Another Quarter Of A Mile Led Us To A Little Bay
On The Solitary Shore Of The Lake Looking To The Northwest.
It is called
the British Landing, because the British troops landed here in the late
war to take possession of the island.
We wandered about awhile, and then sat down upon the embankment of pebbles
which the waves of the lake, heaving for centuries, have heaped around the
shore of the island - pebbles so clean that they would no more soil a
lady's white muslin gown than if they had been of newly polished
alabaster. The water at our feet was as transparent as the air around us.
On the main-land opposite stood a church with its spire, and several roofs
were visible, with a background of woods behind them.
"There," said one of our party, "is the old Mission Church. It was built
by the Catholics in 1680, and has been a place of worship ever since. The
name of the spot is Point St. Ignace, and there lives an Indian of the
full caste, who was sent to Rome and educated to be a priest, but he
preferred the life of a layman, and there he lives on that wild shore,
with a library in his lodge, a learned savage, occupied with reading and
study."
You may well suppose that I felt a strong desire to see Point St. Ignace,
its venerable Mission Church, its Indian village, so long under the care
of Catholic pastors, and its learned savage who talks Italian, but the
time of my departure was already fixed. My companions were pointing out on
that shore, the mouth of Carp River, which comes down through the forest
roaring over rocks, and in any of the pools of which you have only to
throw a line, with any sort of bait, to be sure of a trout, when the
driver of our vehicle called out, "Your boat is coming." We looked and saw
the St. Louis steamer, not one of the largest, but one of the finest boats
in the line between Buffalo and Chicago, making rapidly for the island,
with a train of black smoke hanging in the air behind her. We hastened to
return through the woods, and in an hour and a half we were in our clean
and comfortable quarters in this well-ordered little steamer.
But I should mention that before leaving Mackinaw, we did not fail to
visit the principal curiosities of the place, the Sugar Loaf Rock, a
remarkable rock in the middle of the island, of a sharp conical form,
rising above the trees by which it is surrounded, and lifting the stunted
birches on its shoulders higher than they, like a tall fellow holding up a
little boy to overlook a crowd of men - and the Arched Rock on the shore.
The atmosphere was thick with smoke, and through the opening spanned by
the arch of the rock I saw the long waves, rolled up by a fresh wind, come
one after another out of the obscurity, and break with roaring on the
beach.
The path along the brow of the precipice and among the evergreens, by
which this rock is reached, is singularly wild, but another which leads to
it along the shore is no less picturesque - passing under impending cliffs
and overshadowing cedars, and between huge blocks and pinnacles of rock.
I spoke in one of my former letters of the manifest fate of Mackinaw,
which is to be a watering-place. I can not see how it is to escape this
destiny. People already begin to repair to it for health and refreshment
from the southern borders of Lake Michigan. Its climate during the summer
months is delightful; there is no air more pure and elastic, and the winds
of the south and southwest, which are so hot on the prairies, arrive here
tempered to a grateful coolness by the waters over which they have swept.
The nights are always, in the hottest season, agreeably cool, and the
health of the place is proverbial. The world has not many islands so
beautiful as Mackinaw, as you may judge from the description I have
already given of parts of it. The surface is singularly irregular, with
summits of rock and pleasant hollows, open glades of pasturage and shady
nooks. To some, the savage visitors, who occasionally set up their lodges
on its beach, as well as on that of the surrounding islands, and paddle
their canoes in its waters, will be an additional attraction. I can not
but think with a kind of regret on the time which, I suppose is near at
hand, when its wild and lonely woods will be intersected with highways,
and filled with cottages and boarding-houses.
Letter XXXVIII.
An Excursion to the Water Gap.
Stroudsberg, Monroe Co., Penn. _October_ 23, 1846.
I reached this place last evening, having taken Easton in my way. Did it
ever occur to you, in passing through New Jersey, how much the northern
part of the state is, in some respects, like New York, and how much the
southern part resembles Pennsylvania? For twenty miles before reaching
Easton, you see spacious dwelling-houses, often of stone, substantially
built, and barns of the size of churches, and large farms with extensive
woods of tall trees, as in Pennsylvania, where the right of soil has not
undergone so many subdivisions as with us. I was shown in Warren county,
in a region apparently of great fertility, a farm which was said to be two
miles square. It belonged to a farmer of German origin, whose comfortable
mansion stood by the way, and who came into the state many years ago, a
young man.
"I have heard him say," said a passenger, "that when his father brought
him out with his young wife into Warren county, and set him down upon what
then appeared a barren little farm, now a part of his large and productive
estate, his heart failed him.
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