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Who can travel in the land of the Dacotahs and not hear
"the Falls of Minnehaha
Calling to him through the silence"?
We obey the call, and wander on, yet not, like Hiawatha,
"Through interminable forests, Through uninterrupted silence,"
but over well-trodden roads, and past well-tilled farms. Nor can we wholly repress a sense of sadness, a tender regret for what has so utterly passed away. The last place in the world to be sentimental over Indians is Minnesota. In a
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country where, until lately, a woman might stand frying doughnuts at her kitchen fire, and look up to see a dark, dreadful face in the gathering twilight pressed against the window-pane, watching the process, and receive for her ostensibly hospitable, but really affrighted greeting, only a non-committal grunt, it is just as well not to rhapsodize over the noble savage. When, in addition to this, the noble savage yells out a war-whoop, whips out his tomahawk, and takes off your scalp, it is all over with the poetry of the real thing. But while we may not expect that Minnesotians should be affectionate towards Indians, I cannot help saying that the seed of every atrocity which they committed seems to have been planted by our own white Christian hands. Their violence was the result of our injustice. The wrong which they did to us was born of the wrong we did to them. Long-continued, systematic fraud bore bloody fruit. Government agents and traders robbed them of their annuities. Whiskey was carried among them by the agents of the government which forbade its introduction. The meat which government furnished them, or paid for furnish-
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ing, was delivered to them in a loathsome condition. Flour was so completely spoiled, that, when the hoops and staves were knocked off, it stood up like a rock, and had to be cut to pieces with hatchets. But why should we go into details? Official investigation revealed a sickening array of facts. By every ingenious and infernal device, by menace and violence when deceit alone was insufficient, the traders managed to stand between the government and the Indians, and clutch at the larger portion of what was intended for the latter. They sought redress in vain. Is it strange that stupid, ignorant, savage men, having complained and appealed to no purpose, seeing themselves always outraged and overborne by force or fraud, inflamed with rum and rage, reckless of fate and fortified by despair, should finally have taken a rough justice into their own brutal hands? or that such justice, so taken, should have been goaded and maddened into revenge, and cruelty, and indiscriminate slaughter?
It may not be possible for the law to take into account the accumulated wrongs which induced the terrible outburst of savage wrath. It may
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be that the safety of the State required strict legal penalty, regardless of moral desert; but who can doubt that, to the eye of God, the guilt rested most heavily upon those selfish and unprincipled men whose foul deeds aroused the Indian revenge? On them rests the blood of the slain. The Indians, it seems to me, are to be pitied more than they are to be blamed. I pitied them in the very height of their diabolical madness, for it could not fail to be seen that every blow they struck at us would recoil with ten-fold fury on themselves. They are but a handful of unwashed ragamuffins, from whose smoking ruins no Æneas will ever come out to tell where Troy was. But Vengeance belongeth unto God, and whatever may be out theology regarding future retribution, it is true in the present world that the wages of sin is death,--and death not only to the guilty but the guiltless.
If this were an affair of the past alone, it might not be worth while to dwell on it; but recent developments show that the same course towards the Indians is going on. Untaught by disaster, and with no fear of God before their
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eyes, wicked men are carrying out the same plans of fraud that brought about the massacres of 1862, and that are still springing up in wars and rumors of wars. They care not for the rights of the Indians, nor the safety of the whites, nor the good name of the government. Indifferent to everything but their own pockets, short-sighted and bad-hearted, they are plunging the State into danger and the country into disgrace.
Having said my say about the right and wrong of it, I will confess that the Song of Hiawatha overpowers, with its plaintive, simple melody, the fierce, wild war-whoop of these late times. The day itself is full of tenderness and melancholy,--a still, yellow, smoky day, warm with the lingering loveliness of Summer, yet breathing through all its warmth a prophecy of departure. Such a day as when listless, careless Shawondasee, In the Drowsy, dreamy sunshine, In the never-ending Summer, Sent the melons and tobacco, And the grapes in purple clusters.
"From his pipe the smoke ascending Filled the sky with haze and vapor, Filled the air with dreamy softness,
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Gave a twinkle to the water, Touched the rugged hills with smoothness, Brought the tender Indian Summer, In the Moon when nights are brightest."
