But This Is Not The Greatest Calamity Which
Has Befallen This Part Of The Country.
The season is uncommonly sickly.
We
passed the first night of our journey at Pawpaw Grove - so named from the
number of pawpaw-trees which grow in it, but which here scarcely find the
summer long enough to perfect their fruit. The place has not had the
reputation of being unhealthy, but now there was scarce a family in the
neighborhood in which one or more was not ill with an intermittent or a
bilious fever. At the inn where we stopped, the landlady, a stout
Pennsylvania woman, was just so far recovered as to be able, as she
informed us, "to poke about;" and her daughter, a strapping lass, went out
to pass the night at the bedside of one of the numerous sick neighbors.
The sickness was ascribed by the settlers to the extremely dry and hot
weather following a rainy June. At almost every place where we stopped we
heard similar accounts. Pale and hollow-eyed people were lounging about.
"Is the place unhealthy," I asked one of them. "_I_ reckon so," he
answered; and his looks showed that he had sufficient reason. At Aurora,
where we passed the second night, a busy little village, with mills and
manufactories, on the Fox River, which here rushes swiftly over a stony
bed, they confessed to the fever and ague. At Naperville, pleasantly
situated among numerous groves and little prairies swelling into hills, we
heard that the season was the most sickly the inhabitants had known. Here,
at Chicago, which boasts, and with good reason, I believe, of its healthy
site, dysenteries and bilious attacks are just now very common, with
occasional cases of fever.
It is a common remark in this country, that the first cultivation of the
earth renders any neighborhood more or less unhealthy. "Nature," said a
western man to me, some years since, "resents the violence done her, and
punishes those who first break the surface of the earth with the plough."
The beautiful Rock River district, with its rapid stream, its noble
groves, its banks disposed in natural terraces, with fresh springs gushing
at their foot, and airy prairies stretching away from their summits, was
esteemed one of the most healthy countries in the world as long as it had
but few inhabitants. With the breaking up of the soil came in bilious
fever and intermittents. A few years of cultivation will render the
country more healthy, and these diseases will probably disappear, as they
have done in some parts of western New York. I can remember the time when
the "Genesee Country," as it was called, was thought quite a sickly
region - a land just in the skirts of the shadow of death. It is now as
healthy, I believe, as any part of the state.
Letter XXXIV.
Voyage to Sault Ste. Marie.
Sault Ste. Marie, _August_ 13, 1846.
When we left Chicago in the steamer, the other morning, all the vessels in
the port had their flags displayed at half-mast in token of
dissatisfaction with the fate of the harbor bill.
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