Elmwood Avenue, Cambridge, 31s£ August 1870.
I managed with some difficulty and scramble to get off a letter to you by yesterday’s post, which ought to go by steamer from New York to-day, bringing my narrative up to our arrival here. We found Lowell on his verandah with his wife and friend, and sat there talking till ten. I am not the least disappointed with him, Henry Cowper notwithstanding. I have never met a more agreeable talker, and his kindness to me is quite unbounded. Then he has not a grain of vanity in his composition, but is as simple and truthful as the best kind of boy. The house is a wooden one, as four-fifths of the houses in New England are. It is roomy, airy, and furnished with quaint old heavy pieces, bureaus like ours, and solid heavy little mahogany tables, all dating from the last century. The plate in the same way is all of the Queen Anne shape, like your little tea-service and my grandmother’s milk jugs and tea-pots which George has. The plainness and simplicity of the living, too, is most attractive. We breakfast at 8.30, beginning with porridge, and following up with eggs, some hot dish, corn cakes, toast and fruit. Then there is no regular meal till six—a terribly late and fashionable dinner hour here, as the prevalent hour is two or three—and afterwards we have a cup of coffee and crackers (good plain biscuits) and a glass of toddy at ten. Miss Mabel and others have given us a desperate idea of the difficulties as to service, but they certainly do not exist in this establishment just now. The principal servant that we see is an Irish girl, Rose by name, who reminds me of one of Mrs. Cameron’s servants except that she is far more diligent. The ingenious way in which she hid away all my wardrobe in the ample cupboards and recesses of the bureau in my room was a perfect caution, and she whisks away my things and gets them beautifully washed, wholly refusing to allow me to pay for them. The parlour-maid is a little, slight, ladylike girl, who certainly is not a first-rate waiter, but then there is no need of one. The dinner is confined to one thing at a time—soup, sometimes fish, a joint, or chickens, and a sweet. The Professor opens his own wine at the table and passes it round, and very good it is, but one scarcely needs it in this climate. A cook whose acquaintance I have also made, and an Irishman who has been thirty years on the place in a roomy cottage, and attends to the cows, garden, and farm of thirty acres, complete the establishment. Mrs. Lowell, who is a very nice, quiet, and clever woman, is very fond of flowers, and manages to keep a few beds going about the house, and there are a number of very fine trees, so that though there is no pretence to the neatness and finish of English grounds and garden, the place has a thoroughly homely, cultivated atmosphere and look which is very attractive, and the whole town of Cambridge seems to be made up of just such houses. We have lost no time in lionising men and places. On Thursday we took the car into Boston and ascended the monument on Bunker’s Hill, 290 steps up a dark spiral staircase. Lowell had never been up it before, nor indeed has any native as far as I can find out. The view at the top repays you thoroughly for the grind with the thermometer at eighty in the shade. Boston Harbour, where the tea was thrown out of the English ships in 1775, and> the whole town and suburbs lie below you like a map, and are very striking. After descending we hunted up a number of people, including young Holmes, our Colonel, who was as charming as ever, absorbed in his law at which he is doing famously, and resolved in his first holiday to revisit England. He came out to dine, and fraternised immensely with R——, and with him a young Howells, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, whom Conway had brought to our house years ago, and I had entirely forgotten. However he is a very nice fellow, and I don’t think I betrayed my obliviousness. Next day, Friday, we had a long country drive in the morning through broad avenues lined with three fascinating wooden houses, each standing with plenty of elbow-room in its own grounds, up to a wooded hill from which we got a splendid view of the city. Then I went into Boston and called on the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, who is one of the best talkers I ever met, and quite worthy to be the Colonel’s father. He is one of Motley’s oldest friends, and deeply grieved, as all good men here, at his recall. His chief talk was of his memories of his English visits, and the folk he met, and so I find it with all the best men and women here. Notwithstanding the bitterness which our press created during the war, I am convinced that with a very little tact and judicious handling on our side the international relations may be easily made all we can wish as far as New England is concerned. Afterwards I sauntered about the town, looking at some good statues in their park (Boston Common), and letting the place sink into me. The Common is about the size, I should say, of Green Park, but of a regular shape. It lies on the side of a hill at the top of which are the State House and other public buildings and private houses. It is well wooded with fine American and English elms (pre-revolutionary, they say, but I don’t believe it. They are not used to our elms, and I doubt whether any of these are 100 years old) on the upper part and along the sides; the middle is a great playground for the boys, who are diligent there all day at base-ball, our rounders, which I should think must spoil the enjoyment of the place for ladies and children. However they can always take to the pretty gardens at the lower end, in which is a very fine equestrian statue of Washington, and one of Everett by Story, by no means fine in my opinion. How should it be, when he insisted on being taken with his arm right up in the air, his favourite attitude in speaking, and stands up in that attitude in ordinary buttoned frock coat and trousers? Everett has not been a trustworthy public man to my mind, and is simply nothing unless it