Section 42:  "I Was Done with the West"

Two years after that, in the spring of 1857, Col. Coulter and I took a trip to Minnesota, stopped over night in Chicago, and next day went on through Illinois to Dubuque in Iowa; stayed there over Sunday and the following Monday evening took passage on the Gray Eagle for Winona. Saw little of the Mississippi that night, but the next day out viewed the banks and margin of the great River. Had a very intelligent load of passengers. Stopped a short time at Prairie du Chien and La Crosse and the second day landed at Winona where we stayed several days and admired the site of the city. Though at that time it was small, any amount of town lots were offered us at what I thought were high prices. Though strongly urged, I declined to buy. Col. Coulter bought two lots with nothing on them for thirteen hundred dollars and he never made more than interest out of them.

We again took a boat for St. Paul and I cannot now recollect how long we were getting up, but I recollect of passing up by St. Croix and Hastings. We landed at St. Paul in time for dinner at the Winston House. In the afternoon took a hack and went through most of the streets in the city. I understood that my Uncle Andrew W. Oliver was living there and I got a directory and examined it, but his name was not in it.

The next day we took a stage and went up to St. Anthony's Falls and wandered round there all day, crossed over to a saw mill or two on the breast of the falls. Some places from the pitch, back for a considerable distance, the rock rose up and no water passed over. The mills were built on these islands and a head race cut through the rock. The fall was 15 to 30 feet and the water power was immense, and the greatest flouring mills in the world have since been built there. At that time no such mills were there, but the saw mills seemed to be doing a large business and there was said to be four million logs in the dam held by a boom. The saw mills were so constructed that as the board was cut off it dropped into a plank box set up on scantling and extended out to the east shore and away down the river two miles to a board yard and rafting station. About six inches of water was turned into the box or tail race and the boards and sawdust went off and the mill was as clean as a kitchen.

I intended going over to Minneapolis, but we spent so much time about the mills and walking around St. Anthony that we had to take the stage again and get back to St. Paul. I afterwards found out that my Uncle Andrew was living within forty rods of where I had been on the Minneapolis side.

We thought of taking a steamer to St. Cloud, but finding it did not go up till the next Tuesday, we gave it up. We came down and stayed all night at the Winslow House and next morning took a steamer and went down to Hastings and there got a stage for Faribault.

Soon after we left the river we crossed a little stream called Vermillion River and ascended on to a rolling prairie, found very good land with scattered settlements; soon came down to the Cannon River which we followed. Took dinner at a place called Cannon City, but there were only two or three houses in it.

Continuing up the river we came to Northfield on the edge of what was called the big woods, extending through to the Minnesota River. Northfield is beautifully located with groves of trees and prairie presenting a nice appearance. From there it rained on us and the road being through woodland and the mud deep, we made poor progress and did not get to Faribault till dark in the evening. There we found D. Morell and Alfred Lumberton and some others we had met in Winona. The town, though very new and very muddy, was a lively place and a number of houses and stores going up.

Faribault was apparently an educated man, half French and half Indian -- had a fortune of some three hundred thousand dollars, largely obtained from the government in buying out the reservation called the "Half Breed Reservation." I suppose the purchase was made through Mr. Faribault. The Indians, both of the half and whole blood, seemed to rely on him and every evening while I was there a dozen or two came to his house and were fed and turned in to a large wood house he had to sleep.

The girls and women that I saw appeared less intelligent than the men. Faribault had plowed a field on the river bottom for corn. It was not harrowed or marked out into rows, but about a dozen of young squaws were planting the corn. On about every third furrow, with a little bag of corn round their neck and a small hoe in their hand, they dug a little hole and dropped in and covered the corn; worked very slow and frequently squatted on their haunches and rested. Two active men would have done as much as the whole of them. They looked pretty coarse, high cheek bones, pig eyed with long black hair hanging down their back and did not look very clean. Their faces had no expression; their motions slow and stealthy, and I suppose they were the slaves and beasts of burden of the male sex for ages -- at least that was the impression they made on me. Faribault's wife was said to be a three-quarter blood and was darker than her husband or daughters.

