Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/63



assemblage that night. The respectable travelers and tourists were making their first rush northward. There were, besides these, a full complement of immigrants, upon whose stolid countenances anticipation found no place, and to whom the means of travel were only forms assumed by an inscrutable Providence, to which they blindly acceded; and Government, too, happened at this time to be putting in force a recent benevolent impulse in regard to the aborigines, and was conveying a large party of them to a reservation, west of the Mississippi. They were dirty beyond belief, and seemed to add to the damp river air another portion of miasma. The missionary enterprise which shall establish a soap manufactory in their midst will perhaps succeed in converting them into moral and responsible beings. But such as we were, the steamer voraciously received its prey, gave a series of unearthly shrieks, and swung round with the current of the river. For the few remaining hours before daybreak, our steamer seemed to be constantly meeting and signaling her sister steamers coming down the river. These high-pressure steam-whistles found a nerve in my body which had hitherto remained dormant, and fairly indicated to what an unimagined and supreme degree a human being may be capable of being tortured. I was also haunted by the romantic desire of seeing the great river for the first time by sunrise. But as the sun took occasion to rise during the only ten minutes that I lost consciousness, it was shining with glittering and cheerful effulgence by the time that I reached the deck; and with, I could not help but fancy, an extra sparkle of amazement and good humor, to find that the clouds, whose gray mistiness it had been unable to penetrate for two days previous, had metamorphosed a winter into a summer landscape.

Summer comes like a miracle to this

peculiar region. The deciduous trees, which remain entirely bare during April, and the entire or greater part of May, suddenly clothe themselves with a luxuriance of foliage. The bluffs which I now saw on either side of the river were high, and heavily-wooded. The foliage was of a tender, delicate green color, and imparted to the trees a sort of misty indistinctness, at strange variance with the clear air and sparkling sunshine. So uninterrupted were these bluffs, that the river seemed to be flowing between walls of hazy green, through which familiar forest forms could be faintly traced. We left the boat at Winona, which we reached about eight o'clock in the morning. The town, in spite of its newness, was rather pretty, and even interesting. It is situated high enough above the current of the Mississippi to keep itself clean from its muddy washings. The bluffs in the background have a protecting aspect, and undoubtedly shelter this embryo city from the violence of the north-west winds., Winona is not without the marked characteristic of new and rapidly growing towns—an air of conscious importance. The hotel bade defiance to criticism, because ten years before the traveler would only have found a wilderness, or an Indian wigwam, in its place. And the Doric pillars which support the roof of its piazza, and testify that a classic architecture has already reached this frontier, stand out like bristling exclamation points, to confront the traveler with such an assurance. The church-spires, a court-house, and school-houses, all add their testimony that the wilderness is beginning to "bloom and blossom," according to the usages of modern civilization. Even the people seem never to be rid of the vague consciousness that they are natural phenomena, from the mere fact of living in a town of such precocious growth. Half a dozen years before, most of the inhabitants were scattered