Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/62



LESS RECENT MINNESOTA.

IN a country so new as Minnesota,

the interest generally attaches either to the travels of the first discoverers and early settlers, or else to the very latest news in regard to the advancement of the country. From the very nature of the case, but few happen upon the first requisite. Yet to some a blue sky is as infinitely beautiful as if, each morning, they had newly discovered a work of Nature; and a river is as grand as if none but themselves stood by its brink. To be sure, we regret to miss the personal aggrandizement and vanity, but console ourselves that in other respects we are as fortunate as a first- comer. For myself, I confess to a fondness for such trifling appliances of modern civilization as steamboats and railroad cars. On the other hand, in the newest there is much that is frothy and evanescent. So I turn back to my travels midway of these extremes with a pleasant and mellow sort of an interest in the pictares of memory.

The spring of 1867 was an eventful one to lady travelers, for a reason that masculine readers would not be apt to remember. No; it was not that the war being ended, the "' woman question" took the field, and all eyes were directed to her importance, for the first time in history. The cause was more subtile and universal. Omnipotent Fashion had decreed that traveling dresses should be short. The news went like the wind through the length and breadth of the land, and a thousand pairs of scissors hacked into a time-honored custom. As the result of the labors of one pair, I stood, miserable and dejected, on the platform of one of the cars, as the train was about to leave one of our Atlantic cities.

"Well, what is it?" asked my traveling companion, noticing my air of perplexity.

"O, father!" I replied; "I am sure I have forgotten something of the greatest importance. I never in my life felt so incomplete."

It was not until some days had elapsed that I knew it was the train of my dress that I missed, and found out how to use my hands for other purposes than holding it up.

We reached Prairie la Crosse on the 1st of June. The town was so named by the French, from the Indians formerly resorting to it to playa game with racketsticks. It sits down on the edge of a marsh in a slovenly and half-desolate manner, as is the habit of towns in such uncongenial localities. The marsh is about two miles wide, and the "Father of Waters" perversely flows on the opposite side of it. Across the marsh is a long wharf, connecting the town with the river, and at certain, or rather uncertain, times of the day and night there is an appearance of chronic excitement among omnibus-drivers and expressmen, who mercilessly seize the wayfarers ..nd their belongings, assuming an appearance of superior knowledge and power. The traveler yields himself to them with a kind of vague belief that they have, from some inexplicable source, become possessed of his secret designs, and it will be all right in the end. It was midnight when we found ourselves among a crowd of other passengers, who had been conveyed from the cars to the end of the wharf, and who were to take the steamer up the Mississippi. The red glare from the pine - knots, contained in the wicker braziers, fell upon a motley