is an orator, and I can’t say I think it wise to put him up there on the palpable stump. But we have made so many mistakes in our public statues that I suppose it must run in the blood. The best houses in the town, really charming residences, line the two sides and top of the Common, and fine stores the bottom. I have never seen a place I would so soon live in out of England as in one of these houses looking on to Boston Common. The old business town is being rebuilt just as London—red brick two or three story houses giving way everywhere to five or six stories of granite or stone. The town has as old and settled a look and feeling about it as any I know; but they have few old buildings, and I am afraid are going to pull down the most characteristic, the old State House, because it has ceased to be used for public purposes, and its removal will make a fine broad place and relieve the traffic of several narrow streets in the heart of the town. It will be a sad pity, and so unnecessary here, for they might carry it off bodily to any other site. You know how we have often heard, and wondered, scarce believing, of the raising bodily of the great hotels, etc., at Chicago. Well, suddenly, in Boston I came across a great market, three stories high (the upper part being occupied as houses) and 150 or 200 feet long, as big, say, as three houses in Grosvenor Square, which they were moving bodily back on rollers so as to widen the street. There were the wooden ways and the rollers, and the great block with all its marketing and living inhabitants lying on them, and already some twelve feet on its journey. It did not look any the worse for its journey unless it were in the foundations, where there were a few places which had been filled up, I saw, with new brickwork. The long pit twelve feet deep which has been left between the market and the street will now be turned into cellars, over which the new pavement will pass. On the Saturday we dined with the Saturday Club at 2.30 P.M., where were all the New England notables now in town. I sat on the right of Sumner, the State Senator, who was in the chair, with Boutwell, the Secretary of the Treasury, on my right, and Emerson on the other side of Sumner. So you may fancy how I enjoyed the sitting. Emerson is perfectly delightful: simple, wise, and full of humour and sunshine. The number of good Yankee stories I shall bring back unless they burst me will be a caution. Forbes, a great Boston merchant who owns an island seventy-two miles long off the coast close to Nantucket and Cape Cod, which you will find in the map, came up and claimed to have seen me for five minutes when I had the small-pox in 1863.
He knows J——— well, and insisted on carrying us off to his island that night, that we might attend a huge campmeeting on a neighbouring island on Sunday. So he drove up here with us and we packed—the dear Professor agreeing that we ought to do it—went down sixty miles by rail, slept on his yacht, and found ourselves in the morning at his wharf on the island. Your second letter came to hand from Cromer when we returned here, and has as usual lighted up my life.
Cambridge, 2nd September 1870.
We are off this afternoon for Newport on our way to New York, and so south and west. The express man will be here directly for my luggage, which will be a little curtailed, as these dear kind people insist on our returning, and leaving all we don’t want in our rooms. So I shall drop my beaver, leaving it with the most serious admonitions in the charge of Rose, the Irish girl, who is a character. I will now take up the thread of my story, merely remarking that what you seem to think a dull catalogue of small doings at a small watering-place is quite unspeakably delightful to me away here. On the wharf at Nashont Island we found the two young F———s, the elder a colonel in the war, and five months a prisoner in the South, the younger, Malcolm, just left college. I never saw two finer young men, both of them models of strength. They had come down to meet us and bathe, so we stopped and had a splendid header off the wharf and a swim in the bay, after careful inquiries by R——— as to sharks, to which young F——— replied with a twinkle in his eye, that they didn’t lose many friends that way. We walked up to the house after our dip, a large wooden building, with deep verandahs and sun-blinds, furnished quite plainly, even roughly, but capable of holding nearly any number of people. We were about eighteen at breakfast: Mrs. F——— a handsome, clever, elderly lady, born a Quaker, and with their charm of manner, who made tea for the party, and on whose right I sat. Opposite her was her husband with Mrs. L———, the young widow of Lowell’s nephew Charles, the famous soldier, on his left, and therefore opposite me. On my right, a young woman, a cousin of the F———s, a Mrs. P———, whose husband sat down towards the end of the table, the manager of a Western railway, who has given us free passes over his line. Colonel F———, the eldest son, was Lowell’s major, and served with distinction in the war, in which he was taken prisoner, and spent five months in Southern prisons; his wife, a buxom young woman with very good eyes, is Emerson’s daughter, and her brother, a bright boy of twenty-two or twenty-three, was near me. There were two daughters of the family, and two other girls and several boys, all pleasant and easy in hand; but the gem of the party was the young widow. She is not actually pretty, but with a face full of the nobleness of sorrow, which has done its work. I have seldom been more touched than in watching her gentle, cheerful ways, and her sympathy with all the bright life around her. Since the war, in which her husband and only brother R. S———(who commanded the first coloured regiment from Massachusetts, and was buried under his negroes at Fort Wagner) were killed, she has devoted herself to the Freedmen, and is Honorary Secretary to the Society for educating them. After breakfast we started in the yacht for the neighbouring island, on which the great Methodist camp-meeting was going on. This Sunday was the