squirrel. The sombre colour of the foliage, the absence of all sun even at midday, and the vault-like chilliness one feels when entering a cypress swamp, is far from cheering; and I don't know any position so likely to give one the horrors as being lost in one, or where one could so well realize what a desolate loneliness is. The wasps, whose nests like great gourds hang from the trees about the level of one's face; the mosquitos in millions ; the little black flies, and venomous snakes, all add their ''little possible," to render a tramp through a cypress swamp agreeable. When a stranger, uninitiated in the mysteries of woodcraft, and unprovided with a compass, loses his way in a forest, he invariably continues describing circles of greater or less diameter round the spot where he was first puzzled. And this is easily FROM LA POINTE accounted for : for having nothing to guide him as to the points of the compass, and dreading lest he should be advancing too steadily in what may pos- sibly be the vrrong direction, he unconsciously con- tinues tracking in a circlei, and very likely finds himself at the end of several hours' toil in the iden- tical spot where he first commenced. All assistance from the sun is rendered impossible by the crowded growth of the timber. I have frequently, when wish- ing to form some idea of the time of day, tried to get a ghmpse of the sun, and even climbed trees for that purpose, but without success. It is a curious fact, however, that although very few rays do contrive to penetrate the heavy matted foliage of the cypress, yet that all the trunks are most free from moss on their western side, and this knowledge, and the other indescribable instincts which are so remarkable in the savage, enable an Indian to steer his course through the trackless forest with the greatest cer- tainty. An Indian who has made a cache under a particular tree, will make his way years after to that spot, although it were a hundred miles distant, and through an unknown forest, with as little hesi- tation and in as straight a line as if it were the most direct and broadest road. Canoed amongst The Twelve, and one small island, that as it was hardly worthy to be called an Apostle, we named St. Paul. We had a fair wind, stuck up our tents for a sail, and slid away at six knots an hour till we arrived at Riviere de Fer, where we camped, and went out shooting in the bush : saw nothing but fresh bear tracks. One of our com- panions would start alone (though warned by my TO STILL- WATER. 71 previous disaster), and got completely lost ; and by the merest chance of our going up a small stream after sunset to shoot ducks, without any idea of find- ing him, we heard a gun very faintly in the dis- tance, and knowing that there was no other party in the woods but our own within a hundred miles, we fired in answer, and by keeping up a succession of shots he was at length guided to the canoe. If it had not been for the scarcity of ducks, which led us further up the stream than we intended, he must have inevitably perished in the forest. He had been wet through for seven or eight hours, and had wandered at least ten miles through the bush away from home ; we got him back at ten o'clock, quite exhausted. It rained and blew incessantly during the night. The tent leaked, and we suffered considerably from the wet and cold. Brandy-and- water to the n^^ power was our only consolation. After being wind-bound in Iron River for a day or two, we were at length able to proceed, and reached the Riviere des Bois Brules just in time to escape a heavy gale from the north-west, which would have driven us right out into the lake. Soon after starting, in consequence of an under- standing between the old guide and his son, the former told us his son was very ill and could not proceed, and that we must return and get another man. We were at first rather inclined to believe what he said ; but as the son looked perfectly well, and his illness had come on so suddenly, we began to suspect that it was only a ruse, to secure the money which we had paid to the Indian agent at La Pointe ; so after a little consideration we refused point blank to allow him to return. When he saw we were inexorable he gave a 72 FROM LA POINTE shrug and a grunt, took a swill of brandy, lit his pipe, and was all right again. However, as we did not want him to be sick again, if he really had been so, and judging that a little warning might do him good, when we camped we administered five or six antibilious boli, and next morning presented him with a saline draught, composed of salts, enough to have killed a horse. This liberal allowance had a salutary effect, and the next day he started quite fresh. Found three Chippeway warriors and their famihes encamped in their birch-bark lodges, at the mouth of the river. Directly we arrived they hoisted an old Union Jack, and brought out a Morning Chronicle of 1836, which they were very proud of, though they had not the least idea what it meant. As the river was very shallow, the canoe heavy, and one of our men not quite up to the mark, we offered them a dollar a day to accompany us as far as the Grande Portage ; but although the lazy fellows had not food wherewithal to keep body and soul together, they preferred lounging in their dirty lodges, smoking their kinnie kinnie, to earning a few dollars to buy blankets for the winter. As the river was too shallow to allow of our remaining in the canoe, we had to walk along the side through the thickest forest I ever saw, with occasional tracks of bear and reindeer. After toiling all day, and losing ourselves several times, nearly breaking our legs and putting out our eyes, stung by wasps and in continual dread of snakes, several of which we saw, we at length overtook the canoe, and to our great delight found the fire lighted, and our dinner of fried pork and fried flour nearly ready, and the night too chilly for TO STILL-WATER. 73 our enemies, the mosquitos. Nobody who has not experienced it can form any idea of the plague and torment of being pestered all day and night by these animals, or how completely they take away one^s enjoyment. The mosquitos in the cypress swamps of North America are far more powerful and active than those of any other part of the world, and being oi that dissolute race that " don't go home " even in the morning, but keep it up till a frost dries up their young blood, they are doubly annoying. Monday, Sth. — We " humped " it for eight hours through the thickest bush. Not a glimpse of sun all day ; dark and damp, scrambling or falling at every step over fallen or rotten trunks of trees, hidden by rank coarse grass ; we could not see six feet before us, and were being continually stung by the wasps, whose nests, hanging from the trees, we every now and then inadvertently capsized. We killed a tor- toise and ate him : his flesh tasted like bad chicken. We continued to canoe it all day towards the Grande Portage, between the Riviere des Bois Brules and the Lake of Ste Croix, (the former running to the Lakes, and the latter to the Mississippi,) through a miserable agueish cypress swamp. The river, in no place more than ten feet broad, in many hardly six, was of a dark pitch colour from the surrounding peat soil ; and at night when we camped, sometimes we could not by any contrivance manage to lie in less than six inches of water. The forest was very still, no birds, or sounds of any description. The trail of the Portage crossed a ridge of hills about 300 feet high, nearly the only hill, except the Couteau des Prairies, between the Alleghanies and the Eocky Mountains. 74 FROM LI POINTE From the summit of the hill we had a very extensive view over the forest. The day was cloudy, aud any view less interesting it is impossible to conceive. The eye sought in vain for some break, or some variety in shade or colour to relieve the endless monotony of black firs aud cypress. The whole forest looked as if it was in mourning : any clearing, however small, would have been quite a relief. It is a greau mistake imagining that the less cultivated a country is, the more beautiful it is : on the contrary, cultivation enhances the beauty of country a thousandfold, ex- cept where the beauty arises entirely from the natural grandeur of the country, such as Switzerland. I have no doubt that the view from the Grande Por- tage of the Ste Croix, with the meandering streams of the Bois Brules and the Ste Croix, would have been quite as beautiful as the view from Richmond Hill, had the cultivated clearings and green fields of the latter changed places with the black interminable forests of the former. We had now left the waters that run into the Atlantic for those that run into the Gulf of Mexico ; but so very flat is the country, that in the rainy season the waters from the same stream will fre- quently run different ways. The weight the voyageurs carry is quite wonderful ; for any distance under six miles a man will carry 3 cwt. — a heavy mule load — and will carry from 100 to 170 lbs. for 200 or 300 miles, at the rate of 40 miles a-day ; and you see " little weeds " of men carrying these weights that would break down the brawniest highlander that ever trod heather. It is all practice. At Ste. Fe de Bogota, in the Andes, where the natives are by no TO STILL-WATER. 75 means a powerful looking race of men, one man will carry a traveller (one of whom I heard weighed fourteen stone) for hours up the most precipitous mountain, in a chair fastened round the forehead and resting on the back. ' n-h-H The lake of Ste Croix very quickly narrows into the river of that name, and we canoed along all day, with cypress swamps and hideous swarms of mosquitos on hoth sides, and milhons of ducks — the air almost black with them — but too wild to afford sport. They come in clouds to feed on the wild rice that grows here in great quantities. One evening when we camped, an Indian, greased and naked, came in to ask for food. They are the most improvident people, too proud to dig, but not in the least too proud to beg or thieve ; never looking to the morrow, gorging one day, and barely subsisting for the next month. The Chippe- ways are" a well-formed race, with the strut of a prince. This Indian had to keep his eyes " skinned," as he was not very far from the Sioux country, where he would have been snapped up like a young trout. How- ever, our old guide told us, from the manner he was painted, and his carrying nothing but his arms, not even a blanket, that he imagined he was out on the war-path himself, prowling about in the hopes of picking up some stray Sioux. The mosquitos, wlio were grazing on us in shoals, did not appear to touch him. I suppose he was anointed in some way. We had had no fresh meat for fifteen days but one canvass-backed duck; nothing but thin flour-cakes fried in grease, which, though not much among so many, we ate with great rehsh. The woods were alive with birds and wolves ; there were great num^- 76 FROM LA POINTE bers of " wliip-poor- wills ; " it is a small brown bird, with a very pleasing note, exactly repeating the words from which it gets its name, laying the accent strongly on the " whip/' It can be heard at a great distance, and its distinctness is sometimes quite startling. We caught a small sturgeon, about 4 lbs. ; the little " crittur " had made rather a broken voyage of it, having come about 3,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to be eaten by five strange " Britishers " in the Riviere de Ste Croix. The Chippeway that came into camp the other night stole a hatchet and comb. They are the biggest thieves in the world, thinking it quite as worthy to take as to receive. The education of their youth, with regard to the right of meum and tuum is rather Spartan, successful theft being considered rather creditable than otherwise, especially if the white man be the sufferer. The nature of the forest began to change as we pro- ceeded. The almond, cherry, plum, beech, maple, and other hard-wood trees, having taken the place of the cypress, the alder, and the fir. The foliage was just acquiring its autumnal tints, (nowhere more beautiful than in America,) and the change from the gloomy dismal black of the cypress swamp we had been accustomed to for the last fortnight, to the varied foliage, was very pleasing. Who can tell whether three hundred years hence the banks of the Ste Croix may not be studded with smooth lawns and villas like the Thames ? ^ During our supper of pork and flour, an Indian ai-rived on his way up stream to shoot deer by torch- light. He was sitting in the bow of his birch-bark canoe, and his squaw paddling behind. The way in TO STILL-WATER. 77 which the " Chip-aways " or Carpenter Indians shoot deer during the summer, when the mosquitos and density of the underwood render forest hunting almost impossible, is rather curious : they place a flaming torch in the bow of the canoe, and imme- diately behind it a plank with a hole in it, behind Avhich the hunter conceals himself. His squaw then, lying down, manages to steer the canoe, and they drift down as slowly as possible, keeping close to the bank. The deer, being animals with the organ of curiosity strongly developed, no sooner see this strange light floating down stream, than they come down to examine it, and sometimes approach till they are almost touching the canoe, when they receive a quietus in the shape of two or three ounces of buck- shot from the ten-shilling rifle of the Mingo. We ofi'ered to buy any deer he might kill, and he en- gaged to bring us one ; however he did not, and for a good reason, that he and his village ate the only one he killed themselves. Passed a miserable mosquito-ridden night. About midnight we were awoke by a pack of wolves hunting close to us. The whole forest seemed alive with them, and there must have been thirty or forty at least. They give tongue and take up the running by turns like a pack of hounds in England. Their note is not unpleasant, and gives one an idea of wild nature. Sometimes they seemed within 200 or 300 yards of us, and then again the sound almost died away in the distance. There is something slightly unearthly to a man from the civilized diggings, hearing a pack in full cry at the dead of night, and I could almost 78 FROM LA POINTE realize the German legends of the phantom hounds and huntsmen. Paddling down stream we came upon a Chippeway village, and found some thirty or forty miserable devils, well blown out with the buck that should have been ours, lounging before their bark lodges. Most probably they would starve for the next five or six days, as no real Indian ever thinks of going out on a hunt until he actually begins to feel the cravings of hunger. The country was getting more and more lovely, and one hour of such lovely weather and beautiful scenery fully repaid us for all our hard doings. The stream was half-a-mile broad, with sloping banks, and soft thick woods alternating with luxuri- ant prairie, like going through a gentleman^s park : — we passed a log shanty iahabited by an American, a good specimen of a "far west^' pioneer. He had selected a beautiful spot, paid no rent, had no title, and might be removed any day by a legitimate purchaser, though most probably he would shoot any man who was bold enough to buy over his head ; but still, on such an insecure tenure he had cleared eight or ten acres of massive timber. We glided down stream, passing another little " clear- ing." (Clearings seemed quite curiosities after nearly three weeks without seeing one bigger than one's hand.) The poor fellow, a Yankee, who had made it, and lived there four or five years, was two weeks ago shot dead by an Indian, who thought he had some whisky. The Indian watched him like a cat, through a chink in the block-house, and when he had satisfied himself took a deliberate shot, killed and TO STILL-WATER. 79 scalped him, and made tracks for the woods. How- ever, his chief, fearing the displeasure of the Ame- rican government, gave him up, and he was hung. We found everything in the hut exactly as it was when the man was shot. The kettle was on the extinguished fire, and some half-haked bread in the oven. We slept in the hut. Our guide and his son were very superstitious, and believing that the ghost haunted the scene of its murder, nothing would per- suade them to sleep in it. There is an immense lumbering trade on the Ste Croix. The trees are cut during the winter by gangs of axe-men, and floated down during the floods to the saw-mills. Some of the weirs to guide the trunks on their passage down and to keep them in the stream, are on a very gigantic scale. We reached the Chute de Ste Croix, where the river is compressed between precipitous lime-stone cliffs, and forms some very picturesque falls of about half a mile in length. There is an enormous saw-mill at the Chute, em- ploying some fifty or sixty men, with whom we fraternized and dined at a kind of table d'hote with them, for a quarter of a dollar a-head. The saw-mills were not at work, and everything seemed out of order, and on inquiring the reason, I was rather surprised to hear that the property was in Chancery. I had hardly expected such an answer in a young country, and especially in the Far West. Like other Englishmen, who instead of making swans of tlieir ducks, generally make ducks of their swans, and, like a race of hypochondriacs, continually fancy that they are afflicted with institutions and taxes 80 FROM LA. POINTE from which other nations are free, I had imagined that the "law's delay and the misery consequent thereupon, were peculiar to our own little island : I was dehghted to be undeceived, and I am con- vinced that the more an enlightened Englishman compares the abuses and annoyances arising from our institutions at home with those existing in other countries,— even in the "Land of Liberty,"— the more reason he will have to be proud at the com- parison, and the less reason will he have for wishing to see those institutions, the petty annoyances of which we know, supplanted by others whose evils we know not of, but of which we may be sure there is no lack. Proceeding onwards we crossed the boundary between the Chippeway and Sioux country, and arrived at " Still-Water," a small settlement created and supported entirely by the lumbering trade. Here we arranged our attire to greater advantage, plastered down our hair, and put on new mocassins. Alto- gether, with our Canadian cloth shooting coats, and trowsers, and red flannel shirts, and nondescript caps, we looked rather like respectable " navvies," out for the Sunday. One of our party, not content with a red flannel shirt, had red flannel drawers and blanket : and, with beard and moustache, a more perfect impersonation of Le Rouge Determine could hardly be imagined. About twenty miles above the Chute de Ste Croix we met a birch-bark canoe, with two half-breeds and two passengers, dressed in blue blanket coats, mocassins, and beaver-skin caps. O'ur voyageurs stopped to converse, and we exchang-ed TO STILL-WATER. 81 courtesies and " liquored " with the travellers. They said they were en route to Lake Superior, by the same route we had come. We told them there were plenty of mosquitos. " Then did we strip our sleeves and show our scars/' &c. They seemed a rough set, and we imagined they were traders, but our guide told us it was the chief justice of Minnasota and his secretary, or marshal, going the circuit ! Fancy our judges going the circuit in birch-bark canoes, sleeping in the open air, and living on salt-pork and potatoes ! E 82 FROM ST, PAUL'S CHAPTER V. PROM ST. PAUL'S TO LAC-QUI-PARLE. The ChippewaySj or Ojibbeways, once the most poAverful tribe of Wood Indians on the whole conti- nent of North America, originally possessing a terri- tory bounded on the east by the Atlantic, and on the west by the Father of Waters," have now, by the steady encroachment of the Whites on one side, and their enemies the Sioux on the other, been gradually deprived of their territory, till at present they have only the forest between Lake Superior and Lake Winnipeg that they can call their own. They are continually at wars with the Sioux, but owing to one tribe being Wood and the other Prairie Indians, and neither of them fit for much out of their own country, their war is not very bloody, ten or twenty scalps a-year being the extent of the damage. The Chippeways, owing to their proximity to the Whites, have had many more chances of civilization than the Sioux, but as civilization has always been accom- panied or rather preceded by its never-failing curse, whisky, their number is decreasing much more rapidly than the Prairie Indians, and their civiliza- tion is very little greater, since the latter have much more difficulty in procuring liquor, and from having TO LAC-QUI-PARLE. 83 experienced its bad effects they have to a consider- able extent given it up. They are a brave nation, judging them by the Indian standard; and whilst at St. Paul's a young warrior named " Jour Perce," or " Hole in the Day," the son of a great Chippeway chief of the same name, came all alone in his canoe from Lake Superior to the Mississippi, a distance of about 800 miles, 100 at least of Avhich were through his enemy^s country, and crossing it, made his way to a Sioux village, some miles distant, and there, watching his opportunity, shot and scalped a Sioux, after which he made his way back to his canoe and crossed over to St. PauPs, whence he struck into the forest on his homeward track. About two hours after his escape there were between 200 or 300 Sioux stripped, and in their war paint, rushing through the town, like so many demons, looking for him, but after some most miraculous escapes he got clear off to his country. On my return to St. PauPs I saw him in company with the Indian agent, having come for the purpose of patching up a peace Avith the Sioux. He was a good-looking young fellow, about two-and-twenty, as grave as a judge. Leaving our canoe at Still-Water, we struck across a small prairie for St. PauFs. We took our Canadian voyageur and his son. The latter had never seen a town at all, and had no idea of any building large/ than the trader's hut at La Pointe. It was very amusing to see his astonishment at almost every thing. He had never seen a vehicle of any descrip- tion, and his delight at the waggon which took our luggage was intense. Being accustomed to the almost invisible trails of the woods, he could scarcely E 2 84 FROM ST. PAULAS understand the broad path that led from Still-Wate: to La Pointe, and Tiyah ! Quel chemin ! in broken I'rench was uttered every instant. St. PauVs is well situated on a high bluff over- hanging the Mississippi, about five miles below the junction of the St. Peter River. The first glimpse of the Mississippi (or Father of Waters) quite ex- ceeded in grandeur anything I had expected, and I then could hardly realize the fact that I was more than 2,000 miles from its mouth. It is at least a mile broad, very deep and clear, and it rolls majesti- cally along two miles an hour, as if confident in its power, and quite capable of going its 3,000 miles without any exertion or fatigue. It is about the size of the Rhine at Cologne. There is here a Government agent for the Winnibagoes, a Dr. B. (to whom we had a letter of introduction) . I imagine he is called doctor from the skill he displays in bleeding the Indians. The Winnibagoes are a small tribe of peacefully inchned Indians. Twenty years ago they possessed the country now forming the State of Iowa, one of the most fertile in the Union, The Government compelled them to sell their hunting grounds, and removed them some 400 or 500 miles north, to a miserable tract of country lying between the Sioux and the Chips, where they have the greatest difficulty in subsistuig. They are con- tinually returning to their old hunting grounds, but are as regularly driven back. Five years ago there was not a single hut on the ground now occupied by he town of St. Paul's. Now, in 1850, there is a town with 2,000 or 3,000 inhabitants, three or four hotels, churches, schools, and a pubhc library. All TO LAC'QUI-PAULE. 85 the houses are made of wood^ of course. The mush- room growth of all these Western cities is caused by a sudden influx of speculators, on account either of the fertility of the land, or for the lumbering trade ; the latter reason, and very fine water " privileges/' have been the cause of the rise of St. PauFs. Most likely, like the rest of the Western cities, it will go on increasing at an extraordinary rate, and will then suddenly tumble about their heads like a pack of cards. We went to a wooden hotel, conducted exactly on the principle of the Astor-house, full of Indian traders, Western farmers, gamblers, bullies — a race that you only meet with in the Far West. We called on Dr. B., the American agent of the Fur Company, and by him were introduced to a Mr. McLeod, a Canadian, and Indian trader. He had traded with the Sioux for thirteen years, and had a trading fort, under the management of a half-breed, at a place called Echo Lake, or Lac-qui-parle, about five hundred miles from St. PauFs, which he visited every year, for the purpose of taking up goods and bringing down buflFalo robes and other skins : he offered to let us accompany him, if we could get horses, and promised at Lac-qui-parle to supply us with some half-breeds or Canadian trappers, as guides for the buffalo country. The country about St. Paul's has not been burnt for some time, and consequently is covered with young timber, chiefly oaks and maple. As the Indians get driven back, the prairies in con- sequence escape the annual burning, and the trees spring up, and grow with the utmost luxuriance. About twelve miles above St. Paul's, the Mississippi, there about a mile in breadth, rolls majestically over 86 FROM ST. PAUI/S a fall of eighteen feet, which constitutes the " Falls of St. Anthony." Comparatively few foreigners have heard of these falls, and still fewer have seen them : they are very grand, much more so than the fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, and would make the fortune of any river in Europe ; but in the land of Niagara and Trenton they " don^t shine." We were horse-hunting during two or three days, the article being scarce and bad ; however, by great good luck, we picked up three miserable screws, at prices varying from seventy to eighty dollars. During this time we held a long confabulation with six Indian traders, calculating our chances of sport and of being scalped ; we came to the conclusion that there was as much chance of the one as of the other, and not much of either ; the bulfaloes in September and October being very far north, coming south only for the winter. The Indians, too, are not very friendly, especially to the Yankees. St. Paul's is a very democratic place ; the rights of labour are fully recognised, and a man considers he is conferring a favour by working for his employer. The following is a dialogue, almost word for word, which took place in the bar-room at St. Paul's, between an employer and a " gentleman " he wished to engage to chop wood. Scene — bar-room; Pro- prietor — a mild-looking case, seated at a table, reading a newspaper. Enter " Gentleman " to be hired, with beard and moustaches, Californian hat, and red flannel shirt, chewing an enormous quid, swaggering in ; takes a chair, crosses his legs, begins whittling a piece of deal for a few minutes, and without lifting his eyes, or ceasing cutting, loq. — TO LAC-QUI- PARLE. 87 " Are you the man as wants to see me ? because^ if so, my time's precious." Proprietor (rising, and holding out his hand with marked civiUty). "Ha! Mr. Smith, how are you? I hope you have not been waiting long. My object in wishing to see you was to hear whether I should be fortunate enough to find you disengaged next week. I have a little job in the chopping line, and I want your assistance. Mr. S., and Mr. T., &c., have all promised me their assistance, and I have no doubt if you will kindly come, we shall be able to make you comfortable ; and if we could persuade you to remain through the winter, why so much the better." Gent. " Well, I guess — I won't go. Too far off — no newspapers.'' Proprietor. "Oh! I hope you will come, Mr. Smith. You will confer a great favour on me ; and although things are in the rough, I have no doubt you will find it answer your purpose." Gent. " Well, I'll think of it. P'raps I may look in, some time next week, and see how it suits me." Proprietor. " Well, it is really very kind of you, and if you could make it quite convenient to look in on Monday, you and the other gentlemen might be introduced, and commence together." Gent. " Well, I guess I shan't go up on Monday : I've some business of my own to fix ; but if I ' feel like work,' I'll step up on Wednesday or Thursday. Give us some baccy, will you ? " Proprietor. " Oh ! certainly : and won't you take a drink ? " Gent. " Well, p'raps I may take a cocktail." 88 FROM ST. PAUL'S Both drink ; Proprietor bows to Mr. Smith, who takes no notice of it, gulps down his liquor, and then turns on his heel without saying a word. This is not the least exaggerated in this democratic far-west country, where " liberty " is frequently understood to mean incivility and impertinence. We started on the 13th of September, at 7 o'clock — a party of ten — the trader, McLeod, two Sioux half-breeds, myself and two companions, one Cree half-breed, and three Indians in their paint and feathers. I was suffering from a sharp attack of fever, and could hardly sit my horse. My com- panions had kindly offered to wait a day or two for me, but I thought it was useless, so determined to go, for if I was regularly in for fever, two or three days would make no difference, and I knew the prairie air was just as likely to kill as to cure me. Rode all day through a lovely well-wooded country, resembling Richmond Park, substituting new for old timber, and camped at night near some trees ; when rolling myself in my buffalo robe, I tried in vain to sleep, but the fever came on rather severely. The moon looked as large and as bright as the sun, and the stars as large as the moon, and I was soon in a high state of feverishness. However, nature proved a good doctor, and towards morning my nose began bleeding violently, and continued for about three hours. I was a new man, and got up pretty fresh, though rather weak, next morning. The Indians, who always give names to strangers, christened me " Bloody Nose," and my companions " Water Rat,^' and the " Big White Man." We proceeded througli a lovely country, passing an Indian village, where TO LAC-QTJI-PARLE. 89 we were hospitably entertained by a Sioux half-breed trader, whom, poor fellow, on our return from the prairie, we found dying of quinsey : the Indians are subject to, and suffer much from, diseases of the lungs and throat. The day was glorious, the ride most en- joyable, the atmosphere so much clearer, and the arch of heaven seemed so much more extensive than in Europe — so blue, so deep, so liquid— you seem to look right into it, instead of upon it. We started at daylight next morning for an Indian village, called " Travers de Sioux,'^ leaving the half-breed and lug- gage to follow the best way they could. The trail crossed a very picturesque prairie, called Arrow" Prairie, about twenty miles broad, bordered by a magnificent belt of cotton-wood trees. This belt of trees, commencing far north, runs for 500 miles due south, varying from five to ten miles in breadth. The prairie Indians call it " the Bigwood." What would they call some of the Canadian forests, extending 1,000 miles without a break? After leaving the Arrow Prairie, our path ran through a belt of timber. The silk-cotton trees, beautifully festooned with sumach and wild vines, formed the most perfect natural arbours imagin- able, and came up to my idea of a forest far more than the cypress swamps of North America. We reached the banks of the St. Peter, about 300 yards broad at this place, where we swam our horses with- out difficulty. Went to the lodge of a half-breed Scotchman named Graham, a descendant of Claver- house, and were very hospitably received by him and his squaw, and feasted on ducks and tea, which were becoming luxuries again. We found a good many E 3 90 FROM ST. PAULAS Indians come in for the purpose of purchasing powder and shot for their fall hunt. They looked upon us as great curiosities, sitting around us by dozens, for hours at a time, and watching every movement. It was very annoying at first, but we soon got accustomed to it. The young Indians are very inquisitive and troublesome, but the warriors and old men are very grave and reserved, seldom laughing, and taking great pains to conceal any feeling of surprise or curiosity. The young Indians are the greatest dandies in the world, painting and greasing themselves in the most tasty manner, and carrying their pipes and tomahawks as our dandies do their canes in England. The great object of a young Indian's ambition is to possess a looking-glass, which they cherish as their life, and use at least a dozen times a-day to Adonize themselves. The old men and Avarriors, who have trophies to show and can wear an eagle's plume, scorn such childish ornaments. I was surprised to see the young men playing a game very like les graces, with sticks and hoops. They are inordinate smokers, and smoke at least fifty pipes a-day when unemployed. They do not smoke the tobacco pure, but mix one part with three of the dried bark of the red willow, called kinnikinnik, which has a pleasing taste and aroma, but is rather hot to the mouth. In the afternoon we walked out to the prairies to shoot grouse; bagged four or five brace only. They are larger than Scotch grouse, more like grey fowl j they fly slowly and take short flights, and sit like stones. Tiicy increase in a wonderful way in those prairies that are partly settled about Chicago and Gallena, and TO LAC-QUI-PAHLE. 