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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41742 ***
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
+  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
+
+  The page numbers of this Volume start with 275 (continuing the
+  numbering from Volume 1 of this work).
+
+  On page 282 guerillas should possibly be  guerrillas.
+  On page 293 vigilants should possibly be vigilantes.
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+     _EDITION ARTISTIQUE_
+
+     The World's Famous
+     Places and Peoples
+
+     AMERICA
+
+     BY
+     JOEL COOK
+
+     In Six Volumes
+     Volume II.
+
+     MERRILL AND BAKER
+     New York      London
+
+
+
+
+THIS EDITION ARTISTIQUE OF THE WORLD'S FAMOUS PLACES AND PEOPLES IS
+LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND NUMBERED AND REGISTERED COPIES, OF WHICH THIS
+COPY IS NO. 205
+
+Copyright, Henry T. Coates & Co., 1900
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+VOLUME II
+
+
+                                                      PAGE
+
+     MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS, YELLOWSTONE       _Frontispiece_
+
+     THE SUSQUEHANNA WEST OF FALMOUTH                  284
+
+     THE CONEMAUGH NEAR FLORENCE                       312
+
+     ON THE ASHLEY, NEAR CHARLESTON, S. C.             352
+
+     ON THE OCKLAWAHA                                  382
+
+     LINCOLN MONUMENT, LINCOLN PARK, CHICAGO           432
+
+
+
+
+CROSSING THE ALLEGHENIES.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+CROSSING THE ALLEGHENIES.
+
+     The Old Pike -- The National Road -- Early Routes Across the
+     Mountains -- Old Lancaster Road -- Columbia Railroad -- The
+     Pennsylvania Route -- Haverford College -- Villa Nova -- Bryn
+     Mawr College -- Paoli -- General Wayne -- The Chester Valley --
+     Pequea Valley -- The Conestogas -- Lancaster -- Franklin and
+     Marshall College -- James Buchanan -- Thaddeus Stevens --
+     Conewago Hills -- Susquehanna River -- Columbia -- The
+     Underground Railroad -- Middletown -- Lochiel -- Simon Cameron
+     -- The Clan Cameron -- Harrisburg -- Charles Dickens and the
+     Camel's Back Bridge -- John Harris -- Lincoln's Midnight Ride
+     -- Cumberland Valley -- Carlisle -- Indian School -- Dickinson
+     College -- The Whisky Insurrection -- Tom the Tinker -- Lebanon
+     Valley -- Cornwall Ore Banks -- Otsego Lake -- Cooperstown --
+     James Fenimore Cooper -- Richfield Springs -- Cherry Valley --
+     Sharon Springs -- Howe's Cave -- Binghamton -- Northumberland
+     -- Williamsport -- Sunbury -- Fort Augusta -- The Dauphin Gap
+     -- Duncannon -- Duncan's Island -- Juniata River -- Tuscarora
+     Gap -- The Grasshopper War -- Mifflin -- Lewistown Narrows --
+     Kishicoquillas Valley -- Logan -- Jack's Narrows -- Huntingdon
+     -- The Standing Stone -- Bedford -- Morrison's Cove -- The
+     Sinking Spring -- Brainerd, the Missionary -- Tyrone --
+     Bellefonte -- Altoona -- Hollidaysburg -- The Portage Railroad
+     -- Blair's Gap -- The Horse Shoe -- Kittanning Point -- Thomas
+     Blair and Michael Maguire -- Loretto -- Prince Gallitzin --
+     Ebensburg -- Cresson Springs -- The Conemaugh River -- South
+     Fork -- Johnstown -- The Great Flood -- Laurel Ridge --
+     Packsaddle Narrows -- Chestnut Ridge -- Kiskiminetas River --
+     Loyalhanna Creek -- Fort Ligonier -- Great Bear Cave --
+     Hannastown -- General Arthur St. Clair -- Greensburg --
+     Braddock's Defeat -- Pittsburg, the Iron City -- Monongahela
+     River -- Allegheny River -- Ohio River -- Fort Duquesne --
+     Fort Pitt -- View from Mount Washington -- Pittsburg Buildings
+     -- Great Factories -- Andrew Carnegie -- George Westinghouse,
+     Jr. -- Allegheny Park and Monument -- Coal and Coke -- Davis
+     Island Dam -- Youghiogheny River -- Connellsville -- Natural
+     Gas -- Murrysville -- Petroleum -- Canonsburg -- Washington --
+     Petroleum Development -- Kittanning -- Modoc Oil District --
+     Fort Venango -- Oil City -- Pithole City -- Oil Creek --
+     Titusville -- Corry -- Decadence of Oil-Fields.
+
+
+THE OLD PIKE.
+
+The American aspiration has always been to go westward. In the early
+history of the Republic the Government gave great attention to the
+means of reaching the Western frontier, then cut off by what was
+regarded as the almost insurmountable barrier of the Alleghenies.
+General Washington was the first to project a chain of internal
+improvements across the mountains, by the route of the Potomac to
+Cumberland, then a Maryland frontier fort, and thence by roads to the
+headwaters of the Ohio. The initial enactment was procured by him from
+the Virginia Legislature in 1774, for improving the navigation of the
+Potomac; but the Revolutionary War interfered, and he renewed the
+movement afterwards in 1784, resulting in the charter of the
+Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, of which Washington was the first
+President. Little was done at that early period, however, in building
+the canal, but the Government constructed the famous "National Road,"
+the first highway over the Allegheny Mountains, from Cumberland in
+Maryland, mainly through Southwestern Pennsylvania, to Wheeling on
+the Ohio. This noted highway was finished and used throughout in 1818,
+and, until the railways crossed the mountains, it was the great route
+of travel to the West. It was familiarly known as the "Old Pike," and
+Thomas B. Searight has entertainingly recorded its pleasant memories,
+for it has now become mainly a relic of the past:
+
+     "We hear no more of the clanging hoof,
+       And the stage-coach, rattling by;
+     For the steam king rules the travelled world,
+       And the Old Pike's left to die."
+
+He tells of the long lines of Conestoga wagons, each drawn by six
+heavy horses, their broad wheels, canvas-covered tops and huge cargoes
+of goods; of the swaying, rushing mail passenger coach, the
+fleet-footed pony express; the flocks of sheep and herds of cattle,
+the droves of horses and mules sent East from the "blue-grass" farms
+of Kentucky; and occasionally of a long line of men and women, tied
+two and two to a rope, driven by a slave-master from the South, to be
+sold in the newer region of the Southwest. He describes how the famous
+driver, Sam Sibley, brings up his grand coach at the hotel in
+Uniontown with the great Henry Clay as chief passenger, and then after
+dinner whirls away with a rush, but unfortunately, dashing over a pile
+of stone in the road, the coach upsets. Out crawls the driver with a
+broken nose, and a crowd hastens to rescue Mr. Clay from the upturned
+coach. He is unhurt, and brushing the dust from his clothes says:
+"This is mixing the Clay of Kentucky with the limestone of
+Pennsylvania." Many are the tales of the famous road. One veteran
+teamster relates his experience of a night at the tavern on the
+mountain side--thirty six-horse teams were in the wagon-yard, one
+hundred mules in an adjoining lot, a thousand hogs in another, as many
+fat cattle from the West in a field, and the tavern crowded with
+teamsters and drovers--the grunts of the hogs, the braying of the
+mules, the bellowing of the cattle and the crunching and stamping of
+the horses, "made music beyond a dream." In 1846 the message arrived
+at Cumberland at two o'clock in the morning that war was declared
+against Mexico, and a noted driver took the news over the mountains,
+past a hundred taverns and a score of villages, one hundred and
+thirty-one miles to Wheeling, in twelve hours. Over this famous road
+the Indian chief Black Hawk was brought, but the harness broke, the
+team ran away and the coach was smashed. Black Hawk crept out of the
+wreck, stood up surprised, and, wiping a drop of blood from his brow,
+earnestly muttered, "Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!" Barnum brought Jenny Lind over
+this road from Wheeling, paying $17.25 fare apiece to Baltimore.
+Lafayette came along it in 1825, the population all turning out to
+cheer him. Andrew Jackson came over it four years later to be
+inaugurated the first Western President, and subsequently also came
+Presidents Harrison, Polk and Taylor. What was thought of the "Old
+Pike" in its day of active service was well expressed at a reception
+to John Quincy Adams. Returning from the West, he arrived at Uniontown
+in May, 1837, and was warmly welcomed. Hon. Hugh Campbell, who made
+the reception address, said to the ex-President: "We stand here, sir,
+upon the Cumberland Road, which has broken down the great wall of the
+Appalachian Mountains. This road, we trust, constitutes an
+indissoluble chain of Union, connecting forever, as one, the East and
+the West."
+
+In the early part of the nineteenth century, Lancaster in Pennsylvania
+was the largest inland city of the United States. It is sixty-nine
+miles from Philadelphia, and the "old Lancaster Road," the finest
+highway of that period, was constructed to connect them. This began
+the Pennsylvania route across the Alleghenies to the West, which
+afterwards became the most travelled. In 1834 the Pennsylvania
+Government opened its State work, the Columbia Railroad between the
+Delaware and the Susquehanna. In 1836 there were four daily lines of
+stages running in connection with this State railroad between
+Philadelphia and Pittsburg, making the journey in sixty hours.
+Gradually afterwards the Pennsylvania Railroad was extended across the
+mountains, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was completed to
+Wheeling, and they then took away the business from the "Old Pike"
+and all the other wagon or canal routes to the Ohio River.
+
+
+CHESTER AND LANCASTER VALLEYS.
+
+Let us go westward across the Alleghenies by the Pennsylvania route.
+East of the mountains it traverses a rich agricultural region,
+limestone valleys, intersected by running streams and enclosed between
+parallel ridges of hills, stretching, like the mountain ranges, across
+the country from northeast to southwest. It is a land of prolific
+farms and dairies, and for miles beyond Philadelphia the line is
+adjoined by attractive villages and many beautiful suburban villas.
+Three noted institutions of learning are passed--Haverford College,
+the great Quaker College, standing in an extensive wooded park; the
+Roman Catholic Augustinian College at Villa Nova, with its
+cross-surmounted dome and twin church spires; and the Bryn Mawr
+College for women, one of the most famous in the United States. This
+is a region first settled by Welsh Quakers, and the name Bryn Mawr is
+Welsh for the "great hill." It is a wealthy and extensive settlement,
+and its College has spacious buildings and over three hundred
+students. At the Commencements they all join in singing their
+impressive College hymn:
+
+     "Thou Gracious Inspiration, our guiding star,
+     Mistress and Mother, all hail Bryn Mawr,
+     Goddess of wisdom, thy torch divine
+     Doth beacon thy votaries to thy shrine,
+     And we, thy daughters, would thy vestals be,
+     Thy torch to consecrate eternally."
+
+A few miles beyond is Paoli, preserving in its name the memory of the
+Corsican patriot Paoli, and the birthplace of the Revolutionary
+General "Mad Anthony" Wayne. Here the British defeated the American
+patriots in September, 1777. It stands on the verge of one of the
+garden spots of Pennsylvania, the Chester Valley, a charming region of
+broad and smiling acres, bounded on the northwest by the Welsh
+Mountain and Mine Hill, and a veritable land of plenty. The Brandywine
+and Valley Creeks water it, flowing out respectively to the Delaware
+and the Schuylkill. Beyond the long ridge of Mine Hill is Lancaster
+County, another land of rich farms, with many miles of grain and
+tobacco fields. Mine Hill is the watershed between the Delaware and
+the Susquehanna, the fertile Pequea Valley being at its western base.
+This is a great wheat country, and from here was sent the first
+American grain across the Atlantic to feed Europe, the Lancaster
+County wheat, in the days before the railroads brought it from the
+West, ruling prices for the American markets. It was hauled out in the
+ponderous Conestoga wagons, named after the Indian tribe which
+formerly ruled this region--their name signifying "the great magic
+land." They were a quarrelsome people, fighting all the neighboring
+tribes, and becoming deadly foes of the whites. Repeated wars
+decimated them, until in 1763 their last remnant, being hunted almost
+to death, took refuge in the ancient jail at Lancaster, and were
+cruelly massacred by the guerillas called the "Paxton Boys."
+
+In the midst of the wheat lands and bordering the broad Conestoga
+Creek, flowing down to the Susquehanna at Safe Harbor, is the city of
+Lancaster, its red sandstone castellated jail being a conspicuous
+object in the view. This city was originally called Hickory Town, but
+in the eighteenth century its loyal people christened it Lancaster,
+and named the chief streets, intersecting at the Central Market
+Square, King and Queen Streets, with Duke Street parallel to the
+latter. Prior to 1812 it was the capital of Pennsylvania. Lancaster is
+an attractive and comfortable old city of thirty-five thousand
+population, with many mills and factories and large tobacco houses. It
+has a splendid Soldiers' Monument in the Central Square, with finely
+sculptured guards, representing each branch of the service, watching
+at the base of the magnificent shaft. Upon the outskirts are the
+ornate buildings of Franklin and Marshall College, a foundation of the
+German Reformed Church, and it also has a Theological Seminary. The
+charm of Lancaster, however, is Woodward Hill Cemetery, on a bold
+bluff, washed by the Conestoga Creek, which forms a graceful circle
+around its base. Upon the surface and sides of the bluff the graves
+are terraced. Here is the tomb of James Buchanan, the only President
+sent from Pennsylvania, who died in 1868, at his home of Wheatland on
+the outskirts of the town. Another noted citizen of Lancaster was
+Thaddeus Stevens, who long represented it in Congress, and was the
+Republican leader in the House of Representatives during the Civil
+War, and afterwards until his death in 1868. He was the great champion
+of the emancipation of the negro race, and refused to be buried in the
+cemetery because negroes were excluded. Upon the grave which he
+selected in Lancaster are these words: "I repose in this quiet and
+secluded spot, not from any natural preference for solitude, but
+finding other cemeteries limited by charter rules as to race. I have
+chosen it that I might be enabled to illustrate in death the principle
+which I have advocated through a long life--equality of man before
+his Creator." When Lancaster was the chief town of the Colonial
+frontier in 1753, it was the place where Braddock's unfortunate
+expedition against Fort Duquesne at Pittsburg was organized and
+equipped, the work being mainly directed by Benjamin Franklin. Robert
+Fulton was born in Lancaster County, and he grew up and was educated
+at Lancaster, going afterwards to Philadelphia.
+
+
+  [Illustration: _The Susquehanna West of Falmouth_]
+
+THE SUSQUEHANNA RIVER.
+
+The line westward from Lancaster crosses one long ridge-like hill
+after another stretching broadly over the country, and finally comes
+to the outlying ridge of the Allegheny range, the South Mountain,
+beyond which is the great Appalachian Valley. One railroad route
+boldly crosses this mountain through the depressions in the Conewago
+hills, where the picturesque Conewago Creek, the Indian "long reach,"
+flows down its beautiful gorge to the Susquehanna, and this railroad
+finally comes out on that river at Middletown below Harrisburg; the
+other route follows a more easy gradient westward ten miles to
+Columbia, and this is used by the heavier freight trains. Coming
+towards it over the hills, the wide Susquehanna lies low in its broad
+valley, enclosed by the distant ridge of the Kittatinny bounding
+Cumberland County beyond the river. As it is approached, the thought
+is uppermost that this is one of the noblest, and yet among the
+meanest rivers in the country. Rising in Otsego Lake in New York, it
+flows over four hundred miles down to Chesapeake Bay, receives large
+tributaries, its West Branch being two hundred miles long, rends all
+the Allegheny Mountain chains, and takes a great part of the drainage
+of that region in New York and Pennsylvania, passes through grand
+valleys, noble gorges and most magnificent scenery, and yet it is so
+thickly sown with islands, rocks and sand-bars, rapids and shallows,
+as to defy all attempts to make it satisfactorily navigable excepting
+by lumber rafts, logs and a few canal boats. Thus the Indians
+significantly gave its name meaning the island-strewn, broad
+and shallow river, and it is little more than a gigantic drain for
+Central Pennsylvania.
+
+On its bank is Columbia, a town of busy iron and steel manufacture, as
+the whole range of towns are for miles up to and beyond Harrisburg. At
+Columbia first appeared, about 1804, that mysterious agency known as
+the "Underground Railroad," whereby fugitive slaves were secretly
+passed from one "station" to another from "Mason and Dixon's Line" to
+Canada, mainly through the aid and active exertions of philanthropic
+Quakers. All through Chester and Lancaster Counties and northward were
+laid the routes of this peculiar line, whose ramifications became more
+and more extensive as time passed, making the Fugitive Slave Law
+almost a nullity during the decade before the Civil War. There were
+hundreds of good people engaged in facilitating the unfortunate
+travellers who fled for freedom, and many have been the escapades with
+the slave-hunters, whose traffic long ago happily ended. At Middletown
+the Swatara River flows in from the hills of Lebanon County, there
+being all along the Susquehanna a prodigious development of the steel
+industry as well as rich farms on the fertile bottom lands. Here is
+the historic estate of Lochiel, which was the home of Simon Cameron,
+who for many years ruled the political destinies of Pennsylvania. He
+was born in 1799 at Maytown, near Marietta, on the Susquehanna, a few
+miles above Columbia, in humble circumstances, and came as a poor
+printer's boy to Harrisburg, rose to wealth and power, and when he was
+full of years and honors placed the mantle of the United States
+Senatorship upon his son. Their "Clan Cameron" which ruled
+Pennsylvania for two generations has been regarded as the best managed
+political "machine" in the Union, having in its ranks and among its
+allies not only politicians, but bankers, railway managers, merchants,
+manufacturers and capitalists, and men in every walk of life,
+ramifying throughout the Keystone State.
+
+Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, stands upon the sloping
+eastern bank of the river in the grandest scenery. Just above, the
+Susquehanna breaks through the Kittatinny at the Dauphin Gap, giving a
+superb display of the rending asunder of the towering mountain chain.
+Opposite are the forest-clad hills of York and Cumberland bordering
+the fertile Cumberland Valley spreading off to the southwest, while
+behind the city this great Appalachian Valley continues between its
+enclosing ridges as the Lebanon Valley northeast to the Schuylkill
+River at Reading. Market Street is the chief Harrisburg highway, and
+the Pennsylvania Railroad is the back border of the town. The State
+Capitol, set on a hill, was burnt, and is being rebuilt. A pleasant
+park encloses the site, and from the front a wide street leads down to
+the river, making a pretty view, with a Soldiers' Monument in the
+centre, which is an enlarged reproduction of Cleopatra's Needle. The
+Front Street of the city, along the river bank, is the popular
+promenade, and is adorned with the Executive Mansion and other fine
+residences, which have a grand outlook across the broad expanse of
+river and islands. Bridges cross over, among them the old "camel's
+back," a mile long, and having its shelving stone ice-breakers jutting
+up stream. This is the old wooden covered bridge that Charles Dickens
+wrote about in his _American Notes_. On his first American visit he
+came into Harrisburg from York County on a stage-coach through this
+bridge, and he wrote: "We crossed the river by a wooden bridge, roofed
+and covered on all sides, and nearly a mile in length. It was
+profoundly dark, perplexed with great beams, crossing and re-crossing
+it at every possible angle, and through the broad chinks and crevices
+in the floor the river gleamed far down below, like a legion of eyes.
+We had no lamps, and as the horses stumbled and floundered through
+this place towards the distant speck of dying light, it seemed
+interminable. I really could not persuade myself at first as we
+rumbled heavily on, filling the bridge with hollow noises--and I held
+down my head to save it from the rafters--but that I was in a painful
+dream, and that this could not be reality." The old bridge is much the
+same to-day as when Dickens crossed it.
+
+Harrisburg was named for John Harris, who established a ferry here,
+and alongside the river bank is the little "Harris Park" which
+contains his grave. The stump of the tree at the foot of which he was
+buried is carefully preserved. A drunken band of Conestoga Indians
+came this way in 1718, and, capturing the faithful ferryman, tied him
+to the tree to be tortured and burnt, when the timely interposition of
+some Indians from the opposite shore, who knew him and were friendly,
+saved him. His son succeeded him and ran the ferry, and an enclosure
+in the park preserves this spot of historic memory.
+
+
+LINCOLN'S MIDNIGHT RIDE.
+
+It was from Harrisburg that Lincoln took the famous secret midnight
+ride, "in long cloak and Scotch cap," which enabled him to escape
+attack and possible assassination when going to be inaugurated
+President in 1861. Lincoln arrived in Philadelphia on his way to
+Washington February 21st, and had arranged to visit Harrisburg next
+day, address the Pennsylvania Legislature, and then proceed to
+Washington by way of Baltimore. In Philadelphia General Scott and
+Senator Seward informed him that he could not pass through Baltimore
+at the time announced without great peril, and detectives who had
+carefully examined the situation declared his life in danger. Lincoln,
+however, could not believe that anyone would try to assassinate him
+and made light of the matter. On the morning of February 22d he
+raised a flag on Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and then went by
+railway to Harrisburg. There his friends again urged him to abandon
+his plan and avoid Baltimore. He visited the Legislature, and
+afterwards, at his hotel, met the Governor, several prominent people
+being present, among them Colonel Thomas A. Scott, then Vice-President
+of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Again the subject was discussed, and he
+was urged to avoid the danger threatening next day, being reminded
+that the railway passenger coaches were drawn through the Baltimore
+streets by horses, thus increasing the chances of doing him harm. He
+heard them patiently and answered, "What would the nation think of its
+President stealing into the Capital like a thief in the night?" But
+they only the more strenuously insisted, and finally he yielded,
+consenting to do whatever they thought best. Colonel Scott undertook
+the task, and during the early evening quietly arranged a special
+train to take Lincoln to Philadelphia, where he would get aboard the
+regular night express and be in Washington by daylight. Colonel Ward
+H. Lamon, a personal friend, was selected to attend Lincoln. As the
+party left the hotel a large crowd cheered them, and the Governor,
+Andrew G. Curtin, the better to conceal the intention, called out in a
+loud voice, "Drive us to the Executive Mansion." This was done, and
+when they had got away from the crowd the carriage was taken by a
+roundabout route to the station. Lincoln and Lamon were not noticed
+by the few people there, and quietly entering the car, left for
+Philadelphia. As soon as they had started Scott cut every telegraph
+wire leading out of Harrisburg, so nothing could be transmitted
+excepting under his control. Lincoln got to Philadelphia without
+trouble, was put aboard the express at midnight, and then at dawn
+Scott reunited his wires and called up Washington, a group of anxious
+men around him. Soon the message came back, slowly ticked out from the
+instrument, "Plums delivered nuts safely." Scott knew what it meant;
+he jumped to his feet, threw up his hat and shouted, "Lincoln's in
+Washington." The Baltimore plotters were thus foiled, as the new
+President passed quietly through that city before daylight, and
+several hours earlier than they had expected him.
+
+
+THE CUMBERLAND AND LEBANON VALLEYS.
+
+Harrisburg stands in the centre of the great Appalachian Valley, where
+it is bisected by the broad Susquehanna. To the southwest it stretches
+away to the Potomac as the Cumberland Valley, and to the northeast it
+spreads across to the Schuylkill as the fertile Lebanon Valley. The
+high mountain wall of the Kittatinny bounds it on the northwest, with
+all the rivers, as heretofore described, breaking out through various
+"gaps." In the Colonial days, when Indian forays were frequent, the
+Province of Pennsylvania defended the entrances to this fertile
+valley by a chain of frontier forts located at these gaps, with
+attendant block-houses, each post garrisoned by from twenty to eighty
+Provincial soldiers, as its importance demanded. Benjamin Franklin,
+who was then commissioned as a Colonel, was prominent in the advocacy
+of these frontier defences, and he personally organized the settlers
+and arranged the garrisons. Fort Hyndshaw began the chain on the
+Delaware, there were other forts on the Lehigh and Schuylkill, and
+Fort Henry located on the Swatara, now Lebanon, while just above
+Harrisburg was Fort Hunter, commanding the passage of the Susquehanna
+through the Dauphin Gap.
+
+Over in the Cumberland Valley, about nineteen miles from Harrisburg,
+is Carlisle, a town of some nine thousand people, in a rich country,
+and the chief settlement of that valley. Here is located in what were
+formerly the army barracks, coming down from the time when this was a
+frontier post, the Government Indian Training School, where about
+eight hundred Indian boys and girls are instructed, being brought from
+the far western tribes to be taught the arts and methods of
+civilization. These Indian children are numerous in the streets and on
+the railway trains, with their straight hair, round swarthy faces and
+high cheek bones, and show the surprising influence of a civilizing
+education in humanizing their features and modifying their nomadic
+traits. They have quite a noted military organization and band at the
+School. Dickinson College, a foundation of the Methodist Church, is at
+Carlisle, having begun its work in 1783, when it was named after John
+Dickinson, then the President of Pennsylvania, who took great interest
+in it and made valuable gifts. Among its graduates were President
+James Buchanan and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. Carlisle was
+President Washington's headquarters in 1794, during the "Whisky
+Insurrection" in Western Pennsylvania. After the United States
+Government got fairly started, the Congress in 1791 imposed a tax of
+seven cents per gallon on whisky. This made a great disturbance among
+the frontier settlers of Pennsylvania, who were largely Scotch-Irish,
+the population west of the Kittatinny to the Ohio River being then
+estimated at seventy thousand. They had no market for their grain, but
+they made it into whisky, which found ready sale. A horse could carry
+two kegs of eight gallons each on the bridle paths across the
+mountains, and it was worth a dollar a gallon in the east. Returning,
+the horseback load was usually iron worth sixteen cents a pound, or
+salt at five dollars a bushel. Every farmer had a still, and the
+whisky thus became practically the money of the people on account of
+its purchasing value. Opposition to the tax began in riots. A crowd of
+"Whisky boys" from Bedford came into Carlisle and burnt the Chief
+Justice in effigy, setting up a liberty pole with the words "Liberty
+and No Excise on Whisky." President Washington called for troops to
+enforce the law, and this angered them. One John Holcroft, a ready
+writer, appeared, and wrote sharp articles against the law and the
+army, over the signature of "Tom the Tinker." These were printed in
+handbills, and the historian says "half the trees in Western
+Pennsylvania were whitened with Tom the Tinker's notices." Officials
+sent to collect the tax were roughly treated, farmers who paid it were
+beaten by masked men, and one man who rented his house to a tax
+collector was captured at midnight by a crowd of disguised vigilants,
+who carried him into the woods, sheared his hair, tarred, feathered
+and tied him to a tree.
+
+Soon there were gathered at Carlisle an army of thirteen thousand men
+from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia, under Governor
+Henry Lee of Virginia. President Washington and Secretary of the
+Treasury Alexander Hamilton came to Carlisle, and accompanied the
+troops, in October, 1794, on their march across the mountains to
+Bedford. The Governors of New Jersey and Pennsylvania led the troops
+of their respective States, and in the army were many Revolutionary
+veterans. As they advanced they found Tom the Tinker's notices on the
+trees, of which the following is a specimen:
+
+"Brethren, you must not think to frighten us with fine arranged bits
+of infantry, cavalry and artillery, composed of your watermelon armies
+taken from the Jersey shores. They would cut a much better figure in
+warring with crabs and oysters about the banks of the Delaware. It is
+a common thing for Indians to fight your best armies in the proportion
+of one to five; therefore we would not hesitate to attack this army at
+the rate of one to ten."
+
+The soldiers riddled these notices with bullets and pressed on,
+hunting for "Tom Tinker's men," as the insurgents came to be called.
+But they never seemed able to find them. All the people seen told how
+they were forced by threats, and when asked where the persons were who
+threatened them, replied, "Oh, they have run off." The army finally
+reached Pittsburg, the people submitted to the law and paid the tax,
+the insurrection was suppressed, and the army returned and was
+disbanded. The whisky excise was peacefully collected afterwards until
+the tax was repealed.
+
+In the Lebanon Valley east of Harrisburg are important iron furnaces,
+and here are the "Cornwall Ore Banks," which is one of the greatest
+iron-ore deposits in the world--less rich than some others, possibly,
+but having a practically exhaustless supply almost alongside these
+furnaces. There are three hills of solid iron ore, one of them having
+been worked long before the Revolution, the original furnace, still
+existing, dating from 1742. This great Cornwall iron mine was bought
+in 1737 for $675, including a large tract of land. A half-century
+later $42,500 was paid for a one-sixth interest, and to-day a
+one-forty-eighth interest is estimated worth upwards of $500,000.
+These ores have some sulphur in them, and are therefore baked in ovens
+to remove it. They yield about 50 per cent. of iron. A geologist some
+time ago reported upon the ore banks that there were thirty millions
+of tons of ore in sight above the water-level, being over three times
+the amount taken out since the workings began in the eighteenth
+century. The deposits extend to a depth of several hundred feet under
+the surface, thus indefinitely multiplying the prospective yield.
+
+
+THE SUSQUEHANNA HEADWATERS.
+
+Otsego Lake, the source of the Susquehanna River, is one of the
+prettiest lakes in New York State, and is at an elevation of eleven
+hundred feet above tide. It is nine miles long and about a mile wide,
+the Susquehanna issuing from its southern end at Cooperstown, a hamlet
+of two thousand people, beautifully situated amid the high rolling
+hills surrounding the lake. The name of the lake comes from the
+"Ote-sa-ga rock" at the outlet, a small, round-topped, beehive-shaped
+boulder a few rods from the shore, just where the lake condenses into
+the river. This was the Indian Council rock, to which they came to
+hold meetings and make treaties, and it was well-known among the
+Iroquois and the Lenni Lenapes. James Fenimore Cooper, the novelist,
+who has immortalized all this region, called the lake the
+"Glimmerglass." His father, Judge William Cooper, founded the village
+of Cooperstown in 1786, afterwards bringing his infant son from
+Burlington, New Jersey, where he was born in 1789. Here the great
+American novelist lived until his death in 1851, his grave, under a
+plain horizontal slab, being in the little churchyard of Christ
+Episcopal Church. There is a monument to him in Lakewood Cemetery,
+about a mile distant, surmounted by a statue of his legendary hunter
+"Leatherstocking," who has been described as "a man who had the
+simplicity of a woodsman, the heroism of a savage, the faith of a
+Christian, and the feeling of a poet." The old Cooper mansion, his
+home, Otsego Hall, was burnt in 1854, and its site is marked by a rock
+in the middle of the road, surrounded by a railing. "Hannah's Hill,"
+named after his daughter, and commanding a magnificent view, which he
+always described with rapture, is on the western shore of the lake,
+just out of town. The charm of Cooper's genius and the magic of his
+description have given Otsego Lake a world-wide fame. In one place he
+described it as "a broad sheet of water, so placid and limpid that it
+resembled a bed of the pure mountain atmosphere compressed into a
+setting of hills and woods. Nothing is wanted but ruined castles and
+recollections, to raise it to the level of the scenery of the Rhine."
+And thus has the poet sung of it:
+
+     "O Haunted Lake, from out whose silver fountains
+       The mighty Susquehanna takes its rise;
+     O Haunted Lake, among the pine-clad mountains,
+       Forever smiling upward to the skies,--
+     A master's hand hath painted all thy beauties;
+       A master's mind hath peopled all thy shore
+     With wraiths of mighty hunters and fair maidens,
+       Haunting thy forest-glades forevermore."
+
+All around Otsego Lake and its neighborhood are the scenes which
+Cooper has interwoven into his novel, _The Deer-Slayer_. About seven
+miles northwest are the well-known Richfield Springs (magnesia and
+sulphur), near Candarago Lake. This Indian name, meaning "on the
+lake," has recently been revived to supersede the old title of
+Schuyler's Lake for this beautiful sheet of water, enbosomed in green
+and sloping hills, which is the chief scenic charm of Richfield. To
+the eastward from Otsego Lake is the romantic Cherry Valley, another
+attractive summer resort, and the scene of a sad Indian massacre in
+1778, the site of the old fort that was then captured being still
+exhibited, with the graves of the murdered villagers, to whom a
+monument has been erected. A few miles farther, in a narrow upland
+wooded valley surrounded by high hills, are the Sharon Springs
+(sulphur and chalybeate), which in earlier times were so popular with
+our German citizens, who were attracted by the resemblance to the
+Fatherland, that the place was called the "Baden-Baden of America."
+The name of Sharon came from Sharon in Connecticut, and the spring
+water is discharged with a crust of white and flocculent sulphur into
+a stream not inappropriately called the Brimstone Brook. In this
+valley, east of the springs, one of the last Revolutionary battles was
+fought, Colonel Willett's American force in 1781 routing a detachment
+of Tories and Indians with severe loss. There are grottoes in the
+neighborhood abounding in stalactites and beautiful crystals of
+sulphate of lime. Not far away is the noted Howe's Cave, an immense
+cavern, said to extend for eleven miles underground, being an old
+water-channel in the lower Helderberg limestone, and which has many
+visitors, attracted by its fine display of stalactites and grand rock
+chambers, with the usual subterranean lake and stream. All this region
+was originally settled by Germans from the Palatinate.
+
+The Susquehanna, steadily gaining in volume, flows in wayward course
+down rapids and around many bends to Binghamton, near the southern
+border of New York, where it receives the Chenango River, and its
+elevation has declined to eight hundred and sixty feet. This is a busy
+manufacturing city and railway junction, having forty thousand
+inhabitants. The first settlers came in 1787, and William Bingham of
+Philadelphia owning the land at the confluence of the rivers, the town
+was afterwards named for him. The Chenango Canal connects the
+Susquehanna waters from here with the Erie Canal, about ninety miles
+northward, at Utica, the Indian word Chenango meaning "the bull
+thistle." Entering Pennsylvania, the Susquehanna now flows many miles
+past mountain and village, around great bends and breaking through the
+Allegheny ridges, passes along the Wyoming Valley, already described,
+and finally going out through the Nanticoke Gap, reaches
+Northumberland, where it receives its chief tributary, the West
+Branch. This great stream comes for two hundred miles from the
+westward through the Allegheny ranges, passing Lewisburg, the seat of
+the Baptist University of Lewisburg, Milton, and the noted lumber town
+of Williamsport, famous for its great log boom. This arrangement for
+collecting logs cost a million dollars, and extends about four miles
+up the river above the town, with its massive piers and braces, and
+will hold three hundred millions of feet of lumber. The river front is
+lined with basins and sawmills. In earlier years this boom has been so
+filled with pine and hemlock logs in the spring that the river could
+almost anywhere be crossed on a solid floor of timber. Unfortunately,
+however, the vast forests on the slopes of the Alleghenies have been
+so generally cut off that the trade has seriously declined. At
+Northumberland lived Dr. Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen
+gas, who died there in 1804, and is buried in the cemetery.
+
+The Susquehanna now becomes a broad river, and just below flows past
+Sunbury, the railway outlet of the extensive Shamokin coal district.
+This town was originally Fort Augusta, built in 1756 to guard the
+Susquehanna frontier just below the junction of its two branches. In
+the French and Indian War it had usually a garrison of a regiment, and
+it was then regarded as the best defensive work in Pennsylvania. After
+that war it gradually fell into decay, although during the Revolution
+it was always a refuge for the Susquehanna frontier settlers fleeing
+from Indian brutality and massacre. Many prominent officers of the
+Revolutionary army received their military training at this fort. The
+settlement was originally called Shamokin, from the Indian name of the
+creek here falling into the Susquehanna--Schakamo-kink, meaning, like
+Shackamaxon, "the place of eels." For fifty miles below Sunbury the
+broad Susquehanna winds among the mountain ranges, traversing one
+after another, until its channel is narrowed to pass through the great
+Dauphin Gap in the Kittatinny, five miles above Harrisburg, where the
+river bed has descended to an elevation of three hundred and twenty
+feet above tide.
+
+
+THE BEAUTIFUL BLUE JUNIATA.
+
+A long, low bridge carries the Pennsylvania Railroad across the river
+in front of Dauphin Gap, and a short distance above, in a delta of
+fertile islands, the Susquehanna receives its romantic tributary, the
+Juniata, flowing for a hundred miles from the heart of the
+Alleghenies, and breaking out of them through a notch cut down in the
+long ridge of the Tuscarora Mountain. Here is the iron-making town of
+Duncannon, settled by the sturdy Scotch-Irish, who were numerous along
+the Juniata and in its neighboring valleys, and who suffered greatly
+from Indian forays in the early days of the frontier. Upon Duncan's
+Island, the chief one in the delta, at the mouth of the Juniata, was
+the place of the council-fire of the Indian tribes of all this region.