great day. They have occupied this island for some years, and have built there a whole town of pretty little wooden houses like big Chinese toys, dotted about amongst the trees. Most of them consist of only one long room, divided by curtains in the middle. The front half opens to the street, but raised one step above it is the sitting-room, and the inmates sleep in the back, behind the curtains. A few houses have a story above; but F——— bought a lot of photographs for us, which will show you the style of house better than a page of description. There were literally thousands of people on the island, upwards of two thousand collected in a huge circular tent in the middle of the houses, where a preacher was shouting to them. We sat on the skirts of the congregation and listened for some time, but as he was only talking wildly about Nebuddah, Positivism, Theodore Parker, and other heresies and heretics, I was not edified, and got no worship till he had done, when we all stood up and sang the doxology, which was very impressive. I was much disappointed at the gathering in a religious point of view. It was a rare chance for a man with a living word in him, those thousands of decent, sober, attentive New England men and women. They told me that in the evening it would be much more interesting, when there would be great singing of hymns, and many persons would tell how they came to experience religion as they call it; but we could not stay for this. The meeting lasts for weeks, and is in fact an excuse for the gathering at a pretty sea-place in the early autumn of a number of good folk who would think the ordinary watering-places ungodly, but have a longing for a break in their ordinary colourless lives. We sailed back in time for early dinner, meeting on the way huge steamers packed with passengers for the campmeeting, till they were top heavy. Next day we spent in, fishing off the rocks for blue-fish, and in a beautiful little lake of three-quarters of a mile long (one of several in the island) for bass. I caught a blue fish of nine lbs., the biggest and strongest I have ever caught, also the only bass which was taken; so I naturally crowed loudly. The island hours are: breakfast, eight o’clock or half past eight; dinner, two or three; tea, with cold meat, half-past six or seven. After tea on both evenings we got into full swing on the war. I found Mr. F——— and his wife deeply grieved and prejudiced as to our conduct, our feeling to them as a nation, etc., and set myself to work hard to remove all this as far as I could. As he is a very energetic and influential man it is worth taking any amount of trouble about, and I think I succeeded. In the evenings the young folk sang a number of the war songs, several composed by or for the negro soldiers, going to famous airs, and full of humour and pathos. The March through Georgia is very spirited, and a version of the “John Brown” March, which seems to have superseded “We’ll hang Jef Davies,” etc., exceedingly touching—at least I know it was so to me, as all the young folk sang—
He hath sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat,
He is sifting out the souls of men before His judgment seat:
Be swift, my soul, to welcome Him! be jubilant, my feet.
In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make them free.
Our God is marching on.
To think of what that sweet young woman had gone through (the news of her husband’s death at the head of his brigade, was read by her in a newspaper), and to see her sitting there calmly and trying to join in the chorus, was quite too much for me. However, nobody noticed my emotion. Our last morning, Tuesday, was spent in a famous wild ride over the island. After breakfast we found seven very excellent riding horses (three with sidesaddles) at the door. At home there would have been three grooms, here each horse has a leathern strap fixed to the bit, which you just buckle round his neck till you want to stop, and then fasten it to the nearest tree or lamp-post. The whole turn-out is of course rough, but I don’t wish to see nicer ladies’ hacks than the three which the two Miss F———s and Mrs. P——— rode. We sailed back in the yacht to another little port, a few miles north of New Bedford, F——— having provided us as a parting present with free passes over almost all the Western railways, which will save me at least £20 I should think. He is Chairman of several, and so can do it without any trouble. We found the dear Lowells expecting us, and my second letter also waiting, so you may think that I had a joyful evening. Next day, Wednesday, we drove to Concord to dine with Judge Hoar, the late Attorney-General of the United States, a very able, fine fellow. We passed over classic ground, the very road along which the English troops marched in April 1776 to destroy the stores, when the first collision of the War of Independence took place at Concord Bridge and in the village of Lexington. You may perhaps remember in the second series of the Biglow Papers “Sumthin’ in the Pastoral Line,” in which old Concord Bridge and the monument which has been put up to commemorate the fight, talk together over the Trent affair. The Judge’s two sons, very nice young fellows, pulled us up Concord River, which runs at the bottom of their garden, to the spot, and on the way (which is very pretty) we saw lots of tortoises sitting and basking on the stones, and popping in when we approached, and heard a lot of capital Yankee stories from the Judge. Dinner at three; Emerson came, and there were two Miss H———s, and a Miss S———, a handsome girl, sister of the best oar in the Harvard boat of last year. I enjoyed the dinner and smoke afterwards immensely, and am at last quite sure that I am doing some good with some of these men, all of whom are influential, and most of them sadly prejudiced against us still as a nation. For myself it is quite impossible to express their kindness. They seem as if they can never do enough for me. When we got back to Cambridge, we found Miss M——— and Dr. Lowell, brother to James, an English clergyman, and quite charming too in his way.