91 other frontier towns where their enemies the wolves and foxes have been driven away, and where they are only exposed to the attacks of men as at the above-mentioned places ; a good shot may bag from eighty to one hundred brace a day. There was some- thing very exciting and invigorating in the clear air of the prairie, which one becomes sensible of almost immediately. For the first time, I saw the prairie on fire, (a fine sight,) though in this instance the grass was not high, and the fire did not progress faster than five or six miles an hour. During the night we had a tremendous- thunder-storm. Some chiefs from the Missouri came in for their powder and shot ; they were painted and ornamented with feathers and beads ; they all had blue or crimson blankets, which they wore over the left shoulder, in very classic style; one of them, the " Falling Hail," was a distinguished warrior, and wore several eagle plumes. Last year his arm was broken in two places by a bullet, in an attack upon the Crow Indians ; an account which he gave us through an interpreter of his sufi'erings, being obliged to ride six days on horse-back, with his arm smashed in two places and nothing to eat, was very interesting. One of the half-breed^ s little boys broke his arm and seemed to sufier a good deal. I could not help remarking the stoicism of the " Falling Hail," who, whilst everybody was hurrying about and lamenting, sat perfectly still smoking his pipe before the fire, tiU at last the boy^s father came to him ; he listened to him with the greatest gravity, and when he had finished his pipe, rose, and went and examined the arm, and then splitting some pieces of pipe- 92 FROM ST. Paul's stems for splints, he bandaged them with the thougs of his mocassins, and made a good cure of it, for before we left the country the boy was running about all right. About three o'clock the following morning, we saw the most beautiful aurora borealis one can conceive possible. The Indians hold it in great dread, and call it the " Medicine Fire," and the " Spirit of the Night," and fancy it has the power of making them good shots. The " trail now lay across a Prairie Planche, or open prairie without timber, to which we had now bid farewell, there not being any timber, except on the banks of some of the rivers, from thence to the Pole. We crossed several old buffalo paths and innumerable skulls and bones, but at this time of year the buffaloes themselves are nearly 1,000 miles to the north-west, though three months ago they were swarming over the very country we were now crossing. We crossed Beaver River and a trading post called Les petits Ro- chers, on the St. Peter River, kept by La Framboise, a Potowatamie half-breed, and a friend of Mr. Catlin, of whom, by-the-bye, he had not a very exalted opinion. Much to our. disgust, a severe frost had set in, though we had the consolation of hearing that the Indian sum- mer, the mostbeautiful partof the year, which generally lasts two or three weeks, had not yet commenced. We had given up sleeping under cover, and rolling ourselves up in our blankets, slept round the fire, if there was any; the nights were sometimes very cold. Crossing the Chippeway River, we at length reached '^'Lac- qui-Parle," and found a camp of nearly 200 " lodges," about 2,000 Indians in all, collected from the Rocky Mountains and every part of the Sioux territory. TO LAC-QUI-PARLE. 93 waiting for McLeod's arrival with the aramunition, and also under the impression that there was a treaty- pending with the American government respecting the purchase of some of their land bordering on the Mississippi. The first glimpse of the encampments, the setting sun shining on 200 cow-skin lodges, as white as snow, (the Indians kill the cows in summer for their lodges and for their own dresses, as the skins are not warm enough for the traders to buy,) with hundreds of horses tethered about, was altogether a highly picturesque and wild scene. There were about 200 young men, stripped to the waist, in their war-paint and plumes, performing the scalp-dance to the monotonous chant of about 200 squaws, who were squatted round forty poles, from which were suspended the scalps of some wretched Pawnee men, women, and children, which had been brought in by a war-party a few days before. They had come suddenly on the Pawnee encampment, whilst the warriors were on a hunt, and had made a great "raise.^' Every now and then during the dance, some warrior would dash forward and strike his tomahawk into some particular post, signifying that he was the " brave who had taken that scalp. Whereupon the squaws would redouble their chants, calling out his name, and extolling his bravery ; and then suddenly changing their tones, they would break out into a yell, expressing contempt for the unfortunate deceased, calling him dog, coward, and other abusive epithets, and abusing his father, mother, and relatives to the latest generation. It is rather a disgusting sight, but gave us a greater idea of savage life than anything we saw during the trip. 94 FEOM ST. PAULAS After we had watched them for some time, they broke up and crowded round us^ staring, and hand- ling our guns, pistols, &c., in rather too familiar a manner ; so much so that McLeod, who knew some of the old chiefs, begged them to request the younger ones to desist, and I certainly felt my hair " fixings " safer when they were at a little distance. A more savage bloodthirsty looking set of fellows (some painted like skeletons, and others all white, and some red) I never saw ; and in the excited state they were in, I have no doubt if McLeod had not been known to them, they would not have minded trying the efPect of a white scalp in contrast to the Pawnees. We retired for the night to McLeod's log-hut, which was built of blocks of timber, laid together in the rough, and made strong enough to resist any attack. Directly we began our supper, about thirty of the chiefs of the different tribes came in, and turning out all the young men, who again began to annoy us, and rolling themselves up in their blankets and robes, sat smoking till we had finished. Their con- duct displayed a marked contrast to the younger men, as they smoked with the greatest gravity with- out displaying any curiosity. When we had finished, an old chief of the Yankton band, from the banks of the Missouri, called " Le Boeuf Leve,^^ rose, and throwing his robe gracefully over his left shoulder, and freeing his right arm, commenced a speech, congratulating McLeod on his arrival, and asking him about the treaty, &c. He also said he was very glad to see us, and when he had finished his speech, he came forward and shook us by the hand ; a cere- mony that was performed by all the other chiefs in TO LAC-QUI- PARLE. 95 turn. We tlien gave tliem some tobacco, and joined their smoke with the greatest amity. An Indian's delivery, when speaking, is deliberate, slow, and monotonous, almost as if thinking aloud, and the punctuations are very strongly marked, and very long ; their action is very fine, and they use a great deal of it. They display a favourable contrast to European orators, in never interrupting one another by word or look, even though the speaker may be uttering sentiments quite opposed to those of his audience, or even things they all know to be untrue, and could refute ; still he is always listened to with apparent respect and attention, and when he has sat down, although perhaps there may be a dozen who are burning to contradict, or agree with him, they sit a few minutes, as if meditating on what had been said, and then rise with the greatest de- liberation, always giving way to the eldest. Certainly a council of Indian chiefs is generally conducted with more decorum and self-respect, than most public meetings in more civilized countries. The Sioux are the tallest and most haughty of any of the Indians, and there is a grace in their movements which is very striking. To see a chief, full of pride and self-possession, dressed in his war- plumes, with his blanket or buffalo robe, adorned with his exploits, thrown gracefully over his shoulder^ stalk deliberately into a council, is about as fine a study for an artist as I ever saw, and proves, that for grace and noble bearing, nature's nobility is not far behind those of the world's creating. The very young men, before they have struck a coup, or been on a war party, dress their hair Kke the old 96 FROM ST. PAUL'S pictures of Venetian pages, in Shakspeare and elsewhere, viz. cut quite close round the forehead, and hanging down all round the neck. All the small children use pop-guns, so that the amusements of the young heir to a dukedom in England, and the wild Indian on the prairie, have more affinity than one would suppose. The young Sioux ladies wear their hair in two long plaits down the hack, the ex- tremities ornamented with ribbon. How horrified Mrs. Kenwigs would have been, had she known that in giving pig-tails to the lovely Morleena, and her other beautiful offspring, she was adopting a Sioux fashion ! The Sioux, particularly the squaws, are said, by phrenologists, to display more traces of Asiatic descent than any other tribe of Indians ; they say their skulls are identical with the Mongolian races of Asia. There is, I believe, very little doubt, that they came from there originally, viS, Behring's Straits, which are frozen over in Avinter ; or even the Aleutian Isles might have afforded a means of transit to a nation of far less enterprise that the northern Asiatics are known to have possessed. Many of ihe\x customs would lead one to suppose so : they have the tradition of the deluge, even to the particular of the dove ; and in several ceremonies and observances they follow the Levitical law, almost to the letter ; moreover, the practice of scalping, now so uniA^ersal amongst the North American Indians, is known to have been practised by the Scythians. When the northerly shores of Oregon were first navigated, the inhabitants of Nootka Sound, lying in latitude 50 N., were found wearing identically the same three-cornered caps as those worn by the Chinese. TO LAC-QUI-PARLE. 97 Their religion is very confused, and no two Indians have entirely the same belief: they believe in a good and evil spirit ; they pray to the latter to avert evils, but never to the former, saying that the good spirit only confers benefits, and therefore does not require praying to : they are also fire-worshippers, and believe in the transmigration of souls. The Natchez worshipped the sun and kept a sacred fire continually burning ; so that the sun and fire- wor- shipper of Persia, the Brahmins and Buddhists of India, as well as the Jews and the devil worshippers of Arabia, can each bring forward a claim of parentage ! Their worship of fire is partial, but very peculiar ; they take it as their " totem,'^ or tutelary Deity,^^ and will not, on any account, treat a fire roughly, always replenishing and adjusting it with their hands, believing that if it is touched with a hatchet, knife, or any other instrument used in war, some one of the lodge will die. Other Indians take wolves, foxes, buff'aloes, in fact, nearly every animal for their totem, being careful never to injure one of the species unneccessarily. When an Indian whose totem is the bufialo, kills one, he always makes a point of turning its head towards the south, which is intended as a sign to the other buff'aloes, that their fellow boeuf is gone to the happy hunting grounds. Before going on a war-path, the Indian generally tries to get an omen from his totem. I could not find out on what principles their divination was carried on, but if a warrior's path is crossed by his totem, nothing will persuade him to go on the war-path. The excessive superstition of the Indians has been one of the chief reasons of their 98 MOM ST. Paul's not having destroyed one another long ago ; they will never go to war till their medicine men say the omens are propitious, even though they know their enemy is unprepared ; and sometimes they will delay a whole year, neglecting the most favourable opportunities, before they strike a coup ; whereas if they had not been trammelled by their absurd fancies, they might have committed twice the damage. Their belief in transmigration of souls must be partial, for from the manner they treat their horses and dogs, you would not imagine they ever expected to occupy a like position. As far as I could learn from the Missionary, the whole sum of their belief in a future state consists in the idea, that there are two paths that the spirits pursue after death, one to the south, leading to the happy hunting grounds, where buflFalo swarm, and where they will never suffer from cold and hunger any more ; the other to the north, where in a region of perpetual cold, the evil spirit passes a life of want and misery ! rather reversing our belief as to the tem- perature of the place of eternal punishment. One tribe of the Dahcotahs, or Sioux, have a belief which has a remarkable resemblance to the Ma- hometan creed, of the path pursued after death : they believe that the road to the village of the dead, where warmth and plenty exist, leads over a rock with an edge as sharp as a knife, on which only the good are able to keep their footing ; the wicked fall off, and are severely flogged and worked by a relentless master, in a region of perpetual cold below, very much like the bridge as slight as a spider's w^b, over which the Faithful entered their paradise. TO LAC-QUI-PARLE. 99 The Sioux are the hardest cases of all the American Indian tribes to convert, and the Missionary told me that during a continued residence of thirteen years he had only made one convert, and that he had recanted directly he was old enough to join his tribe on a war party. I once heard or read of a Missionary who was preaching to the Indians, and was trying to explain to them that man was driven from his happy hunting ground for eating an apple. The Indians could not understand its figurative meaning as a punishment for disobedience, but thought it meant literally for eating an apple. Being quite puzzled they said they should like to think of it. The next day they came to the Missionary, and said they had now disco- vered the reason, which was, that the great chief Adam was very wrong to have eaten the apple raw ; he ought to have boiled it ! The men display the greatest affec- tion for their children when young, but it ceases as they grow older. Their wives they treat rather worse than their dogs, (lodge poling and abusing them without any sort of compunction,) and I cannot say more, for the life of an Indian dog is the most com- plete essence of misery it is possible to imagine. Suicide, that last refuge for miseries that are too great to bear, amongst most nations of the world, is very seldom had resource to by the wretched Indian squaws. They have a belief that they are punished for suicide in a future state. Hanging especially is very uncommon, as they have an idea that the per- sons so dying are destined to drag the tree from which they were suspended after them for ever in the land of spirits. If therefore they do " conclude " to hang themselves, they usually select the weakest 100 FROM ST.PAUL'S TO LAC-QTJI-PAELE. tree that will bear their weight, that the drag on their future enjoyment may be as light as possible. The Indians are the greatest cowards in sickness, painting their faces black, and giving themselves up on the slightest attack. When a warrior dies they imagine that his spirit remains an occupant of his lodge four days after his death, as loth to leave the objects of his love. If during that time any of the other occupants of the lodge fall ill they do not attempt to cure them, saying that the spirit wishes to take its best beloved with it to the happy hunting grounds ; and that it is its duty to go : it is a pretty idea, but when any epidemic is raging, it is the means of causing many deaths, which, by proper treatment, might have been prevented. LAC-QUI-PAllLE. 101 CHAPTER VI. LAC-aUI-PARLE — PRAIRIE TO BIG-STONE LAKE. We stayed at Lac-qui-Parle till the middle of Sep- tember^ recruiting our horses, and trjdng to persuade some half-breed guides to go with us. We had some difficulty, as the Indians were in rather bad temper just then, especially the Missouri Indians, amongst whom we were going. They had shot and scalped six American traders and trappers in the spring, and one of McLeod^s men, although living with a Sioux squaw, had a very narrow escape. However, at last, we persuaded a plausible old man, named Eainville, to conduct us to the Buffalo. His father had been a half-bred trader, and his mother was a full-blooded Sioux, so that, excepting his dress, he was pretty nearly Indian. He certainly had all the bad quali- ties of one, and but for his being afraid of his own miserable existence, which he knew he would most probably lose if we caught him betraying us, I have no doubt he would have set the Indians upon us several times. He spoke a little bad French. We started in the direction of the head-waters of the Missouri ; our party consisting of my two com- panions, Rainville, and an Indian he had taken with him, and myself. We had a light cart, — which, how- ever, we left in two days, as the horse broke down, — 102 LAC-aUI-PARLE. the three horses we had brought with us from St. PauFs, two horses McLeod had kindly lent us, besides the Indian's horse, and two belonging to our guide Rainville. On the first night that we camped on a bluff above Beaver River there was a most mag- nificent thunder-storm. We were in a very exposed position, where some years before a whole family of Indians had been destroyed by lightning. A thunder- storm on the prairies is inexpressibly grand — the rolling, rattling reverberation of heaven^s artillery is unimpeded by any of the causes that tend to deaden its sound in a wooded country, and the lightning hisses and crackles as distinctly as if fired close to one. The thunder rolled and muttered along the undulating surface of the prairie for miles and miles, without any hindrance whatever, and appeared to me to be much deeper toned than any I had ever heard. A storm at sea, with its concomitants of rushing winds and roaring waves, is as a tout ensemble more magnificent. On the prairie one's whole attention and admiration are centered in the elements above, and their grandeur becomes, if possible, more grand by the concentration. They are frequently very dangerous, as from the absence of all timber, the elevation of the lodge is apt to enact the part of con- ductor to the lightning. The next day we travelled through a prairie with- out a stick six inches high, till the evening, when we camped near a small brook, and we had some difficulty to collect wood enough to cook the ducks we had shot diu-ing the day for our supper. Before rolling myself up for the night in my buffalo robe before the fire, it being ray turn to look after the PKAIRIE TO BIG-STONE LAKE. 103 horses, I walked out to see that their tethers were all right, and that they had plenty of grass. I re- marked that they seemed a good deal scared, and on mentioning it to the guide he said it was only at the wolves, so I turned in without thinking any more about it; but on getting up in the morning we found one of the horses gone, and now we had no doubt it had been stolen ; luckily the horses were so tethered in a hollow that the Indians could not have stampedoed them without exposing themselves to the risk of our seeing them ; or I have no doubt they would have made a raise " of the whole lot. Most likely the Indians were within a few yards of us during our dinner, and made "the raise'' just as we were going to sleep. The Indians make their attacks either just after their enemies have turned in, or else an hour before dayHght, when both men and horses are in their deepest sleep : however, all they wanted was our horses, as they knew we had nothing else worth taking, and were well armed with double- barrelled guns ; and their dread of a two-shoot gun, or medicine iron, as they call a double-barrelled gun, is very great. The night had been very dark, and they had mistaken a small horse McLeod had lent us for mine, which was the same colour, and marked in the same manner. We had a long and diligent search, during which the young Indian who accom- panied us, and who was an excellent fellow, disco- vered all sorts of trails, and made all manner of inexplicable signs, but could not discover the horse's trail, so that most likely he had been taken along the brook ; and as it would have occupied two or three days to recover it^ and it was but a worthless 104 LAC-QUI-PAELE. animal, and our time precious, we gave him up, and continued our journey. We afterwards found on our return to Lac-qui- Parle that some Indians had brought the horse back to McLeod, claiming a reward, and saying they had found him on the prairie ; most probably they found it was too small to run buffaloes, and so tried the dodge of getting the reward. We travelled north-west till we reached the head-waters of James's River, a tributary of the Missouri, on the 16th, hear- tily disgusted. We had passed through a country that hardly a week before must have been swarming with buffalo. Their bones covered the ground, and the buffalo paths were as thick as the veins in a leaf, but we could not see a single head. We saw in- numerable ducks, swans, and geese, and had very good sport in riding down the wolves. It must re- semble hog-hunting in India very much, I imagine. We saw some antelopes at a great distance, but could not get a shot at them. I had some hours' rather exciting work stalking swans with the young Indian. There was a small lake quite covered with them ; we crawled on our hands and knees for at least a mile, with great bunches of grass fastened to our heads that we might not attract the attention of the swans, who are very wary birds ; but unfortunately just as we were within shot we put up some miserable little duck that had quite escaped our notice, and they frightened away the nobler game. On our route to St. James's Hiver we had to cross the Coteau des Prairies, the only elevation between the Atlantic and the Eocky Mountains ; it rises in about 54"^ N., and runs 200 miles due south, ending PRAIRIE TO BIG-STONE LAKE. 105 abruptly on the open prairie with a fine precipitous bluff of some hundred feet in height. It is about 40 miles broad^ and its summit is about 2,000 feet above the level of the Gulf of Mexico. On one side rise, or rather descend, the tributaries of the Missouri, on the other, those of the Mississippi. The summit and sides are well wooded and watered, and the soil is said to be the richest in the whole continent of America; the view from the edge, which is quite abrupt, extends as far as the eye can reach, over a rolling treeless prairie bounded on one side by the Father of Waters, on the other by the Rocky Mountains. We had now another hint of the commencement of winter, in the form of a severe frost and heavy fall of snow. We " humped" it along for three days, through the most bitter wind, that blew right through us. All our pork was consumed, and we had only just enough flour to give us each two small pieces of dough a day ; and, to add to our difficulties, all the ducks and geese had gone south with the first frosts, and were not yet replaced from the north. During the bitter cold nights, the snow used to freeze so hard into our buffalo robes, that in the mornings they were like pieces of board ; on the 18th, the wind was piercing — a regular "barber," and as we were not able to find wherewithal to make a fire, we pressed on till three o'clock, when luckily we came upon a small cluster of alder bushes overhanging a frozen pool. We warmed our flour, and washing it down with some stmking pool- water, started again slightly refreshed, intending to camp near some timber the guide knew of; but the young Indian, who had gone on before to F 106 LAC-QUI-PAKLE. kiadle a fire^ came back to tell us there were ten lodges of Ogillillah Siouxs encamped there, and as they are the most expert horse-stealers of the whole Sioux nation, and, moreover, always hungry for scalps, Ave were pretty sure that if we camped near them they would make a raise of our spectral steeds; consequently we made tracks. About 6 P.M. we halted, and after tethering our exhausted cattle, we rolled ourselves up in our robes in the open prairie without a stick of wood to build a fire, half-frozen and half-famished, in which condition, only rather worse, we awoke next morning, and saddled our miserable cattle, whose hair, where it was not covered Avith frost, stood up like bristles, and kicked them along till about 2 p.m., when we mixed our last ration of flour with water, and ate the dough. We had now been thirty-six hours (most of the time on horse- back) exposed to the most cutting wind, without breaking fast, save with the sour flour afore-men- tioned, so, leaving the Indians to bring up three of the horses that were quite done up, we made the best of our Avay on to Lac-qui-Parle, which we reached about ten o^ clock, and were not loth to partake once more a comfortable meal of ducks and potatoes. As we had counted upon falling in with buff'alo in four or five days, or at all events on finding plenty of wild fowl, we had only taken a sufl&cient supply of pork and tea for seven or eight days : if, therefore, we had not turned back the very day we did, and had remained out three or fom^ days longer, Avhich we certainly should have done if the horses had been stronger, it would have gone very hard with us. PRAIRIE TO BIG-STONE LAKE. 107 Many Indians and trappers perish every year, on these North- West prairies, from hunger, and from the sudden snow-storms and migrations of the game, accompanied by a thermometer 10° or 12° below zero. The buffalo are the only food they can in any way count upon, and they have become so much scarcer of late years, that in tracks of fifty or a hundred miles, where a few years ago they swarmed, you now do not see one. On our return to Lac-qui-Parle, we found that most of the Indians were off on their hunt, not leaving more than twenty or thirty lodges. We could not make up our minds to leave the country without seeing the bison in his native wilds, and we determined on another expedition, due north, contrary to McLeod's advice, who said we should be most probably caught by the winter, and were sure to suffer from want of food. We procured fresh horses from McLeod, our own being used up,^' and left in pawn. Faute de mieux we were forced to take our former rascally old guide, Joseph Rainville, and as he professed to be in fear of the Indians, he would only go on condition that we hired his son and cousin, devils many degrees more Jazy and worse than himself; they were a bad lot, and we had to watch them like lynxes, to prevent their playing us false. It appeared that after our departure, on our first trip, some chiefs, of a different band of Sioux, who were not there when we made our presents before, had gone to McLeod and complained that we were gone to hunt their buffalo, and very likely drive them out of their country, and had not made them any presents, and threatened to send apd prevent our 12 108 LAC-QUI-rABLE. hunting, if McLeod did not make them some present : he promised that on our return we should do so. One morning, therefore, about twelve old chiefs assembled in the hut, and we gave them some forty yards of calico, and some very bad tobacco, with which they were enchanted, and said we might kill all the buffalo in the country, if we could; after that, they invited us to a dog-feast — but in the absence of dog, they gave us duck, a change we did not regret. The feast is worth describing. When we arrived at the chiefs lodge, " The Beaver's Tail," — which we entered by a hole like the entrance to a beehive, we found an atmosphere of smoke and smell, not of the pleasantest; about ten old war- riors were squatting in tailor-fashion round the fire, over which was hanging the pot, containing some twenty or thirty canvass-back ducks, each of them nearly the size of three of our domestic ones, and presided over by Dohumneh, or the " Prohfic Pump- kin,'' a rather pretty squaw and the youngest and favourite wife of the " Beaver's Tail." Directly we were seated, great wooden platters were placed before us, loaded with duck enough to have dined ten people in England. The warriors dispensed with plates, dipping nature'^ knife and fork into the caldron. Such appetites I never saw before, and never wish to see again; great, fat, half-boiled ducks disappeared like so many snipes, and handfuUs of grease, of the consistency of thick arrowroot, were baled in, and daubed over the face and person with a most mag- nanimous disregard to personal appearance. After eating for about lialf-an-hour, during which they "swelled visibly," the old Beaver Tail gave in, and PRAIRIE TO BIG-STONE LAKE. 109 with a grunt of repletion fell back in a reclining position ; the others evidently feeling very uneasy, soon followed his example, and the miserable remains of the feast were removed, to be disposed of by the squaws, children, and dogs, in turn. After we had sat some time, the old chief produced a medicine pipe, which, with the accompanying kinni-kinnik hag, he handed to the youngest chief present, who loaded and lighted it, and after turning the howl and blowing a cloud to each of the four quarters of the heavens, handed it to the old Beaver. The Indians, on any great occasion, make a point of propitiating the Great Spirit by turning the bowl of the pipe to the four quarters of the heavens. After the old Beaver had taken six or seven puffs, he passed it to us, and we, doing likewise, passed it to the others, by whom it was inhaled with a grunt of pleasure. When an Indian lights a pipe, it is always handed round to the company present, taking the same direction as the wine does with us, viz. with the sun. After we had smoked a short time in silence, the old Beaver rose, and in the unmusical language of his tribe, made more so by his disgusting state of repletion, began a complimentary speech, saying what pleasure it gave him to see his white brethren, (this was rather a double entendre, for the old villain was supposed to have been one of those who had killed the Americans in the spring, and most pro- bably had some of their hair hanging from his leggings at that moment !) and wishing to know what we had come for, and whether we had brought anything for him. "When he had done speaking, a grunt of acquiescence went round, when we, through 110 LAC-QUI-PARLE. the interpreter, told him, that our Great White Mother, having heard of the fame of the warriors of the great Dahcotah nation, had said, " Go and see whether tlieir warriors equal mine;" and that we had crossed the Big Salt Lake, and come from the rising sun, and that our Big Mother, knowing that her Red Brothers liked tobacco and powder, had sent them some. On this we produced a small quantity of tobacco, and some powder, and paint, and beads, which latter were immediately handed to the squaws, to be worked into ornaments. After this we struck up a great friendship, and a small flask of firewater being produced, the Indian reserve disappeared, and they chatted, and joked, and laughed. One old chief, " Le Croup Perce," grew quite aflPectionate ; he said that he not only loved his white brethren, but his white sisters and mothers, and grandmothers ! — in fact, all his white relations. I had taken a great fancy to the Beaver's TaiFs pipe, and he was equally struck with a shirt of mine, of a sort of bed-curtain pattern, which being worn rather threadbare, I had intended committing to the flames ; on my proposing to make an exchange, he was delighted, and in a moment my shirt was adorning his greasy person, and I was reduced to Indian costume with a ven- geance — and indeed, before we broke up, nearly all our available garments were exchanged for pipes, mocassins, &c., and we returned quite destitute of superfluous clothing. Amongst the Indians it is considered a manly accomplishment to be able to eat a great quantity ; and a young warrior, eating for reputation, will con- sume as much as 20 lbs. of fresh meat at one sitting. PEAIRIE TO BIG-STONE LAKE. Ill I knew one old scoundrel, " The Old Racoon," who ate 120 potatoes, and would have eaten as many more if his friends had not stopped him ; not from any regard to his own good, but from the fear that none would be left for them. During the few days that we remained at Lac-qui-Parle, by liberal presents of bad tobacco and a little paint, we made great friends with " Le Cerf qui But," (the Elk that stands at bay,) the most distinguished warrior of the Sissiton band, and in fact of the whole Sioux nation ; he wore thirty-six eagle's plumes, for thirty-six coups struck in war. Striking a coup is considered quite as honourable as taking a scalp. When an enemy falls, the first Avarrior that can rush up and stick his knife into the body, or strike it with his tomahawk, has what is called " struck a coup," and is allowed to wear an eagle's plume in commemoration of the deed. " The Elk that stands at bay" was a remark- ably fine, well-made fellow, of about forty, with a chest like a buffalo bull. I persuaded him, in ex- change for powder and paint, to part with his Avar- robe, adorned with paintings of his most remarkable feats ; and through the interpreter I made him de- scribe the battles, which he did in the most animated manner, with a great deal of very clever pantomimic action, creeping on his knees through the lodge, when he wanted to show how he stole unawares on his enemies, and then again drawing himself up to his full height, with the air of a prince, to show how he behaved when taken prisoner. He gave me an ac- count of a Chippeway he had scalped some five weeks before. His leg had been broken, and he lay perfectly helpless in the prairie, his friends having ii^ LAC-QUI-PARLE. left him. He was perfectly unmoved when his enemy approached, but when he felt the knife round his top- knot, he shrank from it, which the Elk said was a pity, as otherwise he had shown himself a brave warrior. On inquiring whether he lived after being scalped, he said. No ; for that before he left him he passed his knife into his heart; most likely quite slowly, and taunting him the whole