CHAPTER XII.
DOWN THE RIVER.
The morning came bright and warm as ever.
At the boat Norman was delighted to see his friend, the pilot of the Grey Eagle, who introduced them to Captain Gray, of the Kate Cassel. There he saw too the lady who brought with her memories of the early dawn at St. Anthony. “You like to see everything that is to be seen,” she said to Mrs. Lester; “under that bare spot you see on the bluff south of the town is the grave of Dubuque, the Indian chief who once owned all this land.”
“Mother,” said Norman, as their kindly informant left them, “Dubuque is a very strange name for an Indian chief to have; he must have been named by the French when he was a child.”
“Julien Dubuque,” replied his mother, “was not an Indian, but a Frenchman, who bought all this valuable mining region, so rich in fine lead ore, from the Indians, in 1788. They had been discovered two years before by the wife of Peosta, an Indian warrior. Dubuque died in 1810. The Julien House is named, I suppose, in his honor.”
For a hot and weary hour the deck hands were busy taking on freight: first barrels from a warehouse on the Levee at Dubuque; then at Dunleith, a number of reapers and mowers, very heavy and cumbersome to be moved.
As soon as the boat was in motion Captain Gray asked Mrs. Lester if she would go to the pilot-house, as that was the coolest part of the boat. Very kindly he escorted her thither across the hurricane-deck. It was a delightful change from the heated atmosphere below to the cool refreshing breezes above.
“Two eagles at once,” said the captain. “There is something for you to look at, my boy.”
There was the Grey Eagle, her paddles both in motion, and the War Eagle following her in her northward course; a great sight for Norman.
The banks are well wooded, and of some elevation, and there are pretty islands; but the scenery is more monotonous and not so grand as that of the Upper Mississippi. The river is much more shallow, and can be navigated only by a smaller class of steamboats.
The captain pointed out to them, on the banks of the river, the entrance to a lead mine, and a hill-top called Pilot Knob.
At two o’clock they approached Fulton, and the captain courteously took them on shore.
Fulton, the terminus of an air-line road from Chicago, is rather an uninviting looking place, with a grand hotel, suitable for a great city; a destiny Fulton does not seem likely to achieve.
Seated in the cars, Norman saw the sun set for the last time on the great river that had become to him a familiar friend; saw the Rock River gleam in the moonlight; and soon after the welcome lights of his uncle’s home.
Norman had a great deal to tell his uncle and aunt about the Mississippi, and Minnehaha, and the boats, and the little incidents of their journey, and the week he was to spend at Dixon passed rapidly away.
One day Norman’s aunt took Mrs. Lester to see Father Dixon, the patriarch of the place to which his name is given. The hotel also bears the name given to him by the Indians, Nachusah, or the White Haired. His long flowing white hair makes him look very venerable; and there is an expression of gentleness in his delicate features that wins the love of the children of the town, who all call him Grandpapa. He established a ferry over the Rock River thirty years ago, when there were no white people in all the country round, and lived here in his solitary dwelling by the river side.
He lives there still; and Mrs. Lester was very much interested in her visit to him, and in his accounts of the Indians who formerly roamed over these prairies, now the fruitful farms of the white men.
One day a gentleman, who lived on the opposite side of the river, sent his two carriages over for Norman’s uncle and aunt, his mother and himself. As Norman was in the woods with Herbert Waldorf, they went without him. The bridge had been carried away by the flood, so they crossed by the rope ferry. A very stout wire rope was stretched across the river, and a scow was fastened to this by a rope which slipped by a wheel along the iron cable. When they drove on the scow, the man turned the prow of the boat up the current, which at once urged the boat onward. It is a very pleasant and rapid way of crossing the river, allowing one to have a near look of the swiftly flowing waters.
Mr. Dexter had a pretty cottage and fifty acres of prairie land just on the edge of the town. Mrs. Lester went up stairs to see the extensive view of prairie from Ernest Dexter’s window, and then she looked at a cabinet of fossils, most of which he had collected himself in Illinois. There were some very fine specimens, and he was kind enough to give Mrs. Lester a number of them.
