Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/213

Rh During this period she had many sleepless nights, as appears by her diary, with such constant headaches that she chronicles not the days when she has them but when she is without them. One day at last she writes, quite exhausted: —

“I begin to be so tired of my book! It will be through next Thursday, but I’m afraid I shall feel no better then, because dissatisfied with this last part. I ought to rewrite the Indian chapter, were there but time! It will, I fear, seem desultory and ineffectual, when my materials are so rich; owre rich, perhaps, for my mind does not act on them enough to fuse them.”

The work itself is of value as illustrating a truth often noticed, that the ideal books of travel last longer than the merely statistical; since the details, especially of our newer communities, are superseded in a year, while it may be decades before another traveler comes along who can look beneath them and really picture the new scenes for the mind’s eye. A book of facts about Illinois in 1843 would now be of little value, but the things that Margaret Fuller noted are still interesting. Like Mrs. Jameson, who wrote her “Winter Studies and Summer Rambles” about the same time, she saw the receding Indian tribes from a woman’s point of view; she sat in the wigwams, played with the children, pounded maize with the squaws. The white settlers, also, she studied, and recorded their characteristics; “the Illinois farmers, the large, first product of the soil;” and the varied nationalities represented