Part 25 (1/2)
So we started and after a few hours' travel, stopped at Altona. There I was very much amused by an old darkey at the railway-station hotel, who had, as he declared, ”specially the kyar of de ladies an' quality.” He had been a slave till the war broke out, and had been wondrously favoured by visions and revelations which guided him to freedom. ”De Lawd he 'pear to me in a dream, an' I hyar a vi'ce which cry, 'Simon, arise an'
git out of dis, an' put fo' de Norf as fa.s.s as you kin travel, fo' de day of de 'pressor is at an end, an' you is to be free.'So I rosed an'
fled, hardly a-waitin' to stuff my bag wid some corn-dodgers an' bacon, an' foller de Norf Star till I git confused an' went to sleep agin, wen, lo, an angel expostulated hisself befo' my eyes in a wision, an' say, 'Simon, beholdes' dou dat paff by de riber? Dat's de one fo' you to foller, ole son!' So I follers it till I git on de right trail. Den I met anoder n.i.g.g.e.r a-'scapin' from the bon's of captivity, an' carryin' a cold ham, an' I jined in wid him--you bet--an' so we come to de Lawd's country.”
And so gaily on to Chicago. We went directly to the first hotel, and as soon as I had toiletted and gone below, I saw on the opposite building a sign with the words _Chicago Tribune_. This was an exchange of ours, so I crossed over, and meeting the editor by chance in the doorway, was welcomed and introduced to Governor Desbrosses, who stood by. Then I went to a telegraph office and sent a despatch to the _Press_. The man wanted me to pay. I told him to C. O. D., ”collect on delivery.” He declined. I said, ”Your princ.i.p.al office is in Philadelphia, is it not?--Third and Chestnut Streets. Just send a telegram and ask the name of your landlord. It's Leland, and _I'm the man_. If you make me pay, I'll raise your rent.” He laughed heartily and let me off, but not without a parting shot: ”You see, Mr. Leland, there are so many scallawags {349} from the East come here, that we are obliged to be a little particular.”
I returned to the hotel, and was immediately introduced to some one having authority. I narrated my late experience. He looked at me and said, ”How long have you been in Chicago?” I replied, ”About thirty minutes.” He answered gravely, ”I think you'd better _stay_ here. You'll suit the place.” I was beginning to feel the moral influence of the genial air of the West. Chicago is emphatically what is termed ”a place,” and a certain amount of calm confidence in one's self is not in that city to any one's discredit. Once there was an old lady of a ”hard”
type in the witness-box in an American city. She glared round at the judge, the jury, and the spectators, and then burst out with, ”You needn't all be staring at me in that way. I don't keer a --- for you all. I've lived eleven years in Chicago, and ain't affeard of the devil.” Chicago is said in Indian to mean the place of skunks, but calling a rose a skunk-cabbage don't make it one.
Walking on the edge of the lake near the city, the waters cast up a good- sized living specimen of that extraordinary fish-lizard, the great _men.o.branchus_, popularly known as the h.e.l.l-bender from its extreme ugliness. Owing to the immense size of its spermatozoa, it has rendered great aid to embryology, a science which, when understood _au fond_, will bring about great changes in the human race. We were taken out in a steamboat to the end of the great aqueduct, which was, when built, p.r.o.nounced, I think by the London _Times_, to be the greatest engineering work of modern times.
In due time we came to St. Paul, Minnesota. We went to a very fair hotel and had a very good dinner. In the West it is very common among the commonalty to drink coffee and milk through dinner, and indeed with all meals, instead of wine or ale, but the custom is considered as vulgar by swells. Having finished dessert, I asked the Irish waiter to bring me a small cup of black coffee and brandy. Drawing himself up stiffly, Pat replied, ”We don't serve caafy at dinner in _this_ hotel.” There was a grand roar of laughter which the waiter evidently thought was at _my_ expense, as he retreated smiling.