+Now, this island is mainly a pleasure-ground, having spacious and
+shady groves, while the canal, crossing it from the Susquehanna to the
+Juniata, goes directly through an extensive Indian mound and
+burial-place. We will enter the fastnesses of the Alleghenies by the
+winding gorge of the "beautiful blue Juniata," flowing through
+magnificent scenery from the eastern face of the main Allegheny range
+out to the great river. It breaks down ridge after ridge, stretching
+broadly across the country, and presents superb landscapes and
+impressive mountain views. The route is a series of bends and gorges,
+the river crossing successive valleys between the ridges, now running
+for miles northeast along the base of a towering mountain and then
+turning east or southeast to break through it by a romantic pass. The
+glens and mountains, with ever-changing views, give an almost endless
+panorama. Softness of outline, massiveness and variety, are the
+peculiarities of Juniata scenery. The stream is small, not carrying a
+great amount of water in ordinary seasons, and it seems as much by
+strategy as by power to have overcome the obstacles and made its
+mountain passes. The rended mountains, steep tree-covered slopes and
+frequent isolated sentinel-like hills rising from the glens, have all
+been moulded into rounded forms by the action of the elements, leaving
+few abrupt precipices or naked rocks to mar the regularity of the
+natural beauties. The valleys and lower parts of the mountain sides
+are generally cultivated, the fields sloping up to the mantle of
+forest crowning the flanks and summits of the ridges. Every change of
+sunshine or shadow, and the steady progress of the seasons, give new
+tints to these glens and mountains. At times the ravines are deep and
+the river tortuous, and again it meanders across the rich flat bottom
+lands of a broad valley. In its winding course among these mountain
+ranges, this renowned river passes through and displays almost the
+whole geological formation of Pennsylvania. The primary rocks are to
+the eastward of the Susquehanna, and the bituminous coal measures
+begin on the western Allegheny slope, so that the river cuts into a
+rock stratification over six miles in thickness, as one after another
+formation comes to the surface.
+
+We go through the narrow Tuscarora Gap, and are journeying over the
+lands of the Tuscaroras, one of the Iroquois Six Nations, who came up
+from the South, and were given the name of Tuscarora, or the
+"shirt-wearer," because long contact with the whites had led them to
+adopt that garment. Beyond the Gap, the Tuscarora Valley is enclosed
+on its northwest side by the Turkey Mountain, the next western ridge,
+and it was a region of terrible Indian conflicts and massacres in the
+pioneer days, when the first fort built there was burnt, and every
+settler either killed or carried off into captivity. Here was fought
+the "Grasshopper War" between the Tuscaroras and Delawares. They had
+villages on opposite sides of the river, and one day the children
+disputed about some grasshoppers. The quarrel involved first the
+squaws and then the men, a bloody battle following. Mifflin, an
+attractive town, is located here, and to the westward the Juniata
+breaks through the next great ridge crossing its path, passing a
+massive gorge formed by the Shade and Blue Mountains, flowing for
+miles in the deep and narrow winding canyon between them, the
+far-famed "Lewistown or Long Narrows," having the railway hanging upon
+one bank and the canal upon the other. Broken, slaty shingle covers
+most of the hill-slopes, and in the broad valley, above the lengthened
+gorge, is Lewistown, nestling at the base of a huge mountain at the
+outlet of the beautiful Kishicoquillas Valley, spreading up among the
+high hills to the northward--its name meaning "the snakes are already
+in their dens." The hero of this attractive region in the eighteenth
+century, and then its most distinguished inhabitant, was Logan, the
+chief of the Mingoes and Cayugas, whose speeches, preserved by Thomas
+Jefferson, are a favorite in school declamation. He was of giant
+mould, nearly seven feet high, and lived at Logan's Spring in the
+valley. He was the friend of the white men, but when the frontier
+became too well settled for him longer to find the deer on which he
+subsisted, selling their skins to the traders, he went westward to the
+Ohio River, locating near Wheeling. Here, without provocation, his
+family were cruelly massacred, and this ended Logan's love for the
+whites. He became a relentless foe, wreaking indiscriminate vengeance,
+until killed in the Shawnee wars beyond the Ohio, having joined that
+hostile tribe. The Lewistown Narrows are the finest mountain pass of
+the Juniata, the peaks precipitously rising over a thousand feet above
+the river, which forces a passage between them for more than eight
+miles, the densely wooded cliffs so enclosing and overshadowing the
+gorge as to give it an appearance of deepest gloom.
+
+
+THE STANDING STONE AND SINKING SPRING.
+
+Westward beyond the valley rises the next ridge pierced by the Juniata
+in its outflow, Jack's Mountain, and its gorge is known as "Jack's
+Narrows." Here penetrated Captain Jack Armstrong in the early colonial
+days, a hunter and Indian trader, whose cabin was burnt and wife and
+children massacred, making him always afterwards an avenging Nemesis,
+roving along the Juniata Valley and killing Indians indiscriminately.
+Jack's Narrows is a pass even more contracted than that below
+Lewistown, and a profusion of shingle and broken stone covers its
+mountain sides, the deranged limestone strata in places standing
+almost upright. Mount Union is in the valley east of this pass, and
+beyond it is the chief town of the Juniata, Huntingdon, which has
+about eight thousand people. This was the oldest settlement on the
+river, ninety-seven miles west of Harrisburg, the ancient "Standing
+Stone," where the Indians of the valley for centuries met to hold
+their councils. The earliest white settlers came in 1754. The original
+Standing Stone of Huntingdon, erected by the Indians, was a granite
+column, about fourteen feet high and six inches square, covered with
+strange characters, which were the sacred records of the Oneidas. Once
+the Tuscaroras stole it, but the Oneidas followed, and, fighting for
+their sacred treasure, recaptured it. When the whites came along, the
+Oneidas, who had joined the French, went west, carrying the stone with
+them. Afterwards, a second stone, much like the first, was set up, and
+a fragment of it is now preserved at Huntingdon. Here was built a
+large fort anterior to the Revolution, which was a refuge for the
+frontier settlers. The "Standing Stone" is engraved as an appropriate
+symbol on the city seal of Huntingdon, being surrounded by a
+representation of mountains, and the name of "Oneida" (the granite) is
+preserved in a township across the river. Selina, the Countess of
+Huntingdon, who was a benefactor of the University of Pennsylvania,
+had her titled name given the city. The then University Provost, Dr.
+William Smith, became owner of the town site, and thus remembered her
+generosity. About fifty miles southwest of Huntingdon, amid the
+mountains, is Bedford, noted for its chalybeate and sulphur springs,
+discovered in 1804, which have long been a favorite resort of
+Pennsylvanians on account of their healing waters. The whole country
+thereabout is filled with semi-bituminous coal measures, furnishing a
+lucrative traffic.
+
+Diminishing in volume, our attractive Juniata flows through a rough
+country above Huntingdon, after threading the pass in the lofty
+Warrior Ridge. Extending off to the southwestward is Morrison's Cove,
+a rich valley under the shadow of the long mountain ridge, which was
+settled in 1755 by the Dunkards. These singular people, among whose
+cardinal doctrines are peace and non-resistance, were attacked by the
+Indians in 1777, who entered the valley and almost exterminated the
+settlement. Most of them bowed submissively to the stroke of death,
+gently saying "Gottes wille sei gethan" (God's will be done). One,
+however, resisted, killed two Indians and escaped; but afterwards
+returning, the Dunkard Church tried him for this breach of faith, and
+he was excommunicated. In this region is the Sinking Spring, a strange
+water course originally appearing in a limestone cave, where it comes
+out of an arched opening, with sufficient water to turn a large mill;
+but it soon disappears underground, the concealed current being heard
+through fissures, bubbling far below. Then it returns to the surface,
+flowing some distance, enters another cave, passing under Cave
+Mountain, and finally reappears and falls into the Juniata, making, in
+its peculiar waywardness, as remarkable a stream as can anywhere be
+found. Here our famous Juniata River, dwindled to a little creek,
+comes down the mountain side, and we penetrate farther by following up
+the Little Juniata. It has brought us, through the great ridges, into
+the heart of the Appalachian region, to the eastern base of the main
+Allegheny Mountain, on the flanks of which are its sources. It has
+displayed to us a noted valley, full of the story of early Colonial
+contests, massacres and perils, the scenes of the fearless missionary
+labors of Brainerd the Puritan and Loskiel the Moravian. Brainerd
+recognized the pagan idolatry of the Indians, and did not hesitate to
+take the Bible to their solemn religious festivals and expound its
+divine principles, to spoil the incantations and frustrate the charms
+of their medicine men. Once a Nanticoke pontiff got into a hot
+argument with Brainerd, saying God had taught him religion and he
+would never turn from it; that he would not believe in the Devil; and
+he added that the souls of the dead passed to the South, where the
+good lived in a fair city, while the evil hovered forever in outer
+darkness. Many are the romances of the attractive Juniata:
+
+     "Gay was the mountain song
+       Of bright Alfarata,
+     Where sweep the waters of
+       The blue Juniata:
+     'Strong and true my arrows are,
+       In my painted quiver,
+     Swift goes my light canoe
+       Adown the rapid river.'"
+
+
+CROSSING THE MOUNTAIN TOP.
+
+At the eastern base of the main Allegheny range a long mountain valley
+stretches broadly from the far northeast to the southwest, and here is
+Tyrone, a settlement of extensive iron works, and the outlet of the
+greatest bituminous coal-fields of Central Pennsylvania, the
+Clearfield district, the town of Clearfield being about forty miles to
+the northwest. Northeast of Tyrone, this valley is called the Bald
+Eagle Valley, a picturesque and fertile region; and to the southwest
+it is the Tuckahoe Valley. At the base of the Bald Eagle Mountain,
+thirty-three miles from Tyrone, is the town of Bellefonte, another
+iron region, handling the products of the Bald Eagle and Nittany
+Valleys, and receiving its name from the "Beautiful Fount" which
+supplies the town with water. This is one of the most remarkable
+springs in the Alleghenies, pouring out two hundred and eighty
+thousand gallons of the purest water every minute. Following the
+Tuckahoe Valley southward, at the base of the main Allegheny range we
+come to the Pennsylvania Railroad town of Altoona, and eight miles
+farther to Hollidaysburg. Each is a representative town--Hollidaysburg
+of the past methods of crossing the mountain top, and Altoona of the
+present.
+
+In 1836 Mr. David Stephenson, the famous British railway engineer,
+made a journey across Pennsylvania by the methods then in vogue, and
+wrote that he travelled from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, three hundred
+and ninety-five miles by the route taken, in ninety-one hours, at a
+cost of three pounds sterling, about four cents a mile, and that one
+hundred and eighteen miles of the journey, which he calls
+"extraordinary," were by railroads, and two hundred and seventy-seven
+miles by canals. This was the line used for twenty years, a main route
+of travel from the seaboard to the West, having been put into
+operation in 1834. It followed the Columbia Railroad from Philadelphia
+to Columbia on the Susquehanna, the canal up the Susquehanna and
+Juniata Rivers to Hollidaysburg, a portage railroad by inclined planes
+over the main Allegheny Mountain ridge to Johnstown, and the canal
+again, down the Conemaugh and Allegheny Rivers to Pittsburg. There
+were one hundred and seventy-two miles of canal from Columbia to
+Hollidaysburg, which went through more than a hundred locks and
+crossed thirty-three aqueducts, having risen about six hundred feet
+above the level at Columbia when it reached the eastern face of the
+mountain. The canal west of Johnstown was one hundred and five miles
+long, descended sixty-four locks, and went through a tunnel of one
+thousand feet. The Portage Railroad of thirty-six miles crossed the
+mountain by Blair's Gap, above Hollidaysburg, at twenty-three hundred
+and twenty-six feet elevation, through a tunnel nine hundred feet
+long. There were ten inclined planes, five on each side. The steepest
+side of the Allegheny Mountain being its eastern face, the railway
+from Hollidaysburg to the summit, though only ten miles long, ascended
+fourteen hundred feet, while twenty miles of railway on the western
+side descended eleven hundred and seventy-two feet. The cars hauled up
+the planes each carried three tons of freight, and three cars were
+hauled at a single draft. There could be twenty-four cars carrying
+seventy-two tons passed over in one hour, which was ample for the
+traffic at that time, the average business being three hundred tons of
+freight a day. This amount would be carried in less than ten of the
+big cars of to-day. It took passengers eight hours to go over the
+mountain, halting one hour on the summit for dinner.
+
+This route was superseded by the Pennsylvania Railroad crossing above
+Altoona, opened in 1854, a road made for ordinary trains; and then
+Hollidaysburg became a town of iron manufacture, losing the bustle and
+business of the Portage, which was abandoned. The railroad company
+acquired a large tract of land between the main Allegheny range and
+the Brush Mountain to the southward, which has a deep notch, called
+the "Kettle," cut down into it, opening a distant prospect of gray
+mountain ridges behind. Here has been established the most completely
+representative railway city in the world, having enormous railway
+shops, a gigantic establishment, and a population of thirty-five
+thousand, almost all in one way or another dependent on the
+Pennsylvania Railroad. Altoona is at an elevation of about eleven
+hundred feet above tide, and the railway climbs to the summit of the
+mountain by a grade of ninety feet to the mile, winding around an
+indented valley to get the necessary elevation. At its head this
+valley divides into two smaller glens, with a towering crag rising
+between them. Having ascended the northern side, the railway curves
+around, crossing the smaller glens upon high embankments, doubling
+upon itself, and mounting steadily higher by running up the opposite
+side of the valley to the outer edge of the ridge. This sweeping curve
+gives striking scenic effects, and is the noted Pennsylvania "Horse
+Shoe," and the huge crag between the smaller glens, in which the head
+of the Horse Shoe curve is partly hewn, is Kittanning Point. This
+means the "great stream," two creeks issuing out of the glens uniting
+below it; and here was the route, at sixteen hundred feet elevation,
+of the ancient Indian trail across the mountain, the "Kittanning
+Path," in their portage between the Juniata and Ohio waters. It shows
+how closely the modern railroad builder has followed the route set for
+him by the original road-makers among the red men. The Pennsylvania
+Railroad carries four tracks over the mountain, piercing the summit by
+two tunnels at about twenty-two hundred feet elevation, with two
+tracks in each. The mountain rises much higher, and has coal mines,
+coke ovens and miners' cabins on the very top. This is the watershed
+dividing the Atlantic waters from those of the Mississippi, flowing to
+the Gulf, and Gallitzin, a flourishing mining village, is the summit
+station of the railway.
+
+
+  [Illustration: _The Conemaugh near Florence_]
+
+GOING DOWN THE CONEMAUGH.
+
+In the latter part of the eighteenth century there were but two white
+men living in all this region. The first one there was Thomas Blair,
+whose cabin was on the mountain at Blair's Gap, where the Portage
+Railroad afterwards came over. The other was Michael Maguire, who came
+along in 1790, and going through the Gap, concluded to settle among
+the Indians about twelve miles away, at what was afterwards Loretto.
+These rugged pioneers spent most of their time fighting and watching
+the Indians and wild beasts, and gathered a few companions
+around them. Here afterwards came Prince Demetrius Augustine
+Gallitzin, who left the Russian army in 1792 and visited America,
+designing to travel. He became a Catholic priest, and liking these
+mountains, established a mission at Loretto in 1798, spending a
+fortune in maintaining it, his missionary charge ultimately extending
+over the whole mountain region. He attracted a population of about
+three thousand, chiefly Germans and Irish, repeatedly refused the
+episcopacy, and continued his labors until his death at Loretto in
+1840. His remains lie in front of his church, surmounted by a
+monument, while the centenary of this St. Michael's Church of Loretto
+was marked in October, 1899, by erecting his bronze statue, the
+Prelate-Prince Gallitzin being portrayed as he appeared in the
+Allegheny wilderness, wearing cassock, surplice and a skull-cap in
+lieu of the beretta, this being his usual head-gear at service.
+Loretto, named after the city on the Adriatic, was the first nucleus
+of population in this elevated district, and is about five miles north
+of the railway. Loretto was the first settlement in this region, but
+afterwards the coal and iron attracted the Welsh, who came in numbers,
+and founded the town of Ebensburg, about eleven miles from the
+railway. They gave their familiar name of Cambria to the county. Here
+on the mountain side, at an elevation of over two thousand feet, are
+the Cresson Springs, a noted health resort, with a half-dozen
+medicinal springs, the chief being an astringent chalybeate and a
+strong alum.
+
+The route west of the mountain is down the valley of the Conemaugh, in
+a district underlaid with coal, and having at every village evidence
+of this industry. The Conemaugh is "the other stream" of the Indians,
+and winding down its tortuous valley, with coal and iron all about,
+the railway comes to the settlement of Conemaugh, which spreads into
+the larger town of Johnstown, the seat of the great Cambria Steel
+Works. The Conemaugh Valley is a deep canyon, and Conemaugh village
+was the western terminus of the mountain portage, where the canal
+began. A little flat space about a mile beyond, at the junction of
+Stony Creek, was in early times an Indian village, then known from its
+sachem as "Kickenapawling's Old Town." When the white men ventured
+over the mountain, there came among them a hardy German pioneer named
+Joseph Jahns, who built a log cabin on the flat in 1791, and from him
+the cluster of little houses that grew afterwards became known as
+Jahnstown. Then came the Welsh miners and iron-workers, and they set
+up charcoal furnaces, and soon changed the name to Johnstown. From
+this humble beginning grew the largest iron and steel establishment in
+Pennsylvania. Its ores, coal and limestone were originally all dug out
+of the neighboring ridges, though now it uses Lake Superior ores. The
+Conemaugh Valley is here enclosed by high hills, and in the centre of
+the town the railroad is carried across the river on a solid stone
+bridge with low arches.
+
+This region, on May 31, 1889, was the scene of one of the most
+appalling disasters of modern times. A deluge of rain for the greater
+part of two days had fallen upon the Alleghenies, and made great
+freshets in both the Juniata and the Conemaugh. On the South Fork of
+the Conemaugh, fifteen miles above Johnstown, is Conemaugh Lake, a
+reservoir there formed by damming the stream, so that it covered a
+surface of five hundred acres--the dam, a thousand feet long, being in
+places one hundred feet high. This had been made as a fishing-ground
+by a club of Pittsburg anglers. The excessive rains filled the lake,
+and the weakened dam burst, its twenty millions of tons of waters
+rushing down the already swollen Conemaugh in a mass a half-mile wide
+stretching across the valley and forty to fifty feet high, carrying
+everything before it. The lake level was about three hundred feet
+higher than Johnstown, and every village, tree, house, and the whole
+railway, with much of the soil and rocks, were carried before the
+resistless flood to Johnstown, where the mass was stopped by and piled
+up behind the stone railway bridge, and there caught fire, the
+resistless flood, to get out, sweeping away nearly the whole town in
+the valley bottom. This vast calamity destroyed from three to five
+thousand lives, for no accurate estimate could be ever made, and ten
+millions of property. It took the flood about seven minutes of actual
+time to pass over the fifteen miles between the lake and Johnstown,
+and there was left, after it had passed, a wide bed, like a great
+Alpine glacial _moraine_, filled with ponderous masses of sand and
+stones and wreckage of every description, the resistless torrent being
+afterwards reduced to a little stream of running water. It required
+many months to recover from this appalling destruction; but the people
+went to work with a will and rebuilt the town, the steel works and the
+railway, which for a dozen miles down the valley had been completely
+obliterated. This terrible disaster excited universal sympathy, and a
+relief fund amounting to nearly $3,000,000 was contributed from all
+parts of the world.
+
+
+LIGONIER AND HANNASTOWN.
+
+The whole mountain district west of Johnstown is filled with coal
+mines, coke ovens and iron furnaces, this being the "Pittsburg Coal
+District." The Conemaugh breaks through the next western ridge, the
+Laurel Mountain, and the broadening river winds along its deep valley
+between high wooded hills. It is a veritable "Black Country," and ten
+miles beyond, the river passes the finest mountain gorge on the
+western slope of the Alleghenies, the deep and winding canyon of the
+Packsaddle Narrows, by which the Conemaugh breaks out of the Chestnut
+Ridge, the western border of the Allegheny ranges. For two hundred
+miles the railroad has gone through or over range after range, and
+this grand pass, encompassed by mountains rising twelve hundred feet
+above the bottom of the gorge, is the impressive exit at the final
+portal. The main railroad then leaves the Conemaugh, and goes off
+southwestward along the slope of Chestnut Ridge towards Greensburg and
+Pittsburg. The river unites with the Loyalhanna Creek below, and then
+flows as the Kiskiminetas down to the Allegheny. The name of
+Loyalhanna means the "middle stream," while the tradition is that an
+impatient Indian warrior, anxious to move forward, shouted in the
+night to his comrades encamped on the other river--"Giesh-gumanito"--
+"let us make daylight"--and from this was derived its name of
+Kiskiminetas. A branch railroad from here goes to Blairsville, named
+in memory of the solitary pioneer of Blair's Gap, and another
+northward leads to the town of Indiana. The great Chestnut Ridge which
+the main railway runs along, gradually descending the slope, is the
+last mountain the westbound traveller sees until he reaches the
+Rockies. For seventy miles to the southwestward the Chestnut Ridge and
+Laurel Mountain extend in parallels, their crest lines being almost
+exactly ten miles apart, and enclosing the Ligonier Valley, out of
+which flows northward the Loyalhanna Creek, breaking through the
+Chestnut Ridge. Near this pass in 1757 was built Fort Ligonier,
+another of the frontier outposts which resisted the incursions of the
+French and Indians, who then held all the country to the westward. In
+the Chestnut Ridge at Hillside is the "Great Bear Cave," an extensive
+labyrinth of passages and spacious chambers stretching more than a
+mile underground, which, like most such places, has its subterranean
+river and its tale of woe. A young girl, stolen by gypsies, to escape
+from them took refuge in this cave, and losing her way, perished, her
+bones being found years afterwards. Explorers since have always
+unwound balls of twine in this labyrinth, to be able to retrace their
+steps.
+
+In a good farming district of the Westmoreland region is Greensburg,
+another railway junction where branches go southward to the
+Monongahela coalfields. Robert Hanna built a house near here in the
+eighteenth century, around which gathered some thirty log cabins, and
+the place in course of time became known as Hannastown, prominent in
+the early history of Western Pennsylvania. Here was held the first
+court convened west of the Alleghenies, and here were passed the
+patriotic resolutions of May 16, 1775, upon receipt of the news of the
+battle of Lexington at the opening of the Revolution, which sounded
+the keynote for the Declaration of Independence the following year.
+Here also first appeared during the Revolution General Arthur St.
+Clair, an immigrant from Scotland, the grandson of the Earl of
+Roslyn, who lived in an humble house on Chestnut Ridge. He served in
+the French and Indian wars, and was the British commander at Fort
+Ligonier. Horrible Indian massacres and terrible retributions by the
+settlers were the chief features of the Revolutionary War in
+Westmoreland. At its close, the whites sent an expedition in 1782
+against the Wyandottes, which was defeated. The savages soon wreaked
+fearful vengeance, raiding the region in July of that year and burning
+Hannastown, which was never rebuilt. Greensburg appeared soon
+afterwards, however, and in 1875 it celebrated the centenary of the
+Hannastown resolutions with patriotic spirit. In its Presbyterian
+churchyard lie the remains of General St. Clair, who, after founding
+and naming the city of Cincinnati, returned here, and died in 1818, at
+the age of eighty-four, in his lonely cabin on Chestnut Ridge, in
+unmerited poverty and obscurity. The stone over his grave has this
+significant inscription: "The earthly remains of General Arthur St.
+Clair are deposited beneath this humble monument, which is erected to
+supply the place of a nobler one due from his country." Being in a
+region of fine agriculture and prolific mines, Greensburg is a
+prosperous and wealthy town.
+
+
+BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT.
+
+Natural gas is added to coal and coke in the region beyond Greensburg,
+and the villages display flaring gas torches at night for street
+lamps. The whole country, north, south and west, is a network of
+railways and a maze of mines, having long rows of burning coke ovens
+lighting the sky with their lurid glare. Here are mined the
+Westmoreland gas coals. The valley of the Monongahela River, coming up
+from West Virginia, approaches from the southward, a great highway for
+coal boats out to the Ohio and the West, also receiving a large coal
+tribute from its branch, the Youghiogheny, flowing by crooked course
+through Fayette County. Alongside the Monongahela is the great Edgar
+Thomson Steel Works, one of the chief establishments of the Carnegie
+Steel Company, making railway rails. Here is the famous Colonial
+battlefield of Western Pennsylvania, made immortal by General
+Braddock's defeat in July, 1755. This region was then a thick forest,
+through which an Indian trail coming over the Monongahela led to the
+junction of the two rivers forming the Ohio, where the French had
+established their stockade and trading post of Fort Duquesne. Braddock
+came into this region from beyond the mountains, his object being the
+capture of the fort. His defeat, a great event in our Colonial
+history, was due to his ignorance of the methods of Indian fighting
+and his refusal to listen to those who understood it; but he paid the
+penalty with his life, being shot, as was believed at the time, by one
+of his own men, after having had five horses shot under him. It was
+in rallying the defeated remnant that Washington, the senior surviving
+officer, won his first military laurels. Braddock crossed the river
+and was caught in an ambuscade, eight hundred and fifty French and
+Indians surprising and defeating his force of about twenty-five
+hundred British regulars and Virginia Provincial troops, the loss
+being nearly eight hundred. Washington led the remnant back to
+Virginia, carrying Braddock about forty miles on the retreat, when he
+died. He was buried at night in the centre of the road, Washington
+reading the Episcopal burial service by torchlight, and the defeated
+army marched over the grave to conceal its location from the enemy. A
+handsome monument is erected on the battlefield at Braddock's. And
+thus, through iron mills and coal mines, amid smoke and busy industry,
+the Pennsylvania Railroad enters Pittsburg, the "Iron City."
+
+
+THE GREAT IRON CITY.
+
+The Monongahela River coming from the southward, and the Allegheny
+River flowing from the northward, drain the western defiles of the
+Alleghenies, and at Pittsburg unite to form the Ohio River. Each comes
+to the junction through a deeply-cut canyon, and at the confluence is
+a triangular flat upon which the original town was built. Like most
+American rivers, all these have names of Indian origin. Monongahela is
+the "river of high banks, breaking off in places and falling down."
+Ohio is a Seneca word, originally pronounced "O-hee-o," and meaning
+the "beautiful river" or the "fair water," and Allegheny in the
+language of the Delawares has much the same signification, meaning
+"the fairest stream." All the Indians regarded the two as really the
+same river, of which the Monongahela was a tributary. The first white
+men exploring this region were the French, who came down from the
+lakes and Canada, when they spread through the entire Mississippi
+Valley. In 1753, however, Washington with a surveying party was sent
+out by Virginia and carefully examined the site of Pittsburg,
+advising, on his return, that a fort should be built there to check
+the advance of the French, and the next year this was done. Scarcely
+was it completed, however, when the French sent a summons to
+surrender, addressed "From the Commander-in-chief of His Most
+Christian Majesty's troops now on the Beautiful River to the Commander
+of those of Great Britain." A French force soon appeared, and the fort
+was abandoned. This began the French and Indian Colonial War that
+continued seven years, the French then erecting their famous fort and
+trading-post guarding the head of the Ohio, which they named after the
+great French naval commander of the seventeenth century, Marquis
+Abraham Duquesne. Then came Braddock's defeat in 1755, and for some
+time the region was quiet. Moravian missionary influence, however,
+had by 1758 detached many of the Indians from the French interest, and
+after another British attack and repulse, General Forbes came with a
+large force, and the French abandoned the fort and blew it up.
+Immediately rebuilt by the English, a Virginia garrison occupied the
+post, and it was named Fort Pitt. Then a larger fort was built at a
+cost of $300,000 and garrisoned by artillery, which the enemy vainly
+besieged in 1763. The next year a town site was laid out near the
+fort, and in 1770 it had twenty log houses. After the long succession
+of wars and massacres on that frontier had ceased, the village grew,
+and business began developing--at first, boat- and vessel-building,
+and then smelting and coal mining and the manufacture of glass. In
+1812 the first rolling-mill started, and the war with England in that
+year caused the opening of a cannon foundry, which became the Fort
+Pitt Iron Works. The village of Fort Pitt had become Pittsburg, and
+expanded vastly with the introduction of steam, and it became an
+extensive steamboat builder for the Western waters. Railroad
+connections gave it renewed impetus; natural gas used as a
+manufacturing fuel was a wonderful stimulant; and it now conducts an
+enormous trade with all parts of the country, and is the seat of the
+greatest iron, steel and glass industries in America.
+
+Few views are more striking than that given from the high hills
+overlooking Pittsburg. Rising steeply, almost from the water's edge,
+on the southern bank of the Monongahela River, is Mount Washington,
+three hundred and fifty feet high. Inclined-plane railways are
+constructed up the face of this hill, and mounting to the top, there
+is a superb view over the town. The Allegheny River comes from the
+northeast and the Monongahela from the southeast, through deep and
+winding gorges cut into the rolling tableland, and uniting form the
+Ohio, flowing away to the northwest also through a deep gorge,
+although its bordering ridges of hills are more widely separated.
+Pittsburg stands upon the low flat surface of the peninsula, above the
+junction of the rivers, which has some elongated ridgy hills,
+stretching eastward through the centre. Its situation and appearance
+have thus not inaptly been compared to a flatiron, the point being at
+the head of the Ohio, and these ridgy hills making the handle. The
+city has overflowed into extensive suburbs across both rivers, the
+aggregate population being more than a half-million. Numerous bridges
+span the rivers, the narrow shores between the steep hills bearing a
+mixed maze of railways and factories. Countless chimney-smokes and
+steam-jets come up in all directions, overhanging the town like a
+pall; and so impressive is the obscuration, combined with the lurid
+glare of furnaces and the weird white gleam of electric lights, that
+the elevated view down into Pittsburg seems a veritable pandemonium.
+So startling is it on a lowering day that it has been pointedly
+described by one who thus for the first time looked upon the "Smoky
+City," far down in its deep basin among the high hills, as appearing
+like "Hell with the lid off." There are plenty of railways in the
+scene, and scores of odd-looking, stumpy-prowed little steamboats
+built high above the water, having huge stern-wheels to drive them,
+with their noses thrust up on the sloping levee along the river bank,
+whereon is piled the cargoes, chiefly of iron products. The swift
+current turns all the sterns down stream, so that they lie diagonally
+towards the shore. Fleets of flat, shallow coal barges are moored
+along, waiting to be made up into tows for their journey down the
+Ohio, as Pittsburg has an extensive river trade, covering over twenty
+thousand miles of Western waters. Out of the weird and animated scene
+there come all sorts of busy noises, forges and trip-hammers pounding,
+steam hissing, railroad trains running, whistles screeching,
+locomotives puffing, bells ringing, so that with the flame jets
+rising, and the smokes of all colors blowing about, there is got a
+good idea of the active industries of this very busy place.
+
+
+PITTSBURG DEVELOPMENT.
+
+This wonderful industrial development all came within the nineteenth
+century. There is still preserved as a relic of its origin the little
+block-house citadel of the old Fort Pitt, down near the point of the
+peninsula where the rivers join. This has recently been restored by
+the Daughters of the American Revolution--a small square building with
+a pyramidal roof. The surrounding stockade long ago disappeared. There
+is in the Pittsburg City Hall an inscribed tablet from Fort Pitt
+bearing the date 1764. The old building, which was the scene of
+Pittsburg's earliest history, for it stands almost on the spot
+occupied by Fort Duquesne, is among modern mills and storehouses,
+about three hundred feet from the head of the Ohio. Pittsburg, after
+an almost exclusive devotion to manufacturing and business, began some
+years ago to cultivate artistic tastes in architecture, and has some
+very fine buildings. There is an elaborate Post-office and an
+interesting City Hall on Smithfield Street; but the finest building of
+all, and one of the best in the country, is the magnificent Romanesque
+Court-house, built at a cost of $2,500,000, and occupying a prominent
+position on a hill adjoining Fifth Avenue. There is a massive jail of
+similar architecture, and a "Bridge of Sighs" connects them, a
+beautifully designed arched and stone-covered bridge, thrown for a
+passageway across an intervening street. The main tower, giving a
+grand view, rises three hundred and twenty feet over the architectural
+pile, and, as in Venice, the convicted prisoner crosses the bridge
+from his trial to his doom. There are attractive churches, banks and
+business buildings, and eastward from the city, near Schenley Park, is
+the attractive Carnegie Library and Museum in Italian Renaissance,
+with a capacity for two hundred thousand volumes, a benefaction of Mr.
+Andrew Carnegie, originally costing $1,100,000, to which he has
+recently added $1,750,000 for its enlargement. The residential section
+is mainly on the hills east of Pittsburg and across the Allegheny
+River in Allegheny City, there being many attractive villas in
+beautiful situations on the surrounding highlands.
+
+But the great Pittsburg attraction is the multitude of factories that
+are its pride and create its prosperity. Some of these are among the
+greatest in the world--the Edgar Thomson Works and Homestead Works of
+the Carnegie Steel Company, the Duquesne Steel Works, the Keystone
+Bridge Company, and others. The Edgar Thomas mills make over a million
+tons of rails a year, and at Homestead fifteen hundred thousand tons
+of steel will be annually produced, this being the place where
+nickel-steel armor-plates for the navy are manufactured. They largely
+use natural gas, and employ at times ten thousand men at the two great
+establishments. The Duquesne Works, just above Homestead on the
+Monongahela, have the four largest blast furnaces in the world,
+producing twenty-two hundred tons of pig-iron daily. The Keystone
+Bridge Works cover seven acres, and have made some of the greatest
+steel bridges in existence. The Westinghouse Electrical Works
+manufacture the greatest dynamos, including those of the Niagara
+Power Company, and the Westinghouse Air-Brake Works is also another
+extensive establishment. In the Pittsburg district, covering about two
+hundred square miles, the daily product of mines and factories is
+estimated at $6,000,000.
+
+The two men whose names are most closely connected with Pittsburg's
+vast industrial development are Andrew Carnegie and George
+Westinghouse. Carnegie was born at Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1837, and
+his father, a potter, brought him to Pittsburg when eleven years old.
+He began life as a telegraph messenger boy, attracted the attention of
+Colonel Thomas A. Scott, and was by him brought into the service of
+the Pennsylvania Railroad. Then he entered business, and became the
+greatest developer of the iron and steel industries of Pittsburg and
+its wealthiest resident. He some time ago sold out his interests to
+the Carnegie Steel Company, in which he is largely interested.
+Westinghouse, born in New York State in 1846, combined with business
+tact the genius of the inventor. He invented and developed the railway
+air-brake now in universal use, has established a complete electrical
+lighting and power system, and was the chief adapter of natural gas to
+manufacturing and domestic uses, being the inventor of many ingenious
+contrivances for its introduction and economical employment. He had a
+gas well almost at his door, for Pittsburg overlaid a great deposit.
+The enormous coal measures underlying and surrounding the city have
+been its most stable basis for industry and profit, as the Pittsburg
+coal-field is one of enormous output. The deposits of Lake Superior
+furnish the ores for its furnaces, and the railroad development is
+such that each enormous establishment now has its special railroad to
+fetch in the ores from Lake Erie, where they are brought by vessels.
+Across in Allegheny City, where most of these ore-bringing roads go
+out, about one hundred acres in the centre of the city are reserved
+for the attractive Allegheny Park, one portion rising in a very steep
+hill, almost at the edge of the Allegheny River. Upon its top, seen
+from afar, stands a Soldiers' Monument, a graceful column, erected in
+memory of four thousand men of Allegheny County who fell in the Civil
+War. Soldier statues guard the base, and look out upon the smokes and
+steam jets of the busy city below, and thousands climb up there to
+enjoy the grand view.
+
+
+COAL, COKE AND GAS.
+
+The four counties adjoining Pittsburg turn out over thirty millions of
+tons of bituminous coal in a year. To carry this coal away, besides
+railways, the city has about a million and a half of tonnage of river
+craft of various kinds, a greater tonnage than all the Mississippi
+River ports put together. Its coal boats go everywhere throughout the
+Western water ways, and two thousand miles down the Ohio and
+Mississippi to New Orleans. Its stumpy but powerful little tugs, with
+their stern-wheels, will safely convey fleets of shallow flatboats,
+sometimes over twenty thousand tons of coal being carried in a single
+tow. These flatboats are collected in the rivers about Pittsburg,
+waiting for the proper stage of water on the Ohio; and to regulate the
+depth at the city the curious movable dam was constructed at Davis's
+Island, four miles below Pittsburg, at a cost of $1,000,000, the dam
+opening when necessary to let freshets through, and having a lock five
+hundred feet long and one hundred and ten feet wide to pass the boats.
