"The Clouds Are Thin," He Answered; "The Sun Will Soon Burn Them Off."
In fact, the sun soon melted away the clouds, and before ten o'clock I was
shown, to the north of
Us, the dim shore of the Great Manitoulin Island,
with the faintly descried opening called the West Strait, through which a
throng of speculators in copper mines are this summer constantly passing
to the Sault de Ste. Marie. On the other side was the sandy isle of Bois
Blanc, the name of which is commonly corrupted into Bob Low Island,
thickly covered with pines, and showing a tall light-house on the point
nearest us. Beyond another point lay like a cloud the island of Mackinaw.
I had seen it once before, but now the hazy atmosphere magnified it into a
lofty mountain; its limestone cliffs impending over the water seemed
larger; the white fort - white as snow - built from the quarries of the
island, looked more commanding, and the rocky crest above it seemed almost
to rise to the clouds. There was a good deal of illusion in all this, as
we were convinced as we came nearer, but Mackinaw with its rocks rising
from the most transparent waters that the earth pours out from her
springs, is a stately object in any condition of the atmosphere. The
captain of our steamer allowed us but a moment at Mackinaw; a moment to
gaze into the clear waters, and count the fish as they played about
without fear twenty or thirty feet below our steamer, as plainly seen as
if they lay in the air; a moment to look at the fort on the heights,
dazzling the eyes with its new whiteness; a moment to observe the
habitations of this ancient village, some of which show you roofs and
walls of red-cedar bark confined by horizontal strips of wood, a kind of
architecture between the wigwam and the settler's cabin. A few baskets of
fish were lifted on board, in which I saw trout of enormous size, trout a
yard in length, and white-fish smaller, but held perhaps in higher esteem,
and we turned our course to the straits which lead into Lake Michigan.
I remember hearing a lady say that she was tired of improvements, and only
wanted to find a place that was finished, where she might live in peace. I
think I shall recommend Mackinaw to her. I saw no change in the place
since my visit to it five years ago. It is so lucky as to have no
_back-country_, it offers no advantages to speculation of any sort; it
produces, it is true, the finest potatoes in the world, but none for
exportation. It may, however, on account of its very cool summer climate,
become a fashionable watering-place, in which case it must yield to the
common fate of American villages and improve, as the phrase is.
Letter XXXII.
Journey from Detroit to Princeton.
Princeton, Illinois, _July_ 31, 1846.
Soon after leaving the island of Mackinaw we entered the straits and
passed into Lake Michigan. The odor of burnt leaves continued to accompany
us, and from the western shore of the lake, thickly covered with wood, we
saw large columns of smoke, several miles apart, rising into the hazy sky.
The steamer turned towards the eastern shore, and about an hour before
sunset stopped to take in wood at the upper Maneto island, where we landed
and strolled into the forest. Part of the island is high, but this, where
we went on shore, consists of hillocks and hollows of sand, like the waves
of the lake in one of its storms, and looking as if successive storms had
swept them up from the bottom. They were covered with an enormous growth
of trees which must have stood for centuries. We admired the astonishing
transparency of the water on this shore, the clean sands without any
intermixture of mud, the pebbles of almost chalky whiteness, and the
stones in the edge of the lake, to which adhered no slime, nor green moss,
nor aquatic weed. In the light-green depths, far down, but distinctly
seen, shoals of fish, some of them of large size, came quietly playing
about the huge hull of our steamer.
On the shore were two log-houses inhabited by woodmen, one of whom drew a
pail of water for the refreshment of some of the passengers, from a well
dug in the sand by his door. "It is not so good as the lake water," said
I, for I saw it was not so clear. "It is colder, though," answered the
man; "but I must say that there is no purer or sweeter water in the world
than that of our lake."
Next morning we were coasting the western shore of Lake Michigan, a high
bank presenting a long line of forest. This was broken by the little town
of Sheboygan, with its light-house among the shrubs of the bank, its
cluster of houses just built, among which were two hotels, and its single
schooner lying at the mouth of a river. You probably never heard of
Sheboygan before; it has just sprung up in the forests of Wisconsin; the
leaves have hardly withered on the trees that were felled to make room for
its houses; but it will make a noise in the world yet. "It is the
prettiest place on the lake," said a passenger, whom we left there, with
three chubby and healthy children, a lady who had already lived long
enough at Sheboygan to be proud of it.
Further on we came to Milwaukie, which is rapidly becoming one of the
great cities of the West. It lies within a semicircle of green pastoral
declivities sprinkled with scattered trees, where the future streets are
to be built. We landed at a kind of wharf, formed by a long platform of
planks laid on piles, under which the water flows, and extending to some
distance into the lake, and along which a car, running on a railway, took
the passengers and their baggage, and a part of the freight of the steamer
to the shore.
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