We were kindly received in St. Paul by everybody. There is this immense advantage of English or American hospitality over that of all other countries, that it introduces us to the _home_, and makes us forget that we are strangers. When we were at the end of the fearfully wearisome great moral circus known as the Oriental Congress, held all over Scandinavia in 1890, there came to me one evening in the station a great Norseman with his friends. With much would-be, ox-like dignity he began, ”You ha-ave now experienced de glorious haspitality off our country. You will go oom and say--”
”Stop a minute there!” I exclaimed, for I was bored to death with a show which had been engineered to tatters, and to half defeating all the work of the Congress, in order to glorify the King and Count Landberg. ”I have been here in your country six weeks, and I had letters of introduction, and have made no end of acquaintances. I have been shown thousands of fireworks, which blind me, and offered dozens of champagne, which I never touch, and public dinners, which I did not attend. But during the whole time I have never once seen the inside of a Swedish or Norwegian house.” Which was perfectly true, nor have I ever seen one to this day. There is a kind of ”hospitality” which consists of giving yourself a grand treat at a tavern or _cafe_, and inviting your strangers to it to help you to be glorified. But to very domestic people and utter Philistines, _domestic_ life lacks the charm of a bra.s.s band, and the mirrors and gilding of a restaurant or hotel; therefore, what they themselves enjoy most, they, with best intent, but most unwisely, inflict on more civilised folk. But in America and England, where home-life is _worth_ living and abounding in every attraction, and public saloons are at a discount, the case is reversed. And in these Western towns, of which many were, so to speak, almost within hearing of the whoop of the savage or the howl of the wolf (as Leavenworth really was), we experienced a refinement of true hospitality in homes--kindness and tact such as I have never known to be equalled save in Great Britain. One evening I was at a house in St. Paul, where I was struck by the beauty, refined manners, and agreeableness of our hostess, who was a real Chippeway or Sioux Indian, and wife of a retired Indian trader. She had been well educated at a Canadian French seminary.
We were taken over to see the rival city of Minneapolis, of which word my brother Henry said it was a vile grinding up together of Greek and Indian. _Minne_ means water; _Minne-sota_, turbid water, and _Minne-haha_ does not signify ”laughing,” but _falling_ water. This we also visited, and I found it so charming, that I was delighted to think that for once an Indian name had been kept, and that the young ladies of the boarding-schools of St. Paul or Minneapolis had not christened or devilled it ”Diana's Bath.”
We were received kindly by the Council of the city of Minneapolis. Half of them had come from the East afflicted with consumption, and all had recovered. But it is necessary to remain there to live. My wife's cousin, Mr. Richard Price, who then owned the great saw-mill next the Fall of St. Anthony, came with this affliction from Philadelphia, and got over it. After six years' absence he returned to Philadelphia, and died in six weeks of consumption. Strangely enough, consumption is the chief cause of death among the Indians, but this is due to their careless habits, wearing wet moccasins and the like.
Now a great question arose. It was necessary for the magnates of our party to go to Duluth, and to do this they must make a seven days'
journey through the wilderness, either on a very rough military road cut through the woods during the war, or sometimes on no road at all. Houses or post-stations, often of only one or two rooms, were sometimes a day's journey apart. The question was whether delicate ladies, utterly unaccustomed to anything like hard travel could take this trip, during which they must endure clouds of mosquitos, put up with camp-cooking, or often none, and otherwise go through privations such as only an Indian or a frontiersman would care to experience? The entire town of St. Paul, and all the men of our party, vigorously opposed taking the ladies, while I, joining the latter, insisted on it that they could go; for, as I said to all a.s.sembled, where the devil is afraid to go he sends a woman; and I had always observed that in travelling, long after men are tired out women are generally all right. They are never more played out _than they want to be_.
”Femme plaint, femme deult, Femme est malade quand elle veult, Et par Sainte Marie!
Quand elle veult elle est guerye.”
And of course _we_ carried the day. Twelve men, even though backed up by a city council, have no chance against any ten women. To be sure women, like all other savages, require a male leader--I mean to say, just as Goorkha troops, though brave as lions, must have an English captain--so they conquered under my guidance!
Having had experience in fitting out for the wilderness, I was requested to see to the stores--so many hams to so many people for so many days, so much coffee, and so forth. I astonished all by insisting that there should be one _tin cup_ to every traveller. ”Every gla.s.s you have will soon be broken,” I said. And so it was, sooner than I expected. As tin cups could not be found in St. Paul, we bought three or four dozen small tin basins of about six inches diameter at the rim, and when champagne was served out it was, _faute de mieux_, drunk from these eccentric goblets.
In the first waggon were Mr. and Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Leland. Their driver was a very eccentric Canadian Frenchman named Louis. He was to the last degree polite to the ladies, but subject to attacks of Indian rage at mere trifles, when he would go aside, swear, and destroy something like a lunatic in a fury, and then return quite happy and serene. I was in the second waggon with three ladies, a man being wanted in every vehicle. Our driver was named George, and he was altogether like Brigham, minus the Mexican-Spanish element. George had, however, also lived a great deal among Indians, and been at the great battle of the Chippeways and Sioux, and was full of interesting and naive discourse.