There! I did not mean to quote Hiawatha, but who can help it? When a poet walks before you, how can you choose but follow in his footsteps? Few enough are the scenes in this young lad of ours that have received such consecration; but when you do come upon them, you are instantly aware of another spirit in the air. The woods and fields no longer speak their own words, but are vocal with song and ballad and legend. It is long enough since I read Hiawatha, and yet--so strong is the spell of genius--no sooner do I stand among his haunts than the air is full of the noiseless din of vanished generations, and every bush and brake and tree as if it were not. Progress and improvement and the lumber-trade and free schools,--they are undreamed of as yet, but on the outskirts of the forest forth fares Hiawatha, with his moccasons of magic and the deer across his shoulder. Yonder in the sunshine at the doorway of his
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wigwam sits the ancient arrow-maker, making arrow-heads of jasper, arrow-heads of chalcedony, arrow-heads of flint and jasper, smoothed and sharpened at the edges, hard and polished, keen and costly; and the bright gleam yonder is no sunshine on the maple-bough, but the arrow-maker's dark-eyed daughter, with her moods of shade and sunshine, feet as rapid as the river, tresses flowing like the water. We see her face peeping from behind the curtain of the wigwam to see the brave young warrior, swift of foot and strong of arm,--
"Hear the rustling of her garments From behind the waving curtain, As one sees the Minnehaha Gleaming, glancing through the branches, As one hears the Laughing Water From behind its screen of branches."
There is is again, you see! Hiawatha! Hiawatha! But it does not come to you as quotation, foreign-born poetry. You see it. You feel it. It is your own thought. The breeze sings it, the waters murmur it. The whole air is vital with it. I did not quote Hiawatha. I wrote it myself!
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So, in good ghostly company, we dream on. Scuds across the road an unpretending little brook, that looks as if bent on some merry frolic with never a thought of fame; but that little brook in five seconds is going to be the renowned Falls of Minnehaha, and it know it, and that is why it hurries away so unceremoniously. We do not know it, and jog along leisurely, then turn aside into a grove, loose our tired horses, and loiter down a wood-path, taking in all the sweetness of the woods as we go, and well content to loiter. Suddenly, almost without warning, almost like a discovery of your own, there it is,--Minnehaha,--the very fairy of waterfalls,--a dainty, delicate little made, dancing over the rocks with exquisite winsome grace. Perfect is the word that rises to your lips. The gem has no flaw.
It is surprising how little material Nature needs when she has a mind for feats. The waterfall is the fall of a brook. It is but a flickering, wavering gossamer veil, through which you can discern the brown rock behind. It is not water, but foam,--an airy, tricksy sprite of the skies toying with the clods of the valley,--mocking
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the old cold cliff that vainly seeks to clasp her in his rough, dripping wet arms. The rock over which the rivulet falls is carved into a hollow, regular semicircle. It does not fall, it springs over from very light-heartedness. It just gives a little gleeful laugh,--there is a flash, a sparkle,--and away it goes! Why, it is precisely as I said when I wrote Hiawatha, and told you that the falls of Minnehaha
"Flash and gleam among the oak-trees, Laugh and leap into the valley."
I could not give a better description if I should try again. But the frolicking Undine is a mischievous maiden, and, for all her daintiness, will not hesitate to give you a smart rap if you venture upon familiarities. I have a mind to try the tempting shadows where her white feet rest. I pick my way slowly down the rugged steep bank, press up close to her secret haunts, and, presto! the Laughing Water is changed into a shrew and a scold, and gives me such a swift, sudden box on the ear, as fairly takes my breath away. The spray beats, and the wind raves; it is like a violent northeast rain-storm. I am drenched in a moment, and can hardly believe
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that the mild sun is shining overhead. The rock projects so much that you can very easily walk behind the falls, midway between their top and the river, under a flat, smooth roof, quite across to the other side; but I do not know that the view is at all improved by so doing,--especially as there is no danger in it, for the brook is so shallow one could hardly drown if he should fall in, though I imagine he might be somewhat muddled for a time. Then the happy river trips away through its deep, shadowy gorge, as gayly and as unconcerned as if it had not just made the most beautiful, the most delicate, the most satisfying little spectacle in the world.
Close beside the wilful, graceful Laughing Water, straight through the land of the Dacotahs, graceless, remorseless, runs a railroad, and every melancholy, frustrate ghost will fly in his mile-measuring moccasons from the snort and shriek of the shrill-voiced locomotive. Shawondasee, fat and lazy, will sit and gaze at the fierce-puffing smoke-pipe longer than he did at the maid with yellow tresses, but this will not end in smoke like the maiden. You, wretched Sha-
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wondasee, will be the one this time to turn into a dandelion, and be puffed away forever, pipe and all, by this iron-hearted rival. Alas, poor Yorick!
