Such a people, and such achievements as theirs, compel homage.
This is an independent race who think for themselves, and who arecompetent to do it, because they are educated and enlightened;they read, they keep abreast of the best and newest thought,they fortify every weak place in their land with a school,a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live under law.
Solicitude for the future of a race like this is not in order.
This region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its babyhood.
By what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecastwhat marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity. It is so newthat the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not visited it.
For sixty years, the foreign tourist has steamed up and down the riverbetween St. Louis and New Orleans, and then gone home and written his book,believing he had seen all of the river that was worth seeing or thathad anything to see. In not six of all these books is there mentionof these Upper River towns--for the reason that the five or six touristswho penetrated this region did it before these towns were projected.
The latest tourist of them all (1878) made the same old regulation trip--he had not heard that there was anything north of St. Louis.
Yet there was. There was this amazing region, bristling with great towns,projected day before yesterday, so to speak, and built next morning.
A score of them number from fifteen hundred to five thousand people.
Then we have Muscatine, ten thousand; Winona, ten thousand; Moline,ten thousand; Rock Island, twelve thousand; La Crosse, twelve thousand;Burlington, twenty-five thousand; Dubuque, twenty-five thousand;Davenport, thirty thousand; St. Paul, fifty-eight thousand, Minneapolis,sixty thousand and upward.
The foreign tourist has never heard of these; there is no note of themin his books. They have sprung up in the night, while he slept.
So new is this region, that I, who am comparatively young,am yet older than it is. When I was born, St. Paul had a populationof three persons, Minneapolis had just a third as many.
The then population of Minneapolis died two years ago; and whenhe died he had seen himself undergo an increase, in forty years,of fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine persons.
He had a frog's fertility.
I must explain that the figures set down above, as the population of St. Pauland Minneapolis, are several months old. These towns are far larger now.
In fact, I have just seen a newspaper estimate which gives the formerseventy-one thousand, and the latter seventy-eight thousand.
This book will not reach the public for six or seven months yet;none of the figures will be worth much then.
We had a glimpse of Davenport, which is another beautiful city,crowning a hill--a phrase which applies to all these towns; for theyare all comely, all well built, clean, orderly, pleasant to the eye,and cheering to the spirit; and they are all situated upon hills.
Therefore we will give that phrase a rest. The Indians have a traditionthat Marquette and Joliet camped where Davenport now stands, in 1673.
The next white man who camped there, did it about a hundred and seventyyears later--in 1834. Davenport has gathered its thirty thousandpeople within the past thirty years. She sends more children to herschools now, than her whole population numbered twenty-three years ago.
She has the usual Upper River quota of factories, newspapers,and institutions of learning; she has telephones, local telegraphs,an electric alarm, and an admirable paid fire department,consisting of six hook and ladder companies, four steam fire engines,and thirty churches. Davenport is the official residence of two bishops--Episcopal and Catholic.
Opposite Davenport is the flourishing town of Rock Island,which lies at the foot of the Upper Rapids. A great railroadbridge connects the two towns--one of the thirteen which fretthe Mississippi and the pilots, between St. Louis and St. Paul.
The charming island of Rock Island, three miles long and halfa mile wide, belongs to the United States, and the Government hasturned it into a wonderful park, enhancing its natural attractionsby art, and threading its fine forests with many miles of drives.
Near the center of the island one catches glimpses, through the trees,of ten vast stone four-story buildings, each of which covers an acreof ground. These are the Government workshops; for the Rock Islandestablishment is a national armory and arsenal.
We move up the river--always through enchanting scenery,there being no other kind on the Upper Mississippi--and pass Moline, a center of vast manufacturing industries;and Clinton and Lyons, great lumber centers; and presentlyreach Dubuque, which is situated in a rich mineral region.
The lead mines are very productive, and of wide extent.
Dubuque has a great number of manufacturing establishments; among thema plow factory which has for customers all Christendom in general.
At least so I was told by an agent of the concern who was onthe boat. He said--'You show me any country under the sun where they really know how to plow,and if I don't show you our mark on the plow they use, I'll eat that plow;and I won't ask for any Woostershyre sauce to flavor it up with, either.'
All this part of the river is rich in Indian history and traditions.
Black Hawk's was once a puissant name hereabouts; as was Keokuk's,further down. A few miles below Dubuque is the Tete de Mort--Death's-head rock, or bluff--to the top of which the French drovea band of Indians, in early times, and cooped them up there,with death for a certainty, and only the manner of it matterof choice--to starve, or jump off and kill themselves.
Black Hawk adopted the ways of the white people, toward the endof his life; and when he died he was buried, near Des Moines,in Christian fashion, modified by Indian custom; that is to say,clothed in a Christian military uniform, and with a Christian canein his hand, but deposited in the grave in a sitting posture.