+The Monongahela River above Pittsburg has for miles a series of coal
+mines in the high bordering banks, the river being lined with coal
+"tipples," which load the flatboats; and it is also provided with a
+series of dams, which aid navigation and divide the channel into a
+succession of "pools." The very crooked Youghiogheny flows in at
+McKeesport, fifteen miles above Pittsburg, another river of coal
+mines, whose name was given as a signification of its crookedness by
+the matter-of-fact Indians, the word signifying "the stream flowing a
+contrary, roundabout course." This river comes northward out of the
+chief coke district of America, in the flanks of the long Chestnut
+Ridge, the Connellsville coke region sometimes turning out ten
+millions of tons annually from its ovens. Railways run in there on
+both river banks to Connellsville, a town of six thousand people, in
+the midst of the coke ovens, and about fifty-six miles south of
+Pittsburg.
+
+Pittsburg is decreasing its use of natural gas for manufacturing, as
+the diminishing supply and greater distance it has to be brought are
+making it too costly for the iron and glass works, which are returning
+again to coal and coke, but the city is still said to use forty-five
+thousand millions of cubic feet in a year, mostly for domestic
+purposes. Pittsburg stands in a great but partly exhausted natural-gas
+district. The gas is stored under pressure beneath strata of rock,
+being set free when these are pierced. This is a gaseous member of the
+paraffin series, of which petroleum is a liquid member, and is mainly
+marsh-gas, the "fire-damp" of the miner. It originates in the
+decomposition of animal and vegetable life, and usually has but little
+odor, whilst its illuminating power is low, but in fuel value eight
+cubic feet equal one pound of coal. It was first used at Fredonia, New
+York, in 1821, for lighting purposes, being procured from a well. The
+natural-gas region is the part of Pennsylvania west of the
+Alleghenies, extending into New York, Ohio and West Virginia; and gas
+is also found in Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Kansas. It is held
+under enormous pressure within the pockets beneath the rocks, and when
+first reached in drilling, the tension has been known to equal a
+thousand pounds per square inch. It is not uncommon, when a well is
+drilled, to have all the tools and casing-pipe blown out, while an
+enormous thickness of masonry has to be constructed to hold down the
+cap that covers the well. Its use began in Pittsburg in 1886, the
+chief field of supply then being Murrysville, about twenty miles east
+of the city, while there are also other fields southwest and east of
+Pittsburg. The pipes underlie all the streets, and a main route of
+supply is along the bed of the Allegheny River. There are said to be
+about sixteen hundred miles of pipes laid down to lead the gas to
+Pittsburg from the different fields.
+
+
+PETROLEUM.
+
+The great petroleum fields lie in and near the Pittsburg region, in
+the basin of the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers, and extend from New York
+southwest to West Virginia, and also into Ohio. This region has had
+enormous yields in different parts of the river basin, the wells,
+however, ultimately dwindling as their supplies are drawn out. The
+petroleum industry, which has been one of the greatest in
+Pennsylvania, has been gradually all absorbed by the Standard Oil
+Company, which is probably the most extensive industrial combination
+in America, and certainly the most powerful. Yet we are told that
+those financial magnates began their wonderful career with an
+aggregate capital of only $24,000, largely borrowed money. There have
+been forty millions of barrels of petroleum taken from this great
+basin in a single year. The oil wells are bored in many places, south,
+southwest, north and northeast of Pittsburg. The "Panhandle Railroad,"
+which crosses West Virginia to the Ohio, exhibits many of them. A
+branch of this railroad goes to Canonsburg, and thence to the town of
+Washington, on the old "National Road," thirty miles from Pittsburg.
+At Canonsburg was founded in 1773 Jefferson College, in a log cabin,
+which has now become the Jefferson Theological Seminary of the
+Presbyterian Church. Washington is a town of about four thousand
+people, rambling over a pleasant hilly region in Southwestern
+Pennsylvania, having as its chief institution Washington and Jefferson
+College, also a Presbyterian foundation, started in 1806 in what was
+then a remote Scotch-Irish colony beyond the mountains. Near this town
+in 1888 were struck the greatest petroleum wells the world ever knew.
+One of them, the Jumbo well, in sixty days after the first strike had
+poured out one hundred and forty thousand barrels of oil, flowing a
+steady circular stream of almost white oil, about five inches in
+diameter, at the rate of forty-two hundred gallons an hour. Another
+well, afterwards bored not far away, in its freshness of infancy
+poured out sixty-three hundred gallons an hour. Additional wells were
+bored with almost the same results; but they all afterwards dwindled,
+and finally ceasing a free flow, had to be pumped. This is the
+universal experience of all the oil regions, the "gushers," soon after
+the great strikes, giving out, as the store of petroleum in the
+reservoirs beneath becomes exhausted. But all this shows how enormous
+is the natural wealth of the Pittsburg district--oil, coal, coke and
+gas, with iron, steel and glass, electricity and railways,
+contributing to the wonderful prosperity.
+
+The greatest petroleum field, however, was up the Allegheny River, in
+Northwestern Pennsylvania, and the first wells bored to obtain it were
+sunk at Titusville, on Oil Creek, in 1859. The early settlers knew of
+the appearance of oil about the headwaters of the Allegheny in New
+York and Pennsylvania, and the name of Oil Creek was given a stream
+for this reason in Allegheny County, New York, and also to the one in
+Venango County, Pennsylvania. The Indians had long collected the oil
+on the shores of Seneca Lake in New York, a course that the white
+settlers followed, and it was for years sold as a medicine by the name
+of Seneca or Genesee oil. When its commercial value for illuminating
+purposes began to be recognized, Colonel E. L. Drake went to
+Titusville to see if it could be obtained in sufficient quantities. He
+bored the first well about a mile south of Titusville, and on August
+26, 1859, the oil was struck at a depth of seventy-one feet. The drill
+suddenly sunk into the cavity of the rock beneath, and the oil rose
+within a few inches of the surface. A small pump was introduced which
+brought out four hundred gallons daily, and then a large pump,
+increasing the daily flow to a thousand gallons. Soon a steam-engine
+was applied, and the flow continued uninterrupted for weeks.
+Titusville had at the time three hundred people. Many wells were sunk
+in the neighborhood with varying success, and the product of the Oil
+Creek district became so large that the market could not absorb it,
+and at the beginning of 1861, with two thousand wells in operation,
+the price declined to twenty-five cents per barrel. The two great
+wells were the Empire, originally yielding twenty-five hundred barrels
+daily, and the Phillips, nearly four thousand barrels. In 1863 the
+production had slackened, but the uses had expanded, and prices rose
+proportionately. Vast fortunes were then rapidly made, and as soon
+squandered. In the first twelve years of the development of this
+district, which extended over about four hundred square miles, there
+were taken from some four thousand wells forty-two millions of barrels
+of oil, which were marketed for $163,000,000. At first it was carried
+away by the railroads, of which several sent branches into the
+district, but there have since been laid extensive lines of pipes
+which convey it in various directions, and largely to New York and
+Philadelphia for foreign export. When this district was at the height
+of its yield it produced four hundred millions of gallons a year.
+
+
+ASCENDING THE ALLEGHENY.
+
+From Pittsburg, through bold and pleasing scenery, we ascend the
+Allegheny River, the broad channel flowing grandly around stately
+bends enclosed between high hills. Thirty miles above Pittsburg the
+Kiskiminetas comes in, and in a region of coal mines and furnaces is
+found the town of Kittanning, which retains the name of the Indian
+village standing there in Colonial days. This original Indian village
+was attacked by Colonel Armstrong and three hundred troops at dawn on
+August 8, 1757, and the Indians, who sided with the French, refusing
+to surrender, they were pretty much all killed and their village
+burnt. Armstrong's name is preserved in the county. Beyond is Brady's
+Bend, a great curve of the river, and here are seen the derricks of
+many deserted oil wells, as the farther journey above for miles also
+discloses. This was the Modoc oil district. The Morrison well was
+struck in 1872, yielding five hundred barrels daily, and immediately a
+town was laid out, not inappropriately called Greece City, and it soon
+had a large population. This was a prolific oil region at one time,
+and back from the river were the well-known oleaginous towns of Modoc
+City, Karns City and Petrolia. The Allegheny River gradually leads us
+up to Venango County, which was the chief oil region. Franklin, the
+capital of the county, has about five thousand inhabitants, and is
+built at the mouth of French Creek, the site of the old French Fort
+Venango, which Indian word meant "a guiding mark on a tree." It stood
+on a commanding ridge, and was one of the chain of posts the French
+built from the lakes across to the Ohio, to hold their possessions,
+dating from 1753. The French had a large garrison there, but after
+Canada was captured the English got possession, and in 1763 it was the
+scene of a terrible massacre, the Indians taking it, murdering the
+entire garrison, and slowly roasting the commandant to death.
+
+Five miles above, Oil Creek flows into the Allegheny, and here is Oil
+City, the petroleum headquarters. It has had a varying history, being
+once almost destroyed by flood and twice by fire, but maintains its
+supremacy and is a complete oil town--the air filled with petroleum
+odors, and the lower streets saturated with the fluid. On the
+Allegheny, nine miles from Oil City, is Oleopolis, and a short
+distance inland is Pithole City, which was one of the famous oil towns
+whose rise and decline were so phenomenal. A few farmers here tried to
+get a scanty subsistence from the rocky and almost barren soil, where,
+on a hill, there was a fissure two to four feet wide, called the
+"pithole," from which came out at intervals hot air and bad smells.
+This was on the Holmden farm, which had been nominally valued at five
+dollars an acre. Somebody thought he detected the smell of oil among
+the odors coming up, and a well was bored. It struck oil in the winter
+of 1864-65, and was the greatest strike made down to that time--the
+United States Well yielding seven thousand barrels daily. Multitudes
+flocked thither, and in six months Pithole City arose in the
+wilderness with fifteen thousand inhabitants, two theatres, an opera
+house, a daily newspaper, and seventy-two hotels of various degrees.
+Numerous wells were sunk, and the oil sold at $5 to $8 per barrel,
+being readily sent to the seaboard. The Holmden farm was soon sold for
+$4,000,000. There were some amazing speculative trades made. The story
+is told of a well striking oil and a speculative bystander at once
+buying a three-fourths interest in it for $18,000, agreeing to pay the
+money next day. Turning away from the seller, he met a man seeking
+such an investment, and promptly resold his interest for $75,000,
+receiving immediate payment. The yield of this region was so prolific
+that railroads and pipe lines were soon constructed to carry the oil
+away. Pithole had its great boom in the autumn of 1866, wells being
+bored in every direction, and real estate fetching enormous prices.
+One old fellow who had a few acres of arid land in the centre of the
+excitement sold his farm and hovel for $800,000, paid him on the spot
+in $1000 notes; and then he sorrowfully bemoaned, as he took a last
+look at the hovel he had occupied all his life, "Now I haint got any
+home." The rise of this wonderful town was rapid, and its downfall
+came all too soon. The oil supply became exhausted, the speculators
+left, the inhabitants dwindled in number, and by 1870 Pithole had
+reverted almost to its original condition. The chief hotel, which had
+cost $31,000 to build, was afterwards sold for $100, and the
+population had declined in 1873 to nine families.
+
+The valley of Oil Creek is filled with derricks and oil tanks, having
+a few pumping engines at work, but most of the derricks are over
+abandoned wells. Eighteen miles up Oil Creek is Titusville, and when
+the oil yield was at its height, about 1865, this valley had a
+population of seventy-five thousand people. Titusville is pleasantly
+built in the broadened intervale, surrounded by hills, the streets
+being wide and straight, and the residences comfortable, each in its
+garden enclosure. There are oil refineries, and iron works which make
+engines, tubing and other supplies; and the town, which has eight
+thousand people, is a headquarters for the Standard Oil Company.
+Twenty-seven miles farther northward is Corry, a prominent railroad
+centre, at the northern entrance to the Pennsylvania "Oil Dorado," as
+the region has been popularly called. Its name of Corry was that of
+the farmer who originally cultivated the soil when the place became a
+railway station in 1861, and the location of oil refineries then began
+its prosperity. There are now about six thousand inhabitants. It is
+within a short distance of the New York State boundary, and marks the
+northern limit of the Pennsylvania oil region. This whole district,
+once the prominent petroleum field of Pennsylvania, has been eclipsed,
+however, by other and more prolific oil basins. Fortunes were made
+here, but most of the wealth passed away; and the history of the
+Pennsylvania petroleum trade and its vicissitudes, with the absorption
+of everything of value by the Standard Oil Company, has emphasized the
+truth so pointedly told by Robert Burns, that "The best laid schemes
+o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley." Its wonderful tide of prosperity and
+its subsequent ebb recall Shelley's lines "To Men of England":
+
+     "The seed ye sow another reaps;
+     The wealth ye find another keeps;
+     The robes ye weave another wears;
+     The arms ye forge another bears."
+
+
+
+
+VISITING THE SUNNY SOUTH.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+VISITING THE SUNNY SOUTH.
+
+     Sir Walter Raleigh -- Roanoke Island -- Virginia Dare --
+     Potatoes -- Tobacco -- Carolina -- Cape Hatteras -- Cyclones --
+     Wilmington -- Fort Fisher -- Blockade Running -- Charleston --
+     Palmetto Trees -- John C. Calhoun -- Fort Moultrie -- Osceola's
+     Grave -- Fort Sumter -- Opening of the Civil War -- The Swamp
+     Angel -- St. Michael's Church -- Port Royal -- Savannah --
+     General Oglethorpe -- Count Pulaski -- Fort Pulaski --
+     Bonaventure Cemetery -- Okifenokee Swamp -- Jacksonville -- The
+     Alligator -- Oranges -- Land of Flowers -- Juan Ponce de Leon
+     -- Ferdinand de Soto -- The Huguenots -- Pedro Menendez --
+     Dominique de Gourgues -- Florida Peculiarities -- Cumberland
+     Sound -- St. Mary's River -- Cumberland Island -- Jekyll Island
+     -- Amelia Island -- Fernandina -- Dungeness -- General Greene
+     -- Light Horse Harry -- St. Augustine -- Matanzas River --
+     Anastasia Island -- Coquina -- Fort San Marco -- Fort Marion --
+     Grand Hotels -- Dade's Massacre -- Coa-coo-chee, the Wildcat --
+     Ormond -- Daytona -- New Smyrna -- The Southern Cassadega --
+     Indian River -- Titusville -- Rockledge -- Fort Pierce --
+     Jupiter Inlet -- Palm Beach -- Miami -- Biscayne Bay -- St.
+     John's River -- Mandarin -- Palatka -- Ocklawaha River -- Lake
+     Apopka -- Lake Eustis Region -- Ocala -- The Silver Spring --
+     Navigating the Ocklawaha -- Lake George -- Volusia -- Lake
+     Monroe -- Enterprise -- Sanford -- Winter Park -- Orlando --
+     Lake Tohopekaliga -- Kissimmee River -- Lake Okeechobee -- The
+     Everglades -- Lake Arpeika -- The Seminoles -- Suwanee River --
+     Cedar Key -- Tallahassee -- Achille Murat -- Wakulla Spring --
+     Appalachicola -- Pensacola -- Homosassa -- Tampa -- Charlotte
+     Harbor -- Punta Gorda -- Caloosahatchie River -- Fort Myers --
+     Cape Romano -- Cape Sable -- Florida Keys -- Coral Building --
+     The Gulf Stream -- Key West -- Fort Taylor -- Sand Key -- Dry
+     Tortugas -- Fort Jefferson -- Florida Attractions.
+
+
+CAROLINA.
+
+Sir Walter Raleigh, of chivalrous memory, sent the first English
+colony to America in the sixteenth century. He was a half-brother of
+Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the English explorer, and had previously
+accompanied Gilbert to Newfoundland. He sent out an expedition in
+1584, which selected Roanoke Island, south of the Chesapeake, for a
+settlement, and for this enterprise Queen Elizabeth knighted Raleigh,
+gave him a grant of the whole country, and directed that the new land
+be named in her honor, Virginia. In 1585-86 colonizing expeditions
+were sent to Roanoke, but they did not prosper. The colonists
+quarrelled with the Indians, and in the latter year the Governor
+returned to England for provisions and reinforcements, leaving behind
+with the colony his daughter, Mrs. Dare, and a granddaughter, nine
+days old, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the new land.
+Then came the Spanish Armada to conquer England, and the long war with
+Spain. Nobody went to succor the little band of exiles on Roanoke
+Island for three years, and when they did, the settlement was
+obliterated, the hundred colonists and little Virginia Dare had
+disappeared, and no tidings of them were ever obtained. Thus perished
+Raleigh's colony; and, his means being exhausted, he was discouraged
+and sent no more expeditions out to America. His enterprise failed in
+making a permanent settlement, but it gave two priceless gifts to
+Europe. The returning Governor took back to England the potato, which
+Raleigh planted on his Irish estate and which has proved the salvation
+of old Erin, and also the Virginia tobacco, which he taught the people
+to smoke, and the fragrant weed became the solace of the world.
+
+No further attempts at colonization were made until the seventeenth
+century, when new grants were issued, and the country was named
+Carolina in honor of King Charles I. The Atlantic Coast south of the
+Chesapeake Bay entrance is low and bordered by sand beaches, which for
+most of the distance in front of North Carolina are far eastward of
+the mainland, with broad sounds and river estuaries between. These
+long and narrow beaches protrude in some cases a hundred miles into
+the ocean and form dangerous shoals, the extensive Albemarle and
+Pamlico Sounds being enclosed by them, the former stretching fifty
+miles and the latter seventy-five miles into the land. Out in front of
+Pamlico Sound projects the shoulder of Cape Hatteras into the
+Atlantic, the outer point of a low, sandy island, with shoals
+extending far beyond it, and marked by the great beacon of this
+dangerous coast, a flashing light one hundred and ninety feet high.
+Here is the principal storm factory of the southern coast, noted for
+cyclonic disturbances and dreaded by the mariner. Upon the outer
+Diamond Shoals the Government has long tried in vain to erect a
+lighthouse. A lightship is kept there, but is frequently blown from
+her moorings and drifts ashore. The Gulf Stream, coming with warm and
+speedy current up from Florida, is here diverged out into the ocean by
+the shoulder of Hatteras; and, similarly, the whirling West India
+cyclones of enormous area come along with their resistless energy,
+destroying everything in their paths. In the terrific hurricane of the
+autumn of 1899 a wind velocity of one hundred and sixty miles an hour
+was reached momentarily, and the anemometer at Hatteras was blown down
+after having recorded a velocity of one hundred and twenty miles. The
+actual force exerted by one of these great cyclones in its work of
+devastation, which uproots trees, demolishes buildings and strews the
+coast with wrecks, has been calculated as equalling one thousand
+million horse-power.
+
+
+WILMINGTON AND FORT FISHER.
+
+The interior of North Carolina adjoining the Sounds is largely swamp
+land, and the broad belt of forest, chiefly pines, which parallels the
+coast all along the Atlantic seaboard. Through this region the railway
+extends southward from Virginia past Weldon to Wilmington, an
+uninteresting route among the swamps and pine lands, showing sparse
+settlement and poor agriculture, the wood paths exhibiting an
+occasional ox-team or a stray horseman going home with his supplies
+from the cross-roads store, a typical representative of the
+"tar-heels of Carolina." The railway crosses the deep valley of
+Roanoke River, and then over the Tar and Neuse Rivers, traversing the
+extensive district that provides the world's greatest supply of naval
+stores--the tar, pitch, turpentine, rosin and timber that are so
+largely shipped out of the Cape Fear River from Wilmington. This is
+the chief city of North Carolina, having about twenty thousand people,
+and is located on the Cape Fear River twenty-six miles from its mouth.
+The city spreads along the eastern shore upon the peninsula between it
+and the ocean. The first settlement antedates the Revolution, when the
+inhabitants, who were sturdy patriots, drove out the royal Governor
+and made Fort Johnson, at the mouth of the river, an American
+stronghold. Upon the secession of the Carolinas in 1860-61 this fort
+was occupied by the Confederates and replaced by the larger work on
+Federal Point, between the river and the sea, known as Fort Fisher.
+Owing to the peculiar location and ease of entrance, the Cape Fear
+River became famous in the Civil War as a haven for blockade-runners,
+the effective defense made by Fort Fisher fully protecting this
+traffic. As the Union blockade of the Southern harbors became more
+completely effective with the progress of the war, this finally was
+about the only port that could be entered, and an enormous traffic was
+kept up between Wilmington and Nassau, on the British island of New
+Providence, in the Bahamas, not far away, some three hundred fleet
+foreign steamships safely running the blockade into Cape Fear River
+during 1863 and 1864. The notoriety of this traffic, from which
+enormous profits were made, became world-wide, and it was decided late
+in 1864 that Fort Fisher had to be captured, in order to make the
+Southern blockade entirely effective. A joint land and naval attack
+was made by General Butler and Admiral Porter in December, 1864, but
+they were obliged to retire without seriously damaging the fort. Then
+General Butler ineffectively attempted to blow up the fort by
+exploding a powder-boat near it. Finally a new expedition was landed
+in January, 1865, under General Terry, and in coöperation with the
+navy, which made a fierce bombardment, they captured the fort on the
+15th, after severe loss, the works being partially destroyed the
+following day by the accidental explosion of the powder magazine. This
+capture ended the blockade-running at Wilmington, and had much to do
+with precipitating the fall of Richmond in the following April.
+
+
+  [Illustration: _On the Ashley, near Charleston, S. C._]
+
+CHARLESTON AND FORT SUMTER.
+
+The railway from Wilmington to the South at first goes westward
+through a region largely composed of swamps, and then entering South
+Carolina turns southward past Florence to Charleston. The country is a
+variation of pine barrens and morass, sparsely inhabited, but raising
+much cotton, with many bales brought to the stations for shipment.
+There is a much larger population of blacks than of whites.
+Charleston, the metropolis of South Carolina, is an active seaport
+with sixty-five thousand inhabitants, having a good export trade in
+cotton, timber, naval stores, rice, fruits and phosphate rock, of
+which there are extensive deposits on Ashley River nearby. It is a
+low-lying city, built upon a peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper
+Rivers, just inland from the ocean, and having a good harbor. Its many
+wooden houses are varied by more pretentious ones of brick and stone,
+but there is an air of decadence produced by the traces still
+remaining of the earthquake of 1886, which destroyed the greater part
+of the buildings and killed many people. The dwelling architecture of
+Charleston presents the tropical features of open verandas, spacious
+porticos and broad windows looking out upon gardens in which the
+palmetto tree grows, typical of South Carolina, the "Palmetto State."
+At the point of the peninsula between the rivers is the Battery, a
+park and popular promenade overlooking the harbor, with Fort Sumter
+down on its little shoal-like island, seen as a small dark streak upon
+the distant horizon. The first settlements in this part of South
+Carolina were made on the west bank of Ashley River, but the town,
+which had been named in honor of King Charles II., in 1680 was
+transferred to its present site. Charleston was prominent in the
+Revolution, its troops under Colonel Moultrie repelling a British
+attack upon Sullivan's Island in 1776; but the city was captured by
+Sir Henry Clinton in 1780 after an obstinate defense. Before the Civil
+War it was the chief cotton-shipping port of America, though it is now
+surpassed by the Gulf ports and by Savannah. The great memory in the
+city of that time of its greatest prosperity is of the apostle of
+"State Rights," the South Carolina statesman, John C. Calhoun, who
+died in 1850. His statue stands in Citadel Square, and his grave is in
+St. Philip's churchyard.
+
+The broad estuary of Charleston harbor is completely landlocked, and
+has an entrance from the sea about a mile wide. On the southern side
+is Fort Moultrie, which was enlarged from the battery that repulsed
+the British attack in 1776, on Sullivan's Island, this now being a
+favorite summer resort, and dotted with wooden cottages facing the
+sea. Just behind the fort is the grave of Osceola, the famous chief of
+the Seminoles, who long carried on war in the Florida everglades, but
+was captured and brought a prisoner to Fort Moultrie, dying in 1838.
+Fort Sumter, three miles below Charleston, stands upon a shoal of
+about three acres, out in mid-channel, which is protected from the
+water encroachment by stone rip-rapping. It was faced with brick
+during the Civil War, but the work has since been modernized. At the
+opening of the war, Major Anderson occupied this fort with the small
+force of seventy-five men, which, after the secession of South
+Carolina from the Union, December 20, 1860, had been transferred
+thither from Fort Moultrie, the State troops immediately seizing
+Moultrie and all the other forts around the harbor, and the Federal
+public buildings in Charleston. They also constructed new batteries on
+Morris Island, the nearest land to Fort Sumter. On January 9, 1861,
+the Government at Washington sent the steamer "Star of the West" into
+the harbor with provisions and a reinforcement of two hundred and
+fifty troops. The first shot of the Civil War was on that day fired at
+her from Morris Island, and the ship being struck by this and
+subsequent shots, her commander abandoned the project and withdrew.
+There was a good deal of negotiation and delay afterwards, the
+Government, on April 8th, finally determining to provision Fort
+Sumter, as Anderson's supplies would be exhausted on the 15th, and so
+informing the Governor of South Carolina. On the 11th, General
+Beauregard, commanding the State forces, demanded the surrender of the
+fort, which was refused. Major Anderson was notified early next
+morning that the fort would be fired upon in one hour, and cannonading
+began at 4.20 A.M. on the 12th. A fleet of vessels appeared off the
+harbor at noon with provisions, exchanged signals with the fort, but
+made no attempt to land, and on the 13th terms of surrender were
+arranged by which Major Anderson and his little command marched out on
+the 14th with the honors of war, saluting the American flag with
+fifty guns. This bombardment and evacuation set the North in a blaze
+of patriotic excitement and began the Civil War.
+
+The naval forces of the United States attacked Fort Sumter in April,
+1863, but were repulsed, the monitor "Keokuk" being so seriously
+injured that she afterwards sunk. Subsequently, the Union troops
+landed on Morris Island, erected batteries, and in August partly
+destroyed the works at Sumter; and its bombardment, and also that of
+Charleston, continued with but brief intermission till the war closed
+in 1865. On Morris Island was set up the original "long-range gun,"
+General Gillmore's "Swamp Angel" now adorning a drinking-fountain at
+Trenton, New Jersey; and its ability, until it unfortunately burst, to
+shoot its bolts into Charleston, then regarded as an almost impossible
+distance to carry a projectile, attracted the attention of gunnery
+experts throughout the world. Its conspicuous mark was the white spire
+of St. Michael's Church up in the beleaguered city. This famous old
+church, dating from 1752, was struck six times during these attacks
+and seriously damaged. It was also partly demolished by a cyclone in
+1885, and nearly destroyed by the earthquake of 1886; but it has been
+since restored, and its prominent steeple commands a good view.
+Charleston, however, seems to have always been used to this sort of
+thing. Its statue of William Pitt in front of the City Hall had
+the right arm broken off by a British cannon-shot in 1780. But if the
+city is thus somewhat in dilapidation, its grand development of
+foliage and flowers gives a compensation. Everywhere in the suburbs
+and in the streets and gardens are seen magnificent azaleas,
+magnolias, camellias, and the famous live oak, which flourish in
+luxuriance and add to the charms of this restful South Carolina
+metropolis.
+
+
+THE CITY OF SAVANNAH.
+
+The seacoast of South Carolina and Georgia is composed largely of
+deeply indented bays, with many islands, tortuous bayous, and a
+labyrinth of water ways bordered by dense vegetation. Southward from
+Charleston harbor to the Savannah River many creeks provide a system
+of inland navigation and form fertile islands. There are two capacious
+Sounds, St. Helena and Port Royal, the latter being one of the finest
+harbors in the world, and the rendezvous of the American North
+Atlantic naval squadron when in these waters. This was the place of
+first landing of the original South Carolina colonists before they
+went to the Ashley River, and its chief town now is Beaufort, on St.
+Helena Island. These coast islands raise the famous "sea-island
+cotton," and the whole lowland region produces prolific crops of rice.
+The adjacent land is generally swampy, and its chief industry, outside
+of cultivating the fields, is the working of the extensive phosphate
+deposits, which are manufactured into fertilizers. The railway,
+largely constructed on piles, passes through much marsh and morass,
+crosses swift-running dirty streams, and over the swamps and among the
+pine timber, varied by the oak, bay tree and laurel, which the humid
+atmosphere has hung with garlands of sombre gray moss and clusters of
+ivy and other creeping plants. The festooned moss, overrunning and
+often destroying the foliage of the trees, gives the scene a weird and
+ghostly appearance. The railway route is bordered by an apparently
+almost impenetrable jungle, the few settlements are widely separated,
+and population is sparse, seeming to be chiefly negroes dressed in
+ancient-looking clothing ornamented with patches. The few whites who
+appear are bilious and yellowish, their complexions and garb being
+alike of the butternut hue, while both races seem to talk the same
+dialect. Thus moving farther southward, the Carolina "tar-heels" are
+replaced by the "crackers" and "butternuts," looking as if they had
+been rolled for a generation in the clayey soils drained by the
+Edisto, Coosawhatchie and Savannah Rivers and their neighboring
+streams, and who, farther inland, are the "clay-eaters" of Georgia.
+Then crossing the Savannah River, the route is upon the level lowlands
+down its Georgia bank, and into the city of Savannah, arriving amid a
+vast collection of rosin and pitch barrels, cotton bales and timber.
+
+Savannah--derived from the Spanish word _sabana_, a "meadow or
+plain"--is known popularly as the "Forest City," and is built upon a
+bluff along the river shore, eighteen miles from the sea. It has fifty
+thousand people and a large export trade in naval stores, rice, timber
+and cotton, in the latter export being second only to New Orleans. It
+received great impetus after the Civil War, owing to its excellent
+railway connections with the interior, and is now the chief port of
+the Southern Atlantic coast. The city extends upon a level sandy
+plain, stretching back from the bluff shore along the river, has broad
+streets crossing at right angles, with small parks at the
+intersections, and many trees border the streets and fill the parks,
+so that it is fairly embowered in foliage, thus presenting an
+attractive and novel appearance. This adornment makes Savannah the
+most beautiful city of the coast--the oak, palmetto and magnolia, with
+the holly, orange, creeping ivy and clustering vines, setting the
+buildings in a framework of delicious green. The business quarter is
+along the bluff, where the ships moor alongside the storehouses, which
+have their upper stories on a level with the busy Bay Street at its
+top. Much of the present beauty of the city is due to the foresight of
+its founder who laid out the plan--General Oglethorpe, who selected
+this place in 1733 for the capital of his Province of Georgia, the
+youngest of the original thirteen colonies.
+
+General James Edward Oglethorpe was a native of London and an officer
+in the British army, who, being of philanthropic tendencies, obtained
+a grant of the Province from King George for the purpose of providing
+an asylum for the poor debtors of England and a home for the
+Protestants of all nations. After founding the city and receiving a
+colony of Protestants from Salzburg, he visited England and brought
+out John and Charles Wesley in 1735, and got George Whitefield to come
+and preach to the colonists in 1737. War breaking out with Spain, he
+attacked Florida, carrying his invasion to the gates of St. Augustine,
+but was repulsed. He returned to England in 1743, but though he lived
+until 1785 as a retired general upon half-pay, he never revisited
+America. The British captured Savannah in the Revolution, and repulsed
+a combined French and American attempt to recapture it in 1779. In
+this attack Count Pulaski fell, and the spot, now Monterey Square,
+near the centre of the city, is marked by the Pulaski Monument, one of
+the noblest shafts in America. Count Pulaski is the patron saint of
+Savannah, and Fort Pulaski, named in his honor, guards the Savannah
+River entrance from the sea. During the Civil War, however, this fort
+was practically useless, as it was captured by the Unionists in 1862,
+and Tybee Roads, the harbor at the entrance, was hermetically sealed
+throughout the war by the blockading fleet. General Sherman's
+triumphant march through Georgia ended in December, 1864, at
+Savannah, and his headquarters are still pointed out, opposite Madison
+Square. Savannah has a fine pleasure-ground in Forsyth Park, with its
+wealth of trees and ornamental shrubbery, and the adjoining Parade
+Ground containing the Confederate Soldiers' Monument. The favorite
+route to the southern suburbs is the famous Thunderbolt Shell Road
+leading to Thunderbolt River, and noted for its avenues of live oaks
+draped with Spanish moss. Here is also the favorite burial-place, the
+Bonaventure Cemetery, where the graves and tombstones are laid out
+alongside passages embowered by live oaks, their wide-stretching,
+gaunt and angular limbs being richly garlanded with the gray moss and
+encircled by creeping ivy. The long vista views under these sombre
+archways have an elfish look, peculiarly appropriate for a city of the
+dead, and it would take little imagination to conjure up the spirits
+of the departed and see them wandering beneath these canopies of
+shrouds.
+
+
+THE CITY OF JACKSONVILLE.
+
+Southward from Savannah, the railway route to Florida renews the
+monotonous landscape of woods and swamps. For ninety miles it goes in
+an almost straight line southwest through the pine belt of Southern
+Georgia, crossing the Ogeechee and Altamaha Rivers to Waycross, and
+then, turning to the southeast, proceeds in another almost straight
+line for about an equal distance towards the coast, and crosses St.
+Mary's River into Florida. It traverses the edge of the noted
+Okifenokee Swamp of Georgia, the Indian "weaving, shaking, water," a
+moist and mushy region of mystery and legend, drained by the poetic
+Suwanee, the Indian "Echo river," which has been made the theme of a
+favorite melody. This stream flows through Florida into the Gulf of
+Mexico, while on the eastern side the extensive swamp overflows into
+the winding St. Mary's River leading to the Atlantic. To the
+southward, the pine woods of Florida grow out of a sandy soil nearly
+as level as a floor, in which almost every depression and fissure
+seems filled with water, and the balsamic odors of these pines,
+combined with the mildness of the winter climate, give an indication
+of the attractions which make Florida so popular as a resort for the
+Northern people. The route finally reaches the broad St. John's River
+at the Florida metropolis, Jacksonville, a Yankee city in the South,
+bearing the name of the famous President, General Andrew Jackson, and
+having thirty thousand population, largely of Northern birth. This is
+the centre of the railway system of Florida and of most of the
+business of the State, having a large export trade in timber, naval
+stores, phosphates, oranges and other Florida products. To the
+visitor, probably the first most forcible impression is made by the
+free growth of oranges along the streets and in the house gardens. The
+city stands upon the northern and outer bank of a magnificent bend of
+St. John's River, this noble stream, which flows northward from
+Southern Florida, being a mile wide, and sweeping around to the
+eastward at Jacksonville to reach the sea about twenty-five miles
+beyond, its navigation having been improved by dredging and
+constructing jetties to maintain a channel through the bar at the
+mouth. The business section is near the shore, and the railways come
+down to the wharves; while, as the curving river stretches away to the
+southward, the bank is lined with rows of fine suburban villas,
+occupied by the business men who have built their comfortable homes
+amid the oranges, oleanders, magnolias and banana trees. The river has
+low tree-clad shores, and far over on the opposite bank are more
+villas and orange groves.
+
+Jacksonville is well supplied with hotels and lodging-houses, which
+accommodate the crowds of winter visitors from the North, and it
+spreads into various suburban villages reached by steamboats and hard
+shell roads. It is the great _entrepôt_ for Florida, standing at the
+northern verge, the salubrious and equable climate being the
+attraction, for frost is rare, and the winters are usually clear and
+dry and give a most magnificent atmosphere. Rows of splendid oaks line
+the streets, and form fine archways of green, giving a delicious
+shade. Besides the orange, the alligator is also a Jacksonville
+attraction, live ones being kept as pets, little ones sent northward
+in boxes for gifts, and dead ones of all sizes prepared for
+ornaments. This reptile is the type and emblem of Florida; his skin
+and teeth are worked into fantastic shapes, and his curious bones and
+formation do duty in the make-up of many "Florida curiosities." In
+fact, outside of the timber, which is most prolific, the best known
+Florida crops are the alligator and the orange. Although frosts have
+killed many in late years, yet the product of the orange trees is
+still large, Southern Florida containing the most famous orange
+groves, especially along the Indian River and on the lakes of the
+upper St. John's River, where they are usually planted on the southern
+borders of the lakes, so that the frost is killed by the winds
+carrying it over the water, and thus the orange trees are protected.
+
+
+THE LAND OF FLOWERS.
+
+In the early sixteenth century there flourished a valiant Spaniard of
+noble birth, a grandee of Aragon, who had taken part in the conquest
+of Grenada, Don Juan Ponce de Leon. He had accompanied Columbus on one
+of his American voyages, and in 1510 was appointed Governor of Puerto
+Rico. The bold Don Juan had become somewhat worn by a life of
+dangerous buccaneering and romantic adventure, and being rather
+advanced in years he was losing the attractiveness which had long
+added charms to his gallantries. From the Indians of Puerto Rico he
+heard of an island off to the northwestward, which they called Bimini,
+and he listened with wonder and constantly increasing interest to the
+tales they told of an extraordinary and miraculous spring which it
+contained that would restore youth to the aged and health to the
+decrepit--the "Fountain of Perpetual Youth." They described it as
+being in a region of surpassing beauty, and said there were found
+abundant gold and many slaves in this land of promise. The rugged old
+warrior was fired with the prospect of restored youth, and soon
+secured from the king a grant of Bimini. In March, 1513, he sailed
+with a large expedition from Puerto Rico, discovered some of the
+Bahama Islands, coasted along the mainland to latitude 30° 8' north,
+and on Easter Sunday, April 8th, landed a short distance south of St.