time. Towards the finale of his story, when he came to the scalping part of the business, he got very excited, and went through all the motions of that pleasant operation. The Sioux are very cruel in war, torturing their prisoners, if they take any, (which, however, does not often happen,) in the most inhuman manner, m^iti- lating and hacking them to pieces, and sometimes, in their savage excitement, even eating pieces of the flesh. The Sioux scalp in a more bloodthirsty manner than other Indians, not contenting themselves with the mere scalp, but when practicable taking the features, — nose, lips, ears, &c. The Indian country is said by those who know anything about it to be in a very ticklish state. The Indians dislike the Americans, and with good reason, and they only want an Ossiola, a Tecumseh, or a Blackhawk, to make them forget their mutual ani- mosities, and unite them against their common enemy, the white man, to commence a war to the knife along the whole frontier. The Dahcotah nation alone could muster 1,500 mounted warriors in a fort- night, and a proportionate number might be brought to bear on the whole Indian frontier down to Texas. One insurmountable obstacle, however, exists, which will always prevent large masses of Indians acting in PEAIRIE TO BIG- STONE LAKE. 113 concert, viz. the want of a commissariat. A warrior cannot carry food for more than a fortnight, and ail that time his wife and children would be starving, unless a certain number of young men were left to supply the lodges with meat. However, notwith- standing these difficulties, if the Indians get reaUy aroused, the injury they could inflict on the frontier settlements in a good deal less time than a fortnight would be considerable. The only way the Americans have been able to succeed in Indian warfare hitherto has been by fostering the hereditary enmities, and raising the hope of revenge in one tribe against another. This was done to an iniquitous extent during BlackhawVs war, when, after the Americans found their dragoons had no chance against Indians on their native prairies, and were harassed to death in their attempts to catch them, the whole Sioux nation were let loose upon the Saxes and Foxes, and the whole tribe decimated, the remainder being driven across the Missouri, where they are getting gradually exterminated by the Sioux and Pawnees. When a chief wishes to collect his warriors, he ornaments a pipe with wampum, and with a little bag containing tobacco, and sends it round by a mounted warrior. The colour of the bag implies the object of the message, whether they are to assemble for the council or the war-path. Red and black signify war; blue and green, peace. If the warrior smokes the pipe, he signifies his assent to the proposition, whatever it may be, and hears the rendezvous from the runner ; if he refuses to smoke, it is understood that he declines going, and the messenger goes on his way, "When a warrior wants to go on a war-path, it is r3 114 LAC-QUI-PARLE. always considered the correct thing for his relations and intimate friends to accompany him ; and by pleasant reunions of the kind cheerful little scalping- parties are continually kept going on. If a tribe is at war with another tribe a warrior may go into the ,enemy^s country on his own hook, without the leave of his chief ; but if two tribes are at peace, the chief's leave is always requisite before he can make an incursion into his neighbour's country for the sake of "raising hair/' however hard up he may be for it. On October 23d, contrary to McLeod's advice, we started again on another expedition, steering due north. We expected to meet' buffalo in seven or eight days, but were again disappointed : snow and frost had set in, and it was bitterly cold. The first day's journey lay through a prairie lately burnt, covered with enormous granite boulders, and bones of buffalo. The white granite against the burnt black ground had a most strange appearance, like vast skeletons. The prairie immediately after a fire is jet black ; but after a few weeks' wind the black particles get blown away, and the country is left a sort of stone colour. In crossing this part of the prairie we saw an extra- ordinary mirage, the whole country having the ap- pearance of one vast lake. I had always imagined mirages were caused by vapours rising from a heated ground, and did not expect to see one during an intense frost. We crossed the St. Peter's River, and Riviere de Pomme de Terre. The sides of the latter were very boggy, and it was painful to witness the struggles and exertions of the mules and horses in crossing. Some of them were more than half an PEAmlE TO BIG-STONE LAKE. 115 Kour going a hundred yards, sinking up to their girths at every spring, where they would remain half-buried till they had collected strength for the next spring. We saw several large white prairie wolves, but they were too wild to hunt. We camped at the Big-stone Lake, and slept in the lodge of an Indian (Avho was on his way to the Buffalo). There was rather a motley crowd in the lodge— the Brave himself, who was recovering from a bullet - wound in the back, (rather suspicious,) his two wives, two mothers-in-law and his own mother, six or seven squalling children, and about twice the number of squeaking puppies. The bouquet of this mixture, with the addition of the buffalo-dung fire, did not at all resemble the " sweet south playing upon a bank of roses," and was too much for my olfactory nerves, and I preferred the open air. I doubt whether a family party composed of so many discordant parts in England would quite come under the head of " happy and united ! " Big-stone Lake is about forty miles long, varying from one to three in breadth ; the sides are formed by precipitous granite cliffs of three or four hundred feet in height. At its northern extremity it is con- nected by a swamp with another lake of the same size, called "Lac Travers." The waters from the one lake frequently flow into the other. The waters from Big-stone Lake run by the Chippeway and St. Peter's River into the Mississippi, thence into the Gulf of Mexico ; the waters of Lake Travers run by the River Shian and Red River into Lake Winnipeg and Hudson's Bay— one due north, the other due south ; yet such are the extraordinary cuiTents of the 116 PKAIRIE TO BIG-STONE LAKE. ocean that the waters of the former are carried by the Gulf-stream up the coast of America, till about the latitude of Philadelphia, and the waters of the latter carried by the Arctic current down the coast to about the latitude of Boston ; at these two points they strike oflp to the east, after respective journeys of 5,000 or 6,000 miles, and mingle on the great banks of Newfoundland. I doubt whether they would recognise each other distinctly. According to calculations that have been made by the highest authorities on these subjects, a globule of water from Big-stone Lake and a globule of water from Lake Travers, (which globules might originally have been formed out of the same globule,) might, after re- spective journeys of 5,000 miles, meet and reunite on the Great Banks of Newfoundland, after a separation of about 100 or 150 days— three or four months. PRAIRIE. 117 CHAPTER VII. PRAIRIE. We continued to press onward through an open prairie, burnt as far as the eye could reach. The country was as black as pitch, and every now and then we came upon heaps of buffalo bones, where some band had been overtaken by the fire. A burnt prairie has a very diminishing effect on a landscape, rendering it impossible to judge of distances or the size of different objects ; also on horses, when they have been on it for two or three days. We overtook an Indian village on the march; the men carried nothing, but the women and dogs had enormous burdens ; the latter could hardly creep along under them, but woe betide any unfortunate cur that lagged behind, or tried to lie down : some wizened old squaw would make a rush at him with a lodge-pole, and strike hard enough to break every bone in its body. The buffalo robes, full of puppies and children, with their little red noses peeping out in a confused mass, had a most ludicrous effect. At night, when we camped, three Indians came in : they had also come from Lac-qui-Parle, and were on their way to join the Indian village that was hunting on the Shian, whither we were going; consequently they joined our com- pany. One was a very old Indian, and another was an old friend, Le Boeuf Leve. Their reserve when 118 PRAIRIE. they first came in was very remarkable. Although it was bitter cold, and we had a fine fire, having brought wood with us from Big- stone Lake, and were eating largely of pork and flour, whilst these warriors had not tasted anything for a distance of one hundred miles but half a skunk (or bete puant, as the half- breeds call them), the most oflTensively nasty of all animals, yet when they came in they sat down about a hundred yards from the fire, and did not attempt to address us, or warm themselves, till we invited them to do so, (which we did not do until we had quite finished,) when they gave a grunt of acquiescence, and, although shaking like leaves with the cold, very leisurely came near the fire, as if they were not in the least hurry to get warm, and began to eat ; but certainly, when they did once begin, it was a case of cut and come again " with a vengeance. — I men- tally ejaculated with the landlord, whose visitor, eating voraciously of a round of beef, said, " That^s the way we do it, landlord ; cut, and come again," answered, " Cut it you may; but come again you never shall." They consumed more of our pork in five minutes than we should have done in five days. For two or three consecutive days we " racked " along as fast and as well as our horses would carry us, most of the time through burnt prairies; the weather was bitterly cold, and it had snowed more or less every day since we left Lac-qui-Parle. The excitement of the Indians as the tracks of bulFalo became fresher was very great. At last, one morning, we came upon the gory remains of several bulls and cows that the Indians had killed a few days before. Soon after we saw the Indians, who had pressed oil PRAIRIE. 11& before, on the top of a slight eminence that com- manded a view of the prairie for many miles in every direction, waving their buffalo robes, and galloping about like wild demons. On joining them we found them in the greatest state of delight. They pointed out something to us at a great distance, but we could see nothing. At length, after some time, we saw a sort of flash of the sun, as if a reflection from water. On our guides coming up they told us that what we saw was some Indian sent out from the village to meet our friends, to give them good tidings of the buffalo ; that although we could not see him on ac- count of the distance, he could see us, being on an elevation against the light, and had flashed a looking- glass to attract attention. It is a plan always pursued by the Indians, and they say they can see it at a distance of ten miles. It is a fact that the sappers surveying from the summit of the Big- Cheviot, saw with distinctness the reflector of another party siir- veying on Ben McDhue, distant more than one hundred miles. I have heard old prairie hunters affirm, that on a dark night a flint and steel well struck can be seen fifteen or sixteen miles off ; and that, on a still night, when there is no wind, an Indian, by putting his ear to the ground, will hear a man or a buffalo breathing at the distance of three miles — rather a long distance certainly, but I believe anything of the natural gifts of a savage, who, both for his safety and means of subsistence, is so entirely dependent upon them, that by constant practice they are brought to a pitch of perfection of which we have no idea. In the evening we met the Indian who had flashed the glass. He was a boy about fifteen, the son of the 120 PKAIEIE . old chief who was with us. He had been out two days and nights from the village, quite alone, to meet his father, and bring him some pemmican, or buffalo- meat pounded up with grease. The meeting was very affectionate, and the chief immediately adorned his son with a blue surtout with brass buttons, like a parish beadle's, that had been given him by the American agent, and was too small for his obese body. He said buffalo were plenty, both cows and bulls, and that the Indians had killed fifty the day before. Some of our party saw buffalo next day at a great distance off, and the delight was very great. We continued our route to the banks of the Shian, where we came to the village of Indians, consisting of about twenty lodges we were in search of. Meat was plentiful, and every available pole and stick was adorned with flakes of meat hung up to dry. Here our guides, who had for some days been very restive and impertinent on account of our abusing them for their beastly laziness and the slowness of our pro- gress, thought fit to leave us and to take up their abode in some one of the Indian lodges. It was a bitter cold night, snow falling thick, with a piercing wind, and we had to remain in great misery, without fire or food, watching our traps,whilst within a quarter of a mile were the Indian lodges, and our rascally guides gorging themselves on fat cow. There were two or three score of sneaking, thieving-looking wretches loping about our little camp and laughing at us, and I have no doubt insulting us grossly, only luckily we did not understand them. At that time I would as soon have shot an Indian as I would a dog that wanted to bite me. I could perfectly under- stand the feeling of Ruxton's men, " Kill Buck " and PRAimE. 121 La Bonte, who would as soon shoot an Indian as " any other varmint." Next morning, on turning out, stiff and cold, we found our guides were missing. We entered several lodges to try and discover them; we were most hospitably treated at all of them, masses of half- boiled meat being invariably offered. Our researches proving unavailing, we got hold of an old chief, and taking him to our camp, we gave him some tobacco and sugar, and tried to impress upon him that we wanted to go to his lodge; I don't think he clearly understood what we meant, but to prevent mistakes, we shifted our baggage there, and took up our resi- dence with him. We remained in his lodge six or seven days, and during the whole of that time, though continually mobbed by Indians, we did not lose the value of a sixpence. Of course our inter- course was entirely by signs, and those of an obscure description, but as it snowed hard during the whole of that time, and we had some tea and coffee, and the small remains of the flour, we managed tolerably well. We held a continual levee, and there were never less than twenty or thirty Indians, looking at us most intently, particularly during our meals. The coffee and tea were great treats to them ; the latter we made twice, and then boiled, and the former we kept continually boiling from morning till night. The chief, in whose lodge we had taken up our residence, was the finest specimen of an Indian I ever saw, both in appearance and nature; he was called " Wah-ton-she," which signifies the " good man," in consequence of his amiable qualities ; his affection for his wife and children was very remarkable, especially for the latter, and there was one little boy, about two years old. 123 PRAIRIE. whom he used to nurse and cram with fat cow till it could hardly breathe^ and when it arrived at that state of repletion that one expected it to explode every moment, he used to get a lump of fat, and grease it well about the digestive organs, which seemed to give it great relief, and then lay it down before the fire till it subsided into something like its natural shape. The names of the different tribes, as well as the names of individuals, all have some distinct meaning. " Dahcotah,^' the name of the Siou^ nation, signifies, as nearly as it can be translated, " unum e pluribus," " non pareil." " Ahaton,^' the name of the Chip- peways, signifies " the men who live about the Great Fall," meaning the Fall of St. Anthony. The Indian name of the Pawnees signifies the nation with " big stomachs," " muckle-whames ; " " Iro- quois " signifies the " chief of men." The prairie Indians are most completely dependent on the buffalo. Everything that supports existence is derived from them ; lodges, beds, robes, mocassins, leggings, saddles, are all made from their skins ; powder flasks are made from their horns, needles from the small bones, their ribs make bows, and the arrows are tipped with bone. When they are plentiful the Indians live in clover, and when scarce they starve. No wonder they think and talk of nothing else, from the time they can first prattle till they are old veterans. It appears to me, that many of the arguments adduced in favour of the Asiatic descent of the American Indians (founded on a similarity of customs and habits with the inha- bitants of Asia) are unsound. Between two races of men living entirely by hunting, there must in any age be a great similarity of tastes and pursuits; the PHAIRIE. 12S thoughts and anxieties of both must be continually about their safety and the means of procuring their food and clothing. The habits and thoughts of the hunter on the plains of Asia and on the shores of the Danube must be much the same as the thoughts and habits of the hunter on the shores of the Missis- sippi or the prairies of America. The Indians have no idea of time or space that I could discover : they talk of so many moons and of when the sun is at a certain altitude. Their calendar of months is rather curious: — January, month of storms ; February, month when racoons travel ; March, month "mal aux yeux;" April, the month that the game begins to arrive ; May, when trees are in leaf; June (in lower country), strawberry month, (in upper country) , the month when the buffalo run ; J uly, month of ripe cherries ; August, corn month ; Sep- tember, month when flowers on the Prairie blossom ; October, month when they grille the rice ; November, deer month ; December, month of " I forget what." During two or three days when the snow pre- vented our hunting, we remained almost entirely in the lodge, trying to understand or be understood by the pets of the Dahcotah fancy. They seemed very good fellows, and enjoyed a good laugh, laughing when we did, and we laughed when they did. They kept continually smoking kinni-kinnik, and drinking sweet tea and coffee. Some young men had been sent out in the morning to find the exact locality of the buffalo, and what direction they were taking, in order that the movements of the village might be directed accordingly. They had strict injunctions not to hunt or be seen by the animals, lest they 124 PRAIRIE. might change their route. However, one young fellow, thinking nobody could see him, and having tender recollections of buffalo tongue and tender hump, did hunt and kill a cow. This performance having come to the ears of the chiefs in the evening, the warriors or soldiers of the tribe, who are bound to enforce the laws of the small republic, went to the young man's lodge, and slit it all to pieces, broke his gun, and in fact brought him and his whole family to great grief and dolour — very pleasant on a win- ter's night, with the thermometer below zero. On November 6th, in consequence of certain news of the direction the buffalo were taking, the village moved about ten miles north. Our guides did not come near us, and moreover had evidently tried to persuade the Indians to insult us; for our young Indian, who had hitherto been very amiable, became bumptious, and watched us packing the mules and horses without proffering the least assistance, and when they were ready, jumped on a horse and made signs for me to drive them. This was too much of a joke, so I made him get off, and took his place. As there were a great many Indians watching us, he felt the humiliation very much, seemed inchned to draw his knife, and muttered some harmless impre- cation on my head. In the afternoon two bulls came right into camp, and were killed in most slovenly style with bows and arrows by the Indians, each getting, I should think, twenty or thirty arrows. One poor brute in parti- cular would not die ; the Indians kept firing at him at a distance of fifteen or twenty yards, and the arrows entered the flesh about three inches. Every PRAIEIE. 125 time he was struck he gave a kind of plaintive bellow and tried to charge, but was too weak. He would have been a long time dying, if N had not gone up with his " two-shoot gun and put him out of his misery. It is a painful sight watching a buffalo on his last legs. He seems to get angry with the weak- ness that is creeping upon him, and stamps impa- tiently as if trying to shake it off. He never lies down when badly wounded, but stands till he drops, and when once down never rises again. Directly this unfortunate beast was down, the cowardly savages, who a few minutes before dared not approach within twenty yards, and rushed away at the slightest attempt at a charge, sprang upon him, and kicked him, and stuck their knives into him, with savage dehght. (I could quite imagine them doing the same to an enemy, whenever they had a chance.) The butchering was done in masterly style, but was dis- gusting in the extreme. His tongue was out before he was dead, and they were chewing his kidneys almost before his heart ceased beating ! Altogether the proceeding, in barbarity, reminded me of an Andalusian bull-fight ; although there is even less excuse for the enlightened European than for the wild Indian. The next morning, before daylight, we were awoke by yells and war-whoops, succeeded by the shrieks of squaws and the howls of the dogs. We imagined at first that some hostile Indians had made their ap- pearance. Our friend Wah-ton-she sprang up and rushed out ; but in a few minutes he returned, accompanied by about twenty warriors, and twice the number of squaws and dogs. The "Braves" 126 FEAmiE. seemed to be in a most excited state, and made most significant signs to us of somebody being dead, and then drew their fingers round their scalp with any- thing but pleasing expressions of countenance. From this we were led to imagine that some of the village had come to grief. The squaws and dogs having been turned out, the council-pipe was lit and handed round, and an old chief began a sort of monotonous recital, accompanied by a great deal of pantomimic action, as of men riding and dogs dragging the lodge- poles ; then he imitated men shooting, then of some- body being killed, and then the never-to-be-mistaken signs of the scalping process. His narration, every now and then, was interrupted by the " Ho ho^s " and smothered expressions of his companions, who seemed to be working themselves into a very uneasy state of mind. After the old chief had finished, some others spoke in turn, pointing to the sun and to the north. At length, after a good deal of noise and a great deal of smoking, the council broke up, and we were left in peace. We of course could only form conjectures as to their meaning ; but on the return of our guides a few days afterwards, we heard all about it. It appeared that during the night some Indians, being out after the buffalo, had fallen in with some Sioux dogs and lodge-poles without their owners. This of couse raised their suspicions, and "harking back^-" upon the trail of the dogs, they at length came upon the scalped and mutilated remains of several Sioux men, women, and children. It appeared that they had been on their march to join the band of Indians with whom we were staying, and had been attacked and scalped by PRAIRIE. 127 some of their enemies. The Indians knew from the direction the victors had taken^ and also from the mode of scalping, &c., that their enemies in this instance were the Blackfeet. The Blackfeet are the fiercest and most powerful of all the north-west tribes, except the Sioux, to which nation they formerly belonged, but separated on some dispute about the hunting grounds. The head chief of the Blackfeet is an English half-breed, a son of a Mr. Bird, who for many years was Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. His mother was a Blackfeet squaw, and he acquired such a taste for prairie life that no entreaty availed to make him give it up. It is a curious fact that the head chief of the Crows, also a very powerful tribe, and origi- nally one and the same with the Sioux and Black- feet, is a runaway mulatto from the States, The knowledge acquired amongst the whites, combined with a determined disposition, have enabled him to become the head warrior of the tribco The Sioux are genuine sons of Esau ; their hand is against every man, and every man's hand is against them, and they are at war with every one of their neighbours. The Blackfeet, Crows, Pawnees, or Gros Ventres as the half-breeds call them, Chippeways, Assiniboins, Mandans, Saxes, and Foxes form a cordon all round the Sioux country, but, owing to the central position of the latter, and to their being more powerful than any of their enemies taken singly, they are enabled to show more scalps at their war-dances than are missed from their council fires. November 9th. — To-day, to our great relief, our guides returned. Finding that we were getting on 128 PRAIRIE. very comfortably with the Indians, (the heads of the village having regularly taken us under their charge, never allowing the young men to annoy us in any way,) and seeing that we went out hunting, and made no attempt to discover or bring them back, they began, I suppose, to fear that we should, without awaiting their return, get some Indians to guide us to the Eed River Settlement, distant about 300 miles, in which case they would not only have lost their money, but we should have taken their horses and left them to shift for themselves. They came back to us in a most penitent mood, and begged our pardon, which we at first refused to give, but at last granted with great magnanimity. If they had not returned we should have been in rather an unpleasant " fix,'^ for although there is no doubt that we should have been able to make the Indians understand enough to guide us to the Red River, yet, although they were very civil to us whilst we were with them, very likely when we had left, the guides would have persuaded some of them to pursue and rob us, in which case we should have been in rather an unpleasant position. I never could quite understand the reason of the Indians treating us so well. I fancy it arose from a superstitious dread of us. Few of them had ever seen white men before, and then only as traders and soldiers, and had no conception of their travelling for pleasure and amuse- ment. Knowing from our dress that we were not soldiers, and from the presents we made them that we were not traders ; seeing also that the half- breeds were our servants (which mystified them more than anything else, as they have no ideas of domestic PEAIfllE. 129 servitude,) and having besides a great respect for the half-breeds, they respected us in proportion to the control we exercised over them ; and altogether, being quite mystified, they looked upon us, as they do upon everything they don't understand, as " wahkan,'' or great medicine, and treated us as such As it was now in our power to return, we deter- mined not to lose a moment about it. When we left the Indian village on the Shian, we were 350 miles from Lac-qui-Parle, 600 from St. Paul, and 1,400 from St. Louis. The ground was covered with snow, and winter had regularly set in, and we had the pleasant prospect of travelling that dis- tance through frost and snow with the thermo- meter below zero, and very little chance of finding a sufficiency of wood or food for the first 400 miles. Whilst our beasts were being caught and packed we took leave of our friend Wah-ton-she, his squaw and children, especially the youngest and fattest, who, if he ever gets over the unsymmetrical effect of excessive indulgence in beef-doings at too early an age, may make a great chief and eat his way up to distinction. We gave our host all the powder and shot we could spare, and needles, thread, and paint and ribbon enough to ensure his family's cutting a dash for the next year or two. Amongst other things we gave him a pair of large horse-pistols, which would never go off, a peculiarity so far fortunate that if they had they would probably have burst. Wah-ton-she was by far the finest specimen of the North American Indian, both in person and nature, that we saw. He was famed through his tribe for his gentleness and amiability, never hurting anything unnecessarily, and G 130 PRAmiE. not even beating his squaw or dogs. His innate sense of the law of honour and the rights of hospi- tality was great ; for though he had every oppor- tunity and temptation to rob us, and the doing so would have been attended with no kind of disgrace, but on the contrary would have made him rich, we did not whilst with him lose the value of a sixpence. When our horses were ready we shook hands, and (as is recorded of the unsuccessful meeting of the bishops of the Eastern and Western Churches at B/Ome to settle some intricate theological dispute) " parted with mutual respect.^' In the afternoon we " ran " and killed a large white wolf, as big as a large Newfoundland dog. Camped on the open prairie without a stick of wood, all our tea, colfee, flour, and pork were expended, and we supped on tough bull half-broiled, washed down with snow water. The next morning on awaking we found seven large bulls close to camp. We " ran " them and killed them all, our guides, I believe, doing the greater part of the execution ; they were better mounted, and more up to the sport. Running buf- falo for the first time, and the sensation of galloping alongside a brute that appears as large as a haystack, is novel and exciting ; but after running them a few times the sport loses its excitement, and for my part I would rather have ten minutes with a pack of hounds across the worst country in England than kiU all the buffalo on the prairie. The bulls generally allow you to approach within 500 yards before they start off a la course. A good horse will catch them in half a mile, and once up and alongside the pleasure is over, as PKAIRIE. 131 you keep on loading and tiring as fast as you can at a distance of five or six yards till tlie animal drops or stops, when you dismount and finish him at your leisure. The death-struggles of such an enormous brute (and they die very hard) are most painful to witness. The sport is just dangerous enough to keep up a wholesome excitement, and to originate tales of hair-breadth escapes without number. It is not nearly so dangerous as shooting in cover with five or six excitable sportsmen. There is the chance of your horse putting his foot into a fox or badger-earth; there is the chance of the bull stopping suddenly and turning round, in which case most probably he re- ceives the horse on his horns, and you make a voyage of discovery over his head ; and there is the chauce, if you are fortunate, of his running at you when he is wounded. I only speak of these dangers from hear- say, as all the bulls I saw were in far too great a hurry to get away to have any idea of turning upon their pursuers. We saw innumerable prairie wolves. They hunt the buffalo in packs of from 50 to 100, hanging on the skirts of the herds, and picking off the sick and weak, particularly the cows after calving, and the young calves. Their sagacity in pursuing their prey is very remarkable. Five or six wolves will chase a cow, and whilst one keeps jumping at her nose to occupy her attention, the others try to hamstring her by biting the sinew above the hock. The old she- wolves will catch the young calves by the ears, and drag them to their burrows to teach their young, as a cat does her kittens, to worry their prey. When one considers the number and pertinacity of their enemies it is quite a matter of wonder that g2 132 PRAIRIE. there are any buffalo left. The Indians and half- breeds hunt them continuously, and kill all indis- criminately — the cows heavy in calf, and the calves before they can stand. They act on the same prin- ciple as we do with regard to woodcocks and other birds of passage, killing them whenever they get a chance, knowing that though they may spare them, the next Indian that gets a chance will destroy them. There is no doubt that the immense herds of buffalo, once so common on the Western Prairies, have within the last twenty years become much less numerous; this, of course, is very much owing to their enormous destruction by the Indians and half- breeds, and the consequent diminishing of the whole species ; and it is also very much owing to the buf- falo having been driven from their feeding grounds, and forced to emigrate far north, to a climate im- suited to their nature. The country between the Gulf of Mexico and the river Plate once swarmed with buffalo, whereas now- hardly one is to be met with;* and far north, on the banks of the Columbia and the northern parts of Oregon, where twenty years ago not a buffalo was to be seen, herds of thousands now roam about in comparative peace. This expatriation of the bison, however, wdll cause its destruction almost quicker than the constant though Hmited attacks of the white man or the Indian. During the short warm summers the buffalo roam so far north, that frequently before they can return to more temperate regions they get caught by the snows of winter, and perish by thousands. The buffalo have * Though I have since heard they still exist in countless numbers on those prairies. PRAIKIE. 