Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/476

 450 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1861,

below with a lamp, expecting to find a hole, but he did not. Snags and sawyers were so common that I forgot to mention them. The sound of the boat rumbling over one was the ordinary music. However, as long as the boiler did not burst, we knew that no serious accident was likely to happen. Yet this was a singularly navigable river, more so than the Mississippi above the Falls, and it is owing to its very crook edness. Ditch it straight, and it would not only be very swift, but soon run out. It was from ten to fifteen rods wide near the mouth, and from eight to ten or twelve at Redwood. Though the current was swift, I did not see a &quot; rip &quot; on it, and only three or four rocks. For three months in the year I am told that it can be nav igated by small steamers about twice as far as we went, or to its source in Big Stone Lake ; and a former Indian agent told me that at high water it was thought that such a steamer might pass into the Red River.

In short, this river proved so very long and navigable, that I was reminded of the last letter or two in the voyage of the Baron la Hontan (written near the end of the seventeenth cen tury, I think), in which he states, that, after reaching the Mississippi (by the Illinois or Wis consin), the limit of previous exploration west ward, he voyaged up it with his Indians, and at