Ever since Governor Slade, of
Vermont, brought some bright young school mistresses up to St. Paul
(in 1849), common school education has been diffusing its precious
influences. The government wisely sets apart two sections of land
the 16th and 36th in every township for school purposes. A township
is six miles square; and the two sections thus reserved in each
township comprise 1280 acres. Other territories have the same
provision. This affords a very good fund for educational uses, or
rather it is a great aid to the exertions of the people. There are
some nourishing institutions of learning in the territory. But the
greatest institution after all in the country the surest protection
of our liberties and our laws is the FREE SCHOOL.
LETTER XIII.
CROW WING TO ST. CLOUD.
Pleasant drive in the stage Scenery The past Fort Ripley Ferry
Delay at the Post Office Belle Prairie A Catholic priest Dinner
at Swan River Potatoes Arrival at Watab St. Cloud.
ST. CLOUD, October, 1856.
YESTERDAY morning at seven I took my departure, on the stage, from
Crow Wing. It was a most delightful morning, the air not damp, but
bracing; and the welcome rays of the sun shed a mellow lustre upon a
scene of "sylvan beauty." The first hour's ride was over a road I had
passed in the dark on my upward journey, and this was the first view I
had of the country immediately below Crow Wing. No settlements were to
be seen, because the regulations of military reservations preclude
their being made except for some purpose connected with the public
interests. A heavy shower the night before had effectually laid the
dust, and we bounded along on the easy coach in high spirits. The view
of the prairie stretching "in airy undulations far away," and of the
eddying current of the Mississippi, there as everywhere deep and
majestic, with its banks skirted with autumn-colored foliage, was
enough to commend the old fashioned system of stages to more general
use. Call it poetry or what you please, yet the man who can
contemplate with indifference the wonderful profusion of nature,
undeveloped by art inviting, yet never touched by the plough must
lack some one of the senses. Indeed, this picture, so characteristic
of the new lands of the West, seems to call into existence a new
sense. The view takes in a broad expanse which has never produced a
stock of grain; and which has been traversed for ages past by a race
whose greatest and most frequent calamity was hunger. If we turn to
its past there is no object to call back our thoughts. All is
oblivion. There are no ruins to awaken curious images of former life
no vestige of humanity nothing but the present generation of nature.
And yet there are traces of the past generations of nature to be seen.
The depressions of the soil here and there to be observed, covered
with a thick meadow grass, are unmistakeable indications of lakes
which have now "vanished into thin air." That these gentle hollows
were once filled with water is the more certain from the appearance of
the shores of the present lakes, where the low water mark seems to
have grown lower and lower every year.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 59 of 97
Words from 30527 to 31086
of 50597