New York.
I think I have told you already the sort of royal progress I am making. Some principal citizen always comes to the station to meet us in his carriage, books our luggage by the express (an admirable institution which saves you all the trouble with luggage), drives us up to his house, lodges us in the best rooms, has all the best folks in the neighbourhood to meet us at breakfast, dinner, tea, takes us to the sights of the neighbourhood, keeps all his servants out of sight when we are going, so that we can’t give any one a penny or even pay our washing bills, and finally sends us and our luggage down to the next boat or steamer, when we are booked already probably by a new friend. Certainly I never saw, heard of, or could imagine anything like the hospitality. It is no doubt in some degree, and in individual cases, owing to the part I took during the war in England, but Democrats as well as Republicans have been amongst our warmest hosts; in fact, I am fairly puzzled, and allow the tide at last to carry me along, floating down it and enjoying everything as well as I can. I think in my last I got to our start from Boston. No! was it? At any rate, I wrote about our day at Concord, I know, as to which I shall have to tell you more when we meet. After we got home Miss Mabel rushed upstairs, got into her photographing dress, the quaintest turn-out you can conceive, and commenced a series of groups, etc., which you shall have specimens of when I get back. She is endless fun; has the most arch way of talking to her father as “sir” every now and then; is charming with her stepmother; and altogether as bright a bit of life about a house as you would meet on a summer’s day. I parted from Lowell and his home feeling that the meeting had been more than successful. For these eighteen or nineteen years I have revelled in his books—indeed, have got so much from them and learned to love the parent of them so well, as I imagined him, that I almost feared the meeting, lest pleasant illusions should be broken. I found him much better than his books. We had a pleasant three hours’ rail to Newport, finding Mr. Field, a Philadelphian banker, at the station with his carriage. We were friends at once, for he is a famous, frank, goodlooking, John Bullish man of the world, who has travelled all over Europe and retained his new world simplicity and heartiness. He drove us all round the fashionable watering-place, the description of which I must postpone or I never shall get through (as we say here). His cottage, as he calls it, in accordance with the fashion here, is a charming villa, on the most southern point of Newport, close to the rocks on which the grand Atlantic roll was beating magnificently as we drove up.
Saturday morning a lot of men came to breakfast, including Colonel H———, the officer who had been the first to volunteer to take command of negroes in Virginia, before the New England States even began mustering them. I was delighted to make his acquaintance, as I knew his name in my anti-slavery standard as a real, advanced Radical, and I was anxious to realise that type of Yankee of which I had only seen Lloyd Garrison in England. He was very fascinating to my mind, and the most refined man in manners and look I have yet met, but I should say decidedly a cracked fellow in the good sense. We adjourned to the spouting rock, just at the point where the surf was beating gloriously, and as I continued talking with H———, of course I got a ducking by getting too near this rock, which is hollow underneath, so that it sends a spout of water up like a huge whale some second or two after the breaker hits it. The sight was superb, and well worth the payment of an unstarched waistcoat and shirt. We got home, and I changed at 11.30 or thereabouts, and when I came in to dress for dinner there was my waistcoat, washed and starched, on the bed. Mrs. Field had heard me say in joke that I should be out of white waistcoats. We went to the Episcopal Church on Sunday morning and had a good sermon of a quarter of an hour, sitting in the pew of an acquaintance of the previous day, a Mrs. H——— of New York, who drove us about in her handsome carriage, and insisted on giving me two books—one being extracts from Lincoln’s Speeches and Letters, which I am very glad to have. In the evening we were sent down to the pier, where we were picked up by the most magnificent steamer ever seen in the world, I should think, and by six next morning were running along the north river, one of the many entrances by sea to New York harbour. The approaches to the city are superb, but the first view of it disappointed me, the buildings along the water-side being for the most part poor and almost mean. We found Hewitt’s carriage waiting, he being out of town for his Sunday, and drove up through Broadway and Fourth Avenue to his house, which is a splendid roomy one, belonging to his father-inlaw, Mr. Cooper. The dear old gentleman, a hearty veteran of seventy-nine, is the founder of the Cooper’s Institute, a working-man’s college on a large scale. He has spent nearly a million dollars upon it, and it is certainly the best institution of the kind I have ever seen. He is one of the most guileless and sweetest of old men, and I shall have much to tell you of him. Mr. Hewitt, my friend, who is in partnership with him, and his wife and family live with the old gentleman. Here I found free admission to the four best clubs in New York—the Union League, the Century, and even the Manhattan, a democrat club of which Hewitt is a distinguished member. The nice brisk woman in the house gave us an excellent breakfast, and we started for the town about eleven. One of the first places I went to was Roebuck’s store, where I found him very flourishing. But I can’t go on to catalogue our doings or shan’t get this off. As very few folk are in New York, we are off to-day to West Point up the Hudson, where we stay for a military ball to-morrow night; on Friday we get to Niagara, and then away west, certainly as far as Omaha, to see prairies, etc., and possibly to San Francisco. We must be back here or in New England on the 1st of October, on the 6th is the Harvard Memorial ceremony, laying the first stone of their memorial building, on the 11th I am in for an address, and after that shall set my face homewards. I have looked at myself in the glass at your request and believe I look fabulous.