Midway between the white man's steam-car and the Indian's dog-trot come the lumbering emigrant wagons, white-topped and bulky, drawn by oxen, and overflowing with goods and chattels and children. Tables are slung on behind, kettles swing underneath, and occasionally we see them unlimbering and preparing a meal by the roadside, within sound of Minnehaha, and under the shadow of her groves. Weary-looking, hard-working men and women and children,--all children of toil,--Heaven send rest to their tired feet!
We halt our caravansary too, when the mood takes us, or when some solitary farm-house promises well, and send out a foraging party. It generally returns overflowing with milk, not to say honey. Bread and cheese, bowls, dippers, tumblers, spoons, we furnish from our own camp-chest, and under the brilliant canopy of autumn trees lunch gloriously off nectar and ambrosia. If we were criminals fleeing from justice, any
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competent detective could follow us by our footprints traced in milk. Sometimes a boy whistles up, stops suddenly, stares a moment, and goes on. Sometimes an overgrown pig--well, not to put too fine a point on it, a hog--roots his way out of the woods, comes grunting up to our rendezvous, and is speedily put to ungainly flight. Occasionally a horseman, or a squad of them, ride by in soldiers' garb; but they are on pleasure bent and peace, for they fling us handbills, announcing a theatrical entertainment at Fort Snelling. Entertainment! Well, there is no accounting for tastes. Perhaps, if we should summer it and winter it at Fort Snelling, we too should be reduced to hanging up a curtain, setting out a row of candles on the floor, and strutting our little hour upon the stage, or before it, for entertainment; but in the midst of the lengthened sweetness long drawn out of these golden, hazy holidays, I am ready to adopt Sir Cornwall Lewis's opinion, that this world would be a very tolerable place but for its amusements. No, my soldier-friend, ride on triumphantly in your brave blue coat. I will follow you to Fort Snelling, but not to any counterfeit present-
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ment,--Fort Snelling, the ancient outpost of civilization, set for a defence of pioneer against Indian. It has been the scene of warfare and a place of doom. Now, it is full of peace and grass and sunshine, a corner lot worth having indeed, for the Mississippi comes down on one side and the Minnesota on the other, and between them, just at the angle where they meet, stands the fort, deep in the heart of all this boundless glory of wood and water. The site is a headland,--if that is a correct use of the word, and if not, so much the worse for the word. Any definition of headland that excludes Fort Snelling is defective. What I mean is, that the country behind it, leading up to it, is an extensive plateau, narrowing to a point at the junction of the two rivers, and the fort is just on this jumping-off place. The jump into either of the rivers would be a hundred feet, and from a tower built up at the outmost point the view is magnificent indeed. The face of the bluffs that come in from the right looks as if chiselled into a procession of women in all the rotundity of crinoline and rich fur mantles. I do not mention this as an item of the magnificence pre-
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cisely, but that is what it looks like. Half-way down the Mississippi bank there is a shelf, and on that shelf there is a railroad, and on that railroad a train comes creeping along in and out, slavishly following the river's capricious lead. Another railroad comes in from the right, about a mile away, to meet it, and while we are looking a train moves up on this branch road, discharges its passengers, and then backs down ignominiously. The passengers stand there, little black vertical bugs, stirring uneasily against the light clay background; or perhaps it is the same beautiful white sandstone that lies in banks at our feet,--so soft that we can easily chip and pulverize it, but cannot easily carry it away in any form but sand. And now the main train puffs into view again, crawls on towards the little black bugs, and swallows them all up. Then it steams ahead, slowly feeling its way over the long bridge across the river,--yes, let me give it that credit. Reckless as our Western friends generally seem, that train did look a long while before it leaped. Now it curves and curves and curves cautiously across the river towards us, and now it roars around the point, close at the foot of the tower
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where we stand, so that, leaning over the balustrade, we can look straight down the throat of the smoke-stack, and now it rumbles out of sight, and at length out of sound, going down to St. Paul; or perhaps it has just come from St. Paul, for the river hereabouts seems not to know its own mind, and whirls about in such a puzzle where to go, that one can hardly tell which is up and which is down; but I remember seeing a railroad laid on the shelf at St. Paul, very much after the fashion of this, and I infer that they are parts of one stupendous whole.
So we are left again to the undisturbed beauty of the river, here calm and clear, picturing in its liquid depths the tranquil sky, the floating cloud, the vivid forests, the numberless shadows of the shore, yonder rapid, rushing, tumultuous, but always so living, so wondrous fair, that the eye is never satisfied with seeing. Heaven be thanked, this loveliness does not vanish away when the feet turn aside. In the galleries of memory they hang, the rare, glowing, glorious pictures, perfect as nature, changeless as art. The shut eye sees them, the rapt heart knows them,--things of beauty and joy forever.