Of course, we of the two leading waggons all talked to Louis in French, who gave himself great airs on it. One morning George asked me in confidence, ”Mr. Leland, you're not all French, are you?” ”Certainly not,” I replied; ”we're from Philadelphia.” ”Well,” replied George, ”so I told Louis, but he says you _are_ French, like him, and shut me up by askin' me if I hadn't heard you talkin' it. Now what I want to know is, if you're _not_ French, how came the _whole_ of you to know it?” I explained to George, to his astonishment, that in the East it was usual for all well-educated persons, especially ladies, to learn it. I soon became as intimate with George as I had been with Brigham, and began to learn Chippeway of him, and greet the Indians whom we met. One day George said--
”Of course you have no Indian blood in you, Mr. Leland; but weren't you a great deal among 'em when you were young?”
”Why?”
”Because you've got queer little old Injun ways. Whenever you stop by the roadside to talk to anybody and sit down, you always rake the small bits of wood together and pull out a match and make a _smudge_” (a very smoky fire made by casting dust on it), ”just like an Indian in an Injun kind of way.” (In after years I found this same habit of making fires of small bits of wood peculiar to old English gypsies.)
The smudge is the great summer inst.i.tution of Minnesota. It is the safeguard against mosquitos. They are all over the State in such numbers that they const.i.tute a plague. We all wore all the time over our faces and necks a kind of guard or veil, shaped exactly like an Egyptian _fanous_ or folding lantern. It is cylindrical, made of _tulle_ or coa.r.s.e lace, with rings. At every house people sat in the porticos over a tin bucket, in which there was a smudge--that is to say, in smoke. In the evening some one goes with a tin or iron pail containing a smudge, and fills the bedrooms with dense smoke. One evening Mr. Hinckley and another of our party went fis.h.i.+ng without veils. They returned with their necks behind swollen up as if with _goitres_ or _Kropfe_. I knew a young Englishman who with friends, somewhere beyond Manitoba, encountered such a storm of mosquitos that their oxen were killed, and the party saved themselves by riding away on horseback. So he told me.
At the stations--all log-houses--the ladies collected pillows and buffalo blankets, and, making a great bed, all slept in one room. We men slept in waggons or under a tent, which was not quite large enough for all. The Indian women cut spruce twigs and laid them over-lapping on the ground for our bed. By preference I took the outside, _al fresco_. One night we stayed at a house which had an upper and a lower storey. The ladies camped upstairs. In the morning, when we men below awoke, all took a drink of whisky. There entered a very tall Indian, clad in a long black blanket, who looked on very approvingly at the drinking. I called to my wife above to hand me down my whisky flask. ”There is a big Indian here who wants a drink,” I remarked. ”I think I know,” she replied, ”who that big Indian is,” but handed down the flask. ”Don't waste whisky on an _Indian_” said one of my companions. But I filled the cup with a tremendous slug, and handed it to the Objibway. He took it down like milk, and never a word spoke he, but when it was swallowed he looked at me and winked. Such a wink as that was! I think I see it now--so inspired with grat.i.tude and humour as to render all words needless. He had a rare sense of tact and grat.i.tude. Soon after I was sitting out of doors among a few ladies, when the Indian, who had divined that I was short of Chippeway and wished to learn, stalked up, and pointing to our beauty, said gravely, _squoah_--_i.e._, woman. Then he indicated several other articles, told me the Indian name for each and walked away. It was all he could do. The ladies, who could not imagine why this voluntary lesson was given to me, were much amused at it. But I understood it; he had seen the Injun in me at a glance, and knew what I wanted most!
One night we stopped at a place called Kettle River. It was very picturesque. Over the rus.h.i.+ng stream the high rocky banks actually overhung the water. I got into a birch canoe with my wife, and two Indian boys paddled us, while others made a great fire on the cliff above, which illuminated the scene. Other Indian youths jumped into the water and swam about and skylarked, whooping wildly. It reminded me strangely of the Blue Grotto of Capri, where our boatmen jumped in and swam in a sulphur-azure glow, only that this was red in the firelight.
Our whisky ran short--it always does on all such excursions--and our drivers in consequence became very ”short” also, or rather unruly. But _bon chemin_, _mal chemin_, we went on, and the ladies, as I had predicted, pulled through merrily.
One day, at a halt, I found, with the ladies, in the woods by a stream, a pretty sight. It was a wigwam, which was very open, and which had been made to look like a bower with green boughs. When I was in the artillery I was the only person who ever thus adorned our tent in Indian style. It is very pleasant on a warm day, and looks artistic. In the wigwam sat a pretty Indian woman with a babe. The ladies were, of course, at once deeply interested, but the Indian could not speak English. One of the ladies had a common j.a.panese fan, with the picture of a grotesque G.o.d, and I at once saw my way to interest our hostess.