133 a great dislike to timber, and never approach it but for shelter. It is a curious fact also, that they have a peculiar dislike to the tinkhng of the bells of the domestic cows, and have never been known to return to any neighbourhood where they have once been heard. Upwards of 100,000 robes pass though the hands of the different traders during the year, and as they are all the skins of cows (the bulls' hides are too thick and heavy for use, except as carpets for the Indians to sleep upon), and as, moreover, only those killed during the six months of autumn and winter can be used for the purpose of clothing, those killed in the spring and summer being of no use to the traders, some faint idea of the enormous annual slaughter may be formed. According to this calcu- lation, (and it is from a return made to the Congress some years ago,) at least 400,000 cows and bulls must be destroyed during the year, of which number about nine-tenths are supposed to be cows ; this is exclusive of the thousands killed by the wolves and the rigours of winter. The Indians say that they themselves and the buffalo will go under together, and they are cer- tainly running a neck and neck race for it now, and the pace is beginning to tell ; and unless the Indians can be civilized and the buffalo domesticated, (circum- stances equally improbable,) such will most certainly be the case. At present the Indian not only con- siders work an evil, but absolutely a dishonour : he considers war and the chase the only pursuits worthy of a great chief, (ideas, by the way, not very dissimilar to those of our feudal ancestors,) and leaves the hoe and the spade to the squaw and the white man. 134 PRAmrE. The future of the race of red men in North Ame- rica is very clouded ; they will not embrace agricul- ture and the arts and sciences of civilized life, and even when they do, they enter into a race in which they must soon get either distanced or trampled on. How can the Indian, who in his barbarity and igno- rance raises with the greatest difficulty his scanty crops, (even from rich virgin soil of the prairie,) hope to exist in competition with an unscrupulous race of white men, his superiors in intellect and energy, and aided by all the arts and sciences of an enlightened civilization, who can get more return from one week^s labour than he does from that of the whole year, and who, controlled by no com- punction or pity when the dollar and Indian are weighed in opposite scales, does not hesitate one moment in turning out what they consider the use- less incumbrances of land which may be turned to better purposes ? A race of shepherds, as amongst the pastoral tribes of Northern Asia, where they are in the habit of returning annually to the same pasturages with their flocks and herds, or a race of savages, in some way dependent on the culti- vated fruits of the soil, as in South America and Mexico, have a better chance of attaining a certain • amount of civilization, than a wild race of hunters, who are bound to no particular spot, either by inte- rest or habit, but whose only guide in their wander- ings is the likelihood of procuring a sufficiency of food and clothing, and whose every idea is opposed to that first indispensable component of civilization — a fixed residence. The Sioux, of all the tribes of Indians, are said to PKAIRIE. 135 display the least aptitude for civilization, or for a fixed place of abode : their ruling passion, of a wan- dering life, is strong in death. It is said that not a single half-breed of demi- Sioux origin has been known entirely to relinquish the prairie life, not- withstanding all its privations and dangers. This is not the case with the half-breeds of the tribes of wood Indians. At Bradford, in Upper Canada, there is a large settlement of Seneca and Potowatamie half-breeds and Indians, who cultivate the soil, build houses, and behave as respectable members of society; but then in Canada the Indians have had the advan- tage of a government that has some regard to its treaties, and, moreover, has had the power, as well as the will, to prevent any infringement of them by private individuals, which is not the case in the States. In the States, again, some of the tribes of southern wood Indians, the Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choc- taws, have imbibed a considerable amount of civiliza- tion, and cultivate corn and potatoes and breed cattle with some advantage. The Choctaws and Cherokees, particularly, who inhabit the western frontier of Arkansas, are slave-holders, and have a newspaper pubhshed in their own language. Their civilization, however, is entirely owing to accidental circumstances, which can never be brought to bear on the prairie Indians. And even their future is far from bright, unless they get very quickly fused with the white race. These two tribes were originally the lords of Virginia, and were gradually, half by force and half by treaty, deprived of their lands, till they had only a small reserve left. Here they re- mained many years, surrounded on all sides by civili- 136 PRAIRIE. zation, which had made gigantic strides, and got far to their west ; thus, deprived of their hunting- grounds, and their means of subsistence by the cliase, they were obhged, for the means of existence, to take to agriculture. In this state they remained many years, gradually acquiring the advantages of civilized life ; and here one would have imagined the American Government (with unpeopled wilds, ex- tending for thousands of miles) might have left them in peace. But no: about thirty years ago, the Government, with the most barefaced disregard of all the oaths of repeated treaties, totally regardless of, or despising all the ties of honour or humanity, forced them to leave the small remains of their an- cient possessions, and to emigrate across the Missis- sippi to the state of Arkansas, amongst a people that knew them not. Here, being prevented from hunting by hostile and stronger tribes, they were obliged to avail themselves of the knowledge they had acquired before their emigration, and to cultivate crops and rear cattle. The conduct of the Americans has not been a whit more humane towards the Indians, than that of the Spaniards in Mexico and the West Indian Islands. The latter hunted the natives down with dogs, and treated them with the greatest barbarity, but still did not force them to leave the land of their birth en masse. The Americans, by the no less certain means of treaties and proclamations, have driven the Indians back, inch by inch, till they have deprived them of all their country, and then, with a true feeling of fraternity and equality, and, as their papers say, with an " enlightenment worthy the age we live in,'' have PRAIRIE. 137 taken them kindly by the hand, and handed them over to a hostile country. According to the recent calculation, civilization advances at the rate of fifteen miles a-year ; that was before the discovery of Cali- fornia. It has increased considerably during the last few years, both from the west, as well as from the east ; so that the next fifty years will leave very little country for its original proprietors. The Indians themselves say, that so many white men have gone west, that they are sure the east must be unpeopled, and that therefore they shall emigrate in that direc- tion. The treatment of the Indians by the American Government is much the same as that of a first lieutenant teUing a miserable little midshipman, " If things go on in this manner, sir, either you or I must leave the ship." If either is forced to leave, it is pretty evident which one it would be. G 3 138 PRAIRIE, CHAPTER VIII. PRAIRIE — SOURCE OF ST. PETER'S RIVER— BEAR'S LODGE TO FORT SWELLING. On the 11th of November we camped on the open jDrairie, under the lee of a small knoll, known by the name of the " Bear's Lodge.'' It was a few years ago the residence of a grizzly bear, who was the dread of the surrounding Indians and buffalo. One of the half-breeds, who had been hunting on the Red River, told us some rather interesting stories of the ferocity of the grizzly bear. Last year he was out after wolves, when he suddenly came upon a grizzly bear. He was well mounted, and being anxious to dis- tinguish himself, he determined to try and kill her ; he therefore gallopped up to her and fired at her in passing (the way they always attack large game). When he had fired, he checked his horse a little, whilst loading, intending then to turn and give her another shot. "Whilst in the act of loading he heard a noise behind him, and turning found the bear almost at his horse's quarters. He had just time to turn and fire as the bear sprang upon his horse; luckily the shot took effect and the bear fell dead, but not before she had killed the horse. The grizzly bear cannot climb trees, but can gallop very nearly as fast as a horse ; quite as fast, indeed, for a short distance. A curious PRAIRIE. 139 pair of skeletons were found in the prairie some years since, that of a buffalo bull and a grizzly bear ; they were lying close together, the hulVs horns firmly fixed in the breast-bone of the bear :— the fight must have been worth seeing. We were roused every night by flights of swans and geese and cranes wending their way south. The latter do not seem to have changed their habits much since the days of Homer, and trumpet and cackle incessantly ; when flying low, the flapping of thou- sands of wings in the air has a curious effect. Their migrations are longer than are generally supposed, reaching from the extreme north to Mexico and Central America. We camped on the Shian River, which is full of beaver and otter, but owing to its being the fron- tier between the Sioux and the Chips, neither have the pluck to hunt it. We intended to have re- mained there a week or two to hunt elk and beaver, but our guides were afraid of the pillager bands of Chips making a "raise" of their scalps and our horses. One of my companions and old Eainville went after buffalo, and fell in with some Siouxs on the march. The Sioux, at first, when at a distance, thought they were Mandans and cached. N said it was like magic the way they concealed them- selves in the open prairie. They possess in common with hares and deer the faculty of taking advan- tage of every small rise and undulation, which a white man's eye hardly detects. The Mandans are a race of Indians, perfectly distinct in complexion and habits from the other tribes of North America. They are very nearly as white as Europeans, and 140 MAIRIE. have hair on their faces ; they do not live in buffalo- skin lodges, but build regular huts of mud and wood. They are said to be the descendants of Madoc, a Welsh Prince, who settled in Texas early in the twelfth century, but were driven by the Co- manche and other southern tribes up to the north. They are more ingenious than the other tribes, and the traders say they make a kind of blanket, which in a very small degree resembles the Welsh blanket. They were very nearly destroyed by the small-pox some fifteen years ago, but have now to some extent recovered their former numbers. I have often heard the remark, that it is a great pity some man of science and perseverance does not devote some years to acquiring the different Indian languages, and trying to form some general hypo- thesis of their origin, from the different customs and traditions extant amongst them. This is very true, and is a consummation devoutly to be wished ; but the extraordinary number and complexity of the languages of the Aborigines of America, north and south, completely put it out of the power of one, or even of a dozen philologists, to perform properly. There are as many languages spoken amongst the two or three millions of American savages scattered over the two continents of America, as amongst the six hundred millions of human beings composing the population of the rest of the globe. There are no less than 21 1 languages spoken in the northern continent and Mexico : 44 in central, and 168 in the southerm continent of America. There are thus, according t o Vatel, nearly 500 distinct dialects spoken in the New World, without enumerating any which do not HlAIRIE. 14f differ from each, other as widely as the Spanish from the ItaKan, or the German from the Dutch. After a laborious comparison of the 500 known lan- guages of America with those of the Old World, only some hundred or so words have been found having any distinct or rather indistinct resemblance. Those few words have been selected from nealy 100 American languages, and are said to bear a kind of resemblance to words at present used in the Mongol, Tonguse, and other northern Asiatic nations ; some few also bear a slight resemblance to words in the Celtic and Biscayan languages. These trifling and most probably fortuitous resemblances, although affording a shght foundation on which any number of theoretical superstructures may be raised, are quite insufficient to be of any use in solving the problem, as to how the American continent was peopled. The more an unprejudiced person examines the numerous theories on the subject, the more com- pletely must he be convinced that the data and facts upon which the different theories are founded are insufficient for conclusive argument. Although it is evident from the hull of the ship that Columbus discovered during his second voyage, that the physical conditions of the oceanic currents ren- der it possible that vessels or canoes may have been washed from the coast of Africa to that of America, yet, beyond the undoubted fact that the inhabitants of Paraguay, the point where any vessel or canoe would probably strike, are considerably darker in complexion than the other inhabitants of America — and even amongst them there is no similarity whatever to the negro features — there is very little 142 PRAIRIE. reason to suppose that Africa contributed in any- considerable degree to the peopling of the new world. America must either have been peopled from Asia or from Europe, and the probability is strongly in favour of its being peopled from both. The north of Greenland is only separated from the continent of America by a narrow strait, and the inhabitants every now and then have intercourse ; and it is an ascertained fact that the Esquimaux perfectly resemble the Greenlanders in aspect and appearance, dress, and mode of living. The pre- sumption is strong, therefore, that the Esquimaux originally came from Greenland ; they are, however, the only people of North America who bear any re- semblance to the Northern Europeans, and are evidently a distinct race from all the other nations of the American continent. The other nations of Indians, from the extreme north of the continent to the extreme south, bear undeniable evidence of a common origin, modified of course by climate and their mode of life ; and moreover, in every peculiarity of feature, person, and disposition which characterises them, they display a striking affinity to the rude tribes scattered over the north of Asia : the presumption therefore is equally strong that they also were originally of the same race, and came from Asia : this is quite feasible when we come to consider that the north-east of Asia is only separated from the north-west of America by Behring's Straits. Nearly all the tribes of North American Indians have certain indistinct traditions of their ancestors possessing a warmer country in the south. The now extinct tribe of Indians, the ERAmiE. 143 Natchez of Florida that I before mentioned, form a remarkable and interesting exception. They had a monarchical form of government, and a class of nobles like the Mexicans, and preserved a curious tradition that their forefathers came from the Rising Sun, across the Big Salt Lake ; that the voyage was long, and their ancestors were on the point of perish- ing with hunger when they reached America. They were a fierce tribe, and not improbably belonged to the race of the Caribs of the Islands, having been driven out of their reckoning by storms or currents. Tamerlane, the Mongolian conqueror, who lived some time in the beginning of the fifteenth century, adopted the impression of a bloody hand for his mark on all state occasions. Now it is a curious fact, that the North American Indians are found using this device at this very day in ornamenting their war-robes and lodges ; and in central America, Stephens found on nearly all the ruins he visited the impression of a red hand, evidently made with the hand itself on the plaster when soft ; so frequent were they, that though at first they struck him as curious and mysterious, yet they soon became so common as to attract no attention. Whether the meaning of the impression under such diiFerent cir- cumstances, and in so distant an age and place, could be traced up to some common source or tradition, I leave it for wiser heads to decide; certainly, as Buckstone would say, "the incident is rather a strong one.^' The Indians probably know nothing of the tradition of the device, but use it as an orna- ment which has been handed down to them from father to son, without any distinct meaning. 144 It is singular that traditions regarding tlie arrival of a white and bearded man from an unknown country, and his teaching the natives to build houses and cultivate ground, are preserved in four distinct portions of America. The white man from vrhom the Peruvians professed to have derived their entire code of law — the Quetzalcoatl of the Mexicans — the Bochica of the Muyseas in New Grenada — the Camam of the Brazilians, are all instances of the kind. But what is most singular is, that the Peru- vian legislator was the only one whose advent was said to have been from the West, the other three came from the East. How, it is difficult to conceive. We " humped " it for four days, snowing and sleet- ing continually, with the snow several inches deep, and a wind that went through you and came out the other side without stopping. You felt the breath out of your body was quite as cold as the air you took in. We had no fire but from buffalo-dung, which took a long time to collect, and then lasted but a very short time, giving scarcely any heat. Lying down in snow, with nothing to eat, and wakening next morning half frozen and the snow nearly a foot deep over you, was by no means cheer- ful. A buffalo robe is the warmest thing possible so long as you can exclude the air; but during those cold drifting winds on the prairies, if a crevice of half an inch got open you were half frozen ; the vnnd came direct from the Pole, with hardly a stick or a hill to break its keenness. All our flour, pork, tea, and coffee had been exhausted for nearly a fortnight, and we had nothing but meat, meat, meat, harder and harder, half-cooked, and more indigestible every PRAIRIE. 145 day, washed down with either snow-water, which is very unwholesome, or by stagnant pool-water, got with much difficulty by chopping a hole in the ice. One day, when the repetition of buffalo-meat had become extremely nauseous, we boiled a few tit-bits of some of the large wolves we had killed, and ate them 'par preference, but I cannot say it was an im- provement. A wolf's heart eaten warm was supposed by the ancients to be a cure for madness and hypo- chondria; however, as we were perfectly sane, and by no means melancholy, we had no necessity to try the remedy, and contented ourselves with the ribs and loins. Nov. 17. — One day we shot an old bull ; he was standing in a hollow with several wolves prowling roimd him : as he did not start off at our approach we expected him to charge us and show fight, and approached with great caution ; but when we got close up to him we found that he was quite blind from great age. We held a sort of saddle-bow court-martial on him, and settled that it was more humane to give him an ounce of lead, and put him out of misery, than leave him helpless to the tender mercies of the wolves, who would have attacked him the moment he lay down ; consequently we gave him a volley. He never moved an inch afterwards. We intended taking his tongue, but he was so old and so tough, we found it was no use ! Whilst suffering from excessive cold, and badness and scarceness of food, it appeared as if the ghosts of all the correct little dinners we had ever eaten, every basin of potage a la bisque at the Trois Fr^res, every glass of Cunningham's claret, and every white- 146 PRAIRIE. chokered, white-napkined waiter one had ever known, rose up to mock us in our misery. But who " Can cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast ] ****** Oh no ! the apprehension of the good Gives but the greater feeling to the worse." I think it is Rousseau who says, if a man wants to imagine beautiful scenery he should be shut up between four walls ; and certainly if a man wants to imagine a warm room and comfortable dinner, squat- ting in the snow on the prairie, with a piercing wind, a nearly extinguished fire, and a platter of half-boiled wolf or unmasticable bull, washed down with water by no means so super excellent as that of the Choaspis in Persia, which the Persian kings preferred to wine, or as that of the Clitorius, " with which," as Ovid says, " whoever has allayed his thirst, avoids wine, and abstemious delights in pure water only," is the place to realize this vision with effect ! I know no situation where selfishness is more drawn out, or acts with less disguise than on an expedition of this kind. None of our party were men of bad tempers or remarkably selfish dispositions; but I beheve when wrapped up for the night in our buffalo robes, it must have been a matter of very great im- portance which would have induced us to turn out. This laziness, or selfishness, or whatever it was, showed itself most strongly in trifles. When taking our tea (when we had any) for instance, if either of us asked the other for more sugar, and the party asked had to move his blanket even six inches from his shoulder, the request was sure to be met with some cutting PKAIRIE. 147 remark, such as, " What a fellow you are for sugar ! " — " You^re always asking for more sugar ! " — " Why didn't you take more at first ? " &c. It is the same feeling of irritability which gave rise to the story of the man who, being in a very bad humour, and seeing another, a perfect stranger, stoop down to tie his shoe, gave him a tremendous kick, saying, " Hang you, sir ! — you're always tying your shoe ! " On the 20th November, late in the evening, we arrived at a lake, called by the half-breeds, " Lac de Bete puant," or the Lake of the stinking Skunk." It swarmed with geese and ducks, and we sent out the young Indians to get some. They soon returned with fifteen ducks and two geese, which were speedily placed in the pot, and all devoured by seven hungry men. We were very nearly paying dear for our gourmandizing feast. We had camped about a quarter of a mile from the lake, and having plenty of wood, had made a roaring fire, and after the cold wind of the last ten days, and the fat ducks of the last two hours, we were all in a very sleepy and far from watchful state. The consequence was, we all fell into a deep sleep, from which we did not awake till after sunrise, when we discovered what a narrow escape we had had. The prairie had been on fire, and had run up within a quarter of a mile of our encampment, when fortunately the wind had changed, and when we awoke we could see the fire miles and miles away. If the wind had not changed it must have gone hard with us. We had encamped in very high grass, and if the fire had once caught us asleep, we should never have had time to get to the lake. The next night the wind again changed, and the 148 sotrucE OF fire having almost described a circle round us, came back in quite an opposite direction ; we watched it gradually eating its way up to us all day. About 4 p. M. we camped in a small piece of wood, very near the source of the St. Peter River^ and about a quarter of a mile from the side of the Couteau des Prairies. The fire kept advancing all night, but the wind was so unsteady, it could make but little progress. The fire was crackling all round us, sometimes half-a-mile off, and sometimes hardly three hundred yards: al- though the night was pitch dark, we could see to read the smallest writing by the light of the fire. It was a most magnificent sight, the fire creeping up the sides of the Couteau, like a great writhing serpent, darting out innumerable forked tongues, sometimes almost dying away for want of wind, or from getting amongst the snow-drifts, and then again blazing up twenty or thirty feet high, and rushing along with a crackle like ten thousand men firing a feu de joie. We sat up a good part of the night watching the fire, and our cattle, who were terribly frightened; we knew that we were perfectly safe, (as the fire never enters timber, a fact I should have doubted had I not seen it frequently,) but if the cattle had once been seized with a panic, we should have lost every one of them, as when stampedoed by fire, they are just as likely to rush into it as away from it. A fire in the prairie advances in two sides of a square, exactly in the same way as mowers advance. It is arrested quite suddenly by rain or by a change of wind, as if the mowers had left off to go to their dinners. It crackles (as I before observed) like a platoon of musketry, and with a strong wind, roars and rushes along at the ST. PETER'S RIVER. 149 rate of fifteen or sixteen miles an hour. When the grass is long, and the wind high, the fire advances against the wind ; this apparent anomaly is easily explained : — the high wind blows the tops of the high grass over the fire, which ignite first, and communi- cating with the stem, the fire eats its way to windward. The Indians take the greatest pains to avoid firing the grass in their own country, as it frightens away the buff'alo ; but so thoughtless are they, that they will sometimes make an incursion into an enemy's country on purpose to fire it, quite forgetting that the fire once started, nobody can tell what direction it will take, and that they themselves are just as likely to be the sufi'erers as those they go to injure. This autumn the fires have covered a greater area than has ever been known ; the banks of the Missouri are said to be burnt for the distance of five hundred miles. The Indians, therefore, frequenting those prairies, must either starve, or hunt in their enemies' country. The Sioux say that the Blackfeet and Mandans have fired their prairie this year. There are two methods of avoiding fires in the prairie ; one, by lighting a fire yourself, and keeping on the burnt grass in its track ; and the other, by reaching water or timber : we had to avail ourselves of both these methods. People taking refuge in some of the lakes covered with reeds, frequently find themselves worse off" than if they had remained on hard ground; for though they may be up to the middle in water, the fire still consumes the high reeds, often six or seven feet high, to a level with the water, and unless they can exist under water, they come to grief. Cattle and bufiklo, whose instinct 150 LA.KE TRAVERS. prompts them to rush to the nearest water, fre- quently get caught in this manner, and perish in numbers. We reached Lake Travers late in the evening of November 24th, after the coldest ride I ever re- member, and having had to cross three frozen rivers. There is one of the finest views I ever saw from the High Bluff, between Lake Travers and Big- stone Lake. You have the range of the Couteau behind you, the boundless Prairie in front, and the two Lakes on either hand. Lake Travers is about thirty miles, and Big-stone Lake forty miles long. The latter derives its name from some enormous granite boulders scattered about it, dropped most likely from some icebergs drifting over this part of the world in former ages, when the prairie was the bed of an ocean. Here we found some Sioux lodges: almost all the men were out for their autumn hunt, and only two or three old men left to supply the women and children with fish and the means of subsistence. Our guides were made so much at home by the squaws, and found themselves so comfortable, that they refused to move, declaring the horses and mules wanted rest, that the prairie was burnt the whole distance to Lac-qui-Parle, &c. However, we who saw the real reasons for their wishing to remain, determined to set out without them, and taking the young Indian as a guide, to make the best of our way to Lac-qui-Parle, about 140 miles. We made the young Indian some presents, and explained to him that we wanted to go to the Englishman's lodge, meaning McLeod, (who was the only Englishman he had any knowledge of,) and LAC-QUI-PAfiLE. 151 about three o^clock a.m. we set off, each taking a buffalo-robe and a spare pair of mocassins, and a piece of buffalo-meat. The snow was deep, and the weather bitterly cold. The "trail" lay along the side of Big-stone Lake, and was very picturesque ; we racked along about six miles an hour till long after dark, when we camped in a sort of thicket, built a fire, and roasted, or rather burnt our meat on sticks. We tethered our horses all together, and lay down, as we intended to start again when the moon was well up. The Indian awoke us about midnight. Snowing hard, the wind blowing the snow right into our faces. We made tracks as long as the moon lasted, and lay down till dayhght_, to enable our horses to get a last pick before entering a burnt prairie of about sixty miles. The wind was too cold to allow us to sleep, and we welcomed the first gleam of light with pleasure. We rode the whole day through a burnt prairie, and arrived at Lac-qui-Parle at night. Nothing can well be imagined more tiresome or desolate than a journey across a burnt prairie: when there is snow on the ground you can see the white trail on the black ground meandering like a white worm for miles. The jet black ground causes a very unpleasant sensa- tion in the eye. It was curious to see the ease with which the young Indian kept following the " trail," at the rate of seven miles an hour, without for one. second being confused by the innumerable buff'alo paths which crossed our course at every ten yards, and, to our inexperienced eyes, appeared exactly similar. By the the time we reached Lac-qui-Parle, we had had pretty nearly quantum suff., and for the last tw enty miles our efforts to urge along our poor 152 LAC-QUI-PAKLE. jaded cattle had added considerably to our fatigue and annoyance. We went to the trader's hut, and in a most unrelenting way " pitched into'' the tea, sugar, pork and potatoes, and we never could sufficiently gloat over the large fire, and sat and smoked, and smoked and sat and roasted ourselves in a perfect state of enjoyment. The winding up of the evening, the wrapping ourselves up in our robes, and lying down before the fire, and hearing the wind and snow beating outside, and knowing there were no horses to tether, and no occasion to rouse out till morning, was worthy of the seventh heaven." I now quite realized the Indian's reason for fancying the place for wicked spirits to be a region of perpetual cold and want, and their heaven to be a place of warmth and plenty. We spent three or four days at Lac-qui-Parle before we thought of moving, and had one grand tea-party at the missionary's, a gentlemanly clever man, with an equally agreeable wife, and a family that reminded me of the Swiss family Robinson. He had resided there thirteen years, and I imagine that his success was by no means equal to his exertions and privations. He has translated one of the Gospels into the Sioux language, but more from a sense of duty (and hope for the future) than any idea of its at present benefiting the Indians. He does not give the Sioux a very high place in the in - tellectual classification of the world, and seems to imagine there is no chance whatever of their be- coming civilized. The Indians believe that the thunder is a huge bird, with green back and grey breast, and that the INDIAN BELIEF. 153 flapping of his wings causes the thunder (some faint resemblance to the mythological birds of Jove, who carried the thunder in their claws). They imagine that the heavens are supported by four large poles, resembling large trees ; that the big bird lives in the west, and is only heard when flying east. This is easily accounted for by the fact of their storms almost invariably coming from the west. They have a superstitious fear of the aurora borealis, which they call the " medicine fire." They believe that it has the power of rendering them good shots, (an idea arising, I imagine, from the manner in which the rays of light of an aurora dart about in the heavens,) and consequently worship it. Of meteors and falling stars they have a great dread ; they believe that they are sent by the great warriors who are in the " happy hunting-grounds," to warn them of danger. The meteor that falls in the west is the only one that portends success to the Sioux in war; those that fall in the north, south, or east portend that a blow will be struck in either quarter by their enemies. Four is their sacred number ; they dance four times before going to war, they dance for four months round their scalps, and all their religious ceremonies are performed four times. Their singing is the most monotonous tiresome cbaunt imaginable, a variation on two low notes and a high one. When camping out, if there were many of them, they would keep up the chaunt all night, relieving each other by turns, and if any awoke in the night, they deemed it their duty immediately to begin singing. In the spring they suff"er very much from snow-blindness, (arising from the glare of the sun on the snow ;) so much, H 154 CIVILIZA.TION. incieed, that they have a month which they call the Month of Bad Ej^es. It is no uncommon si^ht in the spring to see one Indian nearly blind leading half-a- dozen others quite blind j luckily there are no ditches for them to fall into. The cant about the trammels of civilization, and the perfect liberty and independence of the savage in his native state, roaming where he listeth, is all humbug ; nobody, in reality, has less liberty than the savage Indian, He cannot say. This country and manner of life does not suit me ; I will go and live elsewhere. The instant he sets his foot out of his own country he knows he will be scalped. His posi- tion realizes to the letter — " In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." His every moment is taken up by his exertions to procure food. The laws even of the society he exists in render him anything but a free agent. Witness the young warrior whose lodge was slit up on a cold winter's night, and his gun broken, because he had hunted without leave — (game laws, with a vengeance.) The more civilized and en- lightened a country becomes, the greater liberty of thought and action its inhabitants enjoy. The common labourer or sweeper of crossings in London has more real freedom than the proudest chief that ever hunted buffalo on the prairie. At the end of the third day our rascally guides made their appearance, and we paid them their score, giving them a little of our minds. A more lazy, lying, and cowardly set of men I hope never to meet again. Our horses were all far too weak to afford any hope of their being of any use to us on our return to St. Peter's, so we made a fresh bargain with the LA. FRAMBOISE. 