+John's River and took possession, calling the country Florida, from
+"Pasqua Florida," the Spanish name for the day. He did not find the
+magic spring, however, but he did discover a fairy scene, a land
+filled with a profusion of fruits and flowers. Though he subsequently
+diligently searched for it, he unfortunately never found the
+miraculous fountain. He explored the Gulf Coast, and returned to the
+quest again in 1521, when he got into quarrels with the Indians, was
+mortally wounded in a combat, and went back to Cuba to die.
+
+Another Spanish grandee, fired with zeal for gold and conquest,
+appeared upon the scene somewhat later in the sixteenth century.
+Ferdinand de Soto, a native of Jerez, whose only heritage was his
+sword and shield, had accompanied various expeditions to Darien and
+Nicaragua, and in 1532 joined Pizarro in the conquest of Peru, where
+he acquired great wealth, with which he returned to Spain. Soon after,
+being anxious for more adventure, he was appointed Governor of Cuba
+and Florida, and given a commission to explore and settle the Spanish
+possessions in the latter country, then including the whole northern
+coast of the Gulf of Mexico. In May, 1539, he sailed from Havana with
+a large fleet and six hundred men, coasted around Florida and landed
+at Tampa Bay on the Gulf side, where his explorations ashore began in
+July. Fabulous stories had been told him of the wealth of the country
+by those who had been there, and De Soto's plan was to go everywhere
+in search of gold. He captured Indians for guides, and found a
+Spaniard, Juan Ortiz, whom they had taken captive several years
+before, but who was now living with them as a friend, knew their
+language and became interpreter. Then De Soto, by his aid, began a
+most difficult exploration, advancing through thick woods, north and
+east, amid tangled undergrowth, over bogs and marshes, crossing rivers
+and lakes, fighting the Indians who resented his cruelties, for he
+made them his slaves and bearers of burdens, tortured and killed them
+if they resisted. But he found no gold, though he pushed steadily
+onward, and turning westward in the quest, his numbers growing
+smaller and the survivors weaker under the weight of their privations.
+He travelled a long distance, crossing Northern Florida and Georgia
+into the Carolinas, and probably to Tennessee, descending the Alabama
+River, and having a battle with the Indians near Mobile Bay in
+October, 1540; then turning again northward, crossing the Mississippi
+River, which he discovered in May, 1541, near the Chickasaw Bluffs,
+exploring it nearly to the mouth of the Missouri, and then turning
+southward he sailed down the river, and finally died of fever near the
+mouth of Red River in May, 1542. During the three years' wanderings
+nearly half his force had perished in battle, or of privation and
+disease. The Indians were in awe of him and believed him immortal, and
+a panic therefore seized his surviving followers, who feared
+annihilation if the savages discovered that De Soto was dead. So they
+quietly buried him at night, from a boat in midstream, sinking the
+corpse in the great Father of Waters. Discouraged and almost hopeless,
+his followers managed to build some small vessels, and the next year
+arrived safely in Mexico.
+
+Neither of these expeditions succeeded in colonizing Florida, but they
+left a feeling of hatred among the Indians, caused by the Spanish
+cruelties, which always afterwards existed. In 1564 some French
+Huguenots, led by René de Loudonnière, attempted making a settlement
+at the mouth of St. John's River, and built Fort Caroline there. News
+of this reached Spain, and in 1565 another colonization expedition was
+sent out under Don Pedro Menendez d'Aviles, which set sail from Cadiz,
+and on St. Augustine's Day, August 28th, landed not far from where
+Ponce de Leon had made his first invasion, and founded a colony which
+he named St. Augustine, in honor of his day of arrival. As soon as
+Menendez was established on shore he attacked the Huguenots at St.
+John's River, and hanged such of them as had escaped being killed in
+the battle, declaring that he did this because they were Protestants.
+Some of them who had been away from the fort at the time were
+afterwards shipwrecked near St. Augustine, and these he also captured
+and put to death. The French Fort Caroline was then garrisoned by the
+Spaniards, its name changed to Fort San Mateo, and they also fortified
+with redoubts both sides of the river entrance. The story of the
+atrocities of Menendez was received with indignation in France, but
+the King, controlled by intrigue, dared do nothing, such was his fear
+of the power of Spain.
+
+Full vengeance was afterwards taken, however. Dominique de Gourgues, a
+French gentleman of Mont-de-Marsan, who hated the Spaniards with a
+mortal hatred, took up the quarrel, sold his inheritance, borrowed
+money, and equipped a small expedition of three vessels and one
+hundred and eighty men. He concealed his real object, and sailing for
+some time through the tropical seas, finally came to Cuba, when he
+first made known his purpose to his followers. He landed at St. Mary's
+River, opening communication with the Indians, and a joint attack upon
+the Spaniards to the southward was arranged. In May, 1568, the fort
+and redoubts at St. John's River were stormed and taken, a few
+Spaniards being captured alive, all the rest having been slain in the
+combat. Gourgues was shown nearby the trees whereon Menendez had
+hanged the French prisoners when he first took the fort, having placed
+over them the inscription "Not as Frenchmen, but as Lutherans." He
+hanged his Spanish prisoners on the same trees, and over them was also
+nailed an inscription, burned with a hot iron on a tablet of pine,
+"Not as Spaniards, but as Traitors, Robbers and Murderers." Gourgues'
+mission of vengeance was fulfilled. His Indian allies demolished the
+fort and the redoubts at the mouth of the river. He then sailed home
+with his expedition, landing at Rochelle on the day of Pentecost,
+where the Huguenots greeted him with all honor, and whilst he was
+scorned at court and lived for some years in obscurity, Queen
+Elizabeth showed him great favor; and as he was going overland to join
+the army of Portugal to once more fight his enemies, the Spaniards, he
+fell ill at Tours and died. The French made no more attempts at
+settlement in Florida, and the Spaniards afterwards possessed it,
+though frequently being at war with the English. Spain finally ceded
+the "Land of Flowers" to the United States, which took final
+possession in 1821.
+
+
+SOME FLORIDA PECULIARITIES.
+
+Florida is a strange region, yet most attractive. The traveller
+regards its surface as mainly a monotonous level of forest and swamp,
+with fruit and floral embellishments, but it in fact rises by an
+almost insensible ascent from the coast towards the interior, where
+there is a central summit ridge all along the peninsula of about three
+hundred feet elevation, covered with pine woods. Most of the surface,
+however, is but a few feet above the sea-level, these "flatlands," as
+they are called, being grass-grown savannahs, pine woods, swamps and
+cabbage-palm thickets. The southern part of the peninsula is the
+region of the everglades, which have been formed by successive dykes
+of coral, built by the industrious little insect long ago. The upper
+part of this region is occupied by the extensive but shallow waters of
+Lake Okeechobee, which merges insensibly into the everglades south and
+east, the Seminoles calling this grass-grown and spongy region, which
+is still the abode of some remnants of the tribe, Pa-ha-yo-kee,
+meaning "much grass in water." These everglades are penetrated in all
+directions by tortuous water channels of slight depth; and at frequent
+intervals in the whole district there are wooded islands possessing
+fertile soils and covered with dense tropical vegetation. These
+islands are said to have been surrounded by the sea in bygone ages,
+and they then stood in the same relation to the mainland as do the
+present Southern Florida reefs and keys. Wide tracts of cypress swamp
+separate the everglades from the Gulf of Mexico, while in Southern
+Florida they approach within a few miles of the Atlantic Coast, being
+separated by an intervening dyke of coral, crossed by frequent streams
+of rapid current, for the everglades are far from being stagnant
+swamps. There are also many other extensive swamps in the State.
+
+The Florida seacoast is usually protected by sand beaches which are
+quite hard, and are separated from the mainland by interior lagoons.
+The mangrove and the coral, constantly growing, are ever encroaching,
+however, on the sea-waters, and thus Florida seems to have been
+constructed. The country is full of water courses, lakes and springs,
+some of the latter being regarded as among the most remarkable in the
+world, the famous Silver Spring near Ocala being estimated as
+discharging three hundred millions of gallons daily. There are
+countless springs along the coasts, and one of these bursts up in the
+sea near St. Augustine, two miles off shore, with a torrent so
+vigorous that the ocean waves break over the column of fresh water as
+if it were a sunken reef. Scientific investigators are amazed at the
+vast amounts of water everywhere visible and discharged from these
+springs, and with only the narrow and low peninsula for a watershed,
+the problem as to where the vast water supply comes from baffles
+solution. Some of the Florida lakes are subject to remarkable
+fluctuations of level, and one of them, Lake Jackson, ran suddenly dry
+at the time of the Charleston earthquake in 1886, but after a few
+weeks the water began returning, and it soon resumed its natural
+proportions.
+
+
+CUMBERLAND SOUND.
+
+The memory of the Duke of Cumberland, son of King George II., the
+victor of the battle of Culloden, in Scotland, where he defeated the
+Pretender in 1746, is preserved in America in the name of Cumberland
+Sound, the finest harbor on the Southern Atlantic Coast. St. Mary's
+River, coming out of Okifenokee swamp to make the northern boundary of
+Florida, flows an erratic course, boxing the compass in every
+direction until it finally heads eastward and debouches in Cumberland
+Sound, among a group of islands forming a large landlocked harbor.
+This river and sound, the boundary between Georgia and Florida, were,
+prior to the Revolution, a disputed frontier between the English and
+the Spaniards. To the northward of the entrance from the sea is
+Cumberland Island in Georgia, then comes Jekyll Island, with its
+magnificent club-house and elaborate cottages, and then St. Simon's
+Bay, having as its chief port the busy lumber-shipping town of
+Brunswick. To the southward of the Cumberland entrance is Amelia
+Island in Florida. The sound behind Amelia and Cumberland Islands is a
+magnificent roadstead, capable of floating at safe anchorage an
+enormous fleet. Amelia Island is a long, narrow sand bank with much
+foliage upon it, stretching about fourteen miles down the Florida
+coast to Nassau Sound. On the sea front of this island is one of the
+finest sand beaches on the Atlantic. Behind it is the arm of the sea
+known as Amelia River, and the port of Fernandina, thirty-six miles
+northeast of Jacksonville, having at the point of the island, guarding
+the entrance to its harbor, old Fort Clinch, a superannuated
+brick-work battery, formerly of great importance, but now of little
+use, though it was somewhat strengthened to meet the exigencies of the
+recent Spanish War.
+
+The French Huguenots first came along here and settled, as they did at
+the St. John's River entrance, and they called the island Garde. They
+found here a powerful Indian tribe, whose chief, the "Cacique of
+Garde," their historian described as "handsome and noble," and his
+queen as "beautiful and modest," and the same authority says they had
+"five handsome daughters." The French were engaged in desultory
+quarrels with the Spaniards south of them at St. Augustine, and the
+young gallants of the colony, in the intervals of the warfare,
+alternately courted and jilted the Indian maidens, the result being a
+savage attack and massacre; and finally, between Indian and Spanish
+enmity, the settlement disappeared. But the English, made of sterner
+stuff, ultimately came along, settling Georgia, and giving British
+names to the islands, the rivers and the Sound, which they still
+retain. For a long time this was disputed territory between the
+English and the Spaniards, the latter claiming everything northward to
+Carolina. General Oglethorpe marched through here to attack St.
+Augustine, and in 1763 the British held Amelia Island, extending the
+little fort to almost its present proportions, and laying out a town
+behind it, while to the southward the Countess of Egmont established
+an indigo plantation, which flourished for a brief period. Spain
+ultimately got the island, and it came into American possession with
+Florida in 1821. A little town with sandy streets, a pretty park, much
+foliage, delicious air bringing the balsam of the pines and the tonic
+of the sea, and hotels accommodating the influx of winter visitors,
+make up the Fernandina of to-day. Its beach on the ocean front, more
+than a mile away, is one of the finest in existence, hard as a floor,
+level and broad, stretching as far as eye can see, and having a grand
+surf booming upon it.
+
+On Cumberland Island is the estate of Dungeness. General Nathaniel
+Greene of Rhode Island, one of Washington's most trusted officers, was
+the commander of the Revolutionary armies in the South in 1780-81
+which drove the British out of that section, gained the victory of
+Cowpens in South Carolina, and compelled the withdrawal of Cornwallis
+to Yorktown, which ended in his surrender. After the close of the war,
+in gratitude for his great services, the people of Georgia presented
+him with this estate of about ten thousand acres. He made it his home
+for a time, but it afterwards passed away from his family, and being
+neglected, the old coquina stone mansion was burnt. The house has
+since been reconstructed, and a picturesque avenue of moss-hung live
+oaks a mile long stretches over the island near it to the sea. In a
+little cemetery on the estate are the graves of General Greene's widow
+and daughter. Here is also the grave of "Light Horse Harry" of the
+Revolution (the father of General Robert E. Lee), who died abroad in
+1818. He had visited and loved Dungeness, and requested to be buried
+there. Oaks and palmettos embower these modest graves, which are
+carefully preserved.
+
+
+ANCIENT ST. AUGUSTINE.
+
+St. Augustine, thirty-six miles southeast of Jacksonville, on the
+seacoast, is the oldest city in the United States, founded by Menendez
+in 1565, and existing to this day with the characteristics of a
+Spanish town of the sixteenth century, which have been also reproduced
+in the architecture of most of the newer buildings. A small inlet from
+the ocean, about fifteen miles south of the mouth of St. John's
+River, stretches its arms north and south, the latter arm, called
+Matanzas River, seeking the sea again about eighteen miles below. It
+thus forms Anastasia Island, sheltering the harbor like a breakwater,
+and behind it the city is built, being protected by a sea-wall nearly
+a mile long, built of coquina or shell-stone. Another arm of the sea,
+called San Sebastian River, is a short distance inland, so that the
+town site is really upon a peninsula. About five thousand people
+reside permanently in St. Augustine, a few of Spanish descent, and
+more of them the offspring of a colony of Minorcans who came in 1769,
+but in winter the Northern visitors to the palatial hotels swell the
+population to over ten thousand. The town is built on a level sandy
+plain, and the older streets are narrow, being only a few feet wide
+and without sidewalks. The projecting balconies of some of the ancient
+houses almost touch those opposite. The old streets are paved with
+coquina and the old houses are built of it, this curious
+shell-limestone, quarried on Anastasia Island, hardening upon exposure
+to the air. A few streets running north and south, crossed by others
+at right angles, and a broader front street bordered by the sea-wall
+which makes a fine promenade, compose the town. This sea-wall of
+coquina is capped with granite, and was built after the American
+occupation of the city. At its northern end is Fort Marion and at the
+southern end St. Francis Barracks, the United States military post,
+so named because it occupies the site of the old Convent of St.
+Francis, having some of its coquina walls incorporated in the present
+structure. The harbor in front, which in past centuries sheltered so
+many Spanish fleets and those of Spanish enemies as well, is now
+chiefly devoted to yachting.
+
+When Menendez and his Spaniards first landed they built a wooden fort
+commanding the harbor entrance, surrounded by pine trees, which they
+named San Juan de Pinos. This was afterwards replaced by Fort San
+Marco, constructed of coquina, which was nearly a hundred years
+building, and was finished in 1756. Upon the transfer of Florida to
+the United States this became Fort Marion. It is a well-preserved
+specimen of the military architecture of the eighteenth century, built
+on Vauban's system, covering about four acres, with bastions at the
+corners, each protected by a watch-tower, and is surrounded by a moat,
+the walls being twenty-one feet high. The fort is in reasonably good
+preservation, and is said to have been constructed mainly by the labor
+of Indians. It took so long to build and cost so much under the
+wasteful Spanish system that one sovereign wrote that it had almost
+cost its weight in gold; yet it was regarded then as supremely
+important to be finished, being the key to the Spanish possession of
+Florida. Over the sally-port at the drawbridge are carved the Spanish
+arms and an inscription recording the completion of the fort in 1756,
+when Ferdinand VI. was King of Spain and Don Hereda Governor of
+Florida. It mounted one hundred of the small guns of those days, and
+the interior is a square parade ground, surrounded by large casemates.
+Upon each side of the casemate opposite the sally-port is a niche for
+holy water, and at the farther end the Chapel. Dungeons and
+subterranean passages abound, of which ghostly tales are told. This
+fort is the most interesting relic of the ancient city, a picturesque
+place, with charms even in its dilapidation.
+
+There are other quaint structures in this curious old town. A gray
+gateway about ten feet wide, flanked by tall square towers, marks the
+northern entrance to the city, the ditch from the fort passing in
+front of it. In one of the streets is the palace of the Spanish
+Governors, since changed into a post-office. The official centre of
+the city is a public square, the Plaza de la Constitucion, having a
+monument commemorating the Spanish Liberal Constitution of 1812, and
+also a Confederate Soldiers' Monument. This square fronts on the
+sea-wall, and alongside it and stretching westward is the Alameda,
+known as King Street, leading to the group of grand hotels recently
+constructed in Spanish and Moorish style, which have made modern St.
+Augustine so famous. These are the Ponce de Leon, the Alcazar and the
+Cordova, with the Casino, adjoined by spacious and beautiful gardens.
+These buildings reproduce all types of the Hispano-Moorish
+architecture, with many suggestions from the Alhambra. The Ponce de
+Leon, the largest, is three hundred and eighty by five hundred and
+twenty feet, enclosing an open court, and its towers rise above the
+red-tiled roofs to a height of one hundred and sixty-five feet, the
+adornments in colors being very effective. To the southward of the
+town, adjoining the barracks, is the military cemetery, where a
+monument and three white pyramids tell the horrid story of the Dade
+massacre during the Seminole War. Major Dade, a gallant officer, and
+one hundred and seven men, were ambushed and massacred by eight
+hundred Indians in December, 1835, and their remains afterwards
+brought here and interred under the pyramids. Opposite the barracks is
+what is claimed to be the oldest house in the United States, occupied
+by Franciscan monks from 1565 to 1580, and afterwards a dwelling. It
+has been restored, and contains a collection of historical relics.
+
+St. Augustine has had a chequered history. In 1586, Queen Elizabeth's
+naval hero, Sir Francis Drake, sailing all over the world to fight
+Spaniards, attacked and plundered the town and burnt the greater part
+of it. Then for nearly a century the Indians, pirates, French, English
+and neighboring Georgians and Carolinians made matters lively for the
+harried inhabitants. In 1763 the British came into possession, but
+they ceded it back to Spain twenty years later, the town then
+containing about three hundred householders and nine hundred negroes.
+It became American in 1821, and was an important military post during
+the subsequent Seminole War, which continued several years. It was
+early captured by the Union forces during the Civil War, and was a
+valuable stronghold for them. This curious old town has many
+traditions that tell of war and massacre and the horrible cruelties of
+the Spanish Inquisition, the remains of cages in which prisoners were
+starved to death being shown in the fort. Its best modern story,
+however, is told of the escape of Coa-coo-chee, the Seminole chief,
+whose adventurous spirit and savage nature gained him the name of the
+"Wild Cat." The ending of the Seminole War was the signing of a treaty
+by the older chiefs agreeing to remove west of the Mississippi.
+Coa-coo-chee, with other younger chiefs, opposed this and renewed the
+conflict. He was ultimately captured and taken to Fort Marion.
+Feigning sickness, he was removed into a casemate giving him air,
+there being an aperture two feet high by nine inches wide in the wall
+about thirteen feet above the floor, and under it a platform five feet
+high. Here, while still feigning illness, he became attenuated by
+voluntary abstinence from food, and finally one night squeezed himself
+through the aperture and dropped to the bottom of the moat, which was
+dry. Eluding all the guards, he escaped and rejoined his people. The
+flight caused a great sensation, and there was hot pursuit. After some
+time he was recaptured, and being taken before General Worth, was used
+to compel the remnant of the tribe to remove to the West. Worth told
+him if his people were not at Tampa in twenty days he would be killed,
+and he was ordered to notify them by Indian runners. He hesitated, but
+afterwards yielded, and the runners were given twenty twigs, one to be
+broken each day, so they might know when the last one was broken his
+life would pay the penalty. In seventeen days the task was
+accomplished. The tribe came to Tampa, and the captive was released,
+accompanying his warriors to the far West. This ended most of the
+Indian troubles in Florida, but some descendants of the Seminoles
+still exist in the remote fastnesses of the everglades.
+
+
+THE FLORIDA EAST COAST.
+
+All along the Atlantic shore of Florida south of St. Augustine are
+popular winter resorts, their broad and attractive beaches, fine
+climate and prolific tropical vegetation being among the charms that
+bring visitors. Ormond is between the ocean front and the pleasant
+Halifax River, its picturesque tributary, the Tomoka, being a favorite
+resort for picnic parties. A few miles south on the Halifax River is
+Daytona, known as the "Fountain City," and having its suburb, "the
+City Beautiful," on the opposite bank. New Smyrna, settled by
+Minorcan indigo planters in the eighteenth century, is on the northern
+arm of Indian River. Here are found some of the ancient Indian shell
+mounds that are frequent in Florida, and also the orange groves that
+make this region famous. Inland about thirty miles are a group of
+pretty lakes, and in the pines at Lake Helen is located the "Southern
+Cassadaga," or Spiritualists' Assembly. For more than a hundred and
+fifty miles the noted Indian River stretches down the coast of
+Florida. It is a long and narrow lagoon, parallel with the ocean, and
+is part of the series of lagoons found on the eastern coast almost
+continuously for more than three hundred miles from St. Augustine
+south to Biscayne Bay, and varying in width from about fifty yards to
+six or more miles. They are shallow waters, rarely over twelve feet
+deep, and are entered by very shallow inlets from the sea. The Indian
+River shores, stretching down to Jupiter Inlet, are lined with
+luxuriant vegetation, and the water is at times highly phosphorescent.
+Upon the western shore are most of the celebrated Indian River orange
+groves whose product is so highly prized. At Titusville, the head of
+navigation, where there are about a thousand people, the river is
+about, at its widest part, six miles. Twenty miles below, at
+Rockledge, it narrows to about a mile in width, washing against the
+perpendicular sides of a continuous enclosing ledge of coquina rock,
+with pleasant overhanging trees. Here comes in, around an island, its
+eastern arm, the Banana River, and to the many orange groves are added
+plantations of the luscious pineapple. Various limpid streams flow out
+from the everglade region at the westward, and Fort Pierce is the
+trading station for that district, to which the remnant of the
+Seminoles come to exchange alligator hides, bird plumage and snake
+skins for various supplies, not forgetting "fire-water." Below this is
+the wide estuary of St. Lucie River and the Jupiter River, with the
+lighthouse on the ocean's edge at Jupiter Inlet, the mouth of Indian
+River.
+
+Seventeen miles below this Inlet is Palm Beach, a noted resort,
+situated upon the narrow strip of land between the long and narrow
+lagoon of Lake Worth and the Atlantic Ocean. Here are the vast Hotel
+Royal Poinciana and the Palm Beach Inn, with their cocoanut groves,
+which also fringe for miles the pleasant shores of Lake Worth.
+Prolific vegetation and every charm that can add to this American
+Riviera bring a crowded winter population. The Poinciana is a tree
+bearing gorgeous flowers, and the two magnificent hotels, surrounded
+by an extensive tropical paradise, are connected by a wide avenue of
+palms a half-mile long, one house facing the lake and the other the
+ocean. There is not a horse in the settlement, and only one mule,
+whose duty is to haul a light summer car between the houses. The
+vehicles of Palm Beach are said to be confined to "bicycles,
+wheel-chairs and jinrickshas." Off to the westward the distant horizon
+is bounded by the mysterious region of the everglades. Far down the
+coast the railway terminates at Miami, the southernmost railway
+station in the United States, a little town on Miami River, where it
+enters the broad expanse of Biscayne Bay, which is separated from the
+Atlantic by the first of the long chain of Florida keys. Here are many
+fruit and vegetable plantations, and the town, which is a railway
+terminal and steamship port for lines to Nassau, Key West and Havana,
+is growing. Nassau is but one hundred and seventy-five miles distant
+in the Bahamas, off the Southern Florida coast, and has become a
+favorite American winter tourist resort.
+
+
+ASCENDING ST. JOHN'S RIVER.
+
+The St. John's is the great river of Florida, rising in the region of
+lakes, swamps and savannahs in the lower peninsula, and flowing
+northward four hundred miles to Jacksonville, then turning eastward to
+the ocean. It comes through a low and level region, with mostly a
+sluggish current; is bordered by dense foliage, and in its northern
+portion is a series of lagoons varying in width from one to six miles.
+The river is navigable fully two hundred miles above Jacksonville. The
+earlier portion of the journey is monotonous, the shores being distant
+and the landings made at long piers jutting out over the shallows
+from the villages and plantations. At Mandarin is the orange grove
+which was formerly the winter home of Harriet Beecher Stowe; Magnolia
+amid the pines is a resort for consumptives; and nearby is Green Cove
+Springs, having a large sulphur spring of medicinal virtue. In all
+directions stretch the pine forests; and the river water, while clear
+and sparkling in the sunlight, is colored a dark amber from the swamps
+whence it comes. The original Indian name of this river was We-la-ka,
+or a "chain of lakes," the literal meaning, in the figurative idea of
+the savage, being "the water has its own way." It broadens into
+various bays, and at one of these, about seventy-five miles south of
+Jacksonville, is the chief town of the upper river, Palatka, having
+about thirty-five hundred inhabitants and a much greater winter
+population. It is largely a Yankee town, shipping oranges and early
+vegetables to the North; and across the river, just above, is one of
+the leading orange plantations of Florida--Colonel Hart's, a Vermonter
+who came here dying of consumption, but lived to become, in his time,
+the leading fruit-grower of the State. Above Palatka the river is
+narrower, excepting where it may broaden into a lake; the foliage is
+greener, the shores more swampy, the wild-fowl more frequent, and the
+cypress tree more general. The young "cypress knees" can be seen
+starting up along the swampy edge of the shore, looking like so many
+champagne bottles set to cool in the water. The river also becomes
+quite crooked, and here is an ancient Spanish and Indian settlement,
+well named Welaka, opposite which flows in the weird Ocklawaha River,
+the haunt of the alligator and renowned as the crookedest stream on
+the continent.
+
+
+  [Illustration: _On the Ocklawaha_]
+
+GOING DOWN THE OCKLAWAHA.
+
+The Ocklawaha, the "dark, crooked water," comes from the south, by
+tortuous windings, through various lakes and swamps, and then turns
+east and southeast to flow into St. John's River, after a course of
+over three hundred miles. It rises in Lake Apopka, down the Peninsula,
+elevated about a hundred feet above the sea, the second largest of the
+Florida Lakes, and covering one hundred and fifty square miles. This
+lake has wooded highlands to the westward, dignified by the title of
+Apopka Mountains, which rise probably one hundred and twenty feet
+above its surface. To the northward is a group of lakes--Griffin,
+Yale, Eustis, Dora, Harris and others--having clear amber waters and
+low shores, which are all united by the Ocklawaha, the stream finally
+flowing northward out of Lake Griffin. This is a region of extensive
+settlement, mainly by Northern people. The mouth of the Ocklawaha is
+sixty-five miles from Lake Eustis in a straight line, but the river
+goes two hundred and thirty miles to get there. To the northward of
+this lake district is the thriving town of Ocala, with five thousand
+people, in a region of good agriculture and having large
+phosphate beds, the settlement having been originally started as a
+military post during the Seminole War. About five miles east of Ocala
+is the famous Silver Spring, which is believed to have been the
+"fountain of perpetual youth," for which Juan Ponce de Leon vainly
+searched. It is the largest and most beautiful of the many Florida
+springs, having wonderfully clear waters, and covers about three
+acres. The waters can be plainly seen pouring upwards through fissures
+in the rocky bottom, like an inverted Niagara, eighty feet beneath the
+surface. It has an enormous outflow, and a swift brook runs from it, a
+hundred feet wide, for some eight miles to the Ocklawaha.
+
+This strange stream is hardly a river in the ordinary sense, having
+fixed banks and a well-defined channel, but is rather a tortuous but
+navigable passage through a succession of lagoons and cypress swamps.
+Above the Silver Spring outlet, only the smallest boats of light draft
+can get through the crooked channel. This outlet is thirty miles in a
+direct line from the mouth of the river at the St. John's, but the
+Ocklawaha goes one hundred and nine miles thither. The swampy border
+of the stream is rarely more than a mile broad, and beyond it are the
+higher pine lands. Through this curious channel, amid the thick
+cypress forests and dense jungle of undergrowth, the wayward and
+crooked river meanders. The swampy bottom in which it has its course
+is so low-lying as to be undrainable and cannot be improved, so that
+it will probably always remain as now, a refuge for the sub-tropical
+animals, birds, reptiles and insects of Florida, which abound in its
+inmost recesses. Here flourishes the alligator, coming out to sun
+himself at mid-day on the logs and warm grassy lagoons at the edge of
+the stream, in just the kinds of places one would expect to find him.
+Yet the alligator is said to be a coward, rarely attacking, unless his
+retreat to water in which to hide himself is cut off. He thus becomes
+more a curiosity than a foe. These reptiles are hatched from eggs
+which the female deposits during the spring, in large numbers, in
+muddy places, where she digs out a spacious cavity, fills it with
+several hundred eggs, and covering them thickly with mud, leaves
+nature to do the rest. After a long incubation the little fellows come
+out and make a bee-line for the nearest water. The big alligators of
+the neighborhood have many breakfasts on the newly-born little ones,
+but some manage to grow up, after several years, to maturity, and
+exhibit themselves along this remarkable river.
+
+It is almost impossible to conceive of the concentrated crookedness of
+the Ocklawaha and the difficulties of passage. It is navigated by
+stout and narrow flat-bottomed boats of light draft, constructed so as
+to quickly turn sharp corners, bump the shores and run on logs without
+injury. The river turns constantly at short intervals and doubles upon
+itself in almost every mile, while the huge cypress trees often
+compress the water way so that a wider boat could not get through.
+There are many beautiful views in its course displaying the noble
+ranks of cypress trees rising as the stream bends along its bordering
+edge of swamps. Occasionally a comparatively straight river reach
+opens like the aisle of a grand building with the moss-hung cypress
+columns in long and sombre rows on either hand. At rare intervals fast
+land comes down to the stream bank, where there is some cultivation
+attempted for oranges and vegetables. Terrapin, turtles and water-fowl
+abound. When the passenger boat, after bumping and swinging around the
+corners, much like a ponderous teetotum, halts for a moment at a
+landing in this swampy fastness, half-clad negroes usually appear,
+offering for sale partly-grown baby alligators, which are the prolific
+crop of the district. Various "Turkey bends," "Hell's half-acres,"
+"Log Jams," "Bone Yards" and "Double S Bends" are passed, and at one
+place is the "Cypress Gate," where three large trees are in the way,
+and by chopping off parts of their roots, a passage about twenty feet
+wide had been secured to let the boats through. There are said to be
+two thousand bends in one hundred miles of this stream, and many of
+them are like corrugated circles, by which the narrow water way, in a
+mile or two of its course, manages to twist back to within a few feet
+of where it started. At night, to aid the navigation, the lurid glare
+of huge pine-knot torches, fitfully blazing, gives the scene a weird
+and unnatural aspect. The monotonous sameness of cypress trunks,
+sombre moss and twisting stream for many hours finally becomes very
+tiresome, but it is nevertheless a most remarkable journey of the
+strangest character possible in this country to sail down the
+Ocklawaha.
+
+
+LOWER FLORIDA AND THE SEMINOLES.
+
+South of the mouth of the Ocklawaha the St. John's River broadens into
+Lake George, the largest of its many lakes, a pretty sheet of water
+six to nine miles wide and twelve miles long. Volusia, the site of an
+ancient Spanish mission, is at the head of this lake, and the
+discharge from the swift but narrow stream above has made sand bars,
+so that jetties are constructed to deepen the channel. For a long
+distance the upper river is narrow and tortuous, with numerous islands
+and swamps, the dark coffee-colored water disclosing its origin; but
+the Blue Spring in one place is unique, sending out an ample and rich
+blue current to mix with the amber. Then Lake Monroe is reached, ten
+miles long and five miles wide, the head of navigation, by the regular
+lines of steamers, one hundred and seventy miles above Jacksonville.
+Here are two flourishing towns, Enterprise on the northern shore and
+Sanford on the southern, both popular winter resorts, and the latter
+having two thousand people. The St. John's extends above Lake Monroe,
+a crooked, narrow, shallow stream, two hundred and fourteen miles
+farther southeastward to its source. The region through which it there
+passes is mostly a prairie with herds of cattle and much game, and is
+only sparsely settled. The upper river approaches the seacoast, being
+in one place but three miles from the lagoons bordering the Atlantic.
+To the southward of Lake Monroe are the winter resorts of Winter Park
+and Orlando, the latter a town of three thousand population. There are
+numerous lakes in this district, and then leaving the St. John's
+valley and crossing the watershed southward through the pine forests,
+the Okeechobee waters are reached, which flow down to that lake. This
+region was the home of a part of the Seminole Indians, and
+Tohopekaliga was their chief, whom they revered so highly that they
+named their largest lake in his honor. The Kissimmee River flows
+southward through this lake, and then traverses a succession of lakes
+and swamps to Lake Okeechobee, about two hundred miles southward by
+the water-line. Kissimmee City is on Lake Tohopekaliga, and extensive
+drainage operations have been conducted here and to the southward,
+reclaiming a large extent of valuable lands, and lowering the
+water-level in all these lakes and attendant swamps.
+
+From Lake Tohopekaliga through the tortuous water route to Lake
+Okeechobee, and thence by the Caloosahatchie westward to the Gulf of
+Mexico, is a winding channel of four hundred and sixty miles, though
+in a direct line the distance is but one hundred and fifty miles.
+Okeechobee, the word meaning the "large water," covers about twelve
+hundred and fifty square miles, and almost all about it are the
+everglades or "grass water," the shores being generally a swampy
+jungle. This district for many miles is a mass of waving sedge grass
+eight to ten feet high above the water, and inaccessible excepting
+through narrow, winding and generally hidden channels. In one locality
+a few tall lone pines stand like sentinels upon Arpeika Island,
+formerly the home of the bravest and most dreaded of the Seminoles,
+and still occupied by some of their descendants. The name of the
+Seminole means the "separatist" or "runaway" Indians, they having
+centuries ago separated from the Creeks in Georgia and gone southward
+into Florida. From the days of De Soto to the time of their
+deportation in the nineteenth century the Spanish, British, French and
+Americans made war with these Seminole Indians. Gradually they were
+pressed southward through Florida. Their final refuge was the green
+islands and hummocks of the everglades, and they then clung to their
+last homes with the tenacity of despair. The greater part of this
+region is an unexplored mystery; the deep silence that can be actually
+felt, everywhere pervades; and once lost within the labyrinth, the
+adventurer is doomed unless rescued. Only the Indians knew its
+concealed and devious paths. On Arpeika Island the Cacique of the
+Caribs is said to have ruled centuries ago, until forced south out of
+Florida by the Seminoles. It was at times a refuge for the buccaneer
+with his plunder and a shrine for the missionary martyr who planted
+the Cross and was murdered beside it. This island was the last retreat
+of the Seminoles in the desultory war from 1835 to 1843, when they
+defied the Government, which, during eight years, spent $50,000,000
+upon expeditions sent against them. Then the attempt to remove all of
+them was abandoned, and the remnant have since rested in peace, living
+by hunting and a little trading with the coast settlements. The names
+of the noted chiefs of this great race--Osceola, Tallahassee,
+Tohopekaliga, Coa-coo-chee and others--are preserved in the lakes,
+streams and towns of Florida. Most of the deported tribe were sent to
+the Indian Territory. There may be three or four hundred of them still
+in the everglades, peaceful, it is true, yet haughty and suspicious,
+and sturdily rejecting all efforts to educate or civilize them. They
+celebrate their great feast, the "Green Corn Dance," in late June; and
+they have unwavering faith in the belief that the time will yet come
+when all their prized everglade land will be theirs again, and the
+glory of the past redeemed, if not in this world, then in the next
+one, beyond the "Big Sleep."
+
+
+WESTERN FLORIDA.