Garrison’s Landing, opposite West Point, Friday, 9th September 1870.
I already look wistfully along the pages of my pocket-book which intervene between this and the beginning of November, and feel very like bolting home instead of going west. The only moments I have for writing are early (it is now 6.30) or after I come up to bed, as the dear, good folk provide occupation for all the rest of the time. Well, we got to New York on Monday mornings by the East River, and left it on Wednesday afternoon by the Hudson, having, I think, seen it superficially, so that I should retain a clear idea of it if I never saw it again. We dined on Monday at the Union League Club, Tuesday at the Manhattan, going in afterwards to the Century—all three clubs as complete, I think, as ours and open to strangers in every corner. We left New York on Wednesday afternoon with Mr. O———, Chairman of the Illinois Central Railway, who has this delicious place on the slope of the mountain opposite West Point. As usual there were carriages at the pier, and all trouble, expense, etc., has been taken off our hands. Mrs. O——— is the nicest Yankee lady we have seen (except Mabel), like Mrs. Goschen in face and charmingly appreciative. Her husband, staunch American, about fifty. The more fanatic Americans they are the more they seem to like to do for me, and as I spend the greater part of my time in showing them how mistaken they must be in their views as to England, else how is it that we didn’t interfere and get to war, I feel I am doing good work. They take to me, I can see, apart from my proclivities.
I am obliged to give up poor old Pam, the mercantile community of England, and the majority of the aristocracy; but when I have made a Jonah of these, I always succeed in bringing these good, simple, candid, impulsive fellows to admit that we did them no bad turn in their troubles. We leave to-day for Niagara, and during the next fortnight I hardly know how or when I can write.
Clifton Hotel, opposite Niagara Falls, 11th September 1870.
I am glad to find that I shall be able to get off this one more letter to you by regular post before we plunge away west for nearly a fortnight. I do so long for you every now and then when there is something to see which you would specially appreciate, not only then as you well know, but then specially, in the glorious reaches of the Hudson near West Point, for instance, where you have all the beauty of the Scotch Highlands, with a hundred well-kept rich men’s houses, and a monster hotel or two crowning some high point,—an excellent substitute, in my view, for the ruined keeps of robber barons on the Rhine,—and endless steamers and sloops, with their white sails and great tows, as they call them, of a dozen large flats lashed together and bringing down lumber and corn from the west, passing up and down; but, above all, last night, when we went under the light of a glorious full moon and saw these mighty falls from above, and then went down some 200 steps, and along under the overhanging cliffs, till we actually got under the end of the horse-shoe fall on the Canadian side, and looked up and saw the moon through the falling water. Just as we descended, an American gentleman and his daughter and an English girl with them came up, to whom we gave our seats, and when we came back they were still there, so we told them what we had seen and offered to escort them down. They were delighted, and “papa” did not object, so down we all went, and so we had a second treat behind the cataract, and being with these ladies made me horribly wishful to get you there. The girl (Philadelphian) was very pretty and simple, so I handed her over to R———, and gave my arm to the English one. To-day we went across the ferry amid a great turbulence of waters, and looked up at the descending rivers, to the English Church on the opposite side. An American bishop preached, and afterwards we walked on Goat Island, above and between the two falls, and saw such effects of rainbows, and lilac and green and purple and pure white surges, as it is utterly impossible to describe, but I shall try to do it by the help of photographs when I get back. Then we had a bath in the rush just above the Falls; you have a little room through which a slice some four feet wide of the water is allowed to rush; you get in at the side, in the back water, and then take hold of a short rope fixed close above the rush, and let the waters seize and tear at you, which it does with a vengeance, tugging as if it would carry off your legs and pull you in two in the middle. You can get out of it in a moment by just slewing yourself round, and the sensation is marvellously delicious. I forget