155 trader's head-man, a Scotcli Canadian, expatriated for shooting a man in a duel. We set off en route to La Framboise trading fort, 120 miles distant, where we arrived in four days, the snow being nearly two feet deep the whole w^ay. During the autumn, on the prairie you find large flocks of black birds, much resembling starlings in shape and flight ; they are very tame, and I have seve- ral times seen them sitting on the horses' backs. The Indians say they are the first to come in the spring and the last to disappear in autumn. How that is, I can't say, but during the last six weeks on the prairies we did not see one, but their place was sup- plied by flocks of stone-coloured birds, with white wings and breasts, rather smaller than the black bird. They are equally tame, taking short flights, and by some peculiarity of movement, when flying, you see only the white breast and inside of the wings, which has exactly the appearance of flakes of snow, or of pieces of white paper falling ; hence the Indians call them the Snow-bird. They appear and disappear equally as suddenly as the black bird. We were hospitably entertained by "La Framboise," the jovial old Canadian half-breed before mentioned. We had got into the region of venison, the only eat- able fresh meat we had tasted since the feast of ducks. La Framboise told us that on the Riviere des Moines, and on the little Sioux River, about fifty miles west of us, the Indians had just had a "difficulty" with some Yankee traders, and had " raised " their hair and taken their horses. Next day we made " tracks " for Travers de Sioux, where we arrived on the even- ing of the second day. Snow very deep, and travel- H 3 156 ST. PETER'S. ling very fatiguing. We found tlie lialf-breed Graham in great distress^ having lost his little son the day before. In the evening some squaws came to cry and condole with the mother. It was a species of " wake and at first I rather respected their motives, but Graham told me it was only a begging manoeuvre to get a supper. On December Sd, after a good breakfast of bacon and wild honey, we got our horses over the St. Peter's with great difficulty; owing to the rapidity of the current and the springs, it had not frozen right over, so we had to create a passage across, and fixing the animals one by one on the leeward side of a canoe, or dug-out, to protect them from the floating blocks of ice, we paddled them across ; some of the poor brutes were nearly dead with cold Avhen we landed them. When they were all over, we set out for St. Peter's. The snow was far too deep to allow of our riding the horses, they having hard work to get thenoselves along ; so we had the pleasant prospect of walking upwards of 100 miles through snow over our ankles, and no snow-shoes on. We camped the first night in the Big-wood, and made a roasting fire of a silk-cotton tree, about thirty feet long, and ten or twelve feet high, and lying down at full length before it, we defied the snow, which fell in quan- tities. The second night we slept at a trader's hnt, where we had breakfasted in going out, but he him- self, poor fellow, was dead of quinsey, and his wife nearly so. On the 7th December, the third day from our leaving Travers de Sioux, after a tedious journey on foot, the snow very deep, and the wind as cold as charity, we arrived at St. Peter's before dark, and FORT SPELLING. 157 found the thermometer fourteen below zero ; and before we left to go south it was as low as twenty. The next day we went over to Fort Snelling, and were invited by the officers to a dance, given in turn by the members of their small society, consisting entirely of the garrison. We explained that we had no ball-dress, but that difficulty being overruled, we accepted the invitation with pleasure. Our "get up " for the ball was of a most curious nature; being short of money till we got to St. Louis, all our investments in dress had been entirely guided by a view to the utility of the article. We had each pur- chased a great blanket-coat, which reached down to the heels; these with black trowsers, hair down to our shoulders, and mocassins, completed our ball attire. When we entered the ball-room, one gentleman not acquainted with the forlorn condition of our ward- robe, came to us and asked us if we would not rather leave our great-coats in an ante-room ! The great- coats being the only upper vestments we had on, we were obliged to explain the necessity of our declining to avail ourselves of his kind offer. The next day we found the Mississippi, though once completely frozen over by a frost of twelve below zero, had broken up again, and being unable to cross over to St. PauPs to "raise the ready,'^ the officers in the garrison kindly pressed us to become their guests, which we did with great pleasure. They rigged us up cots and sleeping places, and we remained with them for about ten days. More agreeable, gentlemanly, and well- informed men I never wish to meet, and I doubt whether any service can produce their superiors. They had been in the Mexican war, and we used to 158 AMERICAN ARMY. have long arguments about it, and they agreed in saying that the difficulties to be encountered in Mexico were more those of privation and climate than of hard fighting. The American army pin their faith on General Scott. They say that his manoeuvres and tactics during his march to the city of Mexico, and his battles en route, were very correct indeed, and showed great generalship. Of General Taylor, and the battle of Buena- Vista, they think nothing at all. The volunteers, on the other hand, pretend to think General Scott over-rated, and swear by General Taylor. The reason for this difference of feeling is easily understood. General Scott is a regular soldier, heart and soul, and took every opportunity of showing the free and enlightened citizens that flocked to the war as volunteers, that though he had a great respect for them as American citizens, as American soldiers he thought they were a failure, Taylor, on the other hand, gave out that the volun- teers were superior to the regulars on every occasion. The consequence was, Taylor was elected President, and the first use he made of his appointment was to remove General Scott from the command of the army, or, what amounted to the same thing, to defer confirming him in the appointment. People who imagine that the Americans are not a nation anxious for military glory, and endued with a military spirit, (at all events, as far as titles and uniforms are con- cerned,) are very much mistaken ; they worship in the blindest manner those whom they are pleased to consider their heroes. General Jackson, the most obstinate, self-willed old individual, with as much CAPTAIN SCOTT. lo9 idea and respect for liberty as the Emperor of China, was elected President twice, merely because he re- pulsed the British at New Orleans — an action which anywhere else would have been counted as an every- day skirmish. General Taylor, merely because he won the battle of Buena- Vista, and flattered the military taste and extolled the deeds of the majority, and for no other reason whatever, was elected Presi- dent, in opposition to Webster and Clay. General Scott is now one of the candidates, not from his poli- tical principles, but from his military renown. If ever any fundamental change takes place in the American constitution, it will be brought about by a man who can dazzle them with military glory, rather than convince them by poKtical reasoning. At Fort Snelling we heard a great deal about a Captain Michael Scott, a worthy namesake of the great Michael, if all is true that is related of him. " Coon" Scott, as he was called, was a notorious character in the American army, and supposed to be the best shot that ever existed. He derived his cognomen "Coon" from a story they told of him. He was out shooting one day, when he saw a racoon sitting in a tree. He levelled his rifle at it, and was just going to fire, when the " coon" called out, and said : " Are you Captain Scott ?" " Yes." " What, Captain Michael Scott of such and such a regiment? " " Yes." " Oh ! then you need not give yourself the trouble to fire ; V\\ come down ; " and down he came accordingly. The real fact was, that Scott's com- panions had been firing at a racoon, which being pro- tected by the limb of a tree from their fire, they could see, but not touch, and consequently it remained unmoved. This Scott saw, and went round 160 ST. PETER'S. to the other side. Directly the racoon found that his body was unprotected, and exposed to the shot^ he came down — and hence the story. Scott was said to be able to put a rifle bullet through two potatoes, thrown up in the air; his brother officers agreed in saying there was no doubt the potatoes were thrown up, and that when they came down there was a hole in each — the only difficulty was the nature of the hole. It appeared that when anybody else fired at a potato and struck it, the bullet split it all to pieces ; whereas, when Scott fired, his bullet made the neatest, smoothest hole possible. This induced his enemies to surmise that the holes were made in the potatoes before they went up. (The most reasonable supposition.) His death was rather singular: he was always shooting with a rifle or smooth-bore, and he had a conviction which he never concealed from any- body, (which was strengthened by his having escaped in duels untouched from the best shots,) that he never could be wounded by a bullet. During the advance on the city of Mexico he commanded a company at the battle of Cliapultepec. His men were ordered to lie down, to allow the enemies' shot to pass over them ; he alone remained standing ; his brother officers remonstrated with him on the folly of exposing himself unnecessarily, but he laughed, and said, " The bullet is not yet run that will kill Michael Scott.'-' The words were hardly out of his mouth, when a ball struck him in the heart, and he never moved again. St. Peter's is a great trading fort on the right bank of the Mississippi, opposite St. Paul's, and is inhabited entirely by half-breeds. They are invari- ably white on the father's, and red on the mother's FORT SNELLING. 161 side, and not a single instance of the contrary is on record. The English, Scotch, or American half- breeds are generally speaking intelligent, honest, determined fellows. The French half-breeds are for the most part lazy, exacting and cowardly, though at St. Peter's I saw some remarkable exceptions. At Port Snelling we made the acquaintance of the Indian agent, whom the Indians call the " Little Potato." His predecessor was a Colonel Murphy, and was a very large man. The Indians inquired the meaning of the word Murphy, and were told it meant "potato'' (which they in their simplicity believed was the name applied to all agents) ; accord- ingly, from his size, they called hini the Big Potato, and his successor, the one I met, (being a much smaller one,) they christened " the Little Potato." We had long discussions with the soldiers, about the comparative merits of revolvers and double- barrelled pistols. All the dragoons, when first sent to Mexico, were armed with revolvers, or rather Colt's repeaters, viz. with one barrel and six cham- bers ; but it was found that, from any inaccuracy or carelessness in the hurry of loading, the chambers were very apt to explode together. Whether this is an imperfection that can be remedied or not, I can- not say; but repeaters are not served out to the army at present. The Texan Rangers, who, during the Mexican war, in the name of liberty, and for the honour of their country, committed more atrocities than were ever heard of in civilized warfare before, were all armed with a Colt's repeating-rifle and a brace of pistols. So they went into action with eighteen shots ready ! and, as most of them were supplied with spare chambers, their eighteen shots n3 163 PORT SNELLING. could very quickly be replaced by other eighteen ! — rather serious odds for an equal number of men with single- barrel muskets to contend against. One of the soldiers had served many years on the extreme western frontier, and gave us some amusing accounts of the extraordinary state of lawlessness existing in those parts. He said, that one day, riding along a road in Arkansas, h.e saw a man seated by the side of it, his face covered with his hands, which were dripping with blood. As he was groan- ing, and appeared suffering, he went up to him, and mquired what was the matter with him. He said he had had a " difficulty " with another man, who had completely " gouged " out one eye, and very nearly destroyed the sight of the other. G of course was shocked, and asked the man whether he could assist him in any way in getting satisfaction. The man grinned, and said, — " I guess I have some satisfaction already, any how ! " — and, putting his hands into his pocket, he pulled out something which A at first thought was a crushed gooseberry, but which on closer inspection he discovered to be the eye of the man's opponent, which he had extracted and pre- served as a trophy ! There is a strong aristocratic feeling in the United States army, and a great jealousy exists between the civil and military authorities, which displays itself whenever they come in contact. The civilians perceive the aristocratic tendency of the army, and affect to consider that a large army is dangerous to the liber- ties of the sovereign people. The military, on the other hand, from the superiority of their education, and from their more enlightened views, arising from foreign travel, and from more time and leisure FORT SNELLING, 163 devoted to the " ingenuas artes," have a great contempt for the vulgarity and would-be military swagger of most of the civilians^ and the superiority they arrogate to themselves over the regulars, more especially with regard to the Mexican war, where in reality all the real fighting was done by the regular troops, — the volunteers doing little else than break into convents, and pillage churches. The regular army are also disgusted at the assumption of military titles, such as General, Colonel, Major, by every tailor or grocer that chooses to join a militia corps. The military have hard work, — only 7,000 men to garrison all the forts in the Union, and to maintain the offensive on an Indian frontier of nearly 3,000 miles, scarcely appears sufficient, or at least is not a large force, especially since the discovery of Oregon and California, and the annexation of New Mexico and Texas. I met one officer of artillery, who had returned, on sick leave, from New Mexico, where he had been under canvass for eighteen months con- tinuously. From all accounts, I imagine there is a great deal of jobbing and favouritism in the United States army, — far more so than in the British. The, pri- vates are all foreigners, — Germans, English, Irish, and Scotch deserters, Poles, Hungarians, but not a single native-born American. I met numbers of United States officers in different parts of the Union, and I always found them the same — gentleman-like and agreeable, and more resembling Englishmen (though perhaps they will not consider that much praise) than any other class I met in America, 164 ST. Px\UL'S. CHAPTER IX. ST. PAUL'S — PRAIRIE DU CHIEN — ST. LOUIS. When the ice was strong enough, we went over to St. Paul's to get money, and inquire as to the best means of getting to St. Louis. I was again very- much struck with the position of St. Paul's ; and if ever emigration tends towards the fertile valley of the St, Peter's and Blue Earth rivers, it will be the capital of the north-western states. Lake Superior is by this time connected with Lake Huron by a ship canal, and there is a plan before Congress for making a communication between the western extremity of Lake Superior and the Upper Mississippi. The plan is perfectly feasible, as Fox River, that runs into the Mississippi, and the St. Louis River, that runs into Lake Superior, are only separated from each other by a very short portage during the dry season, and in the wet season actually join. When that canal is made, there will be an uninterrupted commu- nication by water between the Upper Mississippi and New York and the Atlantic, to the east ; a clear run down to New Orleans and the West Indies, to the south ; and already they talk of a railroad from ST. PAUL'S. 165 St. Paul's, across the Missouri and Rocky Mountains, to California and Oregon, to the west. Who can say, with these magnificent aerial prospects, that St. Paul's will not become a large and important place ? If any one, however, were to say so there, the chances are, they would be provided with an aerial prospect of not quite so pleasant a nature. The Chief Justice of Minnesota was holding his sessions at St. Paul's. The bar of the hotel was the court-house. The judge was sitting with his feet on the stove, on a level with his head, a cigar between his lips, a chew as big as an orange in his mouth, and a glass of some liquor by his side. The jury were in nearly the same elegant position, in different parts of the room; and a lawyer, sitting across a chair, leaning his chin on the back of it, was ad- dressing them. The prisoner was sitting, drinking and smoking, with his back turned to the judge, and looked the most respectable and least concerned of the whole party. Altogether it struck me that there might be a great deal of justice, but very little dignity, in the application of the law in Minnesota. The fact of the judges being elected by a majority in the Houses of Assembly of the different states, and changed every year, is a circumstance that does not enhance the dignity of the judgeship, and must inter- fere with the independence of his position. Instead of its being, as with us, the reward of experience and approved integrity, it is very frequently turned into a political appointment, and the dignity of the posi- tion sacrificed to the interest of the individual. A man who only holds a position by the suffrage of a party runs a risk of being swayed in favour of the 166 ST. Paul's. majority that placed him there, and can remove him at pleasure. Moreover, the j udge cannot enforce the proper respect due to him from the counsel, when they all know their places may be reversed the next day. The age at which a youth becomes independent is a very striking feature in the society of the Far West. A small boy keeps his father's store, or drives his father's waggon, at six years old; commences smoking and chewing at seven ; repudiates his father, and starts on his own resources at ten ; marries at sixteen, and, after becoming in turns judge, doctor, general, and being rich and ruined several times, generally finishes up as a bar-keeper, and dies, a " used-up," wizened, careworn old man, at forty. One hears a great deal about the energy of the native American forcing his way into nature's wilds, undeterred by dangers or hardships. As far as I could judge from the portions of the western frontier that I saw, the native Americans are not at present the pioneers of civilization on the north-western fron- tier, whatever they may formerly have been. In nearly every instance that we came upon a log-hut far in advance of any settlement, we discovered that it belonged to some French Canadians. The French Canadians intermarry with the half-breeds and In- dians very much; I imagine, from there being a similarity in the excessive indolence of their dispo- sitions. At many of the western towns, Gallena, St. Paul's, and others, the native Americans form a small minority. English, Scotch, Canadians, Ger- mans, Danes, and French composed nine-tenths of the population of St. Paul's. I consider St. Paul's the best point of departure for any one meditating EIVIERE DES MOINES. 167 a prairie trip. The Indians and buffalo are much nearer than from St. Louis^ and the expense incurred is much less. There are three trips that can be made from thence, according to the tastes of the traveller. If he wants to see the Indians in their native wilds, and study their habits and pursuits, and kill a mode- rate number of buffalo, the best route is the one we pursued, viz. by Lac-qui-Parle, to the banks of the Missouri. If, on the other hand, he does not care to see the Indians, and seeing and killing buf- falo is his only object, (and this is generally the case,) the best route to pursue is to go from St. Paul's to the Selkirk settlement, on Red River, and join the half-breeds in their "Fall^' hunt in September; here he will see nothing of the Avild Indians, but any amount of buffalo. The third plan, and I think the most enjoyable, would be to start from St. Paul's, in June, with two or three half-breeds, six or seven horses, take a couple of skin lodges, (they are warmer than tents,) and two or three squaws to cook, and go and camp for two or three months on the Riviere des Moines, (Monks' River,) about a hundred and fifty miles south-west of St. Paul's ; there game of all sorts abound. Elk, bear, wolves, and buffalo, are also generally found there. The country about the Riviere des Moines for- merly belonged to the Saxs and Foxes, but they were driven across the Missouri during Black-hawk's war, and only return every now and then on hunting expeditions, and to see if they can pick up a stray Sioux or two. The consequence is, that the Sioux are afraid of hunting there, except in large bodies, and the game being comparatively undisturbed has increased 168 RIVIEEE DES MOINES. to a wonderful extent. If ever 1 were to undertake a shooting expedition again, that is the route I should pursue. The Indians are very interesting, but dirty ; and as for the sport of " running " buffalo, a three year old heifer, in a five-acre field, would afford quite as much sport to a man mounted on a 30s. Smith- field screw, as the biggest bull between the two oceans. But many will differ with me in this opinion ; chacun a son gout. Silk hats have so entirely replaced beaver that the beaver-skin is quite a drug in the market, and the traders don^t care to take them ; the consequence is, the beavers have an easy time of it, and are increas- ing in numbers rapidly. Some ten years since there was every chance of their becoming extinct. A beaver skin was then worth six or eight dollars. On Lake Superior I was offered some very fine ones at a dollar a-piece. " The beaver sits upon the bank, watching the purling stream. But that his skin will make a hat, the beaver does not dream." His sagacity is Avonderful, almost reasonable. When a party of beavers are cutting down a tree, (which, by the way, they can throw in any direction they choose,) one old beaver sits watching, and directly he sees the tree begining to give, he whistles shrill, and all the others run out of the way. I heard of a Canadian, on Lake Wisconsin, who bred beavers with great success ; they are most amusing pets, and playful as a kitten. They once inhabited England and Wales, and their remains are continually discovered. It seems a pity some one does not try them again RIVIERE DES MOINES. 169 in some of the Scotch or Welsh rivers^ where they could do no harm. They live entirely on branches and leaves, chiefly alder and willow. At length, after nearly a fortnight of idleness, spent at Fort Snelling, the ice was declared passable, though not safe, but as we were anxious to get down south, we determined to " make tracks we hired a French Canadian, a good man, and a Sioux half- breed ; they each engaged to supply us with a horse and sleigh, and to conduct us to Prairie du Chien, a distance of 400 miles, in a fortnight, on consideration of our giving them each 100 dollars, or 20/. The sum seemed large, but the distance was great, and the work hard, and they had to walk and run the whole way, and from the rotten state of the ice they ran a pretty good risk of losing their horses. They kept to their agreement very honourably and de- livered us safe and sound at Prairie du Chien, on the evening of the fourteenth day. The ice was very uneven, sometimes for miles ; it was like crossing a ridge and furrow of four or five feet high, sometimes higher. The first ice that forms on the Mississippi is always rough, in conse- quence of the floating masses being jammed up together by the current, and it is only after a few partial thaws, or that a regular track is cut, that the travelling becomes smooth, and then it is most agreeable. In many places the ice was so rotten that the water spouted up through the holes made by the corkings of the horses' shoes; and once one of the horses went bodily in, and was got out with great difficulty. It is impossible to get a horse out of the ice when struggling, and the only way is to 170 RIVIERE DU CHIEN. choke him till insensible, when he is more buoyant and hauled out with greater ease. In some places the ice bent almost like a sheet of paper, and cracked in the most unpleasant manner. Once in particular our position was anything but pleasant ; it was at the junction of the Riviere des Moines, the water of which river had melted the ice on both shores of the Mississippi, leaving only a narrow bridge of ice in the centre of the river, about twenty yards broad, and a hundred yards long, and the ice hardly an inch and a half thick. The river at this point was about 1^ mile broad, and running between almost inaccessible cliffs of two or three hundred feet high, which rendered any idea of making a circuit by land impossible. When we came to this bridge of ice, therefore, we were in a considerable " fix." Going back was out of the question, as it was late in the afternoon, and we were within sight of the log-hut where we intended resting for the night, and our sleeping quarters of the night before were some forty miles in our rear, so, the only question was, whether to camp there, and wait till morning, or to risk it ; we held a long council of war, but contrary to the usual habit in such cases, we in this instance, prompted as much by the pleasant prospect of a good shelter and warm fire for the night, on one side, as by the unpleasant certainty of a cold camp, with no shelter and no food on the other, determined to advance. The Canadian, who was a spirited fellow, and knew the nature of ice thoroughly, advanced first with his axe to reconnoitre. We watched him advanc- ing cautiously like a cat, the bridge bending with him at every step, and as I fully expected to see BEIDGE OF ICE, 171 it give way with his weight, we thought how httle chance there was of our sleigh and horses getting over in safety. Before every step he took he tapped the ice with the axe, to see that it was sound, and every blow descending only with the weight of the axe itself penetrated right through, and the water came spouting up. When the guide had reached the other side he turned round and came back, saying that it was not safe, but still that we might try if we chose ; in fact, unless we made up our minds to camp out in the cold, without food, we had no choice. Whilst standing shivering on the far side of the bridge, gazing with longing eyes at the warm- looking log-hut and the smoking chimney in the distance, I could not help thinking of the " Al-Sirat^' in the Mahommedan creed, the bridge of breadth narrower than the web of a famished spider, and sharper than the edge of a sword, over which the faithful had to skate into Paradise, to which it was the only entrance. Any hesitation or want of courage during this, the last trial of their faith, and over they went, not into a frozen river, but into the " Inferno itself. I doubt whether the most nervous, awkward, fat old Turk, Avho had never had a pair of skates on in his life — With paradise within his view, And all its houris beck'ning through," ever wished himself safe over the difficulty Avith greater earnestness, or looked forward with more pleasure to a social evening in Paradise than I did to the haven before me, and the warm shelter therein. After hesitating a short time longer, and experiencing 172 BRIDGE OF ICE. mucli the same sensations that a person does when standing on the steps of a bathing machine on a very cold morning, we determined to make the attempt. The guide told us to cross one by one, keeping the exact centre of the bridge^ and to walk as lightly and quickly as we could. As I was the lightest of the party the chances were best in my favour, but yet the feeling of the ice bending with your weighty and seeing the black stream, doubly dark contrasted with the clear white ice, and about fifty feet deep and some degrees below zero, gliding noiselessly along at the rate of three or four miles an hour within a few feet of you on either hand, and knowing that if any of the party fell in nothing could save them, as any attempt to help the one immersed by those on the edge of the ice would only have ensured a like death to the whole, and the chance of swim- ming a mile to the shore against a three-knot stream, and with the water so intensely cold, seemed equally hopeless, was anything but pleasant, and like the negro in the song, I felt inclined to " shut my eyes, to hold my breath." However, we all crossed in safety, and then our guides brought across the sleighs. They lengthened the rein as much as possible, to get as far as they could in advance of the horse, and then walked quickly forward. The horses were trembling in every limb, and seemed fully aware, poor brutes, o the danger they incurred ; and had they been seized with a panic in crossing, and stopped, the ice would have given way ; as it was, it bent in the most frightful manner, so much so that the water from the sides ran right over it, and but for its purity and surprising elasticity, and the weight BANKS OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 173 of the man, horse, and sleigh being separated as much as possible, it must have broken. The high heels of the horses' shoes did indeed go right through the ice. When we had got both sleighs and horses over, we paused to look back and consider; it appeared almost more dangerous Avhen we had accomplished it than it did before. The bridge of ice was about 100 yards long and about twenty broad, and the ice was hardly an inch and a half thick; one single flaw or unsound piece and we should have lost our horses, sleighs, and perhaps ourselves. The Canadian guide said he had travelled on the Mississippi for twenty winters, but had never crossed such a bad place before. It could not well be worse. The whole thing reminded me of some very unsafe places we had crossed on the Mer-de-Glace during a trip I had made over the Col-de-Gdant some three years previously. We were the first travellers that had ventured on the ice that year, the mail even considered it too unsafe. We proceeded in safety to a wooding station for steamers, called War Eagle's Point. The banks of the Mississippi, or as the Indians call it, the " Misippi,'' or " Father of Waters," are un- healthy throughout their whole course. The scenery is very superior to anything I expected, and was grand in the extreme, and far exceeded in beauty the Hudson ; at least it would do in summer, but we saw it at a great disadvantage, the banks covered with snow, and the river with ice. Instead of the low, marshy banks, usually connected in my idea with the " Father of Waters," the banks from St. Paul's to the Prairie du Chien, between three and four hundred miles, are composed of a succession of high, rocky 174 RATTLESNAKES. bluffsj some three or four hundred feet high, well wooded on the sides. They are invariably in the same form^ of a perfect truncated pyramid, and reminded me very much of some magnified representation of the ruins discovered by Stephens in Yucatan. The stream itself is deep, dark, and clear, varying from one to two miles in breadth, and winds majestically along at the foot of these bluffs, without any single impediment to change the even tenour of its way, from the Falls of St. Anthony to the Gulf of Mexico. The first night from St. PauFs, we slept at a small Indian trader's hut, at a very pretty spot, called Medicine Wood ; the second at Redwing, an encamp- ment of demi-civihzed Sioux. The quantity of rattlesnakes at this place and at several other districts on the banks of the Mississippi are almost fabulous. In winter they hybernate in holes under the rocks, and wreathe themselves together in knots, like worms at the bottom of a flower-pot. Our guide said that he once put a squib of gunpowder into one of these holes, and killed 150 snakes, that came out. Sindbad's account of the valley of snakes seemed almost real- ized. In Iowa, a few years back, a settler, with his wife and family, had at the beginning of winter occupied a deserted log-hut, and resided in it some weeks, when one evening finding the fire-place not so convenient, he moved the logs to another part of the room, and went to bed. In the night he was awoke by a scream from his wife, and on jumping up, found the floor literally swarming with rattle- snakes, writhing and darting about. His wife told him she Avas bit, and one of the children, and im- plored him to escapie with the others, through the RATTLESNAKE. 