+
+Westward from Jacksonville, a railway runs through the pine forests
+until it reaches the rushing Suwanee River, draining the Okifenokee
+swamp out to the Gulf, just north of Cedar Key. This stream is best
+known from the minstrel song, long so popular, of the _Old Folks at
+Home_. Beyond it the land rises into the rolling country of Middle
+Florida, the undulating surface sometimes reaching four hundred feet
+elevation, and presenting fertile soil and pleasant scenery, with a
+less tropical vegetation than the Peninsula of Florida. Here is
+Tallahassee, the capital of the State, one hundred and sixty-five
+miles from Jacksonville, a beautiful town of four thousand population,
+almost embedded in flowering plants, shrubbery and evergreens, and
+familiarly known from these beauties as the "Floral City," the gardens
+being especially attractive in the season of roses. The Capitol and
+Court-house and West Florida Seminary, set on a hill, are the chief
+public buildings. In the suburbs, at Monticello, lived Prince Achille
+Murat, a son of the King of Naples, who died in 1847, and his grave is
+in the Episcopal Cemetery. There are several lakes near the town, one
+of them the curious Lake Miccosukie, which contracts into a creek,
+finally disappearing underground. The noted Wakulla Spring, an immense
+limestone basin of great depth and volume of water, with wonderful
+transparency, is fifteen miles southward.
+
+Some distance to the westward the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers join
+to form the Appalachicola River, flowing down to the Gulf at
+Appalachicola, a somewhat decadent port from loss of trade, its
+exports being principally lumber and cotton. The shallowness of most
+of these Gulf harbors, which readily silt up, destroys their
+usefulness as ports for deep-draft shipping. The route farther
+westward skirts the Gulf Coast, crosses Escambia Bay and reaches
+Pensacola, on its spacious harbor, ten miles within the Gulf. This is
+the chief Western Florida port, with fifteen thousand people, having a
+Navy Yard and much trade in lumber, cotton, coal and grain, a large
+elevator for the latter being erected in 1898. The Spaniards made this
+a frontier post in 1696, and the remains of their forts, San Miguel
+and San Bernardo, can be seen behind the town, while near the outer
+edge of the harbor is the old-time Spanish defensive battery, Fort San
+Carlos de Barrancos. The harbor entrance is now defended by Fort
+Pickens and Fort McRae. Pensacola Bay was the scene of one of the
+first spirited naval combats of the Civil War, when the Union forces
+early in 1862 recaptured the Navy Yard and defenses. The name of
+Pensacola was originally given by the Choctaws to the bearded
+Europeans who first settled there, and signifies the "hair people."
+
+
+THE FLORIDA GULF COAST.
+
+The coast of Florida on the Gulf of Mexico has various attractive
+places, reached by a convenient railway system. Homosassa is a popular
+resort about fifty miles southwestward from Ocala. A short distance in
+the interior is the locality where the Seminoles surprised and
+massacred Major Dade and his men in December, 1835, only three
+soldiers escaping alive to tell the horrid tale. The operations
+against these Indians were then mainly conducted from the military
+post of Tampa, and thither were taken for deportation the portions of
+the tribe that were afterwards captured, or who surrendered under the
+treaty. When Ferdinand de Soto entered this magnificent harbor on his
+voyage of discovery and gold hunting, he called it Espiritu Sancto
+Bay. It is from six to fifteen miles wide, and stretches nearly forty
+miles into the land, being dotted with islands, its waters swarming
+with sea-fowl, turtles and fish, deer abounding in the interior and on
+some of the islands, and there being abundant anchorage for the
+largest vessels. This is the great Florida harbor and the chief winter
+resort on the western coast. It was the main port of rendezvous and
+embarkation for the American forces in the Spanish War of 1898. The
+head of the harbor divides into Old Tampa and Hillsborough Bays, and
+on the latter and at the mouth of Hillsborough River is the city,
+numbering about twenty-five thousand inhabitants. The great hotels
+are surrounded by groves with orange and lemon trees abounding, and
+everything is invoked that can add to the tourist attractions. The
+special industry of the resident population is cigar-making. Port
+Tampa is out upon the Peninsula between the two bays, several miles
+below the city, and a long railway trestle leads from the shore for a
+mile to deep water. Upon the outer end of this long wharf is Tampa
+Inn, built on a mass of piles, much like some of the constructions in
+Venice. The guests can almost catch fish out of the bedroom windows,
+and while eating breakfast can watch the pelican go fishing in the
+neighboring waters, for this queer-looking bird, with the duck and
+gull, is everywhere seen in these attractive regions. An outer line of
+keys defends Tampa harbor from the storms of the Gulf. There are many
+popular resorts on the islands and shores of Tampa Bay, and regular
+lines of steamers are run to the West India ports, Mobile and New
+Orleans. All the surroundings are attractive, and a pleased visitor
+writes of the place: "Conditions hereabouts exhilarate the men; a
+perpetual sun and ocean breeze are balm to the invalid and an
+inspiration to a robust health. The landscape affords uncommon
+diversion, and the sea its royal sport with rod and gaff."
+
+Farther down the coast is Charlotte Harbor, also deeply indented and
+sheltered from the sea by various outlying islands. It is eight to ten
+miles long and extends twenty-five miles into the land, having
+valuable oyster-beds and fisheries, and its port is Punta Gorda. Below
+this is the projecting shore of Punta Rassa, where the outlet of Lake
+Okeechobee, the Caloosahatchie River, flows to the sea, having the
+military post of Fort Myers, another popular resort, a short distance
+inland, upon its bank. The Gulf Coast now trends to the southeast,
+with various bays, in one of which, with Cape Romano as the guarding
+headland, is the archipelago of "the ten thousand islands," while
+below is Cape Sable, the southwestern extremity of Florida. To the
+southward, distant from the shore, are the long line of Florida Keys,
+the name coming from the Spanish word _cayo_, an island. This
+remarkable coral formation marks the northern limit of the Gulf
+Stream, where it flows swiftly out to round the extremity of the
+Peninsula and begin its northern course through the Atlantic Ocean.
+Although well lighted and charted, the Straits of Florida along these
+reefs are dangerous to navigate and need special pilots. Nowhere
+rising more than eight to twelve feet above the sea, the Keys thus
+low-lying are luxuriantly covered with tropical vegetation. From the
+Dry Tortugas at the west, around to Sand's Key at the entrance to
+Biscayne Bay, off the Atlantic Coast, about two hundred miles, is a
+continuous reef of coral, upon the whole extent of which the little
+builder is still industriously working. The reef is occasionally
+broken by channels of varying depth, and within the outer line are
+many habitable islands. The whole space inside this reef is slowly
+filling up, just as all the Keys are also slowly growing through
+accretions from floating substances becoming entangled in the myriad
+roots of the mangroves. The present Florida Reef is a good example of
+the way in which a large part of the Peninsula was formed. No less
+than seven old coral reefs have been found to exist south of Lake
+Okeechobee, and the present one at the very edge of the deep water of
+the Gulf Stream is probably the last that can be formed, as the little
+coral-builder cannot live at a greater depth than sixty feet. The Gulf
+Stream current is so swift and deep along the outer reef that there is
+no longer a foundation on which to build.
+
+The Gulf Stream is the best known of all the great ocean currents. The
+northeast and southeast trade-winds, constantly blowing, drive a great
+mass of water from the Atlantic Ocean into the Caribbean Sea, and
+westward through the passages between the Windward Islands, which is
+contracted by the converging shores of the Yucatan Peninsula and the
+Island of Cuba, so that it pours between them into the Gulf of Mexico,
+raising its surface considerably above the level of the Atlantic.
+These currents then move towards the Florida Peninsula, and pass
+around the Florida Reef and out into the Atlantic. It is estimated by
+the Coast Survey that the hourly flow of the Gulf Stream past the
+reef is nearly ninety thousand million tons of water, the speed at the
+surface of the axis of the stream being over three and one-half miles
+an hour. To conceive what the immensity of this flow means, it is
+stated that if a single hour's flow of water were evaporated, the salt
+thus produced would require to carry it one hundred times the number
+of ocean-going vessels now afloat. The Gulf Stream water is of high
+temperature, great clearness and a deep blue color; and when it meets
+the greener waters of the Atlantic to the northward, the line of
+distinction is often very well defined. At the exit to the Atlantic
+below Jupiter Inlet the stream is forty-eight miles wide to Little
+Bahama Bank, and its depth over four hundred fathoms.
+
+There are numerous harbors of refuge among the Florida Keys, and that
+at Key West is the best. This is a coral island seven miles long and
+one to two miles broad, but nowhere elevated more than eleven feet
+above the sea. Its name, by a free translation, comes from the
+original Spanish name of _Cayo Hueso_, or the Bone Island, given
+because the early mariners found human bones upon it. Here are twenty
+thousand people, mostly Cubans and settlers from the Bahamas, the
+chief industry being cigar-making, while catching fish and turtles and
+gathering sponges also give much employment. There are no springs on
+the island, and the inhabitants are dependent on rain or distillation
+for water. The air is pure and the climate healthy, the trees and
+shrubbery, with the residences embowered in perennial flowers, giving
+the city a picturesque appearance. Key West has a good harbor, and as
+it commands the gateway to and from the Gulf near the western
+extremity of the Florida coral reef, it is strongly defended, the
+prominent work being Fort Taylor, constructed on an artificial island
+within the main harbor entrance. The little Sand Key, seven miles to
+the southwest, is the southernmost point of the United States. Forty
+miles to the westward is the group of ten small, low and barren
+islands known as the Dry Tortugas, from the Spanish _tortuga_, a
+tortoise. Upon the farthest one, Loggerhead Key, stands the great
+guiding light for the Florida Reef, of which this is the western
+extremity, the tower rising one hundred and fifty feet. Fort Jefferson
+is on Garden Key, where there is a harbor, and in it were confined
+various political prisoners during the Civil War, among them some who
+were concerned in the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln.
+
+Here, with the encircling waters of the Gulf all around us, terminates
+this visit to the Sunny South. As we have progressed, the gradual
+blending of the temperate into the torrid zone, with the changing
+vegetation, has reminded of Bayard Taylor's words:
+
+     "There, in the wondering airs of the Tropics,
+     Shivers the Aspen, still dreaming of cold:
+     There stretches the Oak from the loftiest ledges,
+     His arms to the far-away lands of his brothers,
+     And the Pine tree looks down on his rival, the Palm."
+
+And as the journey down the Florida Peninsula has displayed some of
+the most magnificent winter resorts of the American Riviera, with
+their wealth of tropical foliage, fruits and flowers, and their
+seductive and balmy climate, this too has reminded of Cardinal
+Damiani's glimpse of the "Joys of Heaven":
+
+     "Stormy winter, burning summer, rage within these regions never,
+     But perpetual bloom of roses and unfading spring forever;
+     Lilies gleam, the crocus glows, and dropping balms their scents
+       deliver."
+
+Along this famous peninsula the sea rolls with ceaseless beat upon
+some of the most gorgeous beaches of the American coast. To the
+glories of tropical vegetation and the charms of the climate, Florida
+thus adds the magnificence of its unrivalled marine environment.
+Everywhere upon these pleasant coasts--
+
+                       "The bridegroom, Sea,
+     Is toying with his wedded bride,--the Shore.
+     He decorates her shining brow with shells,
+     And then retires to see how fine she looks,
+     Then, proud, runs up to kiss her."
+
+
+
+
+TRAVERSING THE PRAIRIE LAND.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+TRAVERSING THE PRAIRIE LAND.
+
+     The Northwest Territory -- Beaver River -- Fort McIntosh --
+     Mahoning Valley -- Steubenville -- Youngstown -- Canton --
+     Massillon -- Columbus -- Scioto River -- Wayne Defeats the
+     Miamis -- Sandusky River -- Findlay -- Natural Gas Fields --
+     Fort Wayne -- Maumee River -- The Little Turtle -- Old
+     Tippecanoe -- Tecumseh -- Battle of Tippecanoe -- Harrison
+     Defeats the Prophet -- Tecumseh Slain in Canada -- Indianapolis
+     -- Wabash River -- Terre Haute -- Illinois River -- Springfield
+     -- Lincoln's Home and Tomb -- Peoria -- The Great West -- Lake
+     Erie -- Tribe of the Cat -- Conneaut -- The Western Reserve --
+     Ashtabula -- Mentor -- Cleveland -- Cuyahoga River -- Moses
+     Cleaveland -- Euclid Avenue -- Oberlin -- Elyria -- The Fire
+     Lands -- Sandusky -- Put-in-Bay Island -- Perry's Victory --
+     Maumee River -- Toledo -- South Bend -- Chicago -- The
+     Pottawatomies -- Fort Dearborn -- Chicago Fire -- Lake Michigan
+     -- Chicago River -- Drainage Canal -- Lockport -- Water Supply
+     -- Fine Buildings, Streets and Parks -- University of Chicago
+     -- Libraries -- Federal Steel Company -- Great Business
+     Establishments -- Union Stock Yards -- The Hog -- The Board of
+     Trade -- Speculative Activity -- George M. Pullman -- The
+     Sleeping Car -- The Pioneer -- Town of Pullman -- Agricultural
+     Wealth of the Prairies -- The Corn Crop -- Whittier's Corn
+     Song.
+
+
+THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY.
+
+Beyond the Allegheny ranges, which are gradually broken down into
+their lower foothills, and then to an almost monotonous level, the
+expansive prairie lands stretch towards the setting sun. From their
+prolific agriculture has come much of the wealth and prosperity of
+the United States. The rivers flowing out of the mountains seek the
+Mississippi Valley, thus reaching the sea through the Great Father of
+Waters. Among these rivers is the Ohio, and at its confluence with the
+Beaver, near the western border of Pennsylvania, was, in the early
+days, the Revolutionary outpost of Fort McIntosh, a defensive work
+against the Indians. All about is a region of coal and gas, extending
+across the boundary into the Mahoning district of Ohio, the Mahoning
+River being an affluent of the Beaver. Numerous railroads serve its
+many towns of furnaces and forges. To the southward is Steubenville on
+the Ohio, and to the northward Youngstown on the Mahoning, both busy
+manufacturing centres. Salem and Alliance are also prominent, and some
+distance northwest is Canton, a city of thirty thousand people, in a
+fertile grain district, the home of President William McKinley.
+Massillon, upon the pleasant Tuscarawas River, in one of the most
+productive Ohio coal-fields, preserves the memory of the noted French
+missionary priest, Jean Baptiste Massillon, for all this region was
+first traversed, and opened to civilization, by the French religious
+explorers from Canada who went out to convert the Indians.
+
+In the centre of the State of Ohio is the capital, Columbus, built on
+the banks of the Scioto River, a tributary of the Ohio flowing
+southward and two hundred miles long. This river receives the
+Olentangy or Whetstone River at Columbus, in a region of great
+fertility, which is in fact the characteristic of the whole Scioto
+Valley. The Ohio capital, which has a population of one hundred and
+twenty thousand, large commerce and many important manufacturing
+establishments, dates from 1812, and became the seat of the State
+Government in 1816. The large expenditures of public money upon
+numerous public institutions, all having fine buildings, the wide,
+tree-shaded streets, and the many attractive residences, have made it
+one of the finest cities in the United States. Broad Street, one
+hundred and twenty feet wide, beautifully shaded with maples and elms,
+extends for seven miles. The Capitol occupies a large park surrounded
+with elms, and is an impressive Doric building of gray limestone,
+three hundred and four feet long and one hundred and eighty-four feet
+wide, the rotunda being one hundred and fifty-seven feet high. There
+are fine parks on the north, south and east of the city, the latter
+containing the spacious grounds of the Agricultural Society. Almost
+all the Ohio State buildings, devoted to its benevolence, justice or
+business, have been concentrated in Columbus, adding to its
+attractions, and it is also the seat of the Ohio State University with
+one thousand students. Railroads radiate in all directions, adding to
+its commercial importance.
+
+In going westward, the region we are traversing beyond the
+Pennsylvania boundary gradually changes from coal and iron to a rich
+agricultural section. As we move away from the influence of the
+Allegheny ranges, the hills become gentler, and the rolling surface is
+more and more subdued, until it is smoothed out into an almost level
+prairie, heavily timbered where not yet cleared for cultivation. This
+was the Northwest Territory, first explored by the French, who were
+led by the Sieur de la Salle in his original discoveries in the
+seventeenth century. The French held it until the conquest of Canada,
+when that Dominion and the whole country west to the Mississippi River
+came under the British flag by the treaty of 1763. After the
+Revolution, the various older Atlantic seaboard States claiming the
+region, ceded sovereignty to the United States Government, and then
+its history was chequered by Indian wars until General Wayne conducted
+an expedition against the Miamis and defeated them in 1794, after
+which the Northwest Territory was organized, and the State of Ohio
+taken out of it and admitted to the Union in 1803, its first capital
+being Chillicothe. It was removed to Zanesville for a couple of years,
+but finally located at Columbus.
+
+Beyond the Scioto the watershed is crossed, by which the waters of the
+Ohio are left behind and the valley of Sandusky River is reached, a
+tributary of Lake Erie. Here is Bucyrus, in another prolific natural
+gas region, the centre of which is Findlay. At this town, in 1887, the
+inhabitants, who had then had just one year of natural gas
+development, spent three days in exuberant festivity, to show their
+appreciation of the wonderful discovery. They had thirty-one gas wells
+pouring out ninety millions of cubic feet in a day, all piped into
+town and feeding thirty thousand glaring natural gas torches of
+enormous power, which blew their roaring flames as an accompaniment to
+the oratory of John Sherman and Joseph B. Foraker, who were then
+respectively Senator and Governor of Ohio. The soldiers and firemen
+paraded, and a multitude of brass bands tried to drown the Niagara of
+gas which was heard roaring five miles away, while the country at
+night was illuminated for twenty miles around. But the wells have
+since diminished their flow, although the gas still exists; while
+another field with a prolific yield is in Fairfield County, a short
+distance southeast of Columbus. Over the State boundary in Indiana is
+yet another great gas-field covering five thousand square miles in a
+dozen counties, with probably two thousand wells and a yield which has
+reached three thousand millions of cubic feet in a day. This gas
+supplies many cities and towns, including Chicago, and it is one of
+the greatest gas-fields known. In the same region there are also large
+petroleum deposits.
+
+Not far beyond the State boundary is Fort Wayne, the leading city of
+Northern Indiana, having forty thousand population, an important
+railway centre, and prominent also in manufactures. It stands in a
+fertile agricultural district, and being located at the highest part
+of the gentle elevation, beyond the Sandusky Valley, diverting the
+waters east and west, it is appropriately called the "Summit City."
+Here the Maumee River is formed by the confluence of the two streams
+St. Joseph and St. Mary, and flows through the prairie towards the
+northeast, to make the head of Lake Erie. The French, under La Salle,
+in the eighteenth century established a fur-trading post here, and
+erected Fort Miami, and in 1760 the British penetrated to this then
+remote region and also built a fort. During the Revolution this
+country was abandoned to the Indians, but when General Wayne defeated
+the Miamis in 1794 he thought the place would make a good frontier
+outpost to hold the savages in check, and he then constructed a strong
+work, to which he gave the name of Fort Wayne. Around this post the
+town afterwards grew, being greatly prospered by the Wabash and Erie
+Canal, and by the various railways subsequently constructed in all
+directions. All this prairie region was the hunting-ground of the
+Miamis, whose domain extended westward to Lake Michigan, and southward
+along the valley of the Miami River to the Ohio. They were a warlike
+and powerful tribe, and their adherence to the English during the
+Revolution provoked almost constant hostilities with the settlers who
+afterwards came across the mountains to colonize the Northwest
+Territory. Under the leadership of their renowned chief
+Mishekonequah, or the "Little Turtle," they defeated repeated
+expeditions sent against them, until finally beaten by Wayne.
+Subsequently they dwindled in importance, and when removed farther
+west, about 1848, they numbered barely two hundred and fifty persons.
+
+
+OLD TIPPECANOE.
+
+Some distance westward is the Tippecanoe River, a stream flowing
+southwest into the Wabash, and thence into the Ohio. The word
+Tippecanoe is said to mean "the great clearing," and on this river was
+fought the noted battle by "Old Tippecanoe," General William Henry
+Harrison, against the combined forces of the Shawnees, Miamis and
+several other tribes, which resulted in their complete defeat. They
+were united under Elskwatawa, or the "Prophet," the brother of the
+famous Tecumseh. These two chieftains were Shawnees, and they preached
+a crusade by which they gathered all the northwestern tribes in a
+concerted movement to resist the steady encroachments of the whites.
+The brother, who was a "medicine man," in 1805 set up as an inspired
+prophet, denouncing the use of liquors, and of all food, manners and
+customs introduced by the hated "palefaces," and confidently predicted
+they would ultimately be driven from the land. For years both chiefs
+travelled over the country stirring up the Indians. General Harrison,
+who was the Governor of the Northwest Territory, gathered his forces
+together and advanced up the Wabash against the Prophet's town of
+Tippecanoe, when the Indians, hoping to surprise him, suddenly
+attacked his camp, but he being prepared, they were signally defeated,
+thus giving Harrison his popular title of "Old Tippecanoe," which had
+much to do with electing him President in 1840. Some time after this
+defeat the War of 1812 broke out, when Tecumseh espoused the English
+cause, went to Canada with his warriors, and was made a
+brigadier-general. He was killed there in the battle of the Thames, in
+Ontario Province, and it is said had a premonition of death, for,
+laying aside his general's uniform, he put on a hunting-dress and
+fought desperately until he was slain. Tecumseh was the most famous
+Indian chief of his time, and the honor of killing him was claimed by
+several who fought in the battle, so that the problem of "Who killed
+Tecumseh?" was long discussed throughout the country.
+
+The State of Indiana was admitted into the Union in 1816, and in its
+centre, built upon a broad plain, on the east branch of White River,
+is its capital and largest city, Indianapolis, having two hundred
+thousand population. This is a great railway centre, having lines
+radiating in all directions, and it also has extensive manufactures
+and a large trade in live stock. The city plan, with wide streets
+crossing at right angles, and four diagonal avenues radiating from a
+circular central square, makes it very attractive; and the residential
+quarter, displaying tasteful houses, ornate grounds and shady streets,
+is regarded as one of the most beautiful in the country. The State
+Capitol, in a spacious park, is a Doric building with colonnade,
+central tower and dome, and in an enclosure on its eastern front is
+erected one of the finest Soldiers' and Sailors' Monuments existing,
+rising two hundred and eighty-five feet, out-topping everything
+around, having been designed and largely constructed in Europe. There
+are also many prominent public buildings throughout the city.
+Indianapolis, first settled in 1819, had but a small population until
+the railways centred there, the Capitol being removed from Corydon in
+1825. The Wabash River, to which reference has been made, receives
+White River, and is one of the largest affluents of the Ohio, about
+five hundred and fifty miles long, being navigable over half that
+length. It rises in the State of Ohio, flows across Indiana, and,
+turning southward, makes for a long distance the Illinois boundary.
+Its chief city is Terre Haute, the "High Ground," about seventy miles
+west of Indianapolis, another prominent railroad centre, having
+forty-five thousand people, with extensive manufactures. It is
+surrounded by valuable coal-fields, is built upon an elevated plateau,
+and, like all these prairie cities, is noted for its many broad and
+well-shaded streets. It was founded in 1816.
+
+
+THE GREAT WEST.
+
+Progressing westward, the timbered prairie gradually changes to the
+grass-covered prairie, spreading everywhere a great ocean of
+fertility. Across the Wabash is the "Prairie State" of Illinois, its
+name coming from its principal river, which the Indians named after
+themselves. The word is a French adaptation of the Indian name
+"Illini," meaning "the superior men," the earliest explorers and
+settlers having been French, the first comers on the Illinois River
+being Father Marquette and La Salle. At the beginning of the
+eighteenth century their little settlements were flourishing, and the
+most glowing accounts were sent home, describing the region, which
+they called "New France," on account of its beauty, attractiveness and
+prodigious fertility, as a new Paradise. There were many years of
+Indian conflicts and hostility, but after peace was restored and a
+stable government established, population flowed in, and Illinois was
+admitted as a State to the Union in 1818. The capital was established
+at Springfield in 1837, an attractive city of about thirty thousand
+inhabitants, built on a prairie a few miles south of Sangamon River, a
+tributary of the Illinois, and from its floral development and the
+adornment of its gardens and shade trees, Springfield is popularly
+known as the "Flower City." There is a magnificent State Capitol with
+high surmounting dome, patterned somewhat after the Federal Capitol
+at Washington. Springfield has coal-mines which add to its prosperity,
+but its great fame is connected with Abraham Lincoln. He lived in
+Springfield, and the house he occupied when elected President has been
+acquired by the State and is on public exhibition. After his
+assassination in 1865, his remains were brought from Washington to
+Springfield, and interred in the picturesque Oak Ridge Cemetery, in
+the northern suburbs, where a magnificent monument was erected to his
+memory and dedicated in 1874. About sixty miles north of Springfield,
+the Illinois River expands into Peoria Lake, and here came La Salle
+down the river in 1680, and at the foot of the lake established a
+trading-post and fort, one of the earliest in that region. When more
+than a century had elapsed, a little town grew there which is now the
+busy industrial city of Peoria, famous for its whiskey and glucose,
+and turning out products that annually approximate a hundred millions,
+furnishing vast traffic for numerous railroads. It is the chief city
+of the "corn belt," and is served by all the prominent trunk railway
+lines.
+
+Like the pioneers of a hundred years ago, we have left the Atlantic
+seaboard, crossed the Allegheny Mountains and entered the expansive
+"Northwest Territory," which in the first half of the nineteenth
+century was the Mecca of the colonist and frontiersman. This was then
+the region of the "Great West," though that has since moved far
+beyond the Mississippi. Its agricultural wealth made the prosperity of
+the country for many decades, and its prodigious development was
+hardly realized until put to the test of the Civil War, when it poured
+out the men and officers, and had the staying qualities so largely
+contributing to the result of that great conflict. Gradually
+overspread by a network of railways, the numerous "cross-roads" have
+expanded everywhere into towns and cities, almost all patterned alike,
+and all of them centres of rich farming districts. Coal, oil and gas
+have come to minister to its manufacturing wants, and thus growing
+into mature Commonwealths, this prolific region in the later decades
+has been itself, in turn, contributing largely to the tide of
+migration flowing to the present "Great Northwest," a thousand miles
+or more beyond. It presents a rich agricultural picture, but little
+scenic attractiveness. Everywhere an almost dead level, the numerous
+railways cross and recross the surface in all directions at grade, and
+are easily built, it being only necessary to dig a shallow ditch on
+either side, throw the earth in the centre, and lay the ties and
+rails. Nature has made the prairie as smooth as a lake, so that hardly
+any grading is necessary, and the region of expansive green viewed out
+of the car window has been aptly described as having "a face but no
+features," when one looks afar over an ocean of waving verdure.
+
+
+LAKE ERIE.
+
+This vast prairie extends northward to and beyond the Great Lakes, and
+it is recorded that in the early history of the proposed legislation
+for the "Northwest Territory," Congress gravely selected as the names
+of the States which were to be created out of it such ponderous
+conglomerates as "Metropotamia," "Assenispia," "Pelisipia" and
+"Polypotamia," titles which happily were long ago permitted to pass
+into oblivion. Northward, in Ohio, the region stretches to Lake Erie,
+the most southern and the smallest of the group of Great Lakes above
+Niagara. It is regarded as the least attractive lake, having neither
+romances nor much scenery. Yet, from its favorable position, it
+carries an enormous commerce. It is elliptical in form, about two
+hundred and forty miles long and sixty miles broad, the surface being
+five hundred and sixty-five feet above the ocean level. It is a very
+shallow lake, the depth rarely exceeding one hundred and twenty feet,
+excepting at the lower end, while the other lakes are much deeper, and
+in describing this difference of level it is said that the surplus
+waters poured from the vast _basins_ of Superior, Michigan and Huron,
+flow across the _plate_ of Erie into the deep _bowl_ of Ontario. This
+shallowness causes it to be easily disturbed, so that it is the most
+dangerous of these fresh-water seas, and it has few harbors, and those
+very poor, especially upon the southern shore. The bottom of the lake
+is a light, clayey sediment, rapidly accumulated from the wearing away
+of the shores, largely composed of clay strata. The loosely-aggregated
+products of these disintegrated strata are frequently seen along its
+coast, forming cliffs extending back into elevated plateaus, through
+which the rivers cut deep channels. Their mouths are clogged by
+sand-bars, and dredging and breakwaters have made the harbors on the
+southern shore, around which have grown the chief towns--Dunkirk,
+Erie, Ashtabula, Cleveland, Sandusky and Toledo. The name of Lake Erie
+comes from the Indian "tribe of the Cat," whom the French called the
+"Chats," because their early explorers, penetrating to the shores of
+the lake, found them abounding in wild cats, and thus they gave the
+same name to the cats and the savages. In their own parlance, these
+Indians were the "Eries," and in the seventeenth century they numbered
+about two thousand warriors. In 1656 the Iroquois attacked and almost
+annihilated them.
+
+The Lake Erie ports in the "Buckeye State" of Ohio, so called from the
+buckeye tree, are chiefly harbors for shipping coal and receiving ores
+from the upper lakes, their railroads leading to the great industrial
+centres to the southward. Near the eastern boundary of Ohio is
+Conneaut, on the bank of a wide and deep ravine, formed by a small
+river, broadening into a bay at the shore of the lake, the name
+meaning "many fish." Here landed in 1796 the first settlers from
+Connecticut, who entered the "Western Reserve," as all this region was
+then called. On July 4th of that year, celebrating the national
+anniversary, "they pledged each other in tin cups of lake water,
+accompanied by a salute of fowling-pieces," and the next day began
+building the first house on the Reserve, constructed of logs, and long
+known as "Stow Castle." Conneaut is consequently known as the
+"Plymouth of the Western Reserve," as here began the settlements made
+by the Puritan New England migration to Ohio. On deep ravines making
+their harbors are Ashtabula, an enormous _entrepôt_ for ores, and a
+few miles farther westward, Painesville, on Grand River, named for
+Thomas Paine. Beyond is Mentor, the home of the martyred President
+Garfield, whose large white house stands near the railway. All along
+here, the southern shore of Lake Erie is a broad terrace at eighty to
+one hundred feet elevation above the water, while farther inland is
+another and considerably higher plateau. Each sharp declivity facing
+northward seems at one time to have been the actual shore of the lake
+when its surface before the waters receded was much higher than now.
+The outer plateau having once been the overflowed lake bed, is level,
+excepting where the crooked but attractive streams have deeply cut
+their winding ravines down through it to reach Lake Erie.
+
+
+THE CITY OF CLEVELAND.
+
+Thus we come to Cleveland, the second city in Ohio, having four
+hundred thousand people, and extensive manufacturing industries. It is
+the capital of the "Western Reserve" and the chief city of Northern
+Ohio, its commanding position upon a high bluff, falling off
+precipitously to the edge of the water, giving it the most attractive
+situation on the shore of Lake Erie. Shade trees embower it, including
+many elms planted by the early settlers, who learned to love them in
+New England, and hence it delights in the popular title of the "Forest
+City." Were not the streets so wide, the profusion of foliage might
+make Cleveland seem like a town in the woods. The little Cuyahoga
+River, its name meaning "the crooked stream," flows with wayward
+course down a deeply washed and winding ravine, making a valley in the
+centre of the city, known as "the Flats," and this, with the tributary
+ravines of some smaller streams, is packed with factories and
+foundries, oil refineries and lumber mills, their chimneys keeping the
+business section constantly under a cloud of smoke. Railways run in
+all directions over these flats and through the ravines, while, high
+above, the city has built a stone viaduct nearly a half-mile long,
+crossing the valley. Here are the great works of the Standard Oil
+Company, controlling that trade, and several of the petroleum magnates
+have their palaces in the city.
+
+Old Moses Cleaveland, a shrewd but unsatisfied Puritan of the town of
+Windham, Connecticut, became the agent of the Connecticut Lead
+Company, who brought out the first colony in 1796 that landed at
+Conneaut. They explored the lake shore, and selecting as a good
+location the mouth of Cuyahoga River, Moses wrote back to his former
+home that they had found a spot "on the bank of Lake Erie which was
+called by my name, and I believe the child is now born that may live
+to see that place as large as old Windham." In little over a century
+the town has grown far beyond his wildest dreams, although it did not
+begin to expand until the era of canals and railways, and it was not
+so long ago that the people in grateful memory erected a bronze statue
+of the founder. One of the local antiquaries, delving into the
+records, has found why various original settlers made their homes at
+Cleveland. He learned that "one man, on his way farther West, was laid
+up with the ague and had to stop; another ran out of money and could
+get no farther; another had been to St. Louis and wanted to get back
+home, but saw a chance to make money in ferrying people across the
+river; another had $200 over, and started a bank; while yet another
+thought he could make a living by manufacturing ox-yokes, and he
+stayed." This earnest investigator continues: "A man with an
+agricultural eye would look at the soil and kick his toe into it, and
+then would shake his head and declare that it would not grow white
+beans--but he knew not what this soil would bring forth; his hope and
+trust was in beans, he wanted to know them more, and wanted potatoes,
+corn, oats and cabbage, and he knew not the future of Euclid Avenue."
+
+On either side of the deep valley of "the Flats" stretch upon the
+plateau the long avenues of Cleveland, with miles of pleasant
+residences, surrounded by lawns and gardens, each house isolated in
+green, and the whole appearing like a vast rural village more than a
+city. This pleasant plan of construction had its origin in the New
+England ideas of the people. Yet the city also has a numerous
+population of Germans, and it is recorded that one of the early
+landowners wrote, in explaining his project of settlement: "If I make
+the contract for thirty thousand acres, I expect with all speed to
+send you fifteen or twenty families of prancing Dutchmen." These
+Teutons came and multiplied, for the original Puritan stock can hardly
+be responsible for the vineyards of the neighborhood, the music and
+dancing, and the public gardens along the pleasant lake shore, where
+the crowds go, when work is over, to enjoy recreation and watch the
+gorgeous summer sunsets across the bosom of the lake which are the
+glory of Cleveland. Upon the plateau, the centre of the city, is the
+Monumental Park, where stand the statue of Moses Cleaveland, the
+founder, who died in 1806, and a fine Soldiers' Monument, with also a
+statue of Commodore Perry. This Park is an attractive enclosure of
+about ten acres, having fountains, gardens, monuments and a little
+lake, and it is intersected at right angles by two broad streets, and
+surrounded by important buildings. One of the streets is the chief
+business highway, Superior Street, and the other leads down to the
+edge of the bluff on the lake shore, where the steep slope is made
+into a pleasure-ground, with more flower-beds and fountains and a
+pleasant outlook over the water, although at its immediate base is a
+labyrinth of railroads and an ample supply of smoke from the numerous
+locomotives. A long breakwater protects the harbor entrance, and out
+under the lake is bored the water-works tunnel.
+
+There extends far to the eastward, from a corner of the Monumental
+Park, Cleveland's famous street--Euclid Avenue. The people regard it
+as the handsomest highway in America, in the combined magnificence of
+houses and grounds. It is a level avenue of about one hundred and
+fifty feet width, with a central roadway and stone footwalks on either
+hand, shaded by rows of grand overarching elms, and bordered on both
+sides by well-kept lawns. This is the public highway, every part being
+kept scrupulously neat, while a light railing marks the boundary
+between the street and the private grounds. For a long distance this
+noble avenue is bordered by stately residences, each surrounded by
+ample gardens, the stretch of grass, flowers and foliage extending
+back from one hundred to four hundred feet between the street and the
+buildings. Embowered in trees, and with all the delights of garden and
+lawn seen in every direction, this grand avenue makes a delightful
+driveway and promenade. Upon it live the multi-millionaires of
+Cleveland, the finest residences being upon the northern side, where
+they have invested part of the profits of their railways, mills,
+mines, oil wells and refineries in adorning their homes and
+ornamenting their city. This splendid boulevard, in one way, is a
+reproduction of the Parisian Avenue of the Champs Elysées and its
+gardens, but with more attractions in the surroundings of its
+bordering rows of palaces. Here live the men who vie with those of
+Chicago in controlling the commerce of the lakes and the affairs of
+the Northwest. Plenty of room and an abundance of income are necessary
+to provide each man, in the heart of the city, with two to ten acres
+of lawns and gardens around his house, but it is done here with
+eminent success. About four miles out is the beautiful Wade Park,
+opposite which are the handsome buildings of the Western Reserve
+University, having, with its adjunct institutions, a thousand
+students. Beyond this, the avenue ends at the attractive Lake View
+Cemetery, where, on the highest part of the elevated plateau, with a
+grand outlook over Lake Erie, is the grave of the assassinated
+President Garfield. His imposing memorial rises to a height of one
+hundred and sixty-five feet.
+
+
+CLEVELAND TO CHICAGO.
