Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/65



clear water of the streams of Minnesota; but I here saw no evidences that it could be made useful for ablutions; and here, as elsewhere, I found "Nature's noblemen" were apt to be superior to the exigencies of clean linen.

A lady among the lookers-on chanced to find a former acquaintance in one of my fellow-travelers, and sat down near me to recount her experience of frontier life. She was pretty, or would have been so but for an expression of discontent and habitual ill-humor on her countenance. Her dress, of some cheap material, was supernaturally fashionable, even in the minutest particular. I was tormented by a vague suggestion that I had seen her somewhere before; but, after watching her for a few moments, I found there was nothing in her conversation or manner to justify the feeling. I gathered from her conversation that Owatanna was a free-and-easy place, which was soon to be a city. Already there was an astonishingly polite and intelligent society—bright, smart, goahead business men, and gallant withal. Her business, which was in the millinery line, was at that season of the year dull; but when the farmers came in from the back-country with their crops, it would be more flourishing. In the meantime— with a conscious look—she always kept up with the fashions. But the conversation could not be prolonged beyond our allotted "twenty minutes for dinner." As the train started, I saw the pretty milliner apparently playing an approved ré/e of the coquette with two devoted cavaliers in soiled linen. Two or three hours afterward, as I was listlessly turning over the pages of a magazine, which the "paper-boy" had persistently left in my seat at intervals of an hour and a half during the day, my attention was arrested by a gorgeously colored fashion-plate, which purported to be the correct 'morning costume for a watering-place." The recognition this time

was instantaneous—the Owatanna milliner was a faultless, but cheap imitation of this pattern. The modern traveler unweariedly chants the praises of the march of progress: the locomotive is the first great civilizer; the woodman's axe, or the farmer's plow, are the next to assail the wilderness or prairie; but when fashion takes the field, civilization is secure and triumphant.

The direction of the railroad from Owatanna to St. Paul is northward, with a slight inclination toward the east. The scene was a charming one. The smooth, green, slightly rolling prairie, across which we were riding, had for its eastern horizon the broken bluffs, and, toward the west, gently sloping, wooded eminences. The towns, too, grew more frequent, and were better built. Indeed, the towns of Minnesota differed in this respect from new towns generally throughout the West. Perhaps this was due as much to climatic influences as to the character of the settlers. To be sure, the country bears a strong impress of New England; for New Englanders form a good proportion of the population; but even they, in a milder climate, grow lax and careless. In a country characterized by extremes of climate, the things of to-day can not be put off until to-morrow. The houses must not only be well built, but kept in constant repair, to secure the occupant against actual suffering, or even death, from the intense cold. And what he does for himself he is also obliged to do for his cattle, and even for the productions of the soil; in consequence, we see the house of the Minnesota farmer surrounded by well-built barns and many of the appointments of a New England farm, and every thing characterized by the same neatness and thrift. There was hard work evinced in it all—work with the brains, as well as with the hands; a forethought required, in the necessity of preparing in one season for