whether you had one of the baths at Geneva, where the blue Rhone rushes through at about a third of the pace. That is the only bath I ever remember the least to be compared to this above Niagara. But let me see, I hadn’t got farther with you than our chateau on the Hudson. Well, we left it on Friday after breakfast at about nine o’clock, and travelled away steadily with only twenty minutes’ stop at Albany, where we dined, and a quarter of an hour at Rochester. The greater part of the road was decidedly pretty, especially the earlier part which ran along the banks of the Hudson. We stopped at Rome, Syracuse, and Utica amongst other places, all busy, stirring places apparently, with their streets all converging on and open to the line of rail. Every one has to look out for themselves, and you get in and out of the trains at your own peril. I have heard of very few accidents, and I don’t believe there are as many as with us; but I should think a good many people must often be left behind, as the train starts without any signal, leaving you to climb in as you can, an easy enough feat for an active man, but scarcely for any one else. This journey was our first really long one; we did not get to Suspension Bridge, where we slept, till past midnight, but I didn’t find it very tiring. There was a drawing-room car on, but I would not go in it. The other cars are quite comfortable enough, and I like seeing and being with the people, though they continue to be the most silent and reserved of any race I have ever been amongst. Next day (Saturday) just glanced at the Falls; we ran round the west of Lake Ontario, by Hamilton, to Toronto, the capital of the province, and were exceedingly struck and pleased with the signs of vigour and prosperity both in the country and cities. The farming is certainly cleaner and better than on the American side of the lake, and the towns don’t lose by comparison with those of the same size over the border. At Toronto I found Dymond, one of my best Lambeth supporters, in the Globe Office, and we called on one of our Peruvian acquaintances, who regaled us with champagne in his huge store; we went over the law courts and other public buildings, dined, and then on to the boat to cross back to Niagara. It is about two hours’ sail and very pleasant. There were quite a number of young and pretty girls on board going across for the trip, as you might drive out in a carriage to any suburb. It seems the regular afternoon amusement and lounge, and the heads of families take season tickets which pass all their belongings. There were three Canadian M.P.‘s also on board, with whom I got a good deal of useful and pleasant chat; one of them (M.P. for Niagara) induced me to “drink” twice in ginger-ale and brandy, and again in champagne, which was the first instance of that pressingly convivial habit supposed to be universal on this side that I have seen. I am uncommonly glad it doesn’t really prevail, as nothing I detest more than this irregular kind of drinking. The pick-me-up is decidedly one of the most loathsome inventions of a decrepit civilisation. We got to our hotel here, right opposite the Falls, by about six, saw them first before tea and afterwards by moonlight, as I have already narrated. In an hour’s time we start for Chicago. Our late host, Mr. O———, the President of the Illinois Central Kail, one of the greatest of the Western’s system of railways, has followed us here, and is going round a tour of inspection of his line, and to open 150 miles of new way for traffic. So we shall go round in an express train with him, seeing everything in the most luxurious and easiest manner—a wonderful piece of luck. It was his nice wife who persuaded him to come off and do it now at once while he could have us with him. I am sitting at my open window, outside of which is a broad verandah with a magnificent view of the Falls. I am getting what I take to be my last look at them, and for the last time the sound of many waters, the finest to be heard in the world, I suppose, is in my ears. The mid-Atlantic when the waves were highest struck me more, but nothing else I have ever seen in Switzerland or elsewhere comes near this. It is the first great hotel we have been in, and not a bad specimen I imagine. We get heaps of meals, and though the cooking is not all one could wish, there is nothing to hinder your living very well. We are waited on by some fifteen or twenty real darkies—good, grinning, curly-pated Sambos and Pompeys—so, of course, I am happy so far as service goes. Seriously, though, they are much more obliging and quite as intelligent as their white compeers here and in the States.
Storm Lake, 13th. September 1870.