+
+Thirty-five miles southwest of Cleveland, and some distance inland
+from Lake Erie, is Oberlin, where, in a fertile and prosperous
+district, is the leading educational foundation of Northern
+Ohio--Oberlin College--named in memory of the noted French
+philanthropist, and established in 1833 by the descendants of the
+Puritan colonists, to carry out their idea of thorough equality in
+education. It admits students without distinction of sex or color, and
+has about thirteen hundred, almost equally divided between the sexes,
+occupying a cluster of commodious buildings. To the westward is the
+beautiful ravine of Black River, which gets out to the lake by falling
+over a rocky ledge in two streams, and on the peninsula formed by its
+forks is the town of Elyria. Maria Ely was the wife of the founder of
+the settlement, who named it after her in this peculiar reversible
+way. This romantic stream bounds the "Fire Lands" of the Western
+Reserve, a tract of nearly eight hundred square miles abutting on the
+lake shore, which Connecticut set apart for colonization by her
+people, who had been sufferers from destructive fires in the towns of
+New London, Fairfield and Norwalk on Long Island Sound. They secured
+this wilderness in the early part of the nineteenth century, and their
+chief town is Sandusky, with twenty-five thousand population. Here
+lived most of the Eries, the Indian "tribe of the Cat," who fished in
+Sandusky Bay, its upper waters being an archipelago of little green
+islands abounding with water fowl. They were known to the adjoining
+tribes as the "Neutral Nation," for they maintained two villages of
+refuge on Sandusky River, between the warlike Indians of the east and
+the west, and whoever entered their boundaries was safe from pursuit,
+the sanctuary being rigidly observed. The early French missionaries
+who found them in the seventeenth century speak of these anomalous
+villages among the savages as having then been long in existence.
+
+The name of Sandusky is a corruption of a Wyandot word meaning
+"cold-water pools," the French having originally rendered it as
+Sandosquet. The shores are low, but there is a good harbor and much
+trade, and here is located the Ohio State Fish Hatchery. The railroads
+are laid among the savannahs and lagoons, and one of the suburban
+stations has been not inaptly named Venice. There are extensive
+vineyards on the flat and sunny shores of the bay, and this is one of
+the most prolific grape districts in the State. Sandusky Bay is a
+broad sheet of water, in places six miles wide, and about twenty miles
+long. Sandusky has a large timber trade, being noted for the
+manufacture of hard woods. Out beyond the bold peninsula, protruding
+into the lake at the entrance to the bay, is a group of islands
+spreading over the southwestern waters of Lake Erie, of which Kelly's
+Island is the chief, an archipelago formed largely from the _detritus_
+washed out of the Detroit, Maumee and various other rivers flowing
+into the head of the lake. Here the Erie Indians had a fortified
+stronghold, whose outlines can still be traced. The most noted of the
+group is Put-in-Bay Island, now a popular watering-place, which got
+its name from Commodore Perry, who "put in" there with the captured
+British fleet at the naval battle of Lake Erie, September 10, 1813. It
+was from this place, just after his victory, that he sent the historic
+despatch, giving him fame, "We have met the enemy and they are ours."
+The killed of both fleets were buried side by side near the beach on
+the island, the place being marked by a mound. The lovely sheet of
+water of Put-in-Bay glistens in front, having the towns of
+villa-crowned Gibraltar Island upon its surface. Vineyards and roses
+abound, these islands, like the adjacent shores, being noted for their
+wines.
+
+The Maumee River, coming up from Fort Wayne, flows into the head of
+Lake Erie, the largest stream on its southern coast. It comes from the
+southwest through the region of the "Black Swamp," a vast district,
+originally morass and forest, which has been drained to make a most
+fertile country. This "miserable bog," as the original settlers
+denounced it, when they were jolted over the rude corduroy roads that
+sustained them upon the quaking morass, has since become the "prolific
+garden" and "magnificent forest" described by the modern tourist. The
+Maumee Valley was an almost continual battle-ground with the Indians
+when "Mad Anthony Wayne" commanded on that frontier, he being called
+by them the "Wind," because "he drives and tears everything before
+him." For a quarter of a century border warfare raged along this
+river, then known as the "Miami of the Lakes," and its chief
+settlement, Toledo, passed its infancy in a baptism of blood and fire.
+It was at the battle of Fallen Timbers, fought in 1794, almost on the
+site of Toledo, that Wayne gave his laconic and noted "field orders."
+General William Henry Harrison, then his aide, told Wayne just before
+the battle he was afraid he would get into the fight and forget to
+give "the necessary field orders." Wayne replied: "Perhaps I may, and
+if I do, recollect that the standing order for the day is, charge the
+rascals with the bayonets." Toledo is built on the flat surface on
+both sides of the Maumee River and Bay, which make it a good harbor,
+stretching six miles down to Lake Erie. There are a hundred thousand
+population here, and this energetic reproduction of the ancient
+Spanish city has named its chief newspaper the _Toledo Blade_. The
+city has extensive railway connections and a large trade in lumber and
+grain, coal and ores, and does much manufacturing, it being well
+served with natural gas. A dozen grain elevators line the river
+banks, and the factory smokes overhang the broad low-lying city like a
+pall. To the westward, crossing the rich lands of the reclaimed swamp,
+is the Indiana boundary, that State being here a broad and level
+prairie, which also stretches northward into Michigan. The chief town
+of Northern Indiana is South Bend, named from the sweeping southern
+bend of St. Joseph River, on which it is built. This stream rises in
+Michigan, and flows for two hundred and fifty miles over the prairie,
+going down into Indiana and then back again to empty into Lake
+Michigan. South Bend is noted for its carriage- and wagon-building
+factories, and has several flourishing Roman Catholic institutions,
+generally of French origin. To the westward spreads the level prairie,
+with scant scenic attractions, though rich in agriculture, to the
+shores of Lake Michigan, being gridironed with railways as Chicago is
+approached.
+
+
+THE GREAT CITY OF THE LAKES.
+
+The second city in the United States, with a population approximating
+two millions, Chicago, the metropolis of the prairies, seems destined
+for unlimited growth. It has absorbed all the outlying towns, and now
+embraces nearly two hundred square miles. It has a water-front on Lake
+Michigan of twenty-six miles, and its trade constantly grows. It
+pushes ahead with boundless energy, attracting the shrewdest men of
+the West to take part in its vast and profitable enterprises, and is
+in such a complete manner the depot and storehouse for the products
+and supplies of goods for the enormous prairie region around it, and
+for the entire Northwest, and the country out to the Rocky Mountains
+and Pacific Ocean, that other Western cities cannot displace or even
+hope to rival it. Yet it is a youthful giant, of quick and marvellous
+development, but few of its leading spirits having been born within
+its limits, nearly all being attracted thither by its paramount
+advantages. The prominent characteristics of Chicago are an
+overhanging pall of smoke; streets crowded with quick-moving, busy
+people; a vast aggregation of railways, vessels, elevators and traffic
+of all kinds; a polyglot population drawn from almost all races; and
+an earnest devotion to the almighty dollar. Its name came from the
+river, and is of Indian origin, regarded as probably a corruption of
+"Cheecagua," the title of a dynasty of chiefs who controlled the
+country west and south of Lake Michigan. This also was a word applied
+in the Indian dialect to the wild onion growing luxuriantly on the
+banks of the river, and they gave a similar name to the thunder which
+they believed the voice of the Great Spirit, and to the odorous animal
+abounding in the neighborhood that the white man knew as the
+"polecat." These were rather incongruous uses for the same word, but
+the suggestion has been made that all can be harmonized if Chicago is
+interpreted as meaning "strong," the Indians, being poorly supplied
+with words, usually selecting the most prominent attribute in giving
+names. All these things are in one way or another "strong," and it is
+evident that prodigious strength exists in Chicago.
+
+As elsewhere throughout the Northwest, the French missionaries were
+here the earliest explorers, Father Marquette coming in 1673, and
+afterwards Hennepin, Joliet and La Salle, whose names are so
+numerously reproduced in the Northwestern States. The French built at
+the mouth of the river Fort Chicagou, for a trading-post, and held it
+until the English conquered Canada. When the earlier American settlers
+ventured to this frontier, the Indians on Lake Michigan were the
+Pottawatomies, and were hostile. The Government in 1804 built Fort
+Dearborn, near the mouth of the Chicago River, to control them. These
+Indians joined in the crusade of the Prophet and Tecumseh, and when
+the war with England began in 1812, attacked and captured the fort,
+massacring the garrison. The post was subsequently re-established, and
+the Indians were ultimately removed west of the Mississippi. Not long
+afterwards it was said the first purchase of the site of Chicago took
+place, wherein a large part of the land now occupied was sold for a
+pair of boots. When the town plot was originally surveyed, twelve
+families were there in addition to the garrison of Fort Dearborn, and
+in 1831 it had one hundred people. In 1833 the town government was
+organized, and it had five hundred and fifty inhabitants and one
+hundred and seventy-five buildings. Five trustees then ruled Chicago,
+and collected $49 for the first year's taxes. Collis P. Huntington,
+the Pacific Railway manager, says that in 1835, being possessed of a
+good constitution and a pair of mules, but little else, he was out
+that way prospecting, and found at Chicago nothing but a swamp and a
+few destitute farmers, all anxious to move. One of these farmers came
+to him with the deed of his farm of two thousand acres, and offered to
+trade it for his pair of mules. Huntington adds: "I was not very
+favorably impressed with the settlement and declined his offer, and
+finally continued my travel west, and that farm is to-day the business
+centre of Chicago."
+
+In 1837 Chicago got its first city charter, and it then had about
+forty-two hundred people. The rapid growth since has been
+unparalleled, especially when, after 1850, its commercial enterprise
+began attracting wide attention, the population then being about
+thirty thousand. In 1855, to get above the swamp and improve the
+drainage, the level of the entire city was raised seven feet, huge
+buildings being elevated bodily while business was progressing, an
+enterprise mainly accomplished by the ingenious devices which first
+gave prominence to the late George M. Pullman. The population almost
+quadrupled and its trade increased tenfold in the decade 1850-60, and
+in 1870 the population was over three hundred thousand, and it had
+become a leading American city. Yet Chicago has had terrible setbacks
+in its wonderful career, the most awful being the fire in October,
+1871, the greatest of modern times, which raged for three days, burned
+over a surface of nearly four square miles and until practically
+nothing remained in the district to devour, destroyed eighteen
+thousand buildings, two hundred lives, and property valued at
+$200,000,000, leaving a hundred thousand people homeless--a calamity
+that excited the sympathies of the world, which gave relief
+contributions aggregating $7,000,000. Yet while the embers were
+smoking, this enterprising people set to work to rebuild their city
+with a will and a progress which caused almost as much amazement as
+the original catastrophe. The recovery was complete; the city which
+had been of wood was rebuilt of brick and stone and iron and steel,
+and its progress since has developed an energy not before equalled. It
+has been beautified by grand parks and boulevards, and by the
+construction of palatial residences and business blocks, and of
+enormous office buildings, the tall "sky-scrapers" having been first
+invented and built in Chicago. In 1893 the World's Columbian
+Exhibition, to celebrate the discovery of America, was held at Chicago
+on a vast scale and with remarkable success. The city has long been,
+also, a favorite meeting-place for the great political Conventions
+nominating candidates for President and Vice-President of the United
+States, its large hotel capacity and immense halls giving advantages
+for these enormous assemblages.
+
+
+CHICAGO'S ADMIRABLE LOCATION.
+
+The position of Chicago at the southwestern extremity of Lake
+Michigan, with prairies of the greatest fertility stretching hundreds
+of miles south and west, makes the city the primary food-gatherer and
+supply-distributor of the great Northwest, and this has been the chief
+cause of its growth. In September, 1833, the Pottawatomies agreed to
+sell their prairie homes to the United States and migrate to
+reservations farther West, and seven thousand of them assembled in
+grand council at Chicago, and sold the Government twenty millions of
+acres of these prairies around Lake Michigan, in Indiana, Illinois and
+Michigan, for $1,100,000. Thus was this fertile domain opened to
+settlement. In the Indian dialect, Michigan means the "great water,"
+and it is the largest lake within the United States, being three
+hundred and twenty miles long and seventy broad, and having an average
+depth of one thousand feet, with the surface elevated five hundred and
+seventy-eight feet above the ocean level. On the Chicago side this
+extensive lake has but a narrow watershed, the Illinois River,
+draining the region to the westward, being formed only sixty-five
+miles southwest of the lake by the junction of the Kankakee and
+Desplaines Rivers. This narrow and very low watershed, considered in
+connection with the enormous capacity of the Illinois River valley,
+which is at a much lower level and appears as if worn by a mighty
+current in former times, is regarded by geologists as an evidence of
+the probability that the Lake Michigan waters may in past ages have
+found their way to that outlet and flowed through the Illinois and
+Mississippi Rivers to the Gulf. The diminutive bayou of the Chicago
+River, with its two short and tortuous branches, made Chicago the
+leading lake port, and thus brought trade, so that early in the race
+it far outstripped all its Western rivals. Every railroad of
+prominence sought an outlet or a feeder at Chicago, and the title of a
+"trunk line" was adopted for a line of rails between Chicago and the
+seaboard. The surrounding prairie for miles is crossed in all
+directions by railways, and a large part of the city and suburbs is
+made up of huge stations, car-yards, elevators, storehouses and
+cattle-pens, almost overwhelming visitors with the prodigious scale of
+their elaborate perplexity. The maze of railways and streets on the
+level surface, all crossing at grade, as it has spread over miles of
+prairie and grown into such enormous proportions, presents a most
+serious problem, with which the city and the railways are now dealing
+on a comprehensive plan, by which it is hoped that before long the
+grade-crossings will be eliminated.
+
+Another problem, found even more serious as the city grew, was the
+drainage. In former years the sewage was discharged into the Chicago
+River and Lake Michigan. The river became a most malodorous stream in
+consequence, and as it had practically no descent, the current would
+scarcely flow, and the lake, from which the city water-supply was
+drawn, was more and more polluted. With the customary enterprise of
+these wonderful people, however, they decided to make the only change
+feasible, which was to take advantage of the descending watershed
+towards Desplaines River and change their sewerage system so that it
+would all discharge in that direction. The problem was solved by the
+construction of the most expensive drainage works in the world, and a
+complete change of the sewers, at a cost altogether approximating
+$40,000,000. St. Louis and the towns along the Desplaines fought the
+scheme, and there was protracted litigation, but the very existence of
+Chicago depended on the result. The great drainage canal was completed
+connecting the Chicago River South Branch with Desplaines River at
+Lockport, twenty-eight miles southwest, where it discharges the
+outflow from Lake Michigan, which then flows past Joliet, and
+ultimately into Illinois River. This huge canal, opened in January,
+1900, reverses the flow of the Chicago River, which now draws in about
+three hundred thousand cubic feet of water per minute from Lake
+Michigan and flushes the canal, which is also to be made available for
+shipping. Thus the Chicago River flows towards its source with a free
+current, and Lake Michigan has been purified. The canal has quite a
+descent to Lockport, and the water-power is to be availed of in
+generating electricity. The city water-supply is drawn from cribs out
+in the lake through four systems of tunnels, aggregating twenty-two
+miles, furnishing an ample service, and pumping-stations in various
+locations elevate the water in towers to secure sufficient head for
+the flow into the buildings. The chief of these towers, a solid stone
+structure alongside the lake, rises one hundred and sixty feet, the
+huge pumping-engines forcing a vast stream constantly over its top.
+
+
+  [Illustration: _Lincoln Monument, Lincoln Park, Chicago_]
+
+FEATURES OF CHICAGO.
+
+Chicago is the world's greatest grain, lumber and cattle market. It
+attracts immigrants from everywhere, and all flourish in native
+luxuriance, although occasionally they are compelled to bow to the
+power of the law by the military arm when civil forces are exhausted.
+Everything seems to go on without much hindrance, and thus this
+wonderful city secures its rapid growth and completely cosmopolitan
+character. While proud of their amazing progress, the people seem
+generally so engrossed in pushing business enterprises and piling up
+fortunes that they have little time to think of much else. Yet
+somebody has had opportunity to plan the adornment of the city by a
+magnificent series of parks and boulevards encircling it. The broad
+expanse of prairie was low, level and treeless originally, but
+abundant trees have since been planted, and art has made little lakes
+and miniature hills, beautiful flower-gardens and abundant shrubbery,
+thus producing pleasure-grounds of rare attractions. Michigan Avenue
+and Drexel and Grand Boulevards, leading to the southern system of
+parks and Lake Shore Drive on the north side of Chicago River, are the
+finest residential streets. The huge Auditorium fronting on Michigan
+Avenue was erected at a cost of $3,500,000, includes a hotel and
+theatre, and is surmounted with a tower rising two hundred and seventy
+feet, giving a fine view over the city and lake. Out in front is the
+Lake Park, with railways beyond near the shore, and a fine bronze
+equestrian statue of General John A. Logan, who died in 1886 and is
+buried in the crypt beneath the monument. Michigan Avenue begins at
+Chicago River alongside the site of old Fort Dearborn, now
+obliterated, and it stretches far south, a tree-lined boulevard
+adorned by magnificent residences.
+
+Chicago River, with its entrance protected by a wide-spreading
+breakwater, is the harbor of the city, and, like its railways, carries
+the trade. Tunnels conduct various streets under it, and a multitude
+of bridges go over it, all of them opening to let vessels pass. They
+are mostly swinging bridges, but some are ingenious constructions,
+which roll, and lift and fold, and in various curious ways open the
+channel for the shipping. Huge elevators line the river banks, with
+vessels alongside, into which streams of grain are poured, while
+multitudes of cars move in and out, under and around them, bringing
+the supply from the farm to the storage-bins. In the business section,
+as elsewhere, the streets are wide, thus accommodating the throngs who
+fill them, and there are fine city and national buildings, a new
+Post-office of large size and imposing architecture being in course of
+construction. The Chicago Public Library, completed in 1897, is a
+grand structure, costing $2,000,000, and having about three hundred
+thousand volumes. The University of Chicago, in the southern suburbs,
+is destined to become one of the leading institutions of learning in
+America. It began instruction in 1892, and now has some twenty-four
+hundred students, and endowments of $15,000,000, largely the gifts of
+John D. Rockefeller. The University grounds cover twenty-four acres,
+and when the plan is completed there will be over forty buildings. Its
+libraries contain three hundred and fifty thousand volumes. The great
+Yerkes Observatory, adjunct to this University, is at Lake Geneva,
+Wisconsin, seventy miles distant, and has the largest refracting
+telescope in the world, with forty-inch lens and a tube seventy feet
+long. On the northern side of the city is the Newberry Library, with
+$3,000,000 endowment and two hundred thousand volumes, including
+admirable musical and medical collections, and the Crerar Library,
+with $2,000,000 endowment, principally for scientific works, is being
+established on the south side. Chicago's greatest industrial
+establishment is the Federal Steel Company, having enormous
+rolling-mills and foundries in various parts of the city, and also at
+Joliet on Desplaines River. Its South Chicago Rolling Mills occupy
+over three hundred acres. The manufacture of agricultural machinery is
+represented by two enormous establishments, the McCormick Harvesting
+Machine Company on the southwest side and the Deering Works in the
+northwestern district.
+
+
+CHICAGO BUSINESS ENERGY.
+
+As the elevators of Chicago represent its traffic in grain, and
+contain usually a large proportion of what is known as the "visible
+supply," so do the vast lumber-yards along Chicago River often store
+up an enormous product of the output from the "Great North Woods,"
+covering much of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and spreading
+across the Canadian border. The third great branch of traffic is
+represented by the Union Stock Yards in the southwestern suburbs.
+These yards in a year will handle eight millions of hogs, four
+millions of cattle, four millions of sheep and a hundred thousand
+horses, over two-thirds of the hogs and cattle being killed in the
+yards and sent away in the form of meat, and the whole annual traffic
+being valued at $250,000,000. The yards cover three hundred acres, and
+with the packing-houses employ twenty-five thousand men, and they have
+twenty miles of water-troughs and twenty-five miles of feeding-troughs,
+and are served by two hundred and fifty miles of railway-tracks. The
+hog is a potential factor in American economy, being regarded as the
+most compact form in which the corn crop of the country can be
+transported to market. The corn on the farm is fed to the hog, and the
+animal is sent to Chicago as a package provided by nature for its
+economical utilization. The Union Stock Yards make a complete town,
+with its own banks, hotels, Board of Trade, Post-office, town-hall,
+newspaper and special Fire Department. The extensive enclosure is
+entered by a modest, gray sandstone turreted gateway, surmounted by a
+carved bull's head, emblematic of its uses. The Horse Market is a
+large pavilion, seating four thousand people. From this vast emporium,
+with its enormous packing-houses, are sent away the meat supplies that
+go all over the world, the product being carried out in long trains of
+canned goods and refrigerator cars, the most ingenious methods of
+"cold storage" being invented for and used in this widely extended
+industry.
+
+The active traffic of the grain and provision trades of Chicago is
+conducted in the building of the Board of Trade, a tall and imposing
+structure at the head of La Salle Street, which makes a fitting close
+to the view along that grand highway. It is one of the most elaborate
+architectural ornaments of the city, and its surmounting tower rises
+three hundred and twenty-two feet from the pavement. The fame of this
+grand speculative arena is world-wide, and the animated and at times
+most exciting business done within marks the nervous beating of the
+pulse of this metropolis of food products. The interior is a
+magnificent hall, lighted by high-reaching windows and surmounted by a
+central skylight elevated nearly a hundred feet above the floor.
+Impressive columns adorn the sides, and the elaborate frescoes above
+are in keeping with its artistic decoration. Upon the spacious floor,
+between nine and one o'clock, assemble the wheat and corn, and pork,
+lard, cattle and railway kings in a typical scene of concentrated and
+boiling energy feeding the furnace in which Chicago's high-pressure
+business enterprise glows and roars. These speculative gladiators have
+their respective "pits" or amphitheatres upon the floor, so that they
+gather in huge groups, around which hundreds run and jostle, the scene
+from the overlooking gallery, as the crowds sway and squirm, and with
+their calls and shouting make a deafening uproar, being a veritable
+Bedlam. Each "pit" deals in a specific article, while in another space
+are detachments of telegraph operators working with nimble fingers to
+send instant reports of the doings and prices to the anxious outer
+world. High up on the side of the grand hall, in full view of all, are
+hung large dials, whose moving hands keep momentary record of the
+changes in prices made by the noisy and excited throngs in the "pits,"
+thus giving notice of the ruling figures for the next month's
+"options" on wheat, corn and "short-ribs." There are tables for
+samples, and large blackboards bearing the figures of market
+quotations elsewhere. This Chicago Board of Trade has been the scene
+of some of the wildest speculative excitements in the country, as its
+shouting and almost frenzied groups of traders in the "pits" may make
+or break a "corner," and here in fitful fever concentrates the
+business energy of the great Metropolis of the Lakes.
+
+
+PULLMAN AND THE SLEEPING-CAR.
+
+Another Chicago specialty of wide fame is the railway sleeping-car,
+brought to its present high stage of development by one of the most
+prominent Chicagoans, the late George M. Pullman. The earliest
+American sleeping-car was devised by Theodore T. Woodruff, who
+constructed a small working model in 1854 at Watertown, New York, and
+subsequently building his car, first ran it on the New York Central
+Railroad in October, 1856, charging fifty cents for a berth. George M.
+Pullman was originally a cabinet-maker in New York State, and moved
+when a young man to Chicago. His first fame in that city, as already
+stated, came from the ingenious methods he devised, when the grade of
+the town was elevated to secure better drainage, for raising the
+buildings by putting hundreds of jackscrews under them, trade
+continuing uninterrupted during the process. Pullman, subsequently to
+that time, travelled occasionally between Chicago and Buffalo, and one
+night got into Woodruff's car. He was stretched out upon the vibrating
+couch for some two hours, but could not sleep, and his eyes being
+widely open, and the sight wandering all about the car, he struck upon
+a new idea. When he left the car he had determined to develop from his
+brief experience a plan destined to expand into a complete home upon
+wheels for the traveller, either awake or sleeping. In 1859 he turned
+two ordinary railway coaches into sleeping-cars and placed them upon
+night trains between Chicago and St. Louis, charging fifty cents per
+berth, his first night's receipts being two dollars. He ran these
+experimental coaches about five years before he felt able to carry out
+his ideal plan, and he then occupied fully a year in constructing his
+model sleeping-car, the "Pioneer," at Chicago, at a cost of $18,000.
+But when completed the car was so heavy, wide and high that no railway
+could undertake running it, as it necessitated cutting off station
+platforms and elevating the tops of bridges before it could pass by.
+Thus he had a white elephant on his hands for a time. In April, 1865,
+President Lincoln's assassination shocked the country, and the
+funeral, with its escort of mourning statesmen, was progressing from
+Washington to Chicago, on the way to the grave at Springfield. The
+nation watched its progress, and the railways transporting the
+_cortége_ were doing their best. The manager of the road from Chicago
+to Springfield used the "Pioneer" in the funeral train, taking several
+days to prepare for it by sending out gangs of men to cut off the
+station platforms and alter the bridges. Pullman's dream was realized;
+his "coach of the future," with its escort of statesmen, carried the
+dead President to his grave and became noted throughout the land. A
+few weeks later, General Grant, fresh from the conquest of the
+Rebellion, had a triumphal progress from the camp to his home in
+Illinois. Five days were spent in clearing the railway between Detroit
+and Galena, where he lived, and the "Pioneer" carried Grant over that
+line.
+
+These successes made Pullman's fortune, and the business of his
+company grew rapidly afterwards, it being now an enormous concern with
+$70,000,000 capital, controlling practically all the sleeping-cars of
+this country and many abroad. The main works are at the Chicago suburb
+of Pullman, ten miles south of the centre of the city, where there are
+about twelve thousand population, most of the people being connected
+with the works, which are an extensive general car-building
+establishment. Pullman was built as a model town, with every
+improvement calculated to add to the comfort and health of the
+working-people, being also provided with its own library, theatre,
+and a tasteful arcade, in which are various shops. It was at Pullman
+in 1894 that the great strike took place which ultimately involved a
+large portion of the railways of the country, causing much rioting and
+bloodshed, and finally requiring the intervention of the Federal
+troops to maintain the peace. After a protracted period of turmoil,
+the strike failed.
+
+
+THE CORN CROP.
+
+Chicago is the _entrepôt_ for the great prairie region spreading from
+the Alleghenies westward beyond the Mississippi. Here grows the grain
+making the wealth of the land, and feeding the cattle, hogs and sheep
+that are poured so liberally into the Union Stock Yards of the Lake
+City. Upon the crops of this vast prairie land depends the prosperity
+of the country. Wall Street in New York and the Chicago Board of Trade
+are the market barometers of this prosperity, for the prairie farmer,
+as he may be rich and able to spend money, or poor so that he cannot
+even pay his debts, controls the financial outlook in America. The
+traveller, as he glides upon this universal prairie land, east, south
+and west of Chicago, viewing its limitless fertility seen far away in
+every direction over the monotonous level, as if looking across an
+ocean, cannot help recalling Wordsworth's pleasant lines:
+
+     "The streams with softest sound are flowing,
+     The grass you almost hear it growing,
+     You hear it now, if e'er you can."
+
+Then, as the crops ripen and are garnered, and the wealth of the
+prairie is turned into food for the world, there comes with the
+advancing autumn the ripening of the greatest crop of America, and the
+mainstay of the country, the Indian corn. It is wonderful to think
+that the first corn crop of the United States planted by white men at
+Jamestown, Virginia, on a field of forty acres in 1608, has grown to
+an annual yield approximating twenty-three hundred million bushels.
+This prolific crop is the banner product of the great prairie, and
+Whittier in his "Corn Song" has recorded its glories:
+
+     "Heap high the farmer's wintry hoard!
+       Heap high the golden corn!
+     No richer gift has autumn poured
+       From out the lavish horn!
+
+     "Let other lands, exulting, glean
+       The apple from the pine,
+     The orange from its glossy green,
+       The cluster from the vine;
+
+     "We better love the hardy gift
+       Our rugged vales bestow,
+     To cheer us when the storm shall drift
+       Our harvest fields with snow.
+
+     "Through vales of grass and meads of flowers,
+       Our plows their furrows made,
+     While on the hills, the sun and showers
+       Of changeful April played.
+
+     "We dropped the seed o'er hill and plain
+       Beneath the sun of May,
+     And frightened from our sprouting grain
+       The robber crows away.
+
+     "All through the long bright days of June
+       Its leaves grew green and fair,
+     And waved in hot midsummer's noon
+       Its soft and yellow hair.
+
+     "And now, with autumn's moonlit eves,
+       Its harvest time has come,
+     We pluck away the frosted leaves,
+       And bear the treasure home.
+
+     "There, richer than the fabled gift
+       Apollo showered of old,
+     Fair hands the broken grain shall sift,
+       And knead its meal of gold.
+
+     "Let vapid idlers loll in silk
+       Around their costly board;
+     Give us the bowl of samp and milk
+       By homespun beauty poured!
+
+     "Where'er the wide old kitchen hearth
+       Sends up its smoky curls,
+     Who will not thank the kindly earth,
+       And bless our farmer girls!
+
+     "Let earth withhold her goodly root,
+       Let mildew blight the rye,
+     Give to the worm the orchard's fruit,
+       The wheat-field to the fly;
+
+     "But let the good old corn adorn
+       The hills our fathers trod;
+     Still let us for his golden corn
+       Send up our thanks to God!"
+
+
+
+
+GLIMPSES OF THE GREAT NORTHWEST.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+GLIMPSES OF THE GREAT NORTHWEST.
+
+     The Great Lakes -- Sieur de La Salle -- Lake St. Clair -- Lake
+     Huron -- Detroit -- Ann Arbor -- Mackinac Island -- Sault
+     Sainte Marie -- Lake Superior -- Lake Nepigon -- Thunder Bay --
+     Port Arthur -- Kakabika Falls -- The Pictured Rocks --
+     Marquette -- Keweenaw -- Iron and Copper -- Houghton -- Lake
+     Gogebic -- Superior City -- Duluth -- Messabi and Vermillion
+     Ranges -- Green Bay -- Wisconsin -- Milwaukee -- Waukesha --
+     Madison -- Rock Island -- Davenport -- Moline Rapids -- Dubuque
+     -- Iowa -- Black Hawk -- Minnesota -- La Crosse -- Lake Pepin
+     -- Falls of St. Anthony -- St. Paul -- Minneapolis -- Fort
+     Snelling -- Flour and Lumber -- Lake Minnetonka -- Minnehaha
+     Falls -- Hiawatha and Minnehaha -- Source of the Mississippi --
+     Itasca Lake -- Minnesota River -- Red River of the North --
+     Ancient Lake Agassiz -- Sioux Falls -- Fargo -- Great Wheat
+     Farms -- Manitoba -- Rat Portage -- Keewatin -- Winnipeg --
+     Hudson Bay Company -- Dakota -- Bismarck -- The Bad Lands --
+     Yellowstone River -- Montana -- Big Horn River -- Custer
+     Massacre -- Livingston -- Cinnabar Mountain -- Yellowstone
+     National Park -- Mammoth Hot Springs -- Norris Geyser Basin --
+     Firehole River -- Lower, Middle and Upper Geyser Basins --
+     Yellowstone Lake and Falls -- The Grand Canyon -- Two-Ocean
+     Pond -- Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way.
+
+
+THE GREAT LAKES.
+
+René Robert Cavelier, the Sieur de La Salle, was the chief French
+pilgrim and adventurer in the seventeenth century who explored the
+Great Lakes and valley of the Mississippi, and secured for his country
+the vast empire of Louisiana, stretching from Canada to the Gulf. His
+explorations were made in 1669 and again in 1678, and like all the
+discoverers of that early time he was hunting for the water way
+thought to lead to the South Sea and provide a route to China. The
+historian Parkman describes La Salle as one of the most remarkable
+explorers whose names live in history; the hero of a fixed idea and
+determined purpose; an untiring pilgrim pushing onward towards the
+goal he was never to attain; the pioneer who guided America to the
+possession of her richest heritage. Throughout the northwest his
+memory is preserved in the names of rivers, towns, and otherwise, and
+his maps and narratives gave the earliest geography of the Lakes and
+the vast and prolific region obtained from France in the Louisiana
+cession.
+
+The Great Lakes on the northern border of the United States are the
+largest bodies of fresh water on the globe. They carry an enormous
+commerce, nearly a hundred thousand men being employed by the fleet of
+lake vessels, which approximates two millions tonnage. At the head of
+Lake Erie the waters of Detroit River pour in, draining the upper
+lakes, this stream, about twenty-five miles long, flowing from Lake
+St. Clair and broadening from a half-mile to four miles width at its
+mouth. Lake St. Clair is elevated five hundred and thirty feet, but is
+small, being about twenty-five miles in diameter, and shallow, only
+about twenty feet deep. The navigation of its shallows is intricate,
+and is aided by a long canal through the shoals at the upper end,
+where the St. Clair River discharges, a strait about forty miles long,
+flowing south from Lake Huron. This great lake is at five hundred and
+eighty feet elevation, and in places seventeen hundred feet deep,
+covering twenty-four thousand square miles, and containing many
+islands. At its northern end, Lakes Superior and Michigan join it by
+various straits and water ways beyond Mackinac Island. Westward of
+Lakes Ontario and Erie, and between them and Lake Huron, a long
+peninsula of the Dominion of Canada projects southward into the United
+States, terminating opposite Detroit. Similarly, to the westward of
+Lake Huron, and between it and Lake Michigan, the State of Michigan
+has its lower peninsula projecting upward to Canada. The Canadian
+projection, which is part of Ontario Province, is unfortunately
+located, being almost surrounded by these expansive lakes, having
+bleak, cold winds sweeping across them and seriously impeding its
+agriculture. The surface has little charm of scenery and the
+population is sparse. The trunk railways, however, find this an almost
+direct route from Western New York to Detroit and Chicago, and various
+roads traverse it, coming out on the Detroit River and the
+swift-flowing St. Clair River, which are crossed both by car-ferry and
+tunnel. At the outlet of Lake Huron, St. Clair River is less than a
+thousand feet wide between Point Edward and Fort Gratiot, and here
+and at Ports Sarnia and Huron the low and level shores are lined with
+docks, elevators and other accessories of commerce. This river brings
+vast amounts of sand down out of Lake Huron with its swift current,
+which are deposited on the St. Clair Flats beyond its mouth, keeping
+that lake shallow, and requiring the long ship canal to maintain
+navigation. Below Lake St. Clair, the wider Detroit River presents
+many fine bits of scenery, while the city of Detroit spreads for
+several miles along the northwestern bank, and has Windsor opposite,
+on the Canadian shore. Pretty islands dot the broadening stream below
+Detroit, and the varying width, with the bluffs on the Canadian side,
+and the meadows, fields and forests of Michigan, give lovely views.
+
+
+DETROIT AND MACKINAC.
+
+Detroit means "the strait," and the original Indian names for the
+river mean "the place of the turned channel." The early visitors who
+reached it by boat at night or in dark weather, and were inattentive
+to the involved currents, always remarked, as the Indians did before
+them, that owing to these extraordinary involutions of the waters,
+when the sun appeared again it always seemed to rise in the wrong
+place. The French under La Salle were the first Europeans who passed
+through the river, and in 1701 the Sieur de la Mothe Cadillac, who
+received grants from Louis XIV., came and founded Fort Pontchartrain
+there, naming it after the French Minister of Marine, around which a
+settlement afterwards grew, to which the French sent colonists at
+intervals. The British got possession in 1760, and it successfully
+resisted the conspiracy and attacks of the Ojibway Indian chief
+Pontiac for over a year, the garrison narrowly escaping massacre. The
+United States, after the Revolution, sent out General St. Clair as
+Governor, and his name was given the lake to the northward. Detroit
+was a frontier post in the War of 1812, being alternately held by
+British and Americans. In 1824 it had about fifteen hundred people and
+became a city. It now has three hundred and fifty thousand population,
+and its commercial importance may be estimated from the fact that the
+whole enormous traffic of the Lakes passes in front of the city during
+the seven months that navigation is open, the procession of craft
+often reaching sixty thousand vessels in the season. Detroit also has
+extensive and varied manufactures. It has a gradually rising surface
+and broad and well-paved streets on a rectangular plan, with several
+avenues radiating from a centre, like the spokes of a wheel. The
+central square is the Campus Martius, an expansion, about a half-mile
+from the river, of Woodward Avenue, the chief street. Here is an
+elaborate City Hall, the principal public building, having in front a
+magnificent Soldiers' Monument. The suburbs are attractive, and there
+are various pleasant parks and rural cemeteries, the leading Park of
+Belle Isle, covering seven hundred acres, being to the northeastward,
+with a good view over Lake St. Clair. Fort Wayne, the elaborate
+defensive work of Detroit, is on the river just below the city, and
+has a small garrison of regular troops. It is yet incomplete, and is
+designed to be the most extensive fortification on the northern
+frontier, commanding the important passage between Lakes Huron and
+Erie and the railway routes east and west.
