When There She
Rode With Comparative Ease Upon The Waters, And Took The Sharp Turn
Round Into The River Below Without A Struggle.
The feat was done,
and the Maid was rescued from the sheriff.
It is said that she was
sold below at the mouth of the river, and carried from thence over
Lake Ontario, and down the St. Lawrence to Quebec.
CHAPTER VIII.
NORTH AND WEST.
From Niagara we determined to proceed Northwest - as far to the
Northwest as we could go with any reasonable hope of finding
American citizens in a state of political civilization, and perhaps
guided also in some measure by our hopes as to hotel accommodation.
Looking to these two matters, we resolved to get across to the
Mississippi, and to go up that river as far as the town of St. Paul
and the Falls of St. Anthony, which are some twelve miles above the
town; then to descend the river as far as the States of Iowa on the
west and Illinois on the east; and to return eastward through
Chicago and the large cities on the southern shores of Lake Erie,
from whence we would go across to Albany, the capital of New York
state, and down the Hudson to New York, the capital of the Western
World. For such a journey, in which scenery was one great object,
we were rather late, as we did not leave Niagara till the 10th of
October; but though the winters are extremely cold through all this
portion of the American continent - fifteen, twenty, and even
twenty-five degrees below zero being an ordinary state of the
atmosphere in latitudes equal to those of Florence, Nice, and
Turin - nevertheless the autumns are mild, the noonday being always
warm, and the colors of the foliage are then in all their glory. I
was also very anxious to ascertain, if it might be in my power to
do so, with what spirit or true feeling as to the matter the work
of recruiting for the now enormous army of the States was going on
in those remote regions. That men should be on fire in Boston and
New York, in Philadelphia and along the borders of secession, I
could understand. I could understand also that they should be on
fire throughout the cotton, sugar, and rice plantations of the
South. But I could hardly understand that this political fervor
should have communicated itself to the far-off farmers who had
thinly spread themselves over the enormous wheat-growing districts
of the Northwest. St. Paul, the capital of Minnesota, is nine
hundred miles directly north of St. Louis, the most northern point
to which slavery extends in the Western States of the Union; and
the farming lands of Minnesota stretch away again for some hundreds
of miles north and west of St. Paul. Could it be that those scanty
and far-off pioneers of agriculture - those frontier farmers, who
are nearly one-half German and nearly the other half Irish, would
desert their clearings and ruin their chances of progress in the
world for distant wars of which the causes must, as I thought, be
to them unintelligible?
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