One line from this odd little station, right in the middle of the Iowa prairies, which slope away right out of sight in every direction. It is the highest point between Fort Dodge and Sioux City. Fifteen months ago there were not three settlers’ cabins on the whole 140 miles; now they are dotted along every mile or so, sometimes turf huts, sometimes wooden, with generally a group of barefooted, healthy children tumbling about the doors. We are sitting in the little wooden post-office here, on the walls of which hang maps of the splendid town which is to be run up in the next three or four years, and notices of a meeting of the citizens of Storm Lake to hear the addresses of Captain Jackson Orr, the Republican candidate for Congress of the district, and of Governor G———, who comes to support him. The whole place at present consists of some ten or twelve wooden huts, with two more ambitious buildings running up, one an hotel and the other a big store. The settlers are a fine rough set of fellows, but full of intelligence, and determined to make their place the most important city in the State. It is a most exquisite climate, with a lake four miles by two, in which there are plenty of pickerel, and as we came along in our express train we have put up lots of coveys of prairie hens, like big tame grouse, most delicious eating too. Express train, you will look at with wondering eyes. Well, or rather wâàl, as they pronounce it here, that is the explanation of the whole city, and accounts for all that is going to happen on this glorious prairie. A line of rail has been built right across it by some enterprising folk in New York, who want now to lease it to the Illinois Central Railway, with which it makes connections at Fort Dodge. We left Chicago yesterday morning, got to Dubuque on the Mississippi by night, travelled all through the night to Fort Dodge, and are on here now fifty-three miles farther inspecting. It is regal travelling. We have two carriages,—one a charming sleeping-car, in which I have a beautiful little state-room, another carriage for dining, etc., equally commodious, all our stores on board, so that we live splendidly, two negro boys to wait on us. O———, the present president, and the vice-president of the line, are our only fellow-passengers, each of whom is as well lodged as I am. We go along as we please, sometimes at forty, sometimes at ten miles an hour, talking to the people at each little log-house station, and enjoying the confines of civilisation in the most perfect luxury. While they are talking about the price of land round here I have just this ten minutes, and find I can fire off this note with some chance that it may get off by the New York boat of Saturday, so that I shan’t lose a post or you a letter.
Fort Dodge, 13th September 1870.
Here we are! September 15, 2 p.m. You will see, if you have got my last from Sioux City, that the above heading is somewhat wild. The fact is, that just as I had written the three first words (in fact, while I was writing them, which accounts for their jerky look), our little train moved on from Fort Dodge and I couldn’t write, even on our superb springs. Now we are at Council Bluffs, opposite Omaha. Why, hang it! here we go again moving on, and I must stop again.
3 p.m.—We only ran three miles and then stopped to lunch and let a Union-Pacific train pass. Now after a famous lunch in our second or commissariat car, I am getting a smoke and a few more lines to you before we are off eastward again. Thank Heaven! after all the wonderful new sights and sensations of the last three and a half days since we left Niagara, I confess to the utmost delight at feeling that we have made our farthest point, and that I am already some three miles plus the breadth of the Missouri River and Omaha City on my way back to you. It is still more than a month before we embark for home (if I can hold out as long); still, we are on our way! However, you must not think that I am not enjoying myself wonderfully. I am, and am also, I hope, good company, for when one is treated like the Grand Turk or the Emperor of Russia, the least one can do is to be pleasant. But if I go on with my sensations, I shall never pick up my narrative; as it is, I shall be obliged to leave thousands of things till we meet, when I do hope I shan’t have forgotten anything. Well, didn’t I leave off at Niagara? We left the hotel in front of the Falls there on Monday morning after breakfast with O——, who had no power except for himself till we got to Chicago; we had been furnished with free passes, and rode in the ordinary cars through Ontario province to Windsor, opposite Detroit. In Canada, again, the difference was at once visible between the two peoples; but I am not at all prepared to admit that the Canadians have the worst of it, certainly not in the roadside cookery, for we had the best joint of beef we have seen since we left home at dinner, and the best bread and butter at tea. At Windsor the train ran quietly on to the huge ferry-boat-steamer, and we had a moonlight passage to the railway station at Detroit. Here we secured berths in the Pullman sleeping car, for which you pay rather more than you would for a bed at a first-class hotel. However, they are an admirable institution, and enable one to get through really wonderful travelling feats. We were at Chicago early next morning, and transferred ourselves directly into our small express train, getting glimpses of the city of forty years, which within living men’s memory was a small Indian station.