+
+The peninsula of Michigan was originally covered with the finest
+forests, so that lumbering has always been a leading industry of the
+people. The greater portion of its pine woods, however, has been cut
+off, so that that branch is declining; but its ample supply of hard
+woods has made the State a great manufacturer of furniture, which is
+shipped all over the country. Thirty-eight miles west of Detroit, on
+the Huron River, is the city of Ann Arbor, with a population of
+fifteen thousand. Here are the extensive buildings of the University
+of Michigan, the leading educational establishment of the northwest,
+attended by over three thousand students, of whom a large number are
+young women. It is richly endowed, and has departments of law and
+medicine, as well as of literature and science, a large library and an
+observatory. The State makes a liberal annual contribution for its
+support, raised by taxation, it being governed by eight regents
+elected by the people. At the northern extremity of the Michigan
+Peninsula is the Strait of Mackinac, through which Lake Michigan
+discharges into Lake Huron. This water way is about four miles wide.
+In the strait is Mackinac Island, about nine miles in circumference,
+which was early held by the French on account of its strategic
+importance, but, being taken by the English in 1760, was captured by
+Pontiac when he organized the Indian revolt against the British in
+1763, and all its inhabitants massacred. It is now a military post and
+reservation of the United States. This rocky and wooded island
+contains much picturesque scenery, and is a favorite summer resort,
+its weird legends, fresh breezes, good fishing and clear waters being
+the attraction. It was an early post of the northwestern fur-traders,
+and here was founded one of the frontier trading-stations of the Astor
+Fur Company in the early nineteenth century by John Jacob Astor of New
+York, the building in the little village being still known as the
+Astor House.
+
+
+LAKE SUPERIOR.
+
+To the northward of Mackinac, Lake Superior discharges into Lake Huron
+through the Sault Sainte Marie Strait, the "Leap of St. Mary." This
+strait of St. Mary is a winding and most beautiful stream, sixty-two
+miles long, being a succession of expansions into lakes and
+contractions into rivers, dotted with pretty islands and having some
+villages on the banks. The chief attraction is the Sault, or "Leap,"
+which is a rapid of about eighteen feet descent, the navigation being
+maintained through capacious modern systems of locks and ship canals
+provided by both the United States and Canada. To the westward is the
+great Lake Superior, the largest fresh-water lake on the globe, three
+hundred and sixty miles long and covering thirty-two thousand square
+miles, with a coast-line of about fifteen hundred miles. It is
+elevated about six hundred feet above the ocean level, and has a depth
+averaging one thousand feet. Nearly two hundred rivers and creeks flow
+into it, draining a region of a hundred thousand square miles. There
+are a few islands in the eastern and western portions, but all the
+centre of the lake is a vast unbroken sheet of water, and generally of
+a low temperature, the deeper waters being only 39° in summer. The
+early French missionaries, who were the first explorers, told their
+interesting story of Lake Superior in Paris in 1636, and in their
+published account speak of its coasts as resembling a bended bow, of
+which the north shore makes the arc of the bow, the south shore the
+chord, and the great Keweenaw Point, projecting far from the southern
+shore, represents the arrow. Superior has generally a rock-bound
+coast, displaying impressive beauties of scenery, particularly on the
+northern shore, where the beetling crags and cliffs are projected
+boldly into the lake along the water's edge. This northern coast is
+also much indented by deep bays, bordered by precipitous cliffs, back
+of which rise the dark and dreary Laurentian Mountains. There are also
+rocky islands scattered near this portion of the coast, some
+presenting vast castellated walls of basalt and others peaks of
+granite, elevated a thousand to thirteen hundred feet above the lake.
+Nowhere upon the inland waters of North America is there grander
+scenery.
+
+The most considerable affluent of Lake Superior upon its northern
+coast is the Nepigon River, coming grandly down cascades and rapids,
+bringing the waters of Lake Nepigon, an elliptical lake among the
+mountains to the northward covering about four thousand square miles,
+bounded by high cliffs, and elevated over eight hundred feet. It is
+studded with islands, has very deep waters, and receives various
+streams from the remote northern wilderness. Upon the northwestern
+shore of Lake Superior are gigantic cliffs, surrounding Thunder Bay, a
+deep indentation divided from Black Bay by the great projecting
+promontory of Thunder Cape, rising nearly fourteen hundred feet in
+grand columns of basalt, the summit containing the crater of an
+extinct volcano. Across from it is McKay Mountain, another basaltic
+Gibraltar, rising twelve hundred feet from the almost level plain
+bordering the bay. Pic Island is between them, guarding the entrance.
+The pretty Kaministiquia River flows through rich prairie lands down
+to Thunder Bay, and here is the chief Canadian town on the lake, Port
+Arthur. Thirty miles up this river is the famous Kakabika Falls, where
+the rocks are cleft so that the stream tumbles into a chasm one
+hundred and thirty feet deep, and then boils along with rapid current
+for nearly a half-mile through the fissure, the sides towering
+perpendicularly, and in some places even overhanging their bases. Upon
+this river was for many years the well-known Hudson Bay Company's
+fur-trading station of Fort William, which now has grain elevators,
+and is a suburb of the spreading settlement of Port Arthur. This was
+the beginning of the great portage from Lake Superior over to the
+Hudson Bay waters at Fort Garry, on the Red River in Manitoba, now
+Winnipeg, the portage being the present route of the Canadian Pacific
+Railway.
+
+
+SAULT SAINTE MARIE TO DULUTH.
+
+The southern shore of Lake Superior is mostly composed of lowlands,
+covered with sand, glacial deposits and clays, which came from the
+lake during a former stage of much higher water, when it extended many
+miles south of the present boundary. These lands, while not well
+adapted to agriculture, contain rich deposits of copper, iron and
+other metals and valuable red sandstones. Around the rapids and canals
+at the outlet has gradually grown the town of Sault Sainte Marie,
+familiarly known as the "Soo," having ten thousand people, and
+developing important manufactures from the admirable water-power of
+the rapids, which is also utilized for electrical purposes. An
+international bridge brings a branch of the Canadian Pacific Railway
+over from Canada, on its way to Minneapolis and St. Paul, with
+connections southward to Chicago, and there is also the military post
+of Fort Brady. Stately processions of vessels constantly move through
+the canals, being locked up or down when the navigation season is
+open, and making this a very animated place, over fifteen thousand
+ships passing in the seven months when the canals are free from ice.
+The tonnage is the greatest using any system of canals in the world,
+far exceeding Suez, and the recent improvements enable vessels of
+twenty-one feet draft to go through the new locks. Both Governments
+have expended millions upon these important public works, which are
+chiefly employed for the transport of grain, flour, coal, iron-ores
+and copper. The favorite sports at the "Soo" are catching white fish
+and "shooting the rapids" in canoes guided by the Indians, who are
+very skillful.
+
+About one hundred miles westward from the "Soo," on the southern lake
+shore, there rise cliffs of the red and other sandstones formed by the
+edges of nearly horizontal strata coming out at the border of the
+lake. These are the noted Pictured Rocks, rising three hundred feet,
+extending for a distance of about five miles, and worn by frost and
+storm into fantastic and romantic forms, displaying vivid hues--red,
+blue, yellow, green, brown and gray--as they have been stained by the
+oozing waters carrying the pigments. At intervals, cascades fall over
+the rocks. One cliff, called the Sail Rock, is like a sloop in full
+sail, and there are various castles and chapels, and an elaborate
+Grand Portal. In the country around is laid much of the scene of
+_Hiawatha_, and at the little lake port of Munising, nearby, was the
+site of the wigwam of the old woman, Nokomis,
+
+     "On the shores of Gitchee Gumee,
+     Of the shining Big-Sea-Water."
+
+To the westward is the region of iron-ores, and here is Marquette,
+named for the great Jesuit missionary Father Marquette, who was the
+first founder of mission settlements in this region, and died in 1675
+near the mouth of Marquette River. This town of fifteen thousand
+people is on Iron Bay, and is the chief port of the Marquette,
+Menominee and Ishpeming mines. Farther to the westward the great
+Keweenaw Peninsula projects, the name meaning in the Indian dialect
+the "canoe portage." At its base, the Portage Lake almost separates it
+from the mainland, and a short portage to the westward formerly
+carried the canoes over the narrow isthmus. A canal now enables the
+lake shipping to pass through without making the long detour around
+the outer end of the peninsula. Upon this rocky peninsula are the
+great copper-mines of Michigan, including the Quincy, Tamarack,
+Osceola, Franklin, Atlantic, and the Calumet and Hecla. The latter is
+the world's leading Copper Company, making over $4,000,000 estimated
+annual profit, employing five thousand men, and having the deepest
+shaft in existence, the Red Jacket, which has been sunk forty-nine
+hundred feet. Houghton, on the southern shore of Portage Lake, is the
+leading town of the copper district. To the southwestward and in the
+western part of the Upper Michigan Peninsula is Lake Gogebic, elevated
+thirteen hundred feet, in another prolific iron-ore district, the
+Gogebic range, which produces Bessemer ores, and has its shipping port
+across the Wisconsin boundary at Ashland, another busy town of fifteen
+thousand people at the head of Chequamegon Bay. Out in front are the
+Apostle Islands, a picturesque group, and to the westward the head of
+Lake Superior gradually narrows in the Fond du Lac, or end of the
+lake, where are situated its leading ports, Superior City in Wisconsin
+and Duluth in Minnesota.
+
+Here in the seventeenth century came the early French, and in 1680 a
+trading-post was established by Daniel du Lhut, afterwards becoming a
+Hudson Bay Company Station. The mouth of St. Louis River and its bay
+were naturally recognized as important points for trade, and when the
+Northern Pacific Railway was projected Superior City got its start.
+The first railroad scheme failed, the panic of 1857 came, and the
+railway project was abandoned until after the Civil War; and then,
+when it was renewed, the terminus was located over on the other side
+of the river, the place being named Duluth, after the French trader.
+While there has been great rivalry between them, and Duluth has
+outstripped Superior, yet the latter has an extensive trade and thirty
+thousand people. Duluth, the "Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas," as it
+has been ambitiously called, was originally projected on Minnesota
+Point, a scythe-shaped natural breakwater running out seven miles into
+the lake, which protects the harbor, but the town was subsequently
+built farther in. There were about seventy white people in the
+neighborhood in 1860, and in 1869 its present site was a forest, while
+the railroad, which had many set-backs, had only brought about three
+thousand people there in 1885. The completion of other railway
+connections in various directions, the discovery of iron deposits, and
+the recognition of its advantageous position for traffic, subsequently
+gave Duluth rapid growth, so that it now has eighty thousand people,
+and is the greatest port on the lake. It is finely situated, the
+harbor being spacious and lined with docks and warehouses, and it has
+many substantial buildings. Back of the city a terrace rises some four
+hundred feet, an old shore line of Lake Superior when the water was at
+much higher level, and here is the Boulevard Drive, giving splendid
+views over the town and lake. The vast extent of wheat lands to the
+westward and the prolific iron-ore district to the northward give
+Duluth an enormous trade. Its railways lead up to the Messabi and
+Vermillion ranges, now the greatest producers of Lake Superior
+iron-ores, the red hematite, most of the output being controlled by
+John D. Rockefeller and his associates. These mines yield the richest
+ores in the world, and have made some of the greatest fortunes in
+Duluth. Yet they were not discovered until 1891, and then the lands
+where they are generally went begging, because nobody would give the
+government price for them, $1.25 per acre. One forty-acre tract, then
+abandoned by the man who took it up because he did not think the pine
+wood on it was enough to warrant paying $50 for it, is now the
+Mountain Iron Mine, netting Mr. Rockefeller $375,000 annual profit,
+and his railroad bringing the ores out gets more than that sum for
+freights.
+
+
+THE CITY OF MILWAUKEE.
+
+The early French traders and explorers who came to the upper lakes
+naturally ascended their affluents, and in this way La Salle, Joliet,
+Hennepin and others crossed the portages beyond Lake Michigan to the
+tributaries of the Mississippi. They came to Green Bay on the west
+side of Lake Michigan, ascended the Fox River and crossed over to the
+Wisconsin River. Southward from the Upper Michigan Peninsula and
+westward of the lower peninsula of that State spreads the broad
+expanse of Lake Michigan, stretching from Mackinac and Green Bay down
+to Chicago. Its western shore is the State of Wisconsin, extending
+northward to Lake Superior. When the French explorers came along and
+floated down its chief river, an affluent of the Mississippi, the
+latter making the western boundary of the State, they found the Indian
+name of the stream to be a word which, according to the pronunciation,
+they spelled in their early narratives "Ouisconsing" and "Misconsin,"
+and it finally came out in the present form of Wisconsin, thus naming
+the State. The original meaning was the "wild, rushing red water,"
+from the hue given by the pine and tamarack forests. La Salle coasted
+in his canoe all along the western shore of Lake Michigan, from Green
+Bay down to Chicago, and crossed over to the Mississippi. The traders
+established various settlements on that shore which have grown into
+active cities, and the principal one, eighty-five miles north of
+Chicago, is Milwaukee, its name derived from the Indian Mannawahkie,
+meaning the "good land." A broad harbor, indented several miles from
+the lake, was the nucleus of the city, at the mouth of Milwaukee
+River, which receives two tributaries within the town, and thus adds
+to the facilities for dockage, while extensive breakwaters protect the
+harbor entrance from lake storms.
+
+Milwaukee has three hundred and fifty thousand people, and is the
+growth mainly of the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is
+finely located, with undulating surface, the streets lined with trees,
+and the splendid development of the residential section making it
+almost like an extensive park, the foliage and garden spaces are so
+extensive and attractive. Its population is largely German, and its
+breweries are famous, exporting their product all over the country. It
+has a grand Federal building, costing nearly $2,000,000, a Romanesque
+structure in granite, an elaborate Court-house of brown sandstone, a
+spacious City Hall, a magnificent Public Library and Museum, and many
+attractive churches and other edifices. Juneau Park, on a bluff
+overlooking the lake, commemorates the first settler, Solomon Juneau,
+and contains his statue. Here, in compliment to the large Scandinavian
+population of Wisconsin, is also a statue of Leif Ericsen, who is said
+to have been in command of the first detachment of Norsemen who landed
+in New England in the eleventh century. The Forest Home Cemetery at
+the southwestern verge of the city is one of the most beautiful in the
+country. Milwaukee is familiarly called the "Cream City" from the
+light-colored brick made in the neighborhood, which so largely enter
+into the construction of its buildings. It has extensive grain
+elevators and flour mills and large manufacturing industries. To the
+westward, in a park of four hundred acres, is the National Soldiers'
+Home, with accommodation for twenty-four hundred. Its Sheridan Drive
+along the lake shore southward is gradually extending, the intention
+being to connect with the Sheridan Boulevard constructed northward
+from Chicago. The lion of the city, however, is the great Pabst
+Brewery, covering thirty-four acres and producing eight hundred
+thousand barrels of beer a year. Twenty miles inland to the westward
+is a favorite resort of the Milwaukeans, the noted Bethesda Spring of
+Waukesha, whose waters they find it beneficial to take copiously,
+large quantities being also exported throughout America and Europe for
+their efficacy in diabetes and Bright's disease.
+
+The capital of Wisconsin is the city of Madison, seventy-five miles
+west of Milwaukee, built on the isthmus between Lakes Mendota and
+Monona, thus giving it an admirable position. It has about twenty
+thousand people, and the lake attractions make it a popular summer
+resort. The State Capitol is a handsome building in a spacious park,
+one of the wings being occupied by the Wisconsin Historical Society,
+with a library of two hundred thousand volumes, an art gallery and
+museum. The great structure of Madison is the University of Wisconsin,
+the buildings in a commanding position on University Hill overlooking
+the charming Lake Mendota. There are seventeen hundred students, and
+its Washburn Observatory, one of the best in America, has wide fame.
+
+
+ASCENDING THE MISSISSIPPI.
+
+Westward from Lake Michigan all the railroads are laid across the
+prairie land _en route_ to various cities on the Mississippi River,
+several of them having St. Paul and Minneapolis for their objective
+points, although some go by quite roundabout ways. The great "Father
+of Waters" comes from Northern Minnesota, flows over the Falls of St.
+Anthony at Minneapolis, and is a river of much scenic attractiveness
+down to Dubuque and Rock Island, its width being usually about three
+thousand feet, excepting at the bends, which are wider, the
+picturesque bluffs enclosing the valley sometimes rising six hundred
+feet high. The railways leading to it traverse the monotonous level of
+prairie in Illinois and Wisconsin, excepting where a stream may make a
+gorge, and the face of the country is everywhere almost the same. The
+Moline Rapids in the Mississippi above Rock Island afford good
+water-power, and here the Government, owning the island, has
+established a large arsenal, which is the base for all the western
+army supplies. The admirable location has made cities on either bank,
+Rock Island in Illinois and Davenport in Iowa, both being commercial
+and manufacturing centres, and the latter city having the larger
+population. The Mississippi flows through a rather wide valley, with
+pleasant shores, having villas dotted on their slopes. The Moline
+Rapids, which are said to have a water-power rivalling the aggregate
+of all the cataracts in New England, descend twenty-two feet in a
+distance of fourteen miles. Above them, the river flows between
+Illinois and Iowa, and various flourishing towns are passed, the
+largest being Dubuque, with fifty thousand people, the chief
+industrial city of Iowa, and a centre of the lead and zinc manufacture
+of the Galena district. This was the first settlement made by white
+men in Iowa, the city being named for Julien Dubuque, a French trader,
+who came in 1788 with a small party to work the lead-mines. Iowa is
+known as the "Hawkeye State," and its name is of Dakotan Indian
+derivation, meaning "drowsy," which, however, is hardly the proper
+basis for naming such a wide-awake Commonwealth. Opposite Dubuque is
+the northern boundary of Illinois, and above, the Mississippi
+separates Iowa from Wisconsin.
+
+The Mississippi bordering bluffs now rise much higher and become more
+picturesque, Eagle Point, near Dubuque, being elevated three hundred
+feet. Prairie du Chien, just above the mouth of Wisconsin River, was
+one of the earliest French military posts. This region was the scene
+of the "Black Hawk War," that chief of the Sacs battling to get back
+certain lands which in 1832 had been ceded by the Sac and Fox Indians
+to the United States. He was finally defeated back of the western
+river shore, the boundary between Iowa and Minnesota being nearby.
+Minnesota is the "North Star State," and its Indian name, taken from
+the river, flowing into the Mississippi above St. Paul, means the
+"cloudy water." The river scenery becomes more and more picturesque as
+the Mississippi is ascended, the bluffs rising to higher elevations.
+La Crosse is a great lumber manufacturing town, drawing its timber
+from both Minnesota and Wisconsin. Above, where islands dot the
+channel, is perhaps the most beautiful section of the river.
+Trempealeau Island, five hundred feet high, commands a magnificent
+view, and the Black River flows in through a splendid gorge. Winona is
+a prominent grain-shipping town, and at Wabasha the river expands into
+the beautiful Lake Pepin, thirty miles long and from three to five
+miles wide, with attractive shores and many popular resorts. Over the
+lake rise the bold round headland of Point No Point on one side and
+the Maiden Rock on the other. St. Croix River flows in above on the
+eastern bank, making an enlargement known as St. Croix Lake, and the
+upper Mississippi is now wholly within Minnesota, having here at the
+head of navigation the famous "Twin Cities" of St. Paul and
+Minneapolis.
+
+
+THE FALLS OF ST. ANTHONY
+
+Father Hennepin was the first white man who penetrated the wilds of
+Minnesota, and in 1680 he discovered the great falls of the
+Mississippi River, to which he gave the name of his patron saint,
+Anthony of Padua. The river just below the falls naturally attracted
+the attention of the French adventurers who came to trade with the
+Sioux, Chippewas and Dakotas, and the first white man who tarried and
+built a house here was a Canadian voyageur, who came in 1838. In 1841
+a French priest established the Roman Catholic mission of St. Paul on
+the bank of the river, and thus the settlement was named. The
+admirable water-power of the falls, which, with their two miles of
+rapids, descend seventy-eight feet, afterwards attracted the attention
+of millers, lumbermen and other manufacturers, and this made the
+settlement of Minneapolis, ten miles westward and farther up the
+river, which began in 1849, the name meaning the "city of the waters."
+St. Paul grew with rapidity, being encouraged both by steamboat and
+afterwards by railway traffic; but Minneapolis, though started later,
+subsequently outstripped it. The two places, rivals yet friends, have
+extended towards each other, so as to almost form one large city, and
+they now have over four hundred thousand inhabitants. These "Twin
+Cities" are running a rapid race in prosperity, each independently of
+the other. St. Paul is rather more of a trading city, while
+Minneapolis is an emporium of sawmills and the greatest flour-mills in
+the world. Both are admirably located upon the bluffs rising above the
+Mississippi. St. Paul is situated upon a series of ornamental
+semicircular terraces that are very attractive, though in some
+portions rather circumscribed. Minneapolis is built on a more
+extensive plan upon an esplanade overlooking the falls, and extending
+to an island in midstream, and also over upon the opposite northern
+side of the river. The Falls of St. Anthony is the most powerful
+waterfall in the United States wholly applied to manufacturing
+purposes. The entire current of the Mississippi comes down the rapids
+and over the falls, the latter having a descent of about fifty feet.
+It is protected by a wall built by the Government across the river, to
+prevent the wearing away of the sandstone formation, there having been
+serious inroads made, while the surface is covered with an apron of
+planks over which the water runs, with sluiceways alongside to shoot
+logs down. However much Father Hennepin may have admired the beauties
+of this great cataract, there is no longer anything picturesque about
+the Falls of St. Anthony. Logs jam the upper river, where the booms
+catch them for the sawmills, and subterranean channels conduct the
+water in various directions to the mills, and discharge their foaming
+streams below. There is no romance in the rumble of flour-rollers and
+the buzz of saws, but they mean a great deal of profitable business.
+The force exerted by the falls at low water is estimated at one
+hundred and thirty-five thousand horse-power.
+
+St. Paul is the capital of Minnesota, and the State is building a
+magnificent new Capitol, constructed of granite and marble, with a
+lofty central dome, at a cost exceeding $2,000,000. There is a fine
+City Hall and many imposing and substantial business edifices. Its
+especial residence street, Summit Avenue, is upon a high ridge,
+parallel with and some distance back from the Mississippi, the chief
+dwelling, a large brownstone mansion, being the home of the leading
+railroad prince of the Northwest, President James J. Hill of the Great
+Northern Railroad. Here is also the new and spacious Roman Catholic
+Seminary of St. Thomas Aquinas. The old military post of Fort Snelling
+is on the river above St. Paul, near the mouth of Minnesota River. In
+Minneapolis, the great building is the City Hall, completed in 1896,
+and having a tower rising three hundred and fifty feet, giving a
+superb view. The Guaranty Loan Company's Building is one of the finest
+office structures in America, with its roof arranged for a garden,
+where concerts are given. Minneapolis has a widely extended
+residential section, with hundreds of attractive mansions in
+ornamental grounds. Near the river bank is the University of
+Minnesota, having well-equipped buildings and attended by twenty-eight
+hundred students.
+
+Minneapolis is the greatest flour manufacturing city in the world. Its
+mills, of which there are some twenty-five, are located along the
+river near the falls, and have a daily capacity of over sixty
+thousand barrels, turning out about eighteen millions of barrels
+annually, which are sent all over the globe. The whole country west
+and northwest of Minneapolis, including the Red River Valley, the
+Dakotas and Manitoba, is practically a fertile wheat field, growing
+the finest grain that is produced in America, and this makes the
+prosperity of the city. The Pillsbury-Washburn Flour Mills Company are
+the leading millers. The great Pillsbury A mill, which turns out ten
+thousand seven hundred barrels a day, is the world's champion
+flour-mill. It is a marvel of the economical manufacture, the railway
+cars coming in laden with wheat, being quickly emptied, and then
+filled with loaded flour-barrels and sacks for shipment. Machinery
+does practically everything from the shovelling of wheat out of the
+car to the packing of the barrel or sack with the product. This huge
+mill stands in relation to the flour trade as Niagara does to
+waterfalls. The other great Minneapolis industry is the lumber trade.
+Minnesota is well timbered, a belt of fine forests, chiefly pine,
+stretching across it, known as the _Coteau des Bois_, or "Big Woods,"
+an elevated plateau with a rolling surface, having thousands of lakes
+scattered through it, fed by springs, while their outlets go into
+streams feeding the Mississippi, down which the logs are floated to
+the booms above the falls. The extensive sawmills will cut over four
+hundred and fifty millions of feet of lumber in a year. Thus the flour
+and lumber have become the chief articles of export from Minneapolis.
+
+There are several pleasant lakes in the neighborhood, which are
+popular resorts of the people of the "Twin Cities," the largest and
+most famous being Minnetonka, the Indian name meaning the "Big Water."
+It is a pretty lake, at nearly a thousand feet elevation, with low,
+winding and tree-clad shores, having little islets dotted over its
+surface, and myriads of indented bays and jutting peninsulas which
+extend its shore line to over a hundred miles, though the extreme
+length of the lake is barely seventeen miles. There are many
+attractive places on the shores and islands, and large steamers ply on
+its bosom. From this lake the discharge is through the Minnehaha
+River, and its Minnehaha Falls, the "Laughing Water," poetically
+praised by Longfellow in Hiawatha. The beautiful glen in which this
+graceful cataract is found has been made a park. The falls are about
+fifty feet high, and a critical observer has recorded that there is
+"only wanting a little more water to be one of the most picturesque
+cascades in the country." Below the Minnehaha Falls is another on a
+smaller scale, which the people thereabout have nicknamed the
+"Minnegiggle." Thus sings Longfellow of Minnehaha:
+
+       "Homeward now went Hiawatha;
+     Only once his pace he slackened,
+     Only once he paused or halted,
+     Paused to purchase heads of arrows
+     Of the ancient Arrow-maker,
+     In the land of the Dacotahs,
+     Where the Falls of Minnehaha
+     Flash and gleam among the oak-trees,
+     Laugh and leap into the valley.
+       "There the ancient Arrow-maker
+     Made his arrow-heads of sandstone,
+     Arrow-heads of chalcedony,
+     Arrow-heads of flint and jasper,
+     Smoothed and sharpened at the edges,
+     Hard and polished, keen and costly.
+       "With him dwelt his dark-eyed daughter,
+     Wayward as the Minnehaha,
+     With her moods of shade and sunshine,
+     Eyes that smiled and frowned alternate,
+     Feet as rapid as the river,
+     Tresses flowing like the water,
+     And as musical a laughter;
+     And he named her from the river,
+     From the water-fall he named her,
+     Minnehaha, Laughing Water.
+       "Was it then for heads of arrows,
+     Arrow-heads of chalcedony,
+     Arrow-heads of flint and jasper,
+     That my Hiawatha halted
+     In the land of the Dacotahs?
+       "Was it not to see the maiden,
+     See the face of Laughing Water,
+     Peeping from behind the curtain,
+     Hear the rustling of her garments,
+     From behind the waving curtain,
+     As one sees the Minnehaha
+     Gleaming, glancing through the branches,
+     As one hears the Laughing Water,
+     From behind its screen of branches?
+       "Who shall say what thoughts and visions
+     Fill the fiery brains of young men?
+     Who shall say what dreams of beauty
+     Filled the heart of Hiawatha?
+     All he told to old Nokomis,
+     When he reached the lodge at sunset,
+     Was the meeting with his father,
+     Was his fight with Mudjekeewis;
+     Not a word he said of arrows,
+     Not a word of Laughing Water."
+
+
+THE SOURCE OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
+
+It was in Minnesota, in 1862, that the terrible Indian uprising
+occurred in which the Sioux, exasperated by the encroachments of the
+whites, attacked the western frontier settlements in August, and in
+less than two days massacred eight hundred people. The troops were
+sent as soon as possible, attacked and defeated them in two battles,
+and thirty-eight of the Indians were executed on one scaffold at
+Mankato, on the Minnesota River southwest of Minneapolis, in December.
+The State of Minnesota is said to contain fully ten thousand lakes of
+all sizes, the largest being Red Lake in the northern wilderness,
+having an area of three hundred and forty square miles. The surface of
+the State rises into what is known as the Itascan plateau in the
+northern central part at generally about seventeen hundred and fifty
+feet elevation. From this plateau four rivers flow out in various
+directions--the one on the Western Minnesota boundary, the Red River
+of the North, draining the western slope towards Lake Winnipeg and
+finally to Hudson Bay; the Rainy River, draining the northern slope
+also through Lake Winnipeg to Hudson Bay; the St. Louis River, flowing
+eastward to form the head of Lake Superior, and going thence to the
+Atlantic; and the Mississippi River, flowing southward to seek the
+Gulf of Mexico. Schoolcraft, the Indian ethnologist and explorer,
+named this Itascan plateau, and the little lake in its heart, where
+the Mississippi takes its rise, about two hundred miles
+north-northwest of Minneapolis, though the roundabout course of the
+river from its source to that city is a much longer distance, flowing
+nearly a thousand miles. There was a good deal of discussion as to
+whether this lake was really the head of the great river, as the lake
+received several small streams, but Schoolcraft settled the dispute,
+and named the lake Itasca, from a contraction of the Latin words
+_veritas caput_, the "true head." Its elevation is about sixteen
+hundred feet, being surrounded by pine-clad hills rising a hundred
+feet higher. Out of Itasca Lake the "Father of Waters" flows with a
+breadth of about twelve feet, and a depth ordinarily of less than two
+feet. It goes at first northerly, and then makes a grand curve through
+a long chain of lakes, describing a large semicircle to the eastward,
+and finally southwest, before it becomes settled as to direction, and
+takes its southeast course towards the Falls of St. Anthony, and
+onward in its grand progress to the Gulf.
+
+
+THE ANCIENT LAKE AGASSIZ.
+
+The Minnesota River, rising on the western boundary of the State,
+flows nearly five hundred miles in a deeply carved valley through the
+"Big Woods" to the Mississippi. Its source is in the Big Stone Lake,
+which, with Lake Traverse to the northward, forms part of the Dakota
+boundary. The Red River of the North, rising in Lake Traverse and
+gathering together the streams on the western slope of the Itascan
+plateau, flows northward between Minnesota and North Dakota, and into
+Manitoba, two hundred and fifty miles to Lake Winnipeg. This river has
+cut its channel in a nearly level plain, and it is curious that in
+times of freshet its waters connect, through Lakes Traverse and the
+Big Stone, with the Minnesota, so that steamboats of light draught can
+then occasionally pass from the Mississippi waters north to Lake
+Winnipeg. It was this rich and level plain of the valley of the Red
+River that in the glacial epoch formed the bed of a vast lake which
+scientists have named Lake Agassiz. Its area, as indicated by
+well-marked shore-lines and deltas, was a hundred miles wide and over
+four hundred miles long, stretching far into Manitoba, and the waters
+were two to four hundred feet deep. It was held up on the north by the
+retreating ice-sheet of the great glacier, the outlet being southward,
+where a channel fifty feet deep, fifty miles long and over a mile
+wide can now be distinctly traced leading its outflow into the
+Minnesota River, whose valley its floods then greatly enlarged on the
+way to the Mississippi. The plain of this lake bed is almost level,
+descending towards the northward about a foot to the mile, and here
+the ancient lake deposited the thick, rich, black soils which have
+made the greatest wheat-growing region of North America.
+
+The first settlement of Dakota was on the Big Sioux River at Sioux
+Falls, where flour-mills and other manufacturing establishments have
+gathered around a fine water-power, and there are nearly fifty
+thousand people in the two towns of Sioux Falls in South Dakota and
+Sioux City in Iowa. The whole region to the northward and far over the
+Canadian boundary is a land of wheat-fields, with grain elevators
+dotting the flat prairie at the railway stations, for all the roads
+have lines to tap the lucrative trade of this prolific region. The
+Northern Pacific Railway crosses Red River at Fargo, which, with the
+town of Moorhead, both being wheat and flour centres, has a population
+of fifteen thousand. To the westward are the vast "Bonanza" wheat
+farms of Dakota, of which the best known is the Dalrymple farm,
+covering forty-five thousand acres. Steam-ploughs make continuous
+furrows for many miles in the cultivation, and in the spring the
+seeding is done. The whole country is covered with a vast expanse of
+waving, yellow grain in the summer, and the harvest comes in August.
+To the westward flows James River through a similar district, and the
+country beyond rises into the higher plateau stretching to the
+Missouri. This fertile wheat-growing region extends far northward over
+the Canadian border forming the Province of Manitoba, the name coming
+from Lake Manitoba, which in the Cree Indian dialect means the "home
+of Manitou, the Great Spirit." Its enormous wheat product makes the
+business of the flouring-mills of Minneapolis, Duluth and many other
+cities, and furnishes a vast stream of grain to go through the Soo
+Canal down the lakes and St. Lawrence, much being exported to Europe.
+
+The Canadian Pacific Railway, which provides the traffic outlet for
+Manitoba, comes from the northern shore of Lake Superior at Port
+Arthur northwestward up the valley of the Kaministiquia River, and its
+tributary the Wabigoon, the Indian "Stream of the Lilies." This was
+the ancient portage, and by this trail and Winnipeg River, the canoe
+route of the Hudson Bay Company voyageurs, Lord Wolseley led the
+British army in 1870 to Fort Garry (Winnipeg) that suppressed Louis
+Riel's French-Indian half-breed rebellion, which had possession of the
+post. The railway route is through an extensive forest, and leads near
+the northern shore of the Lake of the Woods, crossing its outlet
+stream at Rat Portage, so named from the numerous colonies of
+muskrats, a town of sawmills standing at the rocky rim of the lake,
+where its waters break through and down rapids of twenty feet fall to
+seek Winnipeg River, the Ounipigon or "muddy water" of the Crees.
+Here, and at Keewatin beyond, are grand water-powers, the latter
+having mammoth mills that grind the Manitoba wheat and send the flour
+to England. Then, emerging from the forests, the railway crosses the
+rich black soils of the Red River Valley, and beyond that river enters
+Winnipeg, the "Prairie City" and commercial metropolis of the Canadian
+Northwest. For nearly eight hundred miles this alluvial region spreads
+west and northwest of Winnipeg, with varying degrees of fertility, to
+the Rocky Mountains. Here, at the junction of the Assiniboine River,
+coming from the remote northwest, with Red River, has grown a Canadian
+Chicago of fifty thousand people, developed almost as if by magic,
+from the little settlement of two hundred and forty souls, whom
+Wolseley found in 1870, around what was then regarded as the distant
+Hudson Bay Company frontier post of Fort Garry. Its original name when
+first established was Fort Gibraltar. The two rivers wander crookedly
+over the flat land, and between them the city covers an extensive
+surface. A half-dozen railways radiate in various directions, and
+there are spacious car-yards and stations. Winnipeg has an energetic
+population, largely Scotch and Americans, but with picturesque touches
+given by the copper-colored Indians and French half-breeds, who wander
+about in their native costumes, though most of these have gone away
+from Red River Valley to the far Northwest. The city has good streets,
+many fine buildings and attractive stores. The Manitoba Government
+Buildings adjoin the Assiniboine River, and the military barracks of
+Fort Osborne are alongside. Near the junction of the rivers is the
+little stone gateway left standing, which is almost all that remains
+of the original trading-post buildings of Fort Garry, representing the
+venerable Hudson Bay Company, chartered by King Charles II. in 1670,
+that controlled the whole vast empire of the Canadian Northwest. This
+Company was a grant by the king originally to Prince Rupert and a few
+associates of a monopoly of the fur trade over a vast territory in
+North America, extending from Lake Superior to Hudson Bay and the
+Pacific Ocean. In this way that portion of British America came to be
+popularly known in England as "Prince Rupert's Land." The great
+Company existed for nearly two hundred years, had one hundred and
+fifty-two trading-posts, and employed three thousand traders, agents
+and voyageurs, and many thousands of Indians. In the bartering with
+the red men, the unit of account was the beaver skin, which was the
+equivalent of two martens or twenty muskrats, while the pelt of a
+silver fox was five times as valuable as a beaver. In 1869, when the
+Dominion of Canada was formed, England bought the sovereignty of the
+Company for $1,500,000 and transferred its territory to Canada. The
+Company still retains its posts and stores, however, and conducts
+throughout the Northwest a mercantile business. Far to the westward of
+Winnipeg spread the fertile prairies of Manitoba and Assiniboia
+Provinces, until they gradually blend into the rounded and
+grass-covered foothills making the grazing ranges of Alberta that
+finally rise into the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies.
+
+
+DAKOTA AND MONTANA.