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It is not only a river and a prairie country hereabouts, but a lake country. Lake Calhoun, Harriet, Spring Lake, Minnetonka,--we shall have to draw lots to see where to go. Let us lounge quietly on, and perhaps something will turn up. Possibly we may catch the listless, careless Shawondasee in the very act of giving a twinkle to the water. Wherever we see a gleam of blue we will go and look at it. Here comes a stalwart man driving his double team. He looks as if he knew on which side his bread is buttered, and that team besides is a guaranty of sense. So we stop to exchange friendly greetings, and fall into friendly chat. It is a fine farming country about here, he says. There ain't no better.
There are lakes scattered among the farms too, here and there?
Lakes enough anywhere, if you want to see lakes.
Which is the best worth seeing? How is Lake Calhoun, for instance?
Can't be beat! Lake Harriet and Lake Calhoun are close together. He came by 'em this morning. Good road all the way.
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We have heard of there being a beaver dam somewhere.
'S one at Lake Calhoun. Two or three more he knows of, but Lake Calhoun's got a good one.
How much of a dam is it? Enough to see, if you had never heard of it?
O Lor, yes! Shoulder high. 'S good a dam as ever you see.
Fine weather we are having this fall.
Fust rate for bein' on the road. An' we shall get more of it. Always have three or four weeks of this smoky Indian weather.
Do you ever have any trouble in finding lodging when you are travelling across the country?
Not much. No. I stopped with a man last night down in A. The man was at home, but his wife had gone away to her mother's. He put me up though. She came home in the course of the evening, drunk. He was mad enough. Did n't want her to come into the house. He knocked her out of the wagon and blackened her eye, but he let her come in. I don't like to see a woman used that way if she is drunk, an' I scooted for B. to get breakfast.
Did you get anything to eat?
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Yes, sour milk and Graham bread. 'S good as I get to home. Better.
Could n't you get tea or coffee?
None goin'! But I did n't care much what I had to drink: only wanted something wet.
"Scooted." I wonder where or what that word came from. It is easy to see what it means, but was it made up out of whole cloth or is it some other word in frontier dress?* That phrase "whole cloth" speaks plainly of the tailor's shop, but--scooted? Another strange thing I saw, an advertisement pasted up in St. Anthony:--
To what known tongue does that belong, or is it the native St. Anthonese dialect?
They tell a story,--I dare say it may be a part of the regular stock in trade, like the steamers that run in a heavy dew, or raise a cloud of dust, or are got off when they are aground by borrowing a pitcher of water from a farmhouse and pouring it on the sand,--but it was new to me,--illustrating the peculiar use of
* I am told that the word "scoot" is quite common in New England, and means about the same as "skedaddle."
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words. A pioneer of some sort is roused at midnight by an unwonted noise. At the high window of his cabin he sees the head of a man just ready to climb in. He presents his pistol to the man's face with the brief remark, "You get!" The burglar looks in his eyes a second and replies, "You bet!" then takes to his heels, and the settler goes back to bed. If Laconia has anything more concise than that, let her bring it on. Another phrase amused me, though I believe it is not peculiar to the West. A man who had been to see one of our famous generals was asked what he thought of him. "Well," said he, "I walked all around him and gawked at him, and I did n't see 's there was much in him!" Is not there a picture for your mind's eye, Horatio? Full of meaning, full of character too?
Lake Calhoun be it then and the beaver dam, but we must go back to town and take a fresh start. Meanwhile some mischance happens to our harness, and we repair to a gunsmith's to mend it. He is not at home, but his wife receives us hospitably. They are Germans. It is a gem of a place, and would work into a novel finely.
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The outside door opens into the front room, which is the gunnery,--if that is the name of it. Guns, pistols, and a great variety of tools stand around or hang against the walls, but in perfect order. A door directly in line with the front door leads into another room of the same size. Two plump, dainty white beds take up pretty much all the space on each side of the door, leaving a passage-way between to the next room, which is the sitting or work room. Both these apartments are well carpeted with ingeniously made mats, and adorned with prints,--brilliant butterflies nicely grouped and glassed and frames, and many little tasteful specimens of feminine handicraft. It is a mere box of a house, but brimful of comfort and neatness and loving care. The good mistress, and attractive little woman, takes a modest pride in exhibiting her pretty things, and we take an honest delight in looking at them. The master presently returns, as neat and smiling as one would expect from such surroundings. They must be two happy people. They look as if they like the same things, and I think of them living there like two bees in a honeysuckle,--foreign bees, alas! for our
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American bees seem never able to compass this snug comfort and content.