The music of the piano called forth the rival notes of the mocking bird, and, accompanied by several canaries, he made the air vocal with sweet sounds. Mrs. Lester forgot what she was playing, so charmed was she with these delicious songsters. Strawberries and ice-cream were fully appreciated after the music, and the evening’s entertainment concluded with a magnificent sunset on the prairie. Golden clouds were penciled softly on the clear amber sky, while rugged wild clouds towered up in stern contrast with this calm serenity. One could imagine the cliffs of Sinai in those gray clouds, so bold and lofty, while through a torn rift gleamed the soft blue sky. It was a memorable sunset even in the West, where they claim for their sunsets a peculiar beauty.
Norman was very sorry when he heard how much he had missed, especially as Mr. Dexter had been kind enough to send over twice for him. So he told Harold Dexter, when he saw him at church the next day, that he would walk over with Herbert Waldorf on Monday morning.
After breakfast Norman and Herbert walked over to Mr. Dexter’s, where they found the boys waiting for them. After a careful survey of Ernest’s treasury, and of a smaller cabinet belonging to Harold and his brother, they set off, with baskets and hammers, in search of minerals. They went to a quarry and found a very fine fossil, a portion of a petrified snake. They hammered at this for a long time, but they broke it all to pieces in endeavoring to get it out. Harold found, however, a large stone filled with petrified shells, which he kindly gave to Norman, who came home in the afternoon with his basket filled with pieces of rock.
One afternoon Norman saw three “prairie schooners” in the street before his uncle’s door. These are the emigrant wagons with their white tops, which look not unlike sails as you see them quietly moving on over the far reaches of the prairie. A number of horses and boys were standing near them. The party were hesitating as to their course; wishing to cross the river, and seeing no bridge but the railroad bridge, they were making their way to that, when they found they could not cross it. Hence the halt and the consultation.
“Norman,” said his mother, “do go and find out where those emigrants are going.”
“O mother,” said Norman, “I would not ask them for anything.”
“I will go then,” replied his mother, as she opened the garden gate, and walked up to the last prairie wagon, in which a woman was seated with her four children.
She seemed pleased to hear the accents of a friendly voice, and soon told her simple story.
Eight years before she had been left a widow, with six children. The boys of twelve and fourteen did not wish to learn a trade, and farming was not very profitable in the part of Pennsylvania where she lived; so she had come to seek, in the fertile fields of Iowa, bread for her children. She had worked hard, and days of toil were still before her, but there was more hope in that virgin soil of securing a competence. The rich deep black loam of these prairies often, at its first sowing, bears a golden harvest, that gives back to the farmer the amount he has paid for the land, and the expense of its cultivation.
Mrs. Lester asked the emigrant, in whose patient face she had taken much interest, if she had any friends in the new and strange country to which she was going.
“O yes,” she replied; she had a married daughter there, and a church and Sunday school for her children. She was a Methodist, as were the two families with whom she was journeying; and she would have been unwilling to go where her children would be deprived of their religious privileges.
There were fifteen persons in the company. They had driven from Pennsylvania to Cleveland, where they had taken the cars for Chicago. The wagon was lifted on the car, the cover taken off, and the woman said she had had the pleasantest ride she had ever taken in her life, looking over the lake and the prairie from her elevated position. From Chicago they had journeyed on, sometimes sleeping in their wagons, and sometimes on the floor of some house opened for them. There were bright, black-eyed children peeping from the recesses of the covered wagon, as their mother was talking to Mrs. Lester, and one little girl sat intently reading. Mrs. Lester bade her goodspeed, and the woman, with brightened face, thanked her for her words of kindness and sympathy.
The last day of their stay in Dixon at length arrived, and with it came Aunt Clara, whom Norman had never seen before, but whom he very soon learned to love. She showed him his picture when a baby, which his mother had sent her, and she found it difficult to trace any resemblance to the tall boy before her.
Norman stayed with her and his uncle in the evening, while his mother went out with a gentleman and lady to take a drive on the prairies. The day had been very warm, but there was a cool breeze on those boundless meadows that undulated peacefully, in their rounded swells, to the far horizon. The corn was laughing in rich abundance, the wheat standing thick on the fields, after the sun had set, leaving its luminous track of light in wavy radiance; one huge cloud towered up in solitary grandeur, its bold outline gilded by those parting rays.