When coming out in the stage, a young half-blood traveled with us. He said he was going out to get the money coming to his mother and himself. His share was three and his mother's eleven hundred dollars. We asked him what he was going to do with his. He said he intended the first thing he did was to take a spree. A young man named Snow talked to him a good deal and told him if he got on a drunk he would lose the money and that he ought not to get drunk, and advised him to get Faribault to put it on interest at 10 or 12 % and that his mother could live on it and he could work and make his living. He said there was a company going to start from St. Paul to Pembine and that a man had offered him two dollars a day to drive an ox team across the portage to the Red River, that it would not start for two weeks and maybe he might go along. Snow advised to go by all means and to save his money and not to get drunk, and he promised he would not. A week after that I had come back to Hastings and was walking around waiting for a boat. Someone touched me on the shoulder. Turning round, here was Natribe, our half-breed, smiling and extending his hand. He sat down with me on the hotel porch and we had quite a talk. He was a good-hearted fellow and had taken Snow's advice -- had put his money on interest, made a contract to drive the ox team, and was going to Pembine to stay a year and go with the man who hired him to explore a river there in search of copper, and seemed a good deal more of a man than when I first saw him in the stage. I told him he was on a fair way to make a man of himself and never to touch liquor and to work steadily for money and to be honest and faithful and he would do well. The steamer came in about that time and I shook his hand and left him and never saw or heard of him since.

Col. Coulter started from Faribault a day or two before I did. He had to go home through Michigan and I had to go down to LaSalle in Illinois to pay the taxes on the land bought two years before.

While in Faribault I had a good deal of talk with the old gentleman for whom the city was named, and bought from him one hundred and sixty acres of land up the Straight River for about five hundred dollars. There was about 40 acres of prairie on it and the rest was woodland, principally sugar trees. This lot, a good many years afterwards, I sold to my nephew, James D. Campbell, and young Cumings for sixteen hundred dollars.

On my way down the river I stopped a day at Winona. About the time I started from there, I fell in company with an old Virginian named "Lamsden." He lived in Chicago, was a wide awake, intelligent old gentleman and a great talker; had been a planter on the Roanoke River in his native State, got to trading in New York and came to Chicago and became a speculator in western land and made money, and knew more about the west than any man I had met -- seemed to have acquaintances everywhere. We traveled together two days and I enjoyed his company. At Freeport, Illinois, we parted and I never saw him again, he going on to Chicago and I down through Mendota to LaSalle to look after my land. I stayed at the latter place till the next day, paid my taxes and made arrangements for having them paid as they fell due.

By this time I was getting anxious to be home and took a train for Chicago. Left there about eleven o'clock at night and next night got to Pittsburgh in a heavy thunder shower, and next day came home and found all well. I had seen enough of the west. I admired the vast extent and fertility of the land but I saw no spot I would prefer as a home to the poor soil of Clarion County. I have never been as far west at the Ohio State line since.

It always seemed to me that a little house out on a flat prairie away out a mile or two from anything, without a shrub or tree or stream of water in sight was a melancholy, lonely, desolate object, and in passing such a place I have thought if I were living there, if I did not commit suicide I would certainly get out of that as fast as I could, and the thought of such a place in a long winter night, with the wind raving around and the thermometer at or below zero gives me the shivers. And then in the summer nothing but grass and corn in sight and the monotony only relieved by blizzards and cyclones. The best township of land in the west would not have tempted me to set my stakes there for life, and I know many a poor fellow got out there in such a home too poor to get away, lived a life of desolation till he had it shaken out of him with the ague. And yet as the country became settled up, trees planted and good buildings erected and wealth acquired, his children and grandchildren may be living in luxury and comfort.

In my former trip I met an old man in Wisconsin who had brought out his family two years before and had a pretty good house and a good large farm, diversified by rolling land and woodland, and a grown family of nice young boys and girls, but he mourned for his Vermont home and the grove of sugar trees where he had spent his better days, and it was all his boys could do to keep the old man from going back to leave his bones in his native hills. The young members of the family were satisfied with the west and were making money. The old man told me if he could get back to his old home with his family as he had been in Vermont, he would live on two meals a day and thank God the balance of his life.

Well, I was done with the west.

Some years before that I had received a commission to attend the World's Exposition at Paris as a Commissioner from this State and I intended to go, but I had loaned three thousand dollars to a man who about that time became a little shaky and I got at it to secure that before starting and it took so long a time to get it in shape that the time I had appropriated to the expedition became exhausted and professional business became pressing and I had to give it up, and perhaps it was as well for I could not have stayed over two months and would have been hurried to see as much of the old world as I could in so short a time.

I have never been in Boston or Washington, and with the exception of the above two tramps west, but little outside of the State. Once I was in Baltimore, and in 1863 with Judge Myers and others I made a trip to New York. That, I think, was in 1863 during the war, and there was a great Fair in New York to raise money for the sick and wounded soldiers. Judge Myers and I went over there one afternoon and next day visited the Fair and walked and rode around on street cars all day and in the evening were pretty well tired out, and got on the night train and came back to Philadelphia.

I often went to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh when I had business, but I rarely took pleasure trips only to the valley, and I rarely missed a year going there before my Mother died. I enjoyed traveling around where I was born and raised and being among my relations -- more than going to watering places or the sea shore. Once or twice took my wife and children along and frequently took one or two of the children with me.