It is enormous, spreading over certainly three times the space which an English city of 250,000 inhabitants would occupy. We shall see the town on our return; meantime, as we ran out of the suburbs, we saw a house of considerable size waiting at the crossing for our train to pass before it went over, as coolly as a farmer’s waggon of hay would wait in England. O———told us that all the old houses in Chicago are moved in this way. As building is very expensive, when one of the big folk wants to put up some splendid new structure—bank, store, or the like—there are always men ready to buy the old house as it stands. They then just cut away its foundation, put it on rollers, and tote it away to the site they have bought in the suburbs. We fell upon breakfast in a half-famished state as we steamed away westward, and through the whole day were kept on the stretch. Not that there was any great beauty in the scenery, but the interest of getting actually into half-settled country was exceedingly absorbing. The most notable town we passed was Galena, in Northern Illinois, from which Grant went to the war, leaving his leather yard for that purpose. The citizens of Galena have bought and presented him a good square house of red brick on the top of the hill there. Then we ran along a tributary of the Mississippi, and about 4.30 came out on the father of waters; where we struck the mighty stream it was not impressive. We came upon a mighty swamp, not a river, miles and miles of trees, some of them fine large ones, standing in the water and covered with creepers. The river was luckily high, so that we had this effect of a forest rising out of water to perfection. Then there were miles of swamp, half water, half land, dreary and horrible to look at, sometimes sound enough for cattle to pick about, and then only fit for alligators and wild-fowl; of the latter we saw a number, including a white heron. At last we came upon the river, some three-quarters of a mile wide-up there, 1600 miles from the sea, and crossed by a gossamer bridge, a real work of high art. On the opposite side we stopped for tea-dinner at Dubuque, one of the largest towns in Iowa, and the first border city we had seen,—very quaint to behold, with streets laid out as broad as Regent Street, here and there a huge block of stores full of dry goods or groceries, and then a lot of wooden hovels, a vacant plot perhaps, and then a big hotel, or another great store,—the streets all as soft as Rotten Row, and much deeper in dirt, side pavements of wood, every house placarded in huge letters with the name and business of the owner. Here, for the first time, we saw emigrants’ waggons packed with their household goods and lumber (sawed planks) for their houses, bound for the prairies beyond, on which they settle under the homestead acts. In short, the pushing slipshod character of the great West was thoroughly mirrored in the place, and above all the other buildings was a fine common school open to every child in the place. This is the one universal characteristic of these towns and villages; almost the first thing they do is to build a famous big school. The member of Congress for the place and one or two other notables came down to see us after tea, and smoked a cigar with us in our saloon car before we started. The talk was, of course, on the wonders of the West, and the chances of Dubuque to be a big city in a year or two. Then we turned in and ran all night to Fort Dodge, from which the first line of this letter was written, a village with the same characteristics as the towns, except that the only building not of wood was the station, which, strange to say, was built of gypsum, found in great quantities here, and the only sort of stone they have. The president of the line—a shrewd, honest, Western man named Douglas, one of our party—guessed that in another five years they would have to pull the station down and manure the land with it. From this place we ran right up into the wild prairies, and at the highest point between the Mississippi and Missouri, at Storm Lake, I wrote you the hasty note which, I hope, you have received from those unknown parts. It is about the largest settlement in the 180 miles, consisting of perhaps twelve or fourteen wooden houses, one of which was a billiard saloon kept by an old Cornish man. He said that quite a number of Cornish miners are over in this district, some at lead and coal mines of a very primitive kind, others farming. On the whole, the people seemed a good, steady, independent lot, and the children looked wonderfully healthy, running about barefooted on the shore of the little lake or amongst the prairie grass. We made acquaintance with prairie chicken and the little earth squirrel, a jolly little dog, with a prettily marked back, who frisks into his hole instead of up a tree like ours. Then we dropped down, still through wild prairie, over which the single line of rail runs with no protection at all, till we came to Sioux City on the Missouri, and the biggest town on the river for 2000 miles from its source. There are 12,000 inhabitants, and precisely the same features as at Dubuque, except that it is a far more rowdy place, being still almost under the dominion of Judge Lynch. Only the day before we arrived, a border ruffian had been swaggering about the town, pistol in hand, and defying arrest. However, they did take him at last, and he was safe in prison. A fortnight earlier a rascal, who confessed to nine murders, had been taken and hung on the other side of the river. There are sixty-three saloons, at most of which gambling goes on regularly every night. The editor of the Sioux Tribune, an Irish Yankee of queer morals and extraordinary “go,” took us into one, stood drinks round, and expounded the ingenious games by which the settlers and officers of the Indian fort up the stream are cleared of their money. A rowdy, loafing, vagabond city, but there they have three or four fine schools (one had just cost 45,000 dollars), for which they tax the saloons mercilessly. I have no doubt the place will be quite respectable in another five years. We slept quietly and dropped down south along the Missouri to Council Bluffs, from which the earlier part of this was written. The Missouri is a doleful stream, shallow, with huge sandbanks in the middle, and great swamps at the side, but striking green bluffs rising above on the east bank under which we went; and behind them I saw the sun rise in great beauty. We just crossed the river to Omaha to say we had been in Missouri and seen the terminus of the Union-Pacific Railway, and a fine go-ahead place it is, like Dubuque, only twice as big and finely situate on hills above the Missouri River. We are now back at Chicago, having seen more frontier towns and prairies on our way here, and in five days, by the good fortune of this private train, have done more than we could have managed otherwise in nine.