We are soon set to rights and come out of the honeysuckle, mutually pleased I trust, but I can only vouch for my side of the house. And then we discover Lake Calhoun to be a bright little beauty sparkling among the hills, well skirted with oak-trees, and describing apparently a perfect circle. At least the verge along which we drive sweeps in an unbroken and most beautiful shore line. The road borders on the lake among a grove, or belt of oaks; and sometimes we take the road, and sometimes the lake, with its smooth, hard, pebbly beach. But where and O where is your famous beaver dam? Why, here, this very road we are driving over is the beaver dam. I do not believe it. In the first place it is not a dam, and in the second place it is not a beaver dam. If it is a dam it must dam something. What does it dam? Dams the lake. Don't you see the water over the other side? Once it was all one sheet; till the beavers came and shut up one end with their dam. Well, if this is a beaver dam, we need not have come fifteen
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hundred miles to look at it. For aught that appears to the contrary, we may have been driving over beaver dams all our lives. The "long causey" at home might just as well hunt out its ancestry and set up for a curiosity. I counted on seeing the beavers cutting down trees, and weaving in the grass, and trowelling down the mud with their tails, and here is nothing but a beaten road, a little higher than the lake, with trees growing out of it, and everything looking staid, conservative, and human, no more as if it were built by beavers than the frog-pond on Boston Common looks as if it were made by frogs. But we are not come all this way to see a beaver dam for nothing,--wherefore
Lake Calhoun is a beautiful sheet of water, not far from St. Paul in Minnesota. It is distinguished for a large and otherwise remarkable beaver dam, shoulder-high, be the same more or less, and however otherwise bounded. This dam is as broad as a road, and on the side farthest from the lake a good deal broader. In fact it seems to have no limitation in that quarter, but subsides gradually into an amphibious
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meadow, which would become a lake on very slight provocation. The dam is composed of sticks and stones, and the trunks of trees, some of which are still sticking out with the leaves on them. These are about ten thousand years old, and yet growing. For the most part, however, the dam is well plastered with mud, after which operation the beavers hauled on large quantities of alluvim, sifted clouds of dust into the chinks, and sowed the whole with hay-seed imported from Massachusetts. Since beavers work only in the night, we were not able to watch them at their labors, which are now over, as the dam is finished according to contract, and has been delivered and accepted; but we saw several beaver hats which had been left out over night by the workmen, and were still in good repair.
There is a leaf out of a book of travels for you!
Then we go to dinner.
Dinner consisted of oysters,--certainly. Minnesota has such a fascinating way with her, that the very oysters in Baltimore Bay cry tenderly across the country, "O whistle, and I 'll come
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to you, my lad!" You can hear them on a still day by placing a shell close to your ear, or, in lack of an oyster-shell, by reading almost any specimen of marine poetry. And come they do by the can-full, with the dew of the morning still fresh on their youthful brows,--oysters, roast beef, bread and butter, custard pudding, apple-pie, and squash-pie, peaches and cream, and cake and apples. I tell you, let you might suppose from the milky way we have hitherto followed that we have nothing to eat in Minnesota but bread and milk. Our dining-room is a fine wooded park, a hill oak-crowned and oak-coated, sloping down to the incomparable lake. Straggling wood-paths tempt us on to sunny nooks, and one rude cart-track strays up to a sign-board, which tells us that it is to
Happy Ika City, if such a sylvan road as this leads to it all the way!
And still the leaves flutter above our heads, and still the lake sparkles before us,--and the soul of sunshine settles into our own souls too, till through the radiant air comes a voice,--
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"Scarcely can the ear distinguish Whether it be sung or spoken."
"Ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."
But we must leave thee, Paradise. Good by, Minnesota, fair land of lake and prairie, of pleasant wood and rolling water. I suppose you are green in summer and white in winter, like the rest of us. I suppose the sky sometimes looks gray and sullen, and the wind howls as savagely as elsewhere. Into your life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary. But to my thought you are always robed in rainbow hues, and steeped in the sunshine of an eternal Indian summer. Old fort, young city, and solitary grave, farewell. Farewell, sad shades of unremembered braves, tribes, and peoples, a voiceless crowd, innumerable, farewell. And you too, little Undine, Laughing Water, is there no note of sadness in all your singing? O, men may come and men may go, but you go on forever. Red-skin or pale-face it is all
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one to you, and if no face at all leans over you, still sunny-hearted you dance on to bee and bird and bending sky and listening wood, yes, and your own sweet will. Laugh on, dance on, Minnehaha!
"A hundred suns shall stream on thee,
A thousand moons shall quiver;
But not by thee my steps shall be
For ever and for ever."