175 roof. This he did, but his wife and child died. It appeared, that when he changed the fire, he placed it over a hole where these reptiles were hybernating, who being awakened by the heat, came swarming out in quite a cheerful manner, delighted to think that summer had arrived. The bite of a rattlesnake is not always, though generally fatal ; it depends on whether the venom has entered any of the larger veins. The best antidote is intoxication, if it can be induced, but generally no amount of liquor will cause it. A missionary at Redwing told me that he was once called in to see an Indian who had been bitten by a rattlesnake. He found a ligature bound tight round the leg, above the wounded part; the leg was frightfully swollen. He gave the man two pints of the strongest alcohol, without producing any visible effect, and it was only by administering a third that he induced partial intoxication. It counteracted the effect of the poison, and the man recovered. We lodged one night with another Missionary at some small station, and rolling ourselves up in our buflPalo robes we slept on the floor, a proceeding which he said would have been most dangerous in the summer-time. Our guide told us he was once camping out with an old Indian ; it was midday, and he was lying on the ground whilst the old chief was reclining with his back against a tree, when suddenly to his horror he saw a large rattlesnake wriggle itself deliberately across the old chiefs naked body. The snake seemed to enjoy the warmth of it, remaining for some time on the Indian''s stomach. The chief himself was watching it all the time, but dared not move an inch, knowing if he did so the snake 176 PRAIRIE DU CHIEN. would strike him. At length without moving a muscle he made a peculiar hissing noise, and the snake, after lifting up his head and listening, glided away. One daj'- as we were sleighing along, two squaws hurried out from the bank, and made signs to us to stop ; this we did, and they had an animated conver- sation with our guide, seemingly in a very uneasy state of mind. On inquiring the reason we found that there was a village of Indians close by, and that they had been drunk for two days, and at length they had fought, and one was killed. Feuds of this kind become hereditary. When one of the family is killed his relations consider themselves bound to revenge his death the first opportunity. At length on the 5th of January, after fourteen days' sleighing down the Mississippi, which was getting rather mono- tonous and tiring to us, and anything but agreeable to the horses, judging by their appearance, we reached Prairie du Chien, a miserable ruined settle- ment of some hundred years' standing, inhabited entirely by French Canadians. Here we parted with our guides ; they were very drunk and very affec- tionate. We were off" at daybreak on the 8th of January in a sleigh (this time on land) for Lancaster, distant forty miles. The track lay through a pretty thickly populated country in the State of Iowa. At a small settlement, where we stopt to recruit nature, we saw a large bear hanging up in a tree, which had just been killed, and was to be cooked in the evening, when a great dance and gathering was expected for the occasion. Bears are very fat at this time of year, PLATTVILLE. 177 and excellent eating. We sleighed on to Plattville, where we arrived in time for a murder. An Irish- man, of course, had killed a Scotchman. We did not actually see the murder, hut the body directly afterwards. It appeared that the Scotchman was an old Waterloo man, and the quarrel had arisen respect- ing the merits of the Duke in particular, and Euro- pean politics in general. The cool, joking way in which the people in the bar-room, where the murder had just been committed, were talking over the matter was highly disgusting. The murderer not being arrested at once had been hustled away by his com- patriots, who in this country stick to each other in crime just as staunchly as they do in the old country. The hotel-keeper told us a story which gives one some idea of the state of morals in this portion of the Union. He said that he met a friend of his one day walking with a loaded gun, and on asking him what he was going to do, "Oh!" he said, "I'm going to shoot Mr. C." (also a friend of the hotel- keeper's). "Well, but," said our friend, "have you told Mr. C. you are going to shoot him? because it is act gentlemanly to do it without giving him notice —it isn't really.'' " Well, certainly," said the other, hesitating, " I have not told him, but if you think it the correct thing, why I'll do so.'^ " Oh ! yes," said the innkeeper, " do so by all means. I assure you it would not be correct to take him unawares." Our friend chuckled when he told us, and said that by that means he had had time to put the threatened man on his guard, and he had no doubt saved his life. The doctor who was called in after the murder was sitting in the bar-room. He had been a I 178 GALENA. colonel, then a doctor, and was now keeping a con- fectionary ! "We gave up sleighing here, and took places in the stage to Galena. The roads were like glass, and how the driver (who was considerably more than three parts drunk) managed to get along without accident, I don't know. Galena is a horrible town, said to be one of the most unhealthy in the Union, and certainly if names have anything to do with it, it ought to be. It is situated on an isthmus between Smallpox and Fever Rivers ! It is the very centre of the lead district, which is supposed to be, and is without doubt, the richest in the world. The lead is disco- vered quite close to the surface, and of a very great purity. All that has hitherto been procured has been by individual exertion, and no Company has as yet commenced any regular works ; and till that is done, the lead will only be extricated in small quan- tities, and the richer veins, which lie deeper, will be imtouched. A very agreeable clever American, who travelled some 200 miles with us, said he had no moral doubt that if he could form a Company with 60,000/. he would repay the outlay in four years, and clear that sum annually, ever after, so long as the price of lead remained at what it was at that time. I have no doubt, from all I have heard, that the copper region of Lake Superior, and the lead districts around Galena, are the two finest mineral districts in the world, and that when the eastern capitalists get more confidence in western investments, enormous for- tunes will be made there. We remained at Galena two days waiting for a stage-coach to Peru and Springfield. MEXICAN WAR. 179 The Western States afford an instance of what a curse a free press may become when conducted by men of no talent, or, what is worse, by talents prosti- tuted to a bad cause. Every little town throughout the Western States has its two or more papers ; they are generally conducted by some briefless lawyer or hanger-on at the bar-rooms. As they have no public news whatever to communicate, they are obliged to occupy themselves with local gossip and abuse. The originals of the Eatanswill Gazette and the Eatan- swill Independent certainly have their being in the Western States of America. Many of them treat of the most abstruse religious questions in matter-of- fact leading articles, and not a few preach total unbelief in the coolest manner imaginable. The information vouchsafed on European matters very often displays the grossest ignorance ; and it is owing to their bitter articles against the old country (which they delight to describe as a bloodstained country, where an iron-heeled aristocracy is continually trampling up to their knees in the life-blood of a crushed peasantry !) that such a bad feeling con- tinues to exist throughout the Western States against England. I could not forbear making one extract from a paper giving a retrospect of the Mexican war. There was a notice at the head of it saying that the articles had been published separately, and had gone through eleven editions. Extract from the History of the Mexican War — 11th edition. Talking of the taking of Mexico : — " The world beheld the sight and trembled ; old Germany festering under her chains, looked up in awe at the strange spectacle, an every day people I 2 180 PEORIA. becoming transformed into a great nation. France saw it too, and sighed as she turned her eye to the grave of Napoleon. But England, hypocritical and ferocious, at once the fox and the hyena, crouching on her trophies, the skulls of Irish starvation, and the corpses of Hindoo massacre ; England, Avhom we hunted from our shores in the Revolution, and chased ignominiously from our seas in the second war ; England, that Carthage of modern history, brutal in her revenge, and satanic in her lust for human flesh, beheld the American people in arms with trembling, and recognised their victorious search with niggardly pleasure." One paper talked of the Duke of Wellington as that " ' Gigantic Fog ' of history, — the man who did not lose the Battle of Waterloo ! " The editors, knowing the best way of pleasing the public is to flatter the national pride, do this to perfection, and as Sam Slick says, " they actually persuade them that having gone ahead of all creation, they are now actually going ahead of themselves." We proceeded by stage from Galena to Peru^ and thence to Peoria, on the Illinois River. The day we got there an attempt had been made by a drunken mob to lynch two prisoners under sentence of death. The mob broke into the prison and got the men out, but were so drunk they could not tie the knot pro- perly ! and the authorities were enabled to rescue them ; they were, however, hung a few days after- wards. We arrived at Springfield on the 14th, the capital of the State of Illinois. The legislative assembly had just met, and great excitement was visible in the town, The Western States are ultra- SPRINGHELD. 181 democratic ia tlieir politics. All the violent men and violent measures come from the west. The division of parties is just the reverse in America to what it is in England. In England the stronghold of democracy is in the large towns^ and aristocracy- has its strongest supporters in the country. In America the ultra-democrat and leveller is the western farmer, and the aristocratic tendency is most visible amongst the manufactui'ers and the merchants of the eastern cities. The Western States are destined to play an important part in the future of the Republic ; already their influence is felt on all important occasions. Ultra- democratic principles, that in the Eastern States have given way to Whig^ gism, and in the south to Protection, in the west exist in the most violent form, and are gaining ground every day. Any idea of a separation of the Union, which in the north and south is openly can- vassed at the public meetings, in the west is scouted ; send I have heard the most sanguinary threats held out against any state or individual who should dare to propose such a thing. It is in the Western States also that that restless spirit and total want of local affection, which is so essentially a part of the Ameri- can character, is most conspicuous. The continually changing their place of residence and mode of life has become by constant habit almost second nature, and it is as unusual in the west to see a man of forty who has not changed his residence and his profession a dozen times, as it is in England to see one who has. The change seems with them to be almost like a game of chance, which they seem to enjoy as much for its excitement as for its gain. 182 THE MORMONS. Springfield is not far from Norvoo, the ruins of the Mormon temple. This curious sect, after being chased from several parts of the Union, fixed their residence in llhnois, on the banks of the Mississippi ; here, under the direction of their prophet, Joseph Smith, and other bright lights, they increased and multiplied to a great extent; but their Byronian style of morals, of "hating their neighbours, and loving their neighbour's wife," and some rather pecuHar notions of the rights of " meum and tuum," caused them to be ejected, after a very severe contest, by the citizens of Illinois, aided by the United States troops, during which Mormon war ! as it is called, many lives were lost, and Joe Smith lodged in the Springfield gaol, from which he was dragged by a drunken mob, and shot ; he Avas a shrewd, clever man, and exercised most unlimited influence over his flock. Their present location on the borders of the Salt Lake in the Rocky Mountains is well situated as regards water and climate : it is said to be the finest wheat climate in the Union, but unfortunately there is no fuel ; wood is very scarce, and they have even now to lead it several miles ; and as the winters are very severe, unless they can manage to discover a coal-mine in the vicinity, they will, I expect, be forced to undertake another emigration towards Oregon. If I was astonished at the violence of religious sects in the Eastern States, I was doubly struck with it in the West, Every sort of Baptist and Unitarian, Wet Baptists, and Dry Baptists, and Every-day Baptists, and Holy-day Baptists, &c., flourish in great numbers; perhaps it is almost natural to imagine. RELIGIOUS DISCUSSION. 183 that in a country where Mammon is worshipped by so large a majority and all religion almost openly scouted, there should be a minority which by its violence and activity compensates for its numerical insignificance. The extraordinary religious excite- ment displayed by the Shakers, Mormons, and other sects against each other, entirely gives the lie to those political economists who say, that the only way to prevent intolerance in religious matters, is to leave people entirely to themselves. The original framers of the United States^ Constitution took great pains to separate Church and State most completely; and it is very fortunate they did so, for in a country where the whole government, you may say almost constitution, changes every four years, and where the majority is so despotic, any established religion, whatever it might be, connected with that govern- ment, would be sure to suffer from innovation. One particular which strikes a foreigner all through the States, especially in the Western States, is the readiness with which everybody enters into discus- sions concerning religious subjects: you are startled at hearing the most ignorant giving most decided opinions concerning questions that even the cleverest and best men have avoided as not fit for public dis- cussion. This habit leads them to get up texts of Scripture, not for their edification, but for the sake of argument; consequently scriptural phrases are continually used. I heard more blasphemy in one week in the bar-room at St. Louis, and I might almost say from one man, than I ever heard in my whole life. However, enough of this. W e were not sorry to arrive at the banks of the Mississippi opposite 184 ST. LOUIS. St. Louis^ which we did just in time, as the next day the river was frozen over. Purgatory must be a joke to what we suffered during the last three hundred miles. The roads were exceedingly bad, ruts three or four feet deep, which nearly dislocated every bone in one^s body. The stage was crowded to suffocation ; three of us, and six great fat blowsy farmers, (who were smoking and spitting, and talking unintelligible nonsense which they thought was politics, con- tinually for three days and nights,) were compressed into a space big enough for four moderate-sized men. At St. Louis we for the first time for five months discarded mocassins and other prairie garments, and arrayed ourselves in every-day apparel, and what to us appeared iron boots, the change being anything but agreeable. St. Louis is a town containing about 90,000 inhabitants of all races and colours, a very large preponderance of the former being Germans : it is situated on the west bank of the Mississippi, about sixteen miles below its junction with the Missouri ; it is the capital of the State of Missouri, and is the most northern of the Slave States. - It used to be the head- quarters of all the gamblers and duellists, and was some twenty years back about the most lawless town in the Union ; now all the worst cha- racters have either gone south to Texas or Arkansas, or west to California. When the annexation of Texas was first mooted, all the biggest scoundrels flocked there : many who failed in trade, or committed forgery or murder, or found the civilized diggings too hot to hold them, wrote " G. T. T.,'' " Gone to Texas,^^ on their doors, and started forthwith. These were the men that ST. LOUIS. 185 formed the Texan Rangers, not a corps boasting of much moral feeling, if all accounts are true. St. Louis is famous for a duel that took place there some time ago. A regular fighting man and bully insulted a young man and challenged him to fight : the novice refused to fight, except in a perfectly dark room, which was agreed to. The two men were put into a dark room, armed with bowie knives and revolvers, and the seconds were not to open the door for half- an-hour. At the end of that time they did so, and found the young man sitting at one end of the room smoking his pipe, and the body of his antagonist lying on the middle of the floor, with the head com- pletely severed from the body and placed on it, so as to face the door ! The young man said they had followed each other about in the dark for some time without meeting, at length he drew himself up in a corner quite close to the wall, and judging of his opponent's approach by his breathing, made a blow at him and killed him on the spot. This duel somewhat resembles the old story of the Englishman and. Italian fighting, the latter making the same proviso of a dark room. The Englishman, after hunting about for some time in the dark, and not wishing to hurt his antagonist, at length sought for the fire-place, intending to discharge his pistol up it ; he found it, and firing up it, to his horror he heard a yell of agony, and down tumbled the Italian, who had sought refuge there as the safest place. Duelling and homicide, though for a Western State comparatively rare, still are not so very unfrequent, nor will they ever be so, till that barbarous custom of going continually armed is discontinued. There is I 3 186 ST. LOUIS* hardly one man out of fifty from St. Louis right down south, that does not always carry a bowie-knife or a revolver. A very agreeable man, at whose house we spent more than one evening, had shot a man dead a short time before in the middle of the day, on the steps of the Planters' house- in the main street of St. Louis. He had been steward of a ball, and in that capacity had thought it his duty to refuse ad- mittance to some individual of whose character he did not approve. The man swore vengeance, and declared he would shoot him the first time he met him. This happened a few days after, when he met my friend standing on the steps of the hotel : he immediately drew out a revolver and fired six shots at him, advancing as he fired. My friend received his fire without moving an inch, but directly the man had finished he drew his pistol, and walking towards him, gave him two shots, killing him on the spot. It certainly was a case of " jastifiable homicide.'^ An incident of Western stoicism was related to me by a gentleman who was himself an eye-witness of it, that was worthy of the days of Brutus, and of some old Uoman, (1 forget his name,) that had his son (who had joined Catiline^s conspiracy) executed in his presence, to save him the ignominy of a public execution with Lentulus, Cethegus, and others of his fellow traitors. My informant was travelling in Kentucky, when towards evening he made for a farm- house for shelter. On arriving at the door he found a number of men in rather an excited state crowding in. He jumped off his horse, and on pushing his way into the room he found two men engaged in deadly combat, with bowie knives. One was older and more ST. LOUIS. 187 powerful than the other, and so evidently had the advantage in strength and skill, that the death of the younger seemed certain. My informant tried to rush forward, but was arrested by the iron hand of an old man, (who was leaning against the wall, smoking and looking on with apparent indifference,) who pulled him back, saying, Stranger, don't mix in other men^s quarrels." In the meantime the battle had been decided, and the younger man fell to the ground dead. The old man then stepped forward and approached the body— it was that of his son ! and examined it without saying a word or changing a muscle. When he found it was quite dead he started back, and approaching the man that had killed him, said, "Now the quarrel is mine/' and drawing his knife was going to revenge his son's death at once, but was prevented by the bystanders, and his opponent taken off ; but although deprived of his revenge for the moment, it is likely he would never rest till either he or his son's destroyer were dead, — such is the moral and civilized state of the Far West. The Mexican war afforded a vent for a great deal of the bad blood of the Union, and California afforded them an employment congenial to their tastes. ^Put for the opportune discovery of it, the 60,000 volun- teers that were under arms in Mexico at the end of the war would have turned their arms, in all likeli- hood, against Cuba, or some part of South America. They never would have settled down again as peace- ful tillers of the soil ; but California opened a field for them, and offered them a life of gaming, drinking, fighting, &c. to their hearts' content. We spent ten 188 ST. LOUIS. days at St. Louis very pleasantly with the officers^ waiting for a steamer with a reputation for safety, to descend to New Orleans. The Americans^ when on the travel, have a fashion of not shaving or putting on a clean shirt before breakfast : they hurry on their clothes, and rush down to breakfast, without any of the ablutions so customary with us ; these are all performed after breakfast. It is in the Western States that all the peculiarities of slang and twang are most remarkable, more especially the " guessing/' An American addressed an English- man, who was not in a very amiable mood, on board one of the steamers. " I guess you're a stranger.'' "Yes," said the Englishman, "I am." "I guess you're a Britisher." "Right again." "Well, I guess — " " Stop," said the Englishman ; " you've guessed often enough : it's my turn to guess now. I guess you're an inquisitive ass." This so took the American by surprise, he did not know what to say. The society in St. Louis, like all the great towns, was very agreeable. We went to several parties, both in high and low life. The American women, as I think I have before remarked, are all very pretty up to about three-and-twenty j and some of them, if they were only a little stouter, and had better teeth, would be beautiful. The western ladies have a funny habit of using the expression, " and nothing else," in an affirmative answer to a question. " Have you been to the play?" "Yes, sir, and nothing else." I asked one young married lady if her husband had not returned the day before. " Yes, and nothing else." I did not know whether she was letting me into ST. LOUIS. 189 any of the family secrets, or if it was merely Q.fagon de parler. Our luggage had been forwarded from New York to a gun-maker at St. Louis, a very intel- ligent and clever man, who invited us to a teaand romp party, which we of course accepted, and enjoyed excessively. The society in " low life," amongst the shopkeepers' families, though not so intellectual as the haut ton, was very amusing, and is, I imagine, like what Ame- rican society was some thirty years back. The young ladies talk loud, and through their noses, and call one " Sir with emphasis, and each other " Miss." I don^t mean, by mentioning these peculiarities of speech, to laugh at the Americans. I have no doubt in the same class in England one would meet quite as much glaring vulgarity, and hear the queen's Eng- lish mutilated much in the same manner. The race of western trappers that Ruxton has immortalized have nearly all gone under, or settled in California or New Mexico. Few that he mentions were alive even in his time. Beaver skins don't repay them now, and the traders find it cheaper to purchase from the Indians themselves than to employ white men. If beaver skins rose again, I have no doubt the race would spring up again. The originals of La Bonte and Kilbuck were not known at St. Louis. 190 AMERICAN PEOPLE. CHAPTER X. AMERICAN PEOPLE — DICKENS — MANNERS— BOOKS — STEAMERS — SLAVES. The Americans are essentially a practical people, and make every use of the progressive improvements of the age, adapting in the most astonishingly short time all modern inventions to the every-day concerns of life. I cannot help thinking this praiseworthy striving after improvement is a good deal caused by the rivalry and jealousy existing between the different States. If New York starts an improvement before Boston, the latter does not rest until it has adopted the same on an improved principle if possible, and tries at the same time to excel New York in some other matter. This same honourable competition is visible all through the north, eastern and western States, but not in the south. It was this emulation between the rival republics of Athens and Corinth, which forced them on to a pitch of civilization, which they would not otherwise have acquired. I met a senator (hot from "Washington) who said that during the last session, when the slave question was being agitated in its most violent form, and party spirit ran very high, twice members drew pistols upon each other, once in the Senate and once in Congress : he said that he had not the slightest doubt but that DICKERS. 191 the southern members were armed to a man with bowies and pistols ; and also that the northern men were nearly all so too ; and if in the heat of passion and debate one shot had been fired, nobody could have told where it would have ended. I don't know which gives one the most exalted idea of an assembly elected by universal suffrage, — one where the mem- bers are armed to the teeth, and every now and then shake their pistols in each other's faces to assist in debate, as in America ; or an assembly elected also by universal suffrage, defended from its electors by loaded cannon and an army of 5,000 troops, as in Paris. The horses in the state of Kentucky are famous all over the union ; the cHmate seems to be favourable to their growth. I saw many fine, well-shaped horses that would have carried fifteen stone well across country, if their constitution and endurance are equal to their appearance ; but they did not give me the idea of being very hardy. The Americans prefer driving to riding, and when they do ride, they always trot and sit well back, legs well forward, and both hands tugging at the bridle as if they expected the horse's head to fall off. During my stay in America I heard many people finding fault with Dickens. They said they did not object to his caricaturing them, that is his metier, and he does it to every nation and every class ; but they say he is not amusing ! (not so bad ! ) and that he has not seized the salient points of ridicule in the Yankee character. Now, with due respect to them, that is just what he has done ; his Brown Forester in the Sketches, and his characters in Martin Chuzzlewit are drawn to the life. The fact is, that in their worship 192 AMERICAN PEOPLE. of DickenSj as in their treatment of another lion, Jenny Lind for instance, who was worshipped like a deity, till she became unpopular in the south, where she was hooted and stoned, (so I read in the papers, but cannot vouch for the truth of it,) they " over-roasted " it, and because his head was not turned by their adulation, and by that means their worship of him became more conspicuous, they got rather ashamed of themselves, and tried to get out of it by turning round and abusing the object of it. The reasons that make the Americans so thin-skinned and touchy about any remark made on their manners and peculiarities are not very dissimilar from those of a boy who has lately taken to stick-up collars and tail-coats ; he feels he is not quite a man, though he wishes every one to think so, and every action is intended to leave that impression on the bystanders, and any joke about his transition state is very unpalatable : so the Ame- ricans, (I doii't mean those who have travelled, and who are as well-mannered as any European, but I mean the mass one meets travelling,) feeling that they do not quite possess European polish, are continually talking of the " elegance^^ and " style^^ of their so- ciety, and use a forced tone of politeness, especially to women, that has very much the stamp of vulgarity, and are very intolerant of ridicule and caricature. The vaunted cheapness of books is one of the clap-traps of America ; the only books that are sold cheap are pirated reprints (very bad ones generally) of European authors. All books where the copy- right is bought, in their country, are very expensive. Prescott's History of Mexico, for instance, I could not buy under thirty shillings, Macaulay for two BOOKS. 193 sliillings and sixpence ! However, as ninety-nine books out of a hundred that are worth reading are European, the convenience is great; but even the repi'ints of our Enghsh books are not cheaper, nor so good, as our cheap publications; and Murray's Colonial Library, and Bohn's Library, and Beading for the Rail, are worth all the cheap editions in America. The public taste as regards Kght reading in America is very low; the books that command immediate sale on the railroads, steamers, &c., are such works as " The Mysteries of the Court of St, James,'' " Amours of the Children of George III.,'' and novels of a highly sentimental tendency, such as " The Evil One Unveiled, or the Red Whiskered Bargeman of Pentonville," "The Frantic Footman, or the Prodigal Reclaimed;" and the trash con- tained in them is quite incredible, hardly worthy of the Weekly Dispatch or the lowest journal in England. It is in the west and south that one is particularly annoyed with the disgusting habit of spitting. I always imagined that the annoyance people pre- tended to feel about it might be an exaggerated aflFectation of nicety ; but the more I saw of it, the more intolerable it became, and no exaggeration can make it appear worse than it really is. I would much rather be shut up with a madman than with a genuine expectorator. The steamers on the Mis- sissippi are on the most gigantic scale, similar to those on the Hudson river, only not so well built, and with this very important difference, viz. they are high instead of low pressure. They are more like Noah's arks than anything else, three stories 194 AMERICAN PEOPLE. high ; the one we descended in^ one of the largest on the river, drew under five feet when empty, and over ten feet of water with 1,300 tons of cotton, flour, &c. The engines and wheels were placed within thirty feet of the bows ; the hurricane-house for the pilot was elevated some feet higher than the top of the funnel, to enable him to see the snags, sandbanks, &c. The largest sized steamers cost 12,000/. when new, all complete; they run two years as first class boats, and get the best prices for fares and freight, and after that they run till they burst their boilers as what are called half-dollar bursters. The fares are very low, twenty dollars from St. Louis to New Orleans, attendance, eating, and everything being included. The steamers are lighted by gas, not manufactured on board, though that may be done soon perhaps, but they take a supply in air-tight cases as regularly as they do a supply of water or fuel. ♦ The company on board was very mixed, and as we got down south changed very much for the worse. One young man who embarked at St. Louis had been going a little too fast, and he was taking down half-a-dozen negroes to New Orleans to sell, just as you hear of a man sending up his horses to Tat- tersall's, with this difference, that whereas the horses are well groomed and looked after, these poor negroes were chained together, two and two, by the wrists, as if they had been convicts on their way to prison. They seemed very happy, however, and chatted away like so many monkeys; the thoughtless happiness, however, of the American slaves, which is always in the mouth of the free and enlightened SLAVES. 195 citizen as an argument in favour of slavery, is not the happiness of a human being, but that of an animal. It cannot arise from the exercise of the social affections — for their wife and children, their kindred and friends, and all the ties that we hold most dear, are to them a blank page ; they are theirs only for the day, and they know they may be taken away at any moment; — it cannot be from the exercise of the intellect, or the faculties either of body or mind; but it is the happiness arising entirely from health and the freedom from care. The former is an enjoy- ment which the Creator has annexed to life, and of which not even the slave-master can deprive them. Their happiness is not even that of the higher order of animals, for, as Paley says, happiness arising from health alone is that of oysters, periwinkles, &c., and other sedentary animals. The most natural instincts, which are common to all animals, are denied to the Negro. The affection of the mother for her child is not weighed in the balance for a second against the all-mighty dollar. Mothers and children are sold separately mthout any sort of compunction. As for the father, he never knows anything about his children; as often as he changes his master he changes his wife. One old fellow told me he had been sold nine times, and had a different wife at each new home. In England, and in most civilized countries, the boy who takes the eggs from the nest, and the young birds from the mother, is considered as showing a want of humanity ; but the slave-owner who sells the mother from the children, and the children from the mother, incurs no censure whatever. The rights of property as 196 AMERICAN PEOPLE. explained by the Scripture text, "Is it not lawful to do what I will with mine own?'' distorted to suit their own views, is the answer always given in argu- ments of that kind. It does not follow that, because it is a man's interest to treat his slaves well, he always does so. It is not a man's interest to ride his horse to death in a good run ; neither is it to the omnibus-driver's interest to overwork his horses; but still they do it. A rich man keeps his horses for his pleasure, not profit, and therefore he does not grudge them expense and comfort; but slaves are never kept for pleasure. Profit, and profit at any cost, is all the slave-owner thinks of, and to that he will, if necessary, sacrifice the health and comfort, and even the life itself of his slaves. The rich planter, when times are good, feeds his slaves well and houses them well; but the small poor proprietor does neither ; he buys broken down negroes at a low figure; he feeds and houses them badly ; they did not cost him nnich, and when they are worn out he can easily replace them. You hear frequently of slaves who have been libe- rated returning to their masters, and begging to be taken into their service again; but this does not prove they were happy with their master: it only proves what is remarkable in all domesticated men and animals, that any home is better than none. No- body will employ a Hberated slave if they can possibly help it ; and liberated by one master he sees himself repudiated by all the rest ; an outcast from charity and humanity, and unable to procure the means of subsistence, he finds himself starving in the midst of plenty; the more he tries to avail himself of his SLAVES. 