Formerly, a horse had always been buried with a chief.
The substitution of the cane shows that Black Hawk's haughty naturewas really humbled, and he expected to walk when he got over.
We noticed that above Dubuque the water of the Mississippi wasolive-green--rich and beautiful and semi-transparent, with the sun on it.
Of course the water was nowhere as clear or of as fine a complexion as itis in some other seasons of the year; for now it was at flood stage,and therefore dimmed and blurred by the mud manufactured from caving banks.
The majestic bluffs that overlook the river, along through this region,charm one with the grace and variety of their forms, and the softbeauty of their adornment. The steep verdant slope, whose baseis at the water's edge is topped by a lofty rampart of broken,turreted rocks, which are exquisitely rich and mellow in color--mainly dark browns and dull greens, but splashed with other tints.
And then you have the shining river, winding here and there and yonder,its sweep interrupted at intervals by clusters of wooded islandsthreaded by silver channels; and you have glimpses of distant villages,asleep upon capes; and of stealthy rafts slipping along in the shadeof the forest walls; and of white steamers vanishing around remote points.
And it is all as tranquil and reposeful as dreamland, and has nothingthis-worldly about it--nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon.
Until the unholy train comes tearing along--which it presently does,ripping the sacred solitude to rags and tatters with its devil'swarwhoop and the roar and thunder of its rushing wheels--and straightwayyou are back in this world, and with one of its frets ready to handfor your entertainment: for you remember that this is the very roadwhose stock always goes down after you buy it, and always goes upagain as soon as you sell it. It makes me shudder to this day,to remember that I once came near not getting rid of my stock at all.
It must be an awful thing to have a railroad left on your hands.
The locomotive is in sight from the deck of the steamboat almostthe whole way from St. Louis to St. Paul--eight hundred miles.
These railroads have made havoc with the steamboat commerce.
The clerk of our boat was a steamboat clerk before these roadswere built. In that day the influx of population was so great,and the freight business so heavy, that the boats were not ableto keep up with the demands made upon their carrying capacity;consequently the captains were very independent and airy--pretty 'biggity,' as Uncle Remus would say. The clerk nut-shelled thecontrast between the former time and the present, thus--'Boat used to land--captain on hurricane roof--mighty stiff and straight--iron ramrod for a spine--kid gloves, plug tile, hair parted behind--man on shore takes off hat and says--' "Got twenty-eight tons of wheat, cap'n--be great favor if youcan take them."'Captain says--' " 'll take two of them"--and don't even condescend to look at him.
'But nowadays the captain takes off his old slouch, and smilesall the way around to the back of his ears, and gets off a bowwhich he hasn't got any ramrod to interfere with, and says--' "Glad to see you, Smith, glad to see you--you're looking well--haven't seen you looking so well for years--what you got for us?"' "Nuth'n", says Smith; and keeps his hat on, and just turnshis back and goes to talking with somebody else.
'Oh, yes, eight years ago, the captain was on top; but it's Smith's turn now.
Eight years ago a boat used to go up the river with every stateroom full,and people piled five and six deep on the cabin floor; and a soliddeck-load of immigrants and harvesters down below, into the bargain.
To get a first-class stateroom, you'd got to prove sixteen quarteringsof nobility and four hundred years of descent, or be personallyacquainted with the nigger that blacked the captain's boots.
But it's all changed now; plenty staterooms above, no harvesters below--there's a patent self-binder now, and they don't have harvestersany more; they've gone where the woodbine twineth--and they didn't goby steamboat, either; went by the train.'
Up in this region we met massed acres of lumber rafts coming down--but not floating leisurely along, in the old-fashioned way,manned with joyous and reckless crews of fiddling,song-singing, whiskey-drinking, breakdown-dancing rapscallions;no, the whole thing was shoved swiftly along by a powerfulstern-wheeler, modern fashion, and the small crews were quiet,orderly men, of a sedate business aspect, with not a suggestionof romance about them anywhere.
Along here, somewhere, on a black night, we ran some exceedinglynarrow and intricate island-chutes by aid of the electric light.
Behind was solid blackness--a crackless bank of it; ahead, a narrowelbow of water, curving between dense walls of foliage that almosttouched our bows on both sides; and here every individual leaf,and every individual ripple stood out in its natural color,and flooded with a glare as of noonday intensified.
The effect was strange, and fine, and very striking.
We passed Prairie du Chien, another of Father Marquette's camping-places;and after some hours of progress through varied and beautiful scenery,reached La Crosse. Here is a town of twelve or thirteen thousand population,with electric lighted streets, and with blocks of buildings which are statelyenough, and also architecturally fine enough, to command respect in any city.
It is a choice town, and we made satisfactory use of the hour allowed us,in roaming it over, though the weather was rainier than necessary.
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