+
+Three railways are constructed westward from Red River to the Rockies
+and Pacific Ocean,--the Northern Pacific and Great Northern in the
+United States and the Canadian Pacific beyond the international
+boundary. The former cross the plateau to the Upper Missouri River,
+and there the Northern Pacific route reaches Bismarck, the capital of
+North Dakota, having a fine Capitol set on a hill, the corner-stone of
+which was laid in 1883, with the noted Sioux chief Sitting Bull
+assisting. This region not so long ago knew only soldiers and Indians;
+but there has since been a great influx of white settlers, enforcing
+the idea of which Whittier has significantly written:
+
+     "Behind the squaw's birch-bark canoe,
+       The steamer smokes and raves;
+     And city lots are staked for sale
+       Above old Indian graves."
+
+The frontier army post of Fort Lincoln on the bluff alongside the
+river testifies to the time not yet remote when the Sioux and Crow
+Indians of the Dakotas needed a good deal of military control. The
+deer, buffalo and antelope then roamed these boundless prairies, but
+they have all disappeared. Beyond the Missouri River is the region of
+the Dakota "Bad Lands." The surface rises into sharp conical
+elevations known as "buttes," and soon this curious district of
+pyramidal hills known as Pyramid Park is entered, fire and water
+having had a remarkable effect upon them. Their red sides are furrowed
+by the rains, and smoke issues from some of the crevices. The lignite
+and coal deposits underlying this country have produced subterranean
+fires that burnt the clays above until they became brittle and red.
+There are ashes and scoriæ in patches, and cinders looking much like
+the outcast of an iron furnace. The buttes are at times isolated and
+sometimes in rows, many being of large size. Their sides are often
+terraced regularly, and frequently into fantastic shapes, occasionally
+appearing as the sloping ramparts of a fort. There are frequent
+pot-like holes among them, filled with reddish, brackish water, and
+sometimes excavated in the ground with regularly square-cut edges.
+When the railway route cuts into a butte, its interior is disclosed as
+a pile of red-burnt clay fragments mixed with ashes and sand. Little
+prairie dogs dodge in and out of their holes, but there is not much
+else of life. The boundary is crossed into Montana, and the "Bad
+Lands" gradually give place to a grazing section. Here stands up the
+great Sentinel Butte, with its reddish-yellow sides, near the Montana
+border, and the railway route then descends from the higher region to
+the valley of the Yellowstone.
+
+The Yellowstone River, one of the headwaters of the Missouri, rises in
+the National Park, and its fertile valley is among the leading
+pasturages of Montana. Cattle and sheep abound, and the cowboys are
+universal, galloping about on energetic little bronchos, with lariats
+hanging from the saddle. The Big Horn River flows in, and an extensive
+region to the southward is the Crow Indian reservation, about three
+thousand living there. It was here, near Fort Custer, at a point
+forty-five miles south of the railroad, that the terrible massacre
+took place in June, 1876, by which General Custer and his command of
+over two hundred and fifty men were annihilated by the Sioux. There is
+now a national cemetery at the place. We gradually enter the mountain
+ranges which are the outposts of the Rockies, and passing between the
+Yellowstone range and the Belt Mountains, reach Livingston, a town of
+several thousand people, and a great centre for hunting and fishing,
+at the entrance to the Yellowstone National Park. From here a branch
+railway turns southward, ascending the valley of the Yellowstone,
+going through its first canyon, known as the "Gate of the Mountain,"
+an impressive rocky gorge, and ascending a steep grade, so that the
+floor of the valley rises within the Park to an elevation of over six
+thousand feet above the sea. A second canyon is passed, and on its
+western side is a huge peak whose upheaved red rocks have named it the
+Cinnabar Mountain. These red rocks are in strata streaked down its
+sides with intervening granite and limestone. One of these, the
+Devil's Slide, is conspicuous, its quartzite walls rising high above
+the lower strata and making a veritable slide of great proportions
+down the mountain. The railroad ends at Cinnabar, and stages cover the
+remaining distance up the Yellowstone to its confluence with Gardiner
+River at the Park entrance, and thence to the Mammoth Hot Springs
+within the Park, the tourist headquarters.
+
+
+THE AMERICAN WONDERLAND.
+
+The Yellowstone National Park has been set apart by Congress as a
+public reservation and pleasure-ground, and covers a surface of about
+fifty-five hundred square miles within the Rocky Mountains. Most of
+the Park is in the northwestern corner of Wyoming, but there are also
+small portions in Montana to the north and Idaho to the west. It is a
+tract more remarkable for natural curiosities than an equal area in
+any other part of the world, and within it are the sources of some of
+the greatest rivers of North America. The Yellowstone, Gardiner and
+Madison Rivers, which are the headwaters of the Missouri, flow out of
+the northern and western sides, while on the southern side originates
+the Snake River, one of the sources of the Columbia River of Oregon,
+and also the Green River, a branch of the Colorado, flowing into the
+Gulf of California. The central portion of the Park is a broad
+volcanic plateau, elevated, on an average, eight thousand feet above
+the sea, and surrounded by mountain ridges and peaks, rising to nearly
+twelve thousand feet, and covered with snow. The air is pure and
+bracing, little rain falls, and the whole district gives evidence of
+remarkable volcanic activity at a comparatively late geological epoch.
+It contains the most elevated lake in the world, Yellowstone Lake. The
+Yellowstone River flows into this lake, and then northward through a
+magnificent canyon out of the Park. Its most remarkable tributary
+within the Park is Tower Creek, flowing through a narrow and gloomy
+pass for two miles, called the Devil's Den, and just before reaching
+the Yellowstone having a fall of one hundred and fifty-six feet, which
+is surrounded by columns of breccia resembling towers. There is frost
+in the Park every month in the year, owing to the peculiar atmospheric
+conditions. The traces of recent volcanic activity are seen in the
+geysers, craters and terrace constructions, boiling springs, deep
+canyons, petrified trees, obsidian cliffs, sulphur deposits and
+similar formations. These geysers and springs surpass in number and
+magnitude those of the rest of the world. There are some five
+thousand hot springs, depositing mainly lime and silica, and over a
+hundred large geysers, many of them throwing water columns to heights
+of from fifty to two hundred and fifty feet. The most elaborate colors
+and ornamentation are formed by the deposits of the springs and
+geysers, these curiosities being mainly in and near the valleys of the
+Madison and Gardiner Rivers. An attempt has been made under Government
+auspices to have in the Park a huge game preserve, and within its
+recesses large numbers of wild animals are sheltered, including deer,
+elk, bears, big-horn sheep, and the last herd of buffalo in the
+country. Troops of cavalry and other Government forces patrol and
+govern the Park.
+
+
+THE MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS.
+
+This extraordinary region was first made known in a way in 1807. A
+hunter named Coulter visited it, and getting safely back to
+civilization, he told such wonderful stories of the hot springs and
+geysers that the unbelieving borderers, in derision, called it
+"Coulter's Hell." Others visited it subsequently, but their remarkable
+tales were generally regarded as romances. The first thorough
+exploration was made by Prof. Hayden's scientific party for the
+Government in 1871, and his report led Congress to reserve it as a
+public Park. The visitor generally first enters the Park at the
+Mammoth Hot Springs, which are near the northern verge of the broad
+central plateau. Here are the wonderful terraces built up by the
+earlier calcareous deposits of these Springs, covering an area of
+several square miles, and in the present active operations about two
+hundred acres, with a dozen or more terraces, and some seventy flowing
+springs, the temperature of the water rising to 165°. The lower
+terrace extends to the edge of the gorge of Gardiner River, with high
+mountain peaks beyond. The hotel is built on one of the terraces, with
+yawning caves and the craters of extinct geysers at several places in
+front. The higher terraces rise in white, streaked with brown and
+other tints, as the overflowing, trickling waters may have colored
+them. The best idea that can be got of this place is by conjuring up
+the popular impression of the infernal regions with an ample stock of
+heat and brimstone. For a long distance, rising from the top of the
+gorge of Gardiner River westward in successive terraces to a height of
+a thousand feet above the stream, the entire surface is underlaid with
+sulphur, subterranean fires, boiling water and steam, which make their
+way out in many places. The earth has been cracked by the heat into
+fissures, within which the waters can be heard boiling and running
+down below, and everything on the surface which can be, is burnt up.
+Almost every crevice exudes steam and hot water; sulphur hangs in
+stalactites from the caves; and in some places the odors are nearly
+overpowering. It is no wonder the Indians avoided this forbidding
+region, and that the tales told by the early explorers were
+disbelieved. Yet it is as attractive as it is startling. The hot
+springs form shallow pools, where the waters run daintily over their
+rim-like edges, trickling down upon terrace after terrace, forming the
+most beautiful shapes of columns, towers and coral decorations from
+the lime deposits, and painting them with delicious coloring in red,
+brown, green, yellow, blue and pink. So long as the waters run, this
+decoration continues, but when the flow ceases, the atmosphere turns
+everything white, and the more delicate formations crumble. The whole
+of this massive structure has been built up by ages of the steady
+though minute deposits of the waters, the rate being estimated at
+about one-sixteenth of an inch in four days. The rocks upon which
+these calcareous deposits are made belong to the middle and lower
+Cretaceous and Jurassic formations, with probably carboniferous
+limestones beneath that put the deposits in the waters. A dozen
+different terraces can be traced successively upward from the river
+bank to the highest part of the formation. Two cones of extinct
+geysers rise from the deposits, near the hotel,--the Liberty Cap,
+forty-five feet high, and the Giant's Thumb, somewhat smaller,--both
+having been built up by the deposits from orifices still seen in their
+tops, whence the waters have ceased flowing. All these springs, as
+deposits are made, shift their locality, so that the scene gradually
+changes as the ages pass.
+
+In climbing about this remarkable formation, some of the most
+beautiful bits of construction and coloring nature has ever produced
+are disclosed. The Orange Geyser has its sides streaked with orange,
+yellow and red from the little wavelets slowly trickling out of the
+steaming spring at the top, which goes off at quick intervals like the
+exhaust of a steam-engine. At the Stalactite Cave the flowing waters
+add green to the other colors, and also scale the rocks in places like
+the back of a fish, while below hang stalactites with water dropping
+from them. The roof of the cave is full of beautiful formations. The
+water is very hot when it starts from the top, but becomes quite cold
+when it has finished its journey down. One of the finest formations is
+Cleopatra's Bath, with Cupid's Cave beneath, the way to them being
+through Antony's Gate, all built up of the deposits. Here rich
+coloring is painted on the rocks, with hot water and steam amply
+supplied to the bath, which has 154° temperature at the outer verge.
+All the springs form flat basins with turned-up edges, over which the
+waters flow, and trickling down the front of the terrace, paint it.
+When the flow ceases, and the surface has been made snowy white by the
+atmosphere, it becomes a spongy and beautiful coral, crumbling when
+touched, and into which the foot sinks when walked upon. The
+aggregation of the currents run in streams over terrace after
+terrace, spread out to the width of hundreds of feet, painting them
+all, and then seeking the Gardiner River, flowing through a deep gorge
+in front of the formation. Everything subjected to the overflow of
+these currents gets coated by the deposits, so that visitors have many
+small articles coated to carry away as curiosities.
+
+Among the many beautiful formations made by these Hot Springs, the
+most elaborate and ornamental are the Pulpit Terraces. These are a
+succession of magnificent terraces, fifty feet high, with beautifully
+colored columnar supports. There is a large pulpit, and in front, on a
+lower level, the font, with the water running over its edges. The
+pulpit, having been formed by a spring that has ceased action, is
+white, while the font is streaked in red and brown. Finely carved
+vases filled with water stand below, and alongside the pulpit there is
+an inclined surface, whitened and spread in wrinkles like the drifted
+snow, which requires very little imagination to picture as a
+magnificent curtain. Beyond is a blackened border like a second
+curtain, the coloring being made by a spring impregnated with arsenic.
+In front of this gorgeous display the surface is hot and cracked into
+fissures, with bubbling streams of steaming water running through it,
+and great pools fuming into new basins with turned-up edges, over
+which the hot water runs. Upon one of these pools seems to be a
+deposit of transparent gelatine, looking like the albumen of an egg,
+streaked into fantastic shapes by elongated bubbles. Everywhere are
+surfaces, over which the water runs, that are covered with regular
+formations like fish scales. It is impossible to adequately describe
+this extraordinary place, combining the supposed peculiarities and
+terrors of the infernal regions with the most beautiful forms and
+colors in decoration. The great hill made by these Hot Springs was,
+from its prevailing color, named the White Mountain by Hayden. The
+springs extend all the way down to the river bank, and there are some
+even in the river bed. It is a common experiment of the angler to hook
+a small fish in the cold water of the river, and then, without
+changing position, to swing him on the hook over into the basin of one
+of these hot springs to cook him. The formation of the terraces is
+wedge-shaped, and runs up into a gulch between the higher mountains,
+which have pines scattered over them, and also grow some grass in
+sheltered nooks. It is said that the volume of the springs is
+gradually diminishing.
+
+
+THE NORRIS GEYSER BASIN.
+
+The route southward into the Park crosses mountain ridges and over
+stretches of lava and ashes and other volcanic formations, through
+woods and past gorges, and reaches the Obsidian Creek, which flows
+near the Obsidian Cliff. This remarkable structure is a mountain of
+black glass of volcanic formation, rising six hundred feet, with the
+road hewn along its edge. It looks as if a series of blasting
+explosions had blown its face into pieces, smashing the glass into
+great heaps of _débris_ that have fallen down in front. The formation
+is columnar, rising from a morass adjoining Beaver Lake, which is a
+mile long. The divide is thus crossed between the Gardiner and Gibbon
+Rivers, the latter flowing into the Madison, and here, twenty-five
+miles from the Mammoth Hot Springs, is the Norris Geyser Basin. In
+approaching, seen over the low trees, the place looks much like the
+manufacturing quarter of a city, steam jets rising out of many
+orifices, and a hissing being heard as of sundry engine exhausts. The
+basin covers about one hundred and fifty acres, and is depressed below
+the general level. The whole surface is lime, silica, sulphur and
+sand, fused together and baked hard by the great heat, cracked into
+fissures, and, as it is walked over, giving out hollow sounds, showing
+that beneath are subterranean caves and passages in which boil huge
+cauldrons. There is a background formed by the bleak-looking mountains
+of the Quadrate range, having snow upon their tops and sides. The
+steam blows off with the noise of a hundred exhaust pipes, and little
+geysers boil everywhere, occasionally spurting up like the bursting of
+a boiler. In one place on the hillside the escaping steam from the
+"Steamboat" keeps up a loud and steady roar; in another is the deeper
+tone of the "Black Growler." As a general thing, the higher vents on
+the hill give off steam only, while the lower ones are geysers. The
+trees are coated with the deposits, the surface is hot, and all
+underneath seems an immense mass of boiling water, impregnated with
+sulphur, giving off powerful odors, while brimstone and lime-dust
+encrust everything, and a large amount of valuable steam-power goes to
+waste.
+
+This is the smallest of the basins, having few large geysers. Most of
+them are little ones, spurting every few minutes, and with some view
+to economy, whereby the water, after being blown out of the crater to
+a brief height, runs back into the orifice again, ready to be ejected
+by the next explosion. A mud geyser here throws up large quantities of
+dirty white paint in several spouting jets, the eruption continuing
+ten minutes, when nearly all the water runs back again, leaving the
+crater entirely bare, and its rounded, water-worn rocks exposed. The
+"Emerald Pool" is the wide crater of an old geyser, filled with hot
+water of a beautiful green color, constantly boiling, but never
+getting as far as an eruption. Probably the best geyser on exhibition
+in this basin is the "Minute Man," which, at intervals of about one
+minute, spouts for ten or twelve seconds, the column rising thirty
+feet, and the rest of the time it blows off steam. The "Vixen" is a
+coquette which is delightfully irregular, never going off when
+watched, but when the back is turned suddenly sending out a column
+sixty feet high. The great geyser here is the "Monarch," standing in a
+hill from which it has blown out the entire side, and once a day
+discharging an enormous amount of water over one hundred feet high,
+and continuing nearly a half-hour. Its column comes from two huge
+orifices, the surplus water running down quite a large brook. When
+quiet, this geyser industriously boils like a big tea-kettle. There
+are plenty of "paint pots" and sulphur springs, and the visitors coax
+up lazy geysers by throwing stones into them,--a method usually making
+the small ones go to work, as if angry at the treatment.
+
+
+THE LOWER AND MIDDLE BASINS.
+
+Through the long deep canyon of the Gibbon River, and up over the
+mountain top, giving a distant view of the Gibbon Falls, a cataract of
+eighty feet far down in the valley, the road crosses another divide to
+a stream in the worst portion of this Satanic domain, which has not
+been inappropriately named the Firehole River. This unites with the
+Gibbon to form the Madison River, one of the sources of the Missouri.
+Miles ahead, the steam from the Firehole Geyser Basins can be seen
+rising in clouds among the distant hills. Beyond, the view is closed
+by the Teton Mountains, far to the southwest, rising fourteen thousand
+feet, the Continental divide and backbone of North America, the
+highest Rocky Mountain range, on the other side of which is the Snake
+River, whose waters go off to the Pacific. The Firehole River is a
+stream of ample current, with beautifully transparent blue water
+bubbling over a bed of discolored stones and lava. Its waters are all
+the outflow of geysers and hot springs, impregnated with everything
+this forbidding region produces; pretty to look at, but bitter as the
+waters of Marah. Along this river, geysers are liberally distributed
+at intervals for ten miles, being, for convenience of description,
+divided into the Lower, Middle and Upper Geyser Basins. The Lower
+Basin, the first reached, has myriads of steam jets rising from a
+surface of some three square miles of desolate geyserite deposits.
+There are about seven hundred springs and geysers here, most of them
+small. The Fountain Geyser throws a broad low stream of many
+interlacing jets every two to three hours, lasting about fifteen
+minutes. The "Thud" Geyser has a crater one hundred and fifty feet in
+diameter, having a smaller rim inside, within which the geyser
+operates, throwing a column of sixty feet with a heavy and regular
+"thud" underground, though it has no fixed period, and is irregular in
+action. This basin has a generous supply of mud geysers, known as the
+"paint pots," which eject brilliantly colored muds with the
+consistency and look of paint, the prevailing hues being red, white,
+yellow and pink.
+
+About three miles to the southwest, farther up the Firehole River, is
+the Middle Geyser Basin. It is a locality covering some fifty acres,
+close to the river, and contains the greatest geyser in the world. The
+name of Hell's Half Acre was given this place in the early
+explorations, and still sticks. The surface is composed mainly of hot
+ashes, with streams of boiling water running over it. The whole basin
+is filled with hot springs, and surrounded by timbered hills, at the
+foot of which is the Prismatic Lake, its beautiful green and blue
+waters shading off into a deposit of bright red paint running down to
+the river. The great Excelsior Geyser is a fountain of enormous power
+but uncertain periods, which when at work throws out such immense
+amounts of water as to double the flow of the river. Its crater is a
+hundred yards wide, with water violently boiling in the centre all the
+time and a steady outflow. The sides of the crater are beautifully
+colored by the deposits, which are largely of sulphur. It is a geyser
+of modern origin, having developed from a hot spring within the memory
+of Park denizens. It throws a column over two hundred feet high, and
+while quiet at times for years, occasionally bursts forth, though
+having no fixed period. In close connection to the westward is the
+seething cauldron which is the immediate Hell's Half Acre, that being
+about its area--a beautiful but terrible lake, steam constantly rising
+from the surface, which boils furiously and sends copious streams
+over the edges. This is an uncanny spot, with treacherous footing
+around, and about the hottest place in the Park.
+
+
+THE UPPER FIREHOLE BASIN.
+
+For five miles along the desolate shores of Firehole River the course
+is now taken in a region of mostly extinct geysers, yet with active
+hot springs and steam jets, and having ashes and cinders covering wide
+spaces. Ahead is the largest collection of geysers in the world, with
+clouds of steam overhanging--the Upper Firehole Basin. Hot water runs
+over the earth, and the "paint pots" color the surface in variegated
+hues. Here are some forty of the greatest geysers in existence, in a
+region covering two or three square miles, all of them located near
+the river, and their outflow making its initial current. The basin is
+at seventy-three hundred feet elevation above the sea. When the author
+visited this extraordinary place the guide, halting at the verge,
+said: "Now I have brought you to the front door of hell." He was asked
+if there were any Indians about there, and solemnly replied: "No
+Indian ever comes into this country unless he is blind; only the white
+man is fool enough to come;" then after a moment's pause he continued,
+"And I get paid for it, I do." The great stand-by of this Upper Basin,
+and the geyser that is first visited, is "Old Faithful," near its
+southern or upper end. This most reliable geyser, which always goes
+off at the time appointed, is a flat-topped and gently rising cone
+about two hundred feet in diameter, and elevated towards the centre
+about twenty feet. The tube is an orifice of eight feet by two feet
+wide in the centre of this cone, with water-worn and rounded rocks
+enclosing it. Steam escapes all the time, and the hard, scaly and
+laminated surface around it seems hollow as you walk across, while
+beneath there are grumblings and dull explosions, giving warning of
+the approaching outburst. Several mounds of extinct geysers are near,
+with steam issuing from one of them, but all have long since gone out
+of active business. Soon "Old Faithful" gives the premonitory symptoms
+of an eruption. The steam jet increases, and also the internal
+rumblings. Then a little spurt of hot water comes, hastily receding
+with a growl, followed by more steam, and after an interval more
+growling, finally developing into repeated little spurts of hot water,
+occupying several minutes. Then the geyser suddenly explodes, throwing
+quick jets higher and higher into the air, until the column rises in a
+grand fountain to the height of about one hundred and fifty feet, the
+stream inclined to the northward, and falling over in great splashes
+upon that side of the cone, dense clouds of steam and spray being
+carried by the wind, upon which the sun paints a rainbow. After some
+four minutes the grand jet dies gradually down to a height of about
+thirty feet, continuing at that elevation for a brief time, with
+quickly repeated impulses. When six minutes have elapsed, with an
+expiring leap the water mounts to a height of fifty feet, there is a
+final outburst of steam, and all is over. A deluge of hot water rushes
+down to the Firehole River; and thus "Old Faithful" keeps it up
+regularly every hour. The eruption being ended, you can look down into
+the abyss whence it came. Through the hot steam, rushing out with a
+strong draught, there is a view far down into the rocky recesses of
+the geyser. The water left by the eruption stands about in transparent
+shallow pools, and is tinted a pale blue. "Old Faithful's" mound is
+built up of layers of geyserite--hard, brittle, porous, full of
+crevices, and having all about little basins with turned-up rims that
+retain the water. This geyser is the favorite in the region, not only
+because of its regular performance, but possibly because its odors are
+somewhat less sulphurous than those emanating elsewhere.
+
+The geysers of the Upper Basin contribute practically the whole
+current of the Firehole River, their outflow sending into the stream
+ten million gallons daily. Across the river to the northward, close to
+the bank, is the Beehive, its tube looking like a huge bird's nest,
+enclosed by a pile of geyserite resembling a beehive, three feet high
+and about four feet in diameter. Nearby is a vent from which steam,
+escaping a few minutes before the eruption, gives notice of its
+coming. The water column shoots up two hundred feet, with clouds of
+steam, but it is quite uncertain, spouting once or twice in
+twenty-four hours, and usually at night. Behind the Beehive are the
+Lion, the Lioness, and their two Cubs, and to the eastward of the
+latter the Giantess. The Lion group has only uncertain and small
+action, while the Giantess is on the summit of a mound fifty feet
+high, with a depressed crater, measuring eighteen by twenty-four feet,
+and usually filled with dark-blue water. This is the slowest of all
+the geysers in getting to work, acting only at fortnightly intervals,
+but each eruption continues the greater part of the day, with usually
+long-previous notice by violent boiling and internal rumblings. When
+it comes, the explosion is terrific, the column mounting two hundred
+and fifty feet, a perfect water-spout the full size of the crater,
+with a half-dozen distinct jets forced through it. To the northwest of
+the Lion and across the river is the Castle, so named from the
+castellated construction of its crater. It stands upon an elevation,
+the side towards the Firehole falling off in a series of rude steps.
+The tube is elevated about ten feet within the castle and is four feet
+in diameter. It is of uncertain eruption, sometimes playing daily and
+sometimes every other day, throwing a column of one hundred and fifty
+feet, falling in a sparkling shower, continuing about forty minutes,
+and then tapering off in a series of insignificant spurts. The
+Saw-Mill is not far away, rather insignificant, its tube being only
+six inches in diameter, set in a saucer-like crater about twenty feet
+across; but its water column, thrown forty feet high, gives the
+peculiar sounds of a saw, caused by the action of puffs of steam
+coming out alternately with the water jets. It generally acts in
+unison with the Grand Geyser, a quarter of a mile northward, which
+goes off about once a day. The Grand Geyser in action is most
+powerful, causing the earth to tremble, while there are fearful
+thumping noises beneath. The water in the crater suddenly recedes, and
+then quickly spurts upward in a solid column for two hundred feet,
+with steam rising in puffs above. The column seems to be composed of
+numerous separate jets, falling back with a thundering sound into the
+funnel. The outburst continues a few minutes, stops as suddenly as it
+starts, and is repeated six or eight times, each growing less
+powerful. Along the river bank nearby are the Wash Tubs, small basins
+ten feet in diameter, each with an orifice in the bottom. If the
+clothes are put in, the washing progresses finely until suddenly out
+goes the water, and with it all the garments, sucked down the hole.
+After awhile the basin fills again, and back come the clothes, though
+sometimes they are very dilatory in returning. The Devil's Well, about
+fifty feet away, is usually accused of complicity in this movement. It
+is a broad and placid basin of hot water, with a beautiful blue
+tinge, in which tourists sometimes boil their eggs and potatoes. It is
+sentinelled by the Comet Geyser, exploding several times daily, but
+through an orifice so large that it does not throw a very high column.
+
+The great geyser of this Upper Basin is the Giant. It has a broken
+cone set upon an almost level surface, with the enclosing formation
+fallen away on one side, the interior being lined with brilliant
+colors like a tessellated pavement. It is somewhat uncertain in
+movement, but usually goes off every fourth day. It gives ample
+notice, certain "Little Devils" adjoining, and a vent in the side of
+the crater, boiling some time before it sends up the enormous column
+which plays ninety minutes. The outburst, when it starts, comes like a
+tornado, and the stream from it runs into and more than doubles the
+current of the river. The column is eight feet in diameter, rises two
+hundred and fifty feet at first, and is afterwards maintained at two
+hundred feet. There is a deafening noise, and the steam clouds seem to
+cover half the valley. The column goes up perfectly straight, and
+falls back around the cone with a deluge of hot water. The Catfish, a
+small geyser, is nearby, and to the northward a short distance is the
+Grotto. This is an odd formation, its crater perforated with orifices
+around a low, elongated mound, which point in different directions;
+and when it goes off at six-hour intervals, the eruption is by streams
+at an angle, giving a curious sort of churning motion to the water
+column, which rises forty feet, continuing twenty minutes. The
+Riverside has a little crater on a terraced mound just at the river's
+edge, and is a small, irregular but vigorous spouter, throwing a
+stream sixty feet. The Fan has five spreading tubes, arranged so that
+they make a huge fan-like eruption, one hundred feet high in the
+centre, this display, given three or four times a day, continuing
+about fifteen minutes. The Splendid plays a jet two hundred feet high
+every three hours, continuing ten minutes, and may be spurred to
+quicker action. The Pyramid and the Punch Bowl are geysers that have
+ceased operations. The former is now only a steam-jet, and the latter,
+on a flat mound, is an elegant blue pool, elevated several feet, and
+having a serrated edge. The Morning Glory Spring, named from its
+resemblance to the convolvulus, is a beautiful and most delicately
+tinted pool. The investigators of these geysers have been able to get
+the temperature at a depth of seventy feet within the tubes, and find
+that under the pressure there exerted the boiling-point is 250°. Upon
+this fact is based the theory of the operation of the geyser. The
+boiling-point under pressure at the bottom of a long tube being much
+higher than at the top, the expansive force of the steam there
+suddenly generated drives out violently the water above it in the
+tube, and hence the explosive spouting.
+
+
+YELLOWSTONE FALLS AND CANYON.
+
+The National Park, besides the extraordinary geyser and hot-spring
+formations exhibits the grand scenery of the Yellowstone Falls and
+Canyon. The Yellowstone River has its source in Bridger Lake, to the
+southeast of the Park, and flows northward in a broad valley between
+generally snow-capped mountain ridges of volcanic origin, with some of
+the peaks rising over eleven thousand feet. It is a sluggish stream,
+with heavily timbered banks, much of the initial valley being marshy,
+and it flows into the Yellowstone Lake, the largest sheet of water at
+a high elevation in North America. This lake has bays indented in its
+western and southern shores, giving the irregular outline somewhat the
+appearance of a human hand, and there are five of them, called the
+"Thumb" and the "Fingers." The thumb of this distorted hand is thicker
+than its length, the forefinger is detached and shrivelled, the middle
+finger has also been badly treated, and the much swollen little finger
+is the biggest of all, thus making a very demoralized hand. The trail
+eastward over from the Upper Firehole Geyser Basin comes out on the
+West Thumb of the lake, mounting the Continental Divide on the way,
+and crossing it twice as it makes a curious loop to the northward, the
+second crossing being at eighty-five hundred feet elevation, whence
+the trail descends to the West Thumb. Yellowstone Lake is at
+seventy-seven hundred and forty feet elevation, and covers about one
+hundred and fifty square miles, having a hundred miles of coast-line.
+The scenery is tame, the shores being usually gentle slopes, with much
+marsh and pine woods. Islands dot the blue waters, and waterfowl
+frequent the marshes. The most elevated portion of the immediate
+environment is Flat Mountain, on the southwestern side, rising five
+hundred feet, but beyond the eastern shore are some of the highest
+peaks of the Park, exceeding eleven thousand feet. Hot springs adjoin
+the West Thumb, and there is an actual geyser crater in the lake
+itself. Towards the northern end the shores gradually contract into
+the narrow and shallow Yellowstone River, which flows towards the
+northwest after first leaving the lake, having occasional hot springs,
+geysers, paint pots and steam jets at work, with large adjacent
+surfaces of geyserite and sulphur. The chief curiosity in operation is
+the Giant's Cauldron, boiling furiously, and with a roar that can be
+heard far away. The pretty Alum Creek is crossed, its waters, thus
+tainted, giving the name. South of this the Yellowstone is generally
+placid, winding for a dozen miles sluggishly through prairie and
+timbered hills, but now it contracts and rushes for a mile down rapids
+and over pretty cascades to the Upper Fall.
+
+Restricted to a width of but eighty feet, the river shoots far over
+this fall, the current being thrown outward, indicating there must be
+room to pass behind it. The fall is one hundred and twenty feet, and
+suddenly turning a right angle at its foot, the stream of beautiful
+green passes through a not very deep canyon. The appearance of the
+surrounding cliffs is quite Alpine, though the rocks forming the
+cascade constantly suffer from erosion. About a half-mile below is the
+great Lower Falls of the Yellowstone. Before reaching it, a little
+stream comes into the river over the Crystal Fall, about eighty feet
+high, rushing down a gorge forming a perfect grotto in the side of the
+canyon, extending some distance under the overhanging rocks. The
+surface of the plateau gradually ascends as the Lower Falls are
+approached, while the river bed descends, and this makes a deep
+canyon, brilliantly colored, generally a light yellow (thus naming the
+river), but in many portions white, like marble, with patches of
+orange, the whole being streaked and spotted with the dark-gray rocks,
+whose sombre color in this region is produced by atmospheric action.
+The river rushes to the brink of the Lower Fall, and where it goes
+over, the current is not over a hundred feet wide, the descent of the
+cataract being about three hundred feet, and the column of falling
+waters dividing into separate white streaks, which are lost in clouds
+of spray before reaching the bottom. Only a small amount of water
+usually goes over, about twelve hundred cubic feet in a second. Before
+the plunge the water forms a basin of dark-green color, and both blue
+and green tints mingle with the prevailing white of the cascade.
+Towards sunset, when viewed from below, there are admirable rainbow
+effects. The river is quite narrow as it flows away along the bottom
+of the canyon, which now becomes deep and large. The grand view of
+this beautiful picture is from Point Lookout, a half-mile below the
+falls. Unlike any other of the world's great waterfalls, this cascade,
+while a part, ceases to be the chief feature of the scene. It is the
+vivid coloring and remarkable formation of the sides of the canyon
+that make the chief impression. These change as the sun gives light
+and shadow, the morning differing from noon and noon from night. It is
+impossible to reproduce or properly describe the beautiful hues in
+this wonderful picture. The prevailing tint is a light yellow, almost
+sulphur color, with veins of white marble and bright red streaked
+through it. The colors blend admirably, while the cascade in the
+background seems enclosed in a setting of chocolate-brown rocks,
+contrasting picturesquely with the brighter foreground. Throughout the
+grand scene, great rocky columns and pinnacles arise, their brilliant
+hues maintained to the tops, and the scattered pines clinging to these
+huge columnar formations give a green tinge to parts of the picture.
+The _débris_, forming an inclined base about half-way down, is colored
+as brilliantly as the rocks above, from which it has fallen. In the
+view over the canyon from Point Lookout, the contracted white streak
+of the cascade above the spray cloud is but a small part of the
+background, while the river below is only a narrow green ribbon, edged
+by these brilliant hues. Some distance farther down the canyon,
+another outlook at Inspiration Point gives a striking view from an
+elevation fifteen hundred feet above the river of the gorgeous
+coloring of the upper canyon.
+
+This grand Canyon of the Yellowstone extends, as the river flows, a
+distance of about twenty-four miles. It is a depression in a volcanic
+plateau elevated about eight thousand feet above the sea, and
+gradually declining towards the northern end of the canyon. Above the
+Upper Fall the river level is almost at the top of the plateau, and
+the falls and rapids depress the stream bed about thirteen hundred
+feet. About midway along the canyon, on the western side, is Washburne
+Mountain, the surface from it declining in both directions, so that
+there the canyon is deepest, measuring twelve hundred feet. Across the
+top, the width varies from four hundred to sixteen hundred yards, the
+angle of slope down to the bottom being fully 45°, and often much
+steeper, in some cases almost perpendicular where the top width is
+narrowest. This Grand Canyon is the beautiful beginning, as it were,
+of the largest river in the world,--the Missouri and the Mississippi.
+Upon the trail in the southern part of the National Park which goes
+over from the Firehole River to the West Thumb, and at quite an
+elevation upon the Continental Divide, there is a quiet little sheet
+of water, having two small streams flowing from its opposite sides. To
+the eastward a babbling brook goes down into the West Thumb of the
+Yellowstone Lake, while to the southwest another small creek flows
+over the boulders towards Shoshone Lake. This scanty sheet of water,
+properly named the Two-Ocean Pond, actually feeds both the Atlantic
+and Pacific Oceans. The one stream gets its outlet through the
+Mississippi and the other through the Columbia River of Oregon.
+
+
+WESTWARD THE COURSE OF EMPIRE.
+
+Here, in the Yellowstone National Park, with the waters flowing
+towards both the rising and the setting sun, is the backbone of the
+American Continent. Beyond it the country stretches through the
+spacious Rocky Mountain ranges to the Pacific. What is herein
+described gives an idea of the vast empire ceded to the United States
+by France in the early nineteenth century, and this Great Northwest is
+gradually becoming the masterful ruling section of the country. When
+Bishop Berkeley, in the early eighteenth century, sitting by the
+Atlantic Ocean waves at Newport, composed his famous lyric on the
+"course of empire," he little thought how typical it was to become
+more than a century after his death. He was musing then "On the
+Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America." The Arts and the
+Learning have had vigorous American growth, but his Muse predicted a
+greater empire than any one could have then imagined.
+
+     "The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime
+       Barren of every glorious theme,
+     In distant lands now waits a better time,
+       Producing subjects worthy fame.
+
+     "In happy climes, where from the genial sun
+       And virgin earth such scenes ensue,
+     The force of Art by Nature seems outdone,
+       And fancied beauties by the true;
+
+     "In happy climes, the seat of innocence,
+       Where Nature guides and Virtue rules,
+     Where men shall not impose for truth and sense
+       The pedantry of courts and schools;
+
+     "There shall be sung another golden age,
+       The rise of empire and of arts,
+     The good and great inspiring epic rage,
+       The wisest heads and noblest hearts.
+
+     "Not such as Europe breeds in her decay;
+       Such as she bred when fresh and young,
+     When heavenly flame did animate her clay,
+       By future poets shall be sung.
+
+     "Westward the course of empire takes its way;
+       The four first acts already past,
+     A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
+       Time's noblest offspring is the last."
+
+END OF VOLUME I.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of America, Volume II (of 6), by Joel Cook
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41742 ***