197 liberty and mix with the whites, the more he is made to feel his utterly debased condition, and he discovers when too late that whereas when he was a slave it was somebody's interest to keep him alive and in comparative health, now he is free it is nobody's. Is it any wonder, such being his position, that he should look to slavery as his only hope ? Moreover, the liberating the old slave, (who from long habits of entire dependence on his master, and from feeling that he cannot dispose of his person, without com- mitting a kind of felony, has as it were lost all interest in himself, and even the power of providing for himself,) is about as humane as turning out an old hunter to pick up a bare subsistence on some common, when from having been fed upon corn and kept in a warm stable it is some time before he knows how to feed himself. I heard a very painful case that happened at Memphis some short time before I was there. It is only a particular instance of cruelty which might, I have no doubt, be multiplied a dozen times, and which must continually take place when there is no law (not even a "Martin's Act") to protect the Negro from the passion and spite of his owner. A slave-dealer bought a slave from a plantation in Kentucky ; the man was a first-rate mechanic and blacksmith, and his master only parted with him because be was " hard up," with the proviso that his wife, to whom he was much attached, should not be separated from him. The sum paid for him was 1,000|. — 200/. after the sale; the slaves were taken as usual to the gaol to be lodged for the night, the Negro being satisfied by the promise that his wife 198 AMERICAN PEOPLE. should accompany him the next day. The following morning, however, when the gang of slaves were brought out, chained two and two together by their wrists, preparatory to commencing their journey, the blacksmith looked in vain for his wife, and on inquiring where she was, the slave-driver laughed at him, and said : " Oh ! you don't suppose I am going to drag your wife about to please you, do you ? that was only a blind to get you from your master.'' The slave said nothing, but soon after he drew his chain companion to where there was a hatchet, and taking it up in his left hand, which Avas free, he deliberately chopped off his right hand at the wrist, and holding up the stump to the slave-driver, said : " There, you gave 1,000$ for me yesterday, what will you get now ?" This case created rather a feeling even in Ken- tucky, and a subscription was got up to buy the Negro back, and restore him to his wife ; but the demon in human shape, his master, refused to part with him at any price, saying, " That he would not lose his revenge for having been made such a fool of, for ten thousand dollars ; that as the man chose to cut his own hand off, he should learn to pick cotton with the other, and he would take care he Kved long enough to repent of what he had done." There was no law to interfere, not even to control his bru- tality, and in a few days the slave was marched off south. Can anything much worse be instanced in the most cruel days of Rome and her emperors? The sufferings even of Catiline's slaves that he chained up to the necks in his fish-ponds to be devoured piecemeal by lampreys, were of shorter duration than the sufferings of this man. SLAVES. 199 A slave can get no protection from the cruelty of his master ; the law, and, what is of much more im- portance, public opinion, countenances the corporeal punishment of slaves. The slave has no legal exist- ence whatever in the Slave States ; for in the drawing up of legal acts he is described as an article of property by the word " it f consequently his oath is not admissible in a court of law. One of the striking features in slavery to an Englishman is the perfectly cold-blooded manner in which it is treated and talked of by the press and individuals. In Vir- ginia, where they breed slaves largely, the business is carried on as systematically, and they take as much pains to keep up a good breeding stock (drafting the weak and sickly ones), as they do for south-downs or short-horns in England. The slave- dealers know the men that raise the best stock, and they go down and buy at their fairs as our horse- dealers do in the north of England. You read quota- tions in the papers — " A good business done in strong healthy negroes with good characters, old stock rather heavy .^^ In the New Orleans papers every week we saw advertisements that " Mr. So-and-so will sell by auction, on such a day, fifty or sixty fine useful young negroes, warranted sound and free from vice," which means lying, thieving, and drunkenness. Dealers buy up young promising negroes unbroke, and give them a smattering of some trade and sell them to advantage. You continually see advertisements — " Wanted to purchase, a good cook." (Or in fact any household servant.) "A first-rate price paid for a first-rate article." You hear of a ""fast" man running through his 200 AMERICAN PEOPLE. negroes as another does his acres in Europe, and some planters sell their slaves as regularly after the cotton picking or sugar grinding seasons as men do their carriage horses after the London, or their hunters after the hunting season. The Americans continually advance the absurd argument about the blacks being the descendants of Ham, and consequently destined by a divine curse to perpetual slavery ; and defend their own conduct by saying they are only the unworthy (?) inflictors of this curse. This fallacious argument they strengthen by asserting that the African is intellectually very little removed from the brute, and that his head shows a most marked inferiority in intellectual orga- nization to the white. However true this may be of the native African, it cannot be advanced as an argu- ment for continuing slavery to the negro Creole of America. In America hardly any of the slaves have been less than three generations in the country, and the skull of an African who has for that time been an inhabitant of a temperate climate partakes more of the intellectual development of the European than of that of the native African, and is very nearly if not quite equal to his master's. I have seen slaves, men and women, sold at New Orleans, who were very nearly as white as myself, and with quite as good a phreno- logical development. Seeing mulattoes and quadroons sold, and watching the blush of shame mantling on the face of a slave who feels his degradation as keenly or more so than his master would if he were in his place, is to my mind the most disgusting feature in slavery ; although it is not actually worse to buy or sell a man or woman who is nearly white, than it SLAVES. 201 is to sell one some shades darker, yet there is some- thing in it more revolting to one's feelings. The blacks and mulattos must have education and oppor- tunity before they can show that the prejudice concerning the inferiority of their intellect is unfounded ; and this opportunity the Americans take good care they never shall have. So long as ignorance exists on the one hand, and determination that it shall exist remains on the other, the possibility of the intellectual improvement of the negro is out of the question. That the negro sometimes possesses an intellect, and that too of a very high order, is evident from a fact mentioned by Dr. Rush of Philadelphia. A negro in that city had a most vronderful faculty for mental calculation, and could in an almost incredibly short space of time solve and unravel the most complexed questions in numbers. Being asked one day before a number of strangers how many seconds a man of seventy years some odd months and days had lived, he told the exact number in a minute and a half. When one of the gentlemen had himself made the calculation he said it was too large. " Yes, massa/^ said the nigger, "but you forget the Leap-years And such was the case. The Americans in the nineteenth century greatly exceed the ancients in the degree of servitude they inflict on their slaves. The ancients were content with enslaving the body, and left the mind free to improve and expand itself. ^Esop and Terence we|*e both slaves. In America they enslave both mind and body. Total ignorance, and the absence of all knowledge of their rights and position, are the K 202 AMERICAN PEOPLE. greatest safeguards the masters have over their slaves, and to ensure these the most stringent laws are enacted by the different State Governments. Heavy fines and imprisonments are the punishment inflicted on any who attempt to teach the negro to read or write; and a missionary who should come into the Southern states for the sake of imparting religious instruction, would have as much chance of escaping summary punishment^ or lynching, as a woodcock in a spinney in Norfolk, surrounded by a dozen crack shots. Many of the States have prohibited the emancipa- tion of slaves, except under such heavy securities and liabilities as render it next to impossible ; a master cannot say to his slave, " You have served me well, I make you free,^^ unless he can previously get the permission of the Assembly of his State, and find security that the slave shall not be a burden on the State. No slave can purchase his liberty without his master's consent, and the better he is and the more money he earns, the less likely his master is to part with him. In Cuba, on the contrary, a slave can procure his freedom for the same sum of money that his master gave for him; if he thinks that too high he can appeal to a jury. I heard a distressing story of a planter, who from the difficulty of getting the consent of the Legislative Assembly, and the impos- sibility of finding the proper securities, had been unable to effect the emancipation of his slaves, and was haunted on his death-bed by the pleasant know- ledge, that the moment the breath had left his body, his favourite slaves, and in some instances his own chil- dren, would be sold to the highest bidder. Numbers SLAVES. 203 of these cases occur. Immediately after the death of President Jefferson, his illegitimate children were sold by public auction at New Orleans. The legal and social position of the negro in the free and slave States are in inverse proportion to each other. In the slave States he has^ as I said before, no legal exist- ence whatever. In the northern free States, on the contrary, he has the legal position of a citizen, the right of voting, &c. ; but if he dared to avail himself of his privilege, and show himself at the poll, or attempt to enter a theatre amongst the whites, or take his place in the first-class cars, he would be turned out as sure as possible. His social position in the south is better than in the north; he is treated equally as a dog in both, with this difference, that in the south he is sometimes a pet dog, whereas •in the north he is always a cur, kicked and hooted on every occasion. The fact is, that in proportion as the legal barrier between the races is lowered, the prejudice of colour and public opinion becomes stronger. In the States that have abohshed slavery, and in those where it never existed, the feeling of prejudice against colour and contact with a negro in any way is twice as strong as in the south. In the free States, if a negro is ill-treated he can complain, but he has white men to judge his cause, and the prejudice of colour and public opinion have most probably settled the verdict upon his case previous to its going before them. In theatres, a negro dare not show his face out of the particular part of the house set aside for him. In the hospital he is never admitted into the white men's Avards ; when praying, he must not do it in a white man's church; and K 2 204 AMERICAN PEOPLE. when dead, gold cannot buy him the privilege df being buried in a white man's burial-ground. Such is liberty and equality as understood in America. Hurrah for the American Constitution ! which com- mences, — " That whereas all men are born free, and equal, and alike," &c. , Moliere's lines in L'Etourdi," slightly altered, describe the nature of liberty as it exists in the Southern states, with great correctness : — " La liberty n'est que franche grimace, Qu'une ombre de vertu qui garde mal la place, Et qui s'evanouit, comme I'on peut savoir, Au rayon du soleil, qu'une bourse fait voir." Poor old Liberty ! she must be a tough old lady to stand all the rough usage and knock-down blows, to say nothing of the almost total loss of character she has sustained during the last eight hundred years. Hoodwinked and made an egregious fool of, throw- ing open prisons, and hobnobbing with thieves and murderers one day, a bloody tyrant destroying some of her best friends the next, — she, and her half-sister, Eeligion, have been made the scape-goats for half the gigantic atrocities the world has seen. She must have a good opinion of herself, or she could not avoid seeing how few love her for herself, or for the benefits she confers on mankind, and how many of her professed admirers seek only to swell the train of license that frequently follows in her wake. How often, like Laius, does she contend for existence with her own children ; and how often, like him, is she destined to fall by their hands ! Equality is the brazen image the Americans worship; Liberty is the name they give it. There is as much SLAVES. 205 liberty under the Pasha of Egypt, or an eastern autocrat, as there is in the Slave states of America. J ohnson defined " liberty " as a " state opposed to slavery." The Americans define it, as a " state connected with slavery." If liberty consists in the right of six or seven millions of men to keep three or four millions of their fellow-men in the most degrading state of abject servitude that the world has ever seen, then they have it. If it consists in the freedom of speech and action, they have it not. A man may say or do what he likes in Russia, if he dare; so he may in America, if he dare. Public opinion, that hun- dred-headed hydra, and the tyranny of the majority, that most intolerant and bigoted of all tyrannies, rules America with a rod of iron. In the southern States a man cannot say what he pleases; his life would not be safe for one instant if he did. I was warned in the steamer on the Mississippi by a gentle- man I was talking to on the subject, not to speak too loud ; " for," said he, " if you are overheard, and they thought you were an abolitionist, they would hustle you over the side, and no one would know who did it." If a republican were to preach a crusade in Russia against the " powers that be," and proclaim equality and the rights of man, and the emperor were to have him shot, who would feign such horror of intolerance, and such detestation of tyranny as the Americans ? where would the papers teem with such rabid articles ? Reverse the case ; — suppose the Emperor of Russia sent an envoy to the Southern states to preach eman- cipation, would they tolerate him? No. They would lynch him in a moment ; and every paper in the 206 AMERICAN PEOPLE. Union would be filled with articles about the disgrace- ful interfoi-ence with national property, — the glorious expression of public opinion, &c. The Americans are fond of saying—" Oh ! the English should not talk about slavery, when they showed us the ex- ample." Yes : but we also showed them the example of abolishing it, at an enormous sacrifice. It was not abolished in the northern or western states from any sense of right or wrong, it was with them merely a question of pecuniary advantage. It was proved, with- out doubt, that white labour was more lucrative where it could be procured, and where the climate was not injurious to health, than black labour. This is especially the case in tlie western states, where the extraordinary influx of emigrants renders labour comparatively cheap. It is found cheaper to employ a white labourer at a dollar a day, when actually wanted, than to have to keep a negro all the year round, half of which perhaps he is not required ; moreover there is the chance of the loss of the capi- tal invested in him, by sickness or otherwise. It is now fully proved that agriculture cannot be advan- tageously carried on by slave labour; Indian wheat, corn, and other grain crops, when once in the ground require little labour till harvest time, but in the cul- tivation of sugar-cane, cotton, and rice, especially the latter, which is cultivated on the sea-board of the Atlantic, amongst swamps that are fatal to the white man, slave labour can be made remunerative, though I believe there is little doubt that free white labour, at a moderate price, would be more so. Moreover, in the western states there is a great deal of cant about the " dignity of labour.'' A native SLAVES. 207 American will on no account work in company with a negro, as he considers he lowers himself, and the " dignity of his labour," by doing so. There is a very strong native American feeling in the western states ; it consists of an excessively exalted opinion of themselves individually and collectively, and an almost Napoleon-like confidence in their destiny. A native American is one born in America, and I heard a story exemplifying the innate rights of man in a view almost strong enough to suit Mr. Mid- shipman Easy. An Irishman beat his son, (a boy about ten years old, and ^vh.o, from being born in the country, was a " native American,") for some misdemeanour : the boy was very indignant, and said it was not the beating he cared for, but the being beaten by an Irishman (although his father) : — he could not stand that ! According to the census, the slaves amount to between three and four millions — I expect they are considerably nearer the five than the three millions, and they are continually increasing. People look forward to the time when they will be emancipated, either by their own exertions, or by the State govern- ment ; I do not see the slightest chance of either. As for doing it themselves, it is out of the question : without arms, organization, or direction, any revolt would only be followed by a war of extermination, which would not cease whilst there was a woolly head remaining in North America. The debased state of feeling amongst the slaves, which makes them fawn on the hand that strikes them, and prompts them to imitate their masters in every way ; and the pride with 208 AMEKICAN PEOPLE. which the Mulatto cherishes any tinge of white blood as a distinctive mark that separates him from the black negro and attaches him to the white man^ would always ensure a large majority supporting their masters in any rising that might take place, and would paralyse any united attempt at revolt. Even if the government wished to liberate them, how are they to do it? they cannot buy four millions of slaves, at prices varying from a hundred to five hundred dollars. The South would never willingly give up their slaves for nothing, and the North would never insist on their doing so. The abolitionists are a very small minority of loud-talking men, who are just tolerated in the north, but who dare not show them- selves in the western or southern states; and I am convinced the abolition agitation is only thrown in the teeth of the south more to annoy them, than with any idea that it is a consummation likely to take place, or even to be desired. Another very embarrassing fact is, that many of the southern pro- perties, with their attendant slaves, are mortgaged to northern capitalists, — and catch them giving up one single bright dollar to liberate a single black negro ! The recent annexation of two such enormous tracts of country as Texas and New Mexico, both es- sentially fitted for the cultivation of sugar and cotton, has raised the price of slaves essentially. Manufactories are also springing up in many of the Southern states worked by slaves. This is proved to be the most lucrative way of employing them, and will probably increase their value still more. Moreover, though the Americans may make their slaves free, they cannot give them liberty, or SLAVES. 209 equality of rights; so that though ceasing to be a slavery of individuals^ it will continue to be a slavery of races. The re-enactment of the Fugitive Slave Bill last year, the most iniquitous bill ever framed by human beings, is a proof of the feeling of the country against the negro, and how little justice and humanity are considered when he is concerned. The bill was to enable slave-owners to recover slaves who had run away at any former period ; and even individuals who had escaped upwards of thirty years were with their children, who had never known slavery, seized in Boston and other free cities, and taken back to slavery ! Some cases even more cruel happened, where the parents being dead, the children who had been born and brought up as free men and women were claimed as the children of slaves, and hurried to interminable slavery ! Is it credible that in this free country, the champion of liberty, as she calls herself, and in the nineteenth century, such a law as this could be revived and acted up to with the most unflinching severity ? The extreme vehe- mence M^th which the question of emancipation is argued by the slave-owners on one side and the abolitionists on the other, goes far to prevent anything being done towards ameliorating the condition of the slaves. While one party demands everything, and nothing will satisfy them but total emancipation, the other refuses to abate one jot in the treatment of what they choose to consider their property. They say, and with some truth. It is all very well for you northern men, who have nothing to lose and every- thing to gain by the abohtion of slavery, to say. Liberate your slaves for the sake of principles — (it is k3 AMERICAN' PEOPLE. for the 'principal they keep them, I guess) : — put yourself in our position, and what would you do then? Thus, whilst one party demands everything, and the other refuses anything, nothing at all is done, and the disease keeps increasing till it will some day endanger the health of the body politic. Come to some termination it must ; how or when, nobody can form any idea : no preparations whatever are being made by the South to " put their house in order," and no plan mooted for the increased emancipation of slaves. Difficult though it may be to point out any remedy for so disgraceful an institution, yet one cannot but think it doubly disgraceful, when one sees the question avoided by all the clever men of the country; and whenever it is forced upon the attention of an unwilling assembly by some aboli- tionist more energetic than the rest, slurred over in haste, and its existence cemented by a disgraceful compromise, as Avas done last year in the Omnibus Bill. The abolitionists are quite as much to blame as the southern men ; for at the same time that they hold white-chokered meetings, expressing in the strongest terms their abhorrence of slavery, and their commiseration, even affection, for anything black, and get up subscriptions to send tracts and red flannel waistcoats to the little negroes on the Gold coast, they yet, without the slightest attempt at resistance, suffer the poor slave that has escaped, and (trusting to their expressions of sympathy) had taken refuge among them, to be torn from his home, or carried back to an enraged master. Not one single step, either for the amelioration, or for the gradual emancipation of slaves, has been taken, and SLAVES. 211 every year more stringent laws are passed to prevent their instruction or manumission. What a farce it is to see the senate, at one moment voting a supply for the establishment of steamers to carry free niggers to Liberia, and at the next, voting for the extension of slavery over Texas and New Mexico, a country nearly equalling in size a quarter of the whole Union, and where slavery, though once estab- lished, had been abolished by the Mexicans, a people whom the Americans aflPect to despise. Liberia is a decided farce ; for whereas less than twelve thousand slaves have been taken there during the last twelve years, the births among them during that time have been nearly one million. 213 VOYAGE DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI CHAPTER XL VOYAGE DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI TO NEW ORLEANS. A Company has undertaken to make a railroad from Cairo, at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, to Mobile, a considerable town on the Gulf of Mexico, about 100 miles east of New Orleans. By this means, a distance of 400 miles out of 860 will be saved, and all the losses of Hfe and property, arising from the diflficulty of the navigation and the reckless- ness of the steamboat captains and engineers, will be obviated. I met the engineer who had made the sur- veys for it; he had no doubt it would be accomplished, the unheal thiness of the labour near the shore of the Mexican Gulf being the only objection : but that is not of much importance where Irish emigrants are plenty. When this railroad is finished. Mobile will be in a fair way to eclipse New Orleans ; the situa- tion is better, both as a port and with regard to health. A voyage down the Mississippi is very tiresome, and when the novelty of the life has a little worn off^ it becomes most irksome. The monotony of the swampy banks for the whole distance from St. Louis to the sea is unbroken by a single bluff, or pic- turesque view. The water is thick and muddy, and TO NEW ORLEANS. 213 rolls along over sand-bars or mud-banks, winding and lengthening its course, as if dreading its junction with the ocean, in the most unnecessary and aggra- vatingmanner. So crooked is its channel, that the mouth of the Ohio, which in a straight line is only 450 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, by the river is 860. It might be shortened at least 350 miles, by cutting through eight or ten necks of land, some not more than thirty yards broad. From the softness of the banks, the river is continually changing its course : and what was mainland yesterday is an island to-day, and vice versd. The Missouri is the larger stream of the two, and stamps its own character upon the Mississippi, changing its; speed and colour most completely. The Mississippi is not increased in width from the junc- tion of any of its great tributaries, but is considerably deepened. It generally runs about three miles an hour; but amongst the islands and shoals, it runs much faster. A great number of islands, some of them of considerable extent, are scattered over this mighty river; and it is frequently almost impossible to know when the land on either hand is an island or the main. Below Red River the country becomes very low and swampy, and has an imperceptible inclination towards the sea, in consequence of which, the waters of the Mississippi below this tributary stream, which overflow their banks, never regain the main channel, but pursue their course alone and by innumerable channels, dividing the country into numerous islands, to the Mexican Gulf. As you approach the mouth of the river, you find 214 VOYAGE DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI ample proof that, the same causes which formed the island of New Orleans, and the land opposite, are still at work, rapidly laying the foundation for future lands in the gulf : the mouths are changing every day: old channels are blocked up, and the stream forces new ones. A single tree of the millions that are annually swept down this mighty stream, when stopped by its roots or branches in any one of these channels, is sufficient to obstruct the pas- sage of a thousand more, that would otherwise have drifted out clear. Astonishing net-works of trees thus formed may be seen at the entrance of many of the small creeks about Belize, which had once been mouths. No force can remove them — the impetus of the stream itself, and the mud carried down by it, do but cement and bind them the more closely ; and in ten years from the formation of one of these bars, it is calculated that vegetation shows itself on shoals thus formed. The Mississippi re- sembles the Nile in two or three respects: — The fertilizing slime which the annual floods spread over the surrounding country, and the numerous mouths (more likely " seventy times seven " than the Septem Ostia Nili) through which it finds its way into an almost inland sea. The dangers of snagging, bursting, &c., are not in the least exaggerated ; but fortunately we had a steady captain, good pilot, teetotaller engineer, and a valuable cargo, so that all racing was declined; and we arrived safely after a passage of ten days — the same time they take to cross the Atlantic! Once when we were aground on a sand-bar, and the engines were snorting and groaning in a most TO NEW ORLEANS. 215 unpleasant manner^ I had the curiosity to go and look at the steam gauge ; I found the pressure was 140 lbs. to the square inch — I immediately retired as near the stern as possible. On asking the en- gineer about it, he said he had seen 200 ! l)ut he did not think it safe ! The wooding at night was a very picturesque scene ; the shore illuminated by numbers of large wood-fires, throwing a red lurid glare over the muddy stream ; the huge steamer, which kept on puffing and snorting and yelling, as if impatient to get on, and every now. and then letting off its steam with a roar and a quivering motion that gave one very uncom- fortable ideas of the state of compression it must have been in before ; the numbers of wild-looking naked negroes, shining like so many wet macintoshes, carrying enormous loads of wood, and swarming up and down the bank and over the long plank into the steamer, like a nest of black ants ; while black figures, on whom one almost expected to see horns a.nd a tail, were hurrying about the huge fires on shore, and feeding and raking them up with great pitchforks, — gave one quite an idea of the lower regions ! and reminded me of an old picture I saw in Spain, where the black gentleman and his friends are employed in much the same manner, merrily toasting the souls of unfortunate heretics, consigned to that warm abode by the infallible decrees of the merciless Inquisition. All the old jokes about the steamers drawing so little Avater, that they can cross the country anywhere after a heavy dew ; and the fact, that when the water is very low and the channel intricate, the captain 216 VOYAGE DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI walks ahead with a lantern, .&c., are repeated to travellers first steaming down the Mississippi. The pilot told rae that in the worn-out steamers they cannot afford to have negro stokers — they are too expensive. Every time a boiler bursts they would lose so many dollars^worth of slaves ; whereas, by getting Irish- men at a dollar a-day they pay for the article as they get it, and if it is blown up, why they get another, and only lose a day's wages by the transaction. He said that the very worst steamers, which even Irishmen would not go in, are stoked by old worn- out niggers who were good for nothing else — pleasant work in one's old age ! Just as we arrived at Memphis, a little excitement was visible ; a run- away'negro, goaded to distraction at being retaken, had struck his master ; he was lynched on the spot. Memphis was, some years ago, the scene of one of the most extensive executions on the principle of Judge Lynch that has taken place in the Union. Seventeen of the gamblers and bullies, who once held rule upon the banks of the Mississippi, and were the terror of all the peacefully-minded travellers, were seized and lynched by the enraged citizens of Memphis. A very good riddance; and if the lynch- law was always as well directed as in this latter instance, there would not be much reason to abuse it ; but lately, in California, some of the most fright- ful murders have been committed under the specious pretence of the necessity of immediate justice. I could not help being amused at the commiseration expressed for a certain doctor, a large slave-owner, who had just lost ten negroes by the sinking of a boat in the river ! Not a feeling of pity was vouchsafed to TO NEW ORLEANS. 217 the unfortunate negroes ; but he, poor man ! it was a heavy loss to him, especially as just at that time negroes were looking up ; and moreover, his losses during the cholera season had been very heavy ! We were not sorry to arrive at New Orleans about the end of January. Two hours on the Mississippi are sufficient for all the purposes of instruction and amusement, and eleven days are rather de trop. It does not increase one's feelings of amiability, and I could almost understand the restless desire for any break in the monotony of the voyage, which prompts passengers to induce their captains to race, even at the risk of their lives. In consequence of the St. Charles Hotel having been entirely destroyed by fire a Few days before our arrival, we had great difficulty in getting located. The winter is the season at New Orleans ; in fact, it is the only season of the year in which an Englishman has a moderate chance of existing. During the whole winter the city is thronged with cotton speculators ; agents from all parts of the Old and New World, ''Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics.^' Most of the great English mercantile houses have accredited agents to speculate in cotton. I had no idea mer- cantile affairs were so entirely a matter of specula- tion. People make bets about the probable rise and fall in the price of cotton, and book them in the same way as a man does his bets on the " Derby." It appears that the real amount of the yield of cotton is never exactly known, and all the great speculators have touts, who are despatched into the different cotton districts to send information to their em- ployers. As their accounts differ considerably, so 218 NEW ORLEANS. does the spirit of gambling increase, each man considering his information better than his neigh- bour's, and backing it accordingly. Fortunes are made and lost as quickly as on the Stock Exchange, and numbers of bankruptcies occur every winter. The cotton-pods are fit for gathering about the middle of December, and begin to arrive at New Orleans through the months of January and Feb- ruary. They are packed in large bales, about five feet square, for transportation down the river, and when arrived at New Orleans are packed again under an enormous steam power, by which several bales are compressed into one, for transport across the Atlantic. A steamer coming down the Mississippi laden with bales of cotton up to the very top of the funnel, has a curious appearance. It gives one the idea of five or six enormous hayricks, joined together and covered with a sail-cloth, seized with a sudden fit of locomotion, and dashing about in a reckless manner at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour. New Orleans is the "Wapping of America, and during the dryest weather resembles that delightful portion of the metropolis of England after a Thames flood. Ima- gine what it must be after a flood of the INIississippi ! It is situated on the eastern bank of the river, which there makes a curve from west to east, a fact that gives it the name of the Crescent city. Dig anywhere you will, you come to water in two feet, generally in eighteen inches ; so that in funerals, that portion of the Burial Service which commits " dust to dust," ought to be dispensed with, and the service appointed for burials at sea adopted in its place. A hole is dug in the ground, and instead of the NEW ORLEANS. 319 coffin being lowered into it by ropes, it is shot down lengthways, and disappears under the thin crust of earth, hke a stick under ice, to find a last abode, not resting-place, amongst the alligators and snapping turtle of Lake Pontchartrain, and the surrounding swamps. The foundations of the houses are very extra- ordinary. A raft, the size of the required foundation, is made of three- inch planks, and sunk a certain depth in the slime, and the houses built upon it, evidently with a view to be prepared for any sudden floods that may float them from their present moorings. I was quite astonished at seeing the foundations of some of the houses that were building, and could hardly be persuaded that abodes so founded could be safe. There is one thing to be said, however, that as by a recent computation every house in New Orleans is burnt, or ought to be burnt, every fifty years, the foundations are not required to last for ever. The foundations are apt to rise, or fall with a succession of floods or dry weather, so that the sides of the houses do not alw ays quite retain their original perpendicular position. The level of the river is about three feet higher than the town; any rent, therefore, in the levee or dyke, which extends about a hundred miles above the city, and which in some places is very frail, causes great disquietude to the inhabitants. In 1850 a breach was made some five miles above the town, and it was in rather a preca- rious state, there being every chance of the inhabitants awaking some morning and finding themselves toss- ing about on their respective rafts in the Gulf of 220 NEW ORLEANS, Mexico — a fleet of streets and squares, with two or three enormous hotels and theatres as a convoy ! In walking through the city after dark, you are per- petually startled by some great slimy rat, about the size of a young pig, starting almost from under your feet : they actually swarm in New Orleans, and you hear them wallowing and sloshing (?) about in the gutters, like the accounts one reads of the hippopo- tami in Africa— parvis componere magna. One evening, a large party of liberators, patriots, or whatever is the name assumed by the late piratical invaders of Cuba, assembled in the streets under the windows of our hotel to serenade General Quitman, Lopez, and some other notorieties, whose prosecution by the United States Government, (the most farcical affair that has ever, I should think, thrown contempt and ridicule on a court of justice,) had just been abandoned. The Americans are not heaven-born musicians at the best of times, and when half-tipsy, as was the case in the present instance, the only tunes they have any idea of are " Yankee Doodle,'' " Hail Columbia, happy land ! " &c. These they yelled out in most delightful discord, every man following his own time and tune to the end, when if he found himself there too soon, he started again to keep time with the main body ; while there sat the liberators, champions of liberty, &c. "liquoring freely,'' and sucking in slings, cock-tails, &c. like heroes, as they were. You would have imagined that an atmosphere of slavery would be as fatal to their free lungs as the breath of an anaconda ; but they received their brandy (raw, of course, for heroes !) from the hands of slaves, actually without swooning, or even without NEW ORLEANS. 221 a shudder passing through their philanthropic frames, smiling complacently at each other, and talking magniloquently about their own glorious liberty, and the tyranny and contemptible servility of the Spa- niards; subjects that were only interrupted for a moment by some son of freedom more thirsty than the rest, getting impatient for his hquor, and de- nouncing in frightful language some wretched nigger, who had had the misfortune to be born in the land of the free ! Certainly, the best friends of America, and the Americans themselves, cannot but allow that it is a land of contradiction and humbug ; a land where, as I before said, " fifteen miUions of freemen and three millions of slaves, are eternally celebra- ting their freedom, their enhghtenment, and their equality : " and where dehcacy is so easily shocked, that one is in constant dread of using words that in England are of hourly parlance; and yet where opera dancing of the most prononce style is patronised by the most fastidious ; where the "members'' {Anglice, legs) of the pianos are clothed in pantaloons, while the " members" of the dancers are applauded accord- ing to their nudity. Dr. Johnson affirms, that the fact of being easily shocked does not always arise from a perfect purity of id§as ; but that, on the con- trary, a "nice person is one of habitually nasty ideas," and that it is owing to his habitual turn of thought that he is apt to perceive impropriety yvhere none is intended; therefore the Americans have good authority for dispensing with what one cannot avoid considering in many instances as most unnecessary mock modesty. However, ladies are much the same in all ages, I expect. Some old Roman, Martial, 222 NEW ORLEANS. I believe, treating of that very subject, mock modesty, says, " In Brutus' presence Lucretia blushed and laid the book aside : when he retired, she took it up again and read." " Erubuit, posuitque meum Lucretia librum ; Sed coram Bruto. Brute recede, legit." I heard a good repartee made on that very point. An American lady being dreadfully shocked at some observation an English gentleman had made, and in which she imagined she detected some impropriety, said she was astonished at his not having more respect for her presence. " I beg your pardon, madam," said he, " and am very sorry that I should have offended your delicacy ; but my excuse is, that what I meant was not what you were thinking of." Honi soit qui mal y pense. The idea was not a new one, but the application was good. The resident proprietors of New Orleans are chiefly French. The English and American merchants and cotton speculators swarm there during the winter and spring months, but fly, if possible, at the first breath of summer. The French Creoles are very fond of amusement, particularly of plays and .operas. There is a very good French operatic company there, and I heard Le Prophete " well performed several times. On one occasion I had the misfortune to be present when a poor woman who was figuring away in the " Pas des Patineurs " fell and broke her ankle. The house, every night I was there, was crowded with what the papers called " elegantly dressed females," chiefly French. They were seemingly NEW ORLEANS. 223 adored by moustached and bearded dandies, with Parisian cut coats, and a most undeniable odour of tobacco, &c. Some of the ladies were excessively pretty, and dressed in remarkably good taste. The only peculiarity that struck me to their disadvantage, was the reckless use they made of paint : I recog- nised many lovely faces, which one evening were blanches comme la blanche ermine, appear the next glowing like the " red, red rose." Painting is a great mistake at all times ; but there is more excuse for it at New Orleans than at most places, as the sallowness of complexion, induced by the damp unhealthy climate, is very disfiguring. I made a point of going to some of the quadroon " balls. I had heard a great deal of the splendid figures and graceful dancing of the New Orleans quadroons, and I certainly was not disappointed. Their move- ments are the most easy and graceful that I have ever seen. They danced one figure, somewhat resem- bling the Spanish fandango, without castanets, and I never saw more perfect dancing on any stage. I wonder some of the opera lessees in Europe do not import some for their corps de ballet : the expense, I conclude, is against it. A handsome quadroon could not be bought for less th^n one thousand or fifteen hundred dollars ! though the market is well supplied at that price. These balls take place in a large saloon : at the entrance, where you pay half a dollar, you are requested to leave your implements, by which is meant your bowie-knifes and revolvers ; and you leave them as you would your overcoat on going into the opera, and get a ticket with their number, and on your way out they are returned to you. You 224 NEW ORLEANS. hear the pistol and bowie-knife keeper in the arms- room call out, " No. 46 — a six-barrelled repeater.^' " No. 100 — one eight-barrelled revolver, and bowie knife with a death's-head and cross-bones cut on the handle." " No. 95 — a brace of double-barrels." All this is done as naturally as possible, and you see fel- lows fasten on their knives and pistols as coolly as if they were tying on a comforter or putting on a coat. As I was going up stairs, after getting my ticket, and replying to the quiet request, " whether I would leave my arms," that I had none to leave, I was stopped and searched from head to foot by a police- man, Avho, I suppose, fancied it impossible that I should be altogether without arms. Notwithstanding all this care murders and duels are of weekly occur- rence at these balls, and during my stay at New Orleans there were three. There are more murders here than in any other city in the Union. In the first place, everybody drinks hard, and every man is armed ; and a man who does not avenge an insult on the spot is despised. It is a word and a blow, and not unfrequently the blow without the word. The southern men are naturally hot blooded, and duelling is part of their creed; and the northern men, who come down south, what with drink, gambling, and the excitement of speculation, are not apt to be very backward in taking up a quarrel. A " difficulty," as it is called, took place in the bar- room of the hotel where I was staying between two young men, and one of them was killed. There were about a hundred men present, but not one of them interfered to stop it; nobody arrested the homicide, and after quietly wiping his knife he NEW ORLEANS. 225 walked away. I asked one old gentleman who was present whether he would not be arrested and tried. He said they would have him up before the magis- trates on the morrow; but that his opponent had called him a liar, which was quite a sufficient provo- cation for stabbing him. He said there was a glorious expression of public feeling in New Orleans, in favour of justifiable homicide, and that no jury could find a man guilty who, as in this case, had had any provocation. The character of the population of New Orleans is worse now than it has ever been, in consequence of the numbers of returned Californians, with all their reckless habits and notions. Some idea of the gambling spirit of speculation in this city may be gathered from the fact that the Atlantic, steamer, after being thirty days over her time, was insured liere at fifty per cent. ! A real go-a-head Yankee will insure all creation for half nothing ! During my fortnight^s residence at New Orleans, the Autocrat steamer was run down, and forty pas- sengers drowned; the John Adams burst, and burned a hundred and forty ; and another steamer, laden with cotton, took fire and burned sixty passengers; all which casualties, as I before remarked, did not so much as elicit a larger type, or any " additional particulars " from the editors. I did not in any way admire New Orleans or its inhabitants, though I met some most agreeable ex- ceptions. If liberty consists in a man being allowed to shoot and stab his neighbour on the smallest pro- vocation, and to swagger drunk about the streets, then certainly the Crescent city is the place in which to seek for it, for they have enough and to spare, But L 226 NEW ORLEANS. if liberty consists in safety to life and property, and the sacrificing the liberty of the individual to the benefit of the community, then they know nothing of it in New Orleans but the name. In Boston you may not by law smoke in the streets, or drink any spirits whatever, under pain of a heavy fine. In New Orleans you may be drunk in the streets the whole day with impunity, if you choose. Hurrah for consistency ! At length, after a fortnight's residence at the " Crescent city," we determined to bid adieu to its bar-rooms and slave-markets, its fat rats, steam-boat explosions, fires, duels, murders, &c., not with much regret on my side, I confess, and engaged our passage in a small barque for the Havana. On taking leave of a country, it is natural to com- pare the expectations one had previously formed of the nature of the country itself, and the manners and customs of the inhabitants, with one's parting convictions, derived from actual experience ; and to consider whether during the course of the visit one has gained any knowledge, or been disabused of any unfounded prejudice. The time was now come for me to bid adieu to America, and I could not but feel that the months I had spent in travelling through the country had been well spent in many ways ; for at the same time that I was proud to find that my own nation and country could well bear a comparison with her daughter and younger rival, I also acquired a great respect and admiration for a kind-hearted energetic people, whom on this side the Atlantic it is too much the custom (though a most mistaken one, and founded on prejudice and ignorance) to NEW ORLEANS. 227 consider as behind us in every way. I was frequently forced to admit, that though we do most things well in England, yet that they do some things even better in America. No expectations regarding the natural grandeur and wealth of the American continent can be disap- pointed. Her magnificent rivers, her lakes, her forests, the richness of her soil, and her mineral wealth, are unequalled in the length and breadth of the world ; and with the golden soil of Cahfornia on the one hand, and the tin and copper regions of Lake Supe- rior and Galena on the other, it is hard to say whether the coming age is destined to be one of gold or of brass : there is plenty of the latter current at present amongst the inhabitants. With respect to the people, I was very agreeably surprised. Far from meeting with that incivility which I had been led to expect was the lot of most travellers, and of the English in particular, I was not once annoyed with any rude inquisitive- ness ; and I found that hospitality, and that too of the most agreeable kind, was the rule and not the exception throughout the Union. Any foreigner landing in America with a single good letter of in- troduction will be franked from one town to another, and be cordially greeted in all. With regard to the repubhcan government itself, I was neither pleased nor .disappointed. It was what I expected, neither so cheap, or Utopian, or so free from jobbing and sinecure patronage as its admirers assert, nor so utterly impotent as regards all federal purposes as its detractors maintain. It is certainly not so powerful to restrain internal com- L 2 228 NEW ORLEANS. motions as our own form of government, and I am now convinced, wliere before I only believed, that the government and institutions of America, although in many ways working admirably in that country, are not by any means suited to us ; and that the man who advocates a Republic in Great Britain, does so either from sheer ignorance, or from a worse motive. The energy and intelligence of the American people in applying the inventions and improvements of modern science to all the comforts and conveniences of life, I have before mentioned as being beyond all praise. But what chiefly affects an EngHshman's national pride, as wounding him in the most sensitive point, is the undeniable fact, that wherever English and American ships are brought into actual compe- tition, the vessels of the latter nation are invariably preferred to those of his own country, and that not from any principle of national bolstering, but by English and American merchants equally. The whole of the Liverpool and New York trade, which formerly we monopolized, is now almost as entirely confined to America. Not a single " English tub " can get a freight in an American port so long as any American vessel can be procured. I am afraid there is no denying that, as a nation, the Americans are progressing much more rapidly than ourselves in the science of naval architecture ; and in the management of their commerce, in the relative relations between the owners and captain and the owners and crew, and the comparatively greater equalization of profits, which renders every man connected with the vessel anxious for the speedy success of the voyage, the Yankees are making lirJlW ORLEANS. 229 rapid strides in the right direction, which we should do well to follow. Although doubtless our social progress and com- mercial enterprise, compared with that of the other nations of Europe, have been mighty indeed, yet it is no part of true wisdom to attempt to deny the fact, which is undeniable, that there is a nation in the other hemisphere, sprung from a common stock, and endowed with an energy equal to our own, but animated with no great affection for us, which is following so closely on the heels of our progress, that while she has been enabled to avoid many of our errors she has yet reaped all the benefit of our success; and that now, rendered doubly eager by the sense of successful competition, she is trim- ming her sails to every cat^s-paw as well as to every steady breeze of commerce, and drawing up so close under our stern, that unless England gives up the self-flattering but fallacious idea of being so far ahead of the rest of the world as to be beyond all danger of defeat, and buckling to, heart and soul, strains every nerve in the race that is inevitable, she will discover, when too late, that her ships are no longer the swiftest, nor her commerce the most princely and universal the world has ever seen ; but she will see the fleets of a younger rival, one that she had almost been considering an " outsider,^^ dis- tancing her in the race of nations ; and as history proves, without a single exception, a lead thus lost is never regained ! It is not by vaunting our progress, or encouraging an unfounded self-confidence in our enterprise and our energy, on the one hand, nor by the servile 230 NEW ORLEANS. praise and admiration of any other country, on the other, — not by subtracting from the merit of our institutions, " tinkering them up in the imitation of those of the United States/' as some member had the bad taste to remark in the House of Commons — but it is by strengthening them as much as may be, improving them gradually where improvement is necessary and admissible, thus rendering them there- by objects of greater aflPection to the people : — it is by marking carefully and without national prejudice the strong points of our adversaries at the same time that we endeavour to detect our own short-comings — it is by this means that England, " That precious stone set in the silver sea," will still, primus inter primos, hold her place as fore- most in the front rank of nations, and will still, as she does now, and will, I firmly believe, continue to do for years to come — rule the waves, not with her ships of war, but with the wealth-bearing fleets of her commerce. TUGS ON THE MISSISSIPPI. 231 CHAPTER XIL NEW ORLEANS — EJLBARK POR THE HAVANA. On joining our vessel towards evening we found every man on board gloriously drunk except the mate, and he was not going to sea with us. The captain was having a pitched battle with the steward, a Spanish lad, whom he was kicking and pushing about the deck with the most drunken perseverance, an amusement he seemed to have been engaged in for some time, judging by the shortness of breath he displayed. As everything seemed in miserable con- fusion I turned into a berth about five feet long by eighteen inches broad, whereby keeping scuttle and door open I managed to get fresh air enough to exist. On turning out the next morning I found we formed one of a brood of four or five vessels that were being towed down to the ocean by a huge white tug, which was in the midst of us. I clambered on board the steamer to have a chat with the tug-captain, and to see the other vessels. He was the most reckless man I had yet met, and the cool way he talked of "bilers bursting," and men living several hours after they had had every atom of skin scalded off", made me feel quite uncomfortable. The employment of tugs on the Mississippi is tlie last dying effort of a steamer on the western water§. 232 FELLOW-TRAYELLERS. It is calculated they will burst or get snagged in that employ; in fact, one of the two is their only legitimate end, as they are never broken up. Our tug was on its last legs ; the engine-boiler was sub- ject to a most unhealthy wheezing, and a spasmodic discharge of steam that was anything but agreeable. She was so unsafe that they could not procure Irish to stoke, so had bought a few worn-out old negroes. On board the tug I made acquaintance with some of my fellow-companions. Two were Frenchmen, scowl- ing and unwashed, with a very scanty supply of Hnen, which was compensated for by a magnificent display of red neckhandkerchiefs. A very few minutes' conversation proved them to be Rouges determines, admirers of Blanqui and Albert Ouvi'ier, whom an ungrateful country and General Cavaignac had re- quested to remain abroad for a short period. We had got into a deep political discussion — in which one brave homme had fully proved, to his own satis- faction at all events, that the rights of property weife all humbug, and that no man had a right even to the shirt on his own back (I don't believe any one would have coveted his) iilepeuple wanted it — when the first plunge of the vessel on our approach to the bar was felt ! Le brave looked unutterables, but still went on talking faster and more energetically than ever. I remarked that his sallow complexion became more sallow, and that he was continually casting rather unwholesome glances to the side ; but as the motion was so very slight, I thought it was only a shudder passing through his patriotic body on thinking of *'La pauvre France." I was soon undeceived, for the vessel giving a deeper pitch than usual, the THE KOUGE DETERMINE. 233 Frenchman ejaculated, " Ah, mon Dieu ! ce mauclit mal de mer ! " and rushing to the side, " La pauvre France " was soon forgotten. I did not see him again for two days, myself having been remarkably uncomfortable during that time; when on coming on deck towards evening, feeling rather queer cirm pr a skin. "We sailed from Margaritta on the evening of the 26th, and anchored off the island of St. Vincent on the 30th. St. Vincent is an excessively pictu- resque island, and as far as it is cultivated is very fertile ; but the want of labour is felt there as well as in all the West India islands. St. Vincent is remarkable as being the only one of the windward islands where a remnant of that once savage and powerful tribe, the Charaibes of the Isles, is now to be found. At the time of the discovery of South America, nearly all the windward islands, Barbadoes, Trinidad, Tobago, St. Vincent, and others, Avere in- habited by a fierce race, called by the Pacific Indians of Cuba and Hispaniola, " Charaibe," which meant in their language, " warlike people." They opposed the Spaniards tooth and nail, and were by them nearly exterminated ; their destruction was com- pleted by the buccaneers, who treated them with the utmost cruelty, introducing bloodhounds for the express purpose of hunting them down. They suc- ceeded to their hearts' content, and the miserable remnant now existing in the island of St. Vincent is all that is left of that gallant race. The Caribs of the main, though called by the same name, were 420 ST. VINCENT. a much less warlike race, and like the Aravvauks, the Chaymas, and the other tribes of the continent, only showed fight on two or three occasions. The Charaibes of the Isles are described as being a tall, handsome race, the men far superior to the Avomen in appearance ; and they had a tradition that their ancestors landed on one of the islands from the mainland, and attacking the inhabitants, killed all the males, but kept the women for their wives, a regular re-enacting the Rape of the Sabines. It is far from improbable that they originally belonged to the fierce tribe of the Goahiros, that I have before mentioned as inhabiting the country between the lake of Maracaybo, and the Rio de la Hecha, and there maintaining their independence at all costs. Neither is it impossible that they were the ancestors of the Natchez of Florida, whose tradition of their ancestors having been driven in a perishing state on the coast of Florida I have before mentioned. The inhabitants of the Bahamas and Cuba mentioned to Columbus, during his first voyage, the existence of a fierce race further to the west ; so that it is evident the Caribs must have made excursions to those islands. Natures so similar to each other, and differing so completely from all the other tribes, both of the islands and the main, as did the Goahiros and Caribs, argue some common origin ; and the certainty that, if the tradition of the Natchez is true, they could have come from no other place than the islands, and, being a fierce race, it is natural to suppose they could not have come from the islands inhabited by a soft, unwarlike people ; there is a kind of negative argument, that ST. VINCENT. 421 they, too, must have been of the same warlike stock, and, in some of their expeditions against their gentler neighbours, have been carried hy the gulf stream, or driven by winds, on the coast of Florida. I was very sorry I had not an opportunity of visiting this last remnant of a great nation, but I have no doubt they retain little of their former characteristics. I should have been curious to see whether they in any deo-ree retain their former barbarous custom of com- pressing the heads of their new-born infants with boards, as is now done by the Flat-head Indians, on the banks of the Columbia, (rather a curious coin- cidence,) or when the custom was abandoned. The Charaibes bury their dead in a cowering posture, with the chin resting 6n the knees : this is also the practice of the natives of Central America, where their superstitions have not been interfered with by the missionaries; and in Yucatan Stephens found the corpses in that position in all the tombs he ex- amined. When the Caribs of the mainland were first dis- covered, slavery existed among them to a great extent; their wars were not bloody, as they seldom destroyed life, but for the sake of having a jollifica- tion. All the vanquished were sold as slaves, either amongst themselves, or to neighbouring tribes. The price during Raleigh's visit was very low ; one of his men having bought eight girls for a common clasp knife. Slavery is at present unknown amongst the Caribs, or any of the tribes of the northern portion of South America. We sailed from St. Vincent's on the 2d, and anchored off Bridgetown on the evening of the 3d ; 423 GULP OF PARIA. on the 4th we sailed for Trinidad. The entrance to the Gulf of Paria is very grand. The mountains of Trinidad stretch out towards the mountains of the mainland of Paria, and I have no doubt that (in those days probably when Mount Abylus and the Rock of Gibraltar were one and the same) they were united. Some convulsion of nature has, however, destroyed all connexion, and riven them up into mountainous rocky islands, with perpendicular cliffs of some fifteen or sixteen hundred feet in heioht, separated from each other by deep channels, varying from half a mile, which is about the breadth of the smaller hoca, to about seven or eight miles, which is the width of the channel between the island of Chacachacarreo, forming "El boca majore del dragon," or the Dragon's biggest mouth. Vessels bound for Spanish Town, or for any port of the island, enter the gulf through one or other of these passages. At the east end of the island the gulf is again connected with the ocean by the Boca del Serpiente, or the Serpent's Mouth, which, however, is too shallow for any but coasting vessels. In consequence of one of the chief channels of the Orinoco opening into the Gulf of Parin, its waters are violently agitated, and pour out at both ex- tremities, through the Serpent's Mouth and through the several mouths of the Dragon, at the rate of four or five knots an hour. During his fourth voyage Columbus, who had been for some days previously greatly alarmed by the swell and agitation of the water outside the island, owing to the mighty influx of the Orinoco, and the force of the equinoctial current flowing into the Caribbean Sea, both of THE riTCH LAKE. 423 which causes he was in utter ignorance of ; finding the waters of the Gulf of Paria rushing in two dif- ferent directions, north and south, from the same spot, fancied that he had reached the culminating point of the terraqueous globe, (he did not know the earth was round;) and having reasoned himself into this belief, he soon began to conjecture that the terrestrial paradise must be at the highest point of the earth, and consequently could not be far off, and that he was the fortunate individual destined to dis- cover it. However, like Commodore Hogers, he was disappointed. Trinidad is the finest island in the West Indies, after Cuba, Jamaica, and St. Domingo. It is in a pretty fiourishing condition, and Coolie labour is to be had at from 8d. to Is. a-day. We went to see the Pitch lake, a district of about an hundred thousand acres, covered to any depth with pitch, which is in many places soft and seething. Many experiments have been tried, especially by the late Commander-in-Chief on the station, for render- ing this pitch serviceable for " tarring " purposes ; but it either has too much of one ingredient, or too little of another, and hitherto it has completely failed. Experiments are now in progress for extracting gas, which is to exceed all other gas in cheapness and brilliancy, and large cargoes have been forwarded to New York for that purpose ; but I expect that, like the Irish peat, although it contains all the necessary ingredients of incalculable wealth, they are so blended together, the chemical analyses necessary for sepa- rating them cost more than all the profits arising from their intended applications are likely to cover. Spanish Town is one of the prettiest of the British 424 RETUEN TO ENGLA.ND. West Indian capitals that I have seen, and the society, composed of Spanish, French, and English in nearly equal numbers, is very good. After spend- ing four or five days there, and making some short excursions into the island, we set sail on the , 9th of July for Old England. As the current was in our favour, we went out through one of the lesser bocas, but, as bad luck would have it, the breeze again failed us just as we were in the most ticklish part of the passage ; and an eddy, which in these narrow passages have the force of currents, running six or seven miles an hour, carried us unpleasantly near the beetling cliffs, before a puff of wind enabled us to sheer off. If we had grounded in that strong current, it would have been a far more serious matter than merely touching off Porto Cabello, and I fear the good ship Ariel would have left her bones to whiten at the dragon's cruel mouth, far from the land of the leal. We sighted Ste Lucie and two or three more of the French islands, and passing out between St. Kitts and Barbuda, on the 14th we found ourselves clear of the squalls and currents of the islands ; and with a fair breeze and a smooth sea, notwithstanding a calm of six days, we made the Scilly Lights on the night of the 29th day, and anchored in Cowes Roads at daylight on the 14th August, 1851, thirty-three days out from Trinidad. THE END. R. CLAY, PRINTER, BREAD STKEKX HILI. ,0