The Sun.
London, England, 1855-11-05 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Minnesota and the Far West. By Laurence
Oliphant. Blackwood.
It lives pleasantly in our recollection how an
English gentleman in the person of Mr. Beste con-
ducted us very recently along the track pursued
by himself and his family down to the beautiful
Wabash bottom in the recesses of Indiana. An
unfrequented " location" not far from the New
Harmony, sacred to the memory of the socialistic
day-dreamiugs Robert 0 wen—immediatelysouth
of Lake Michigan, northward of Kentucky, and
exactly mid-way between the states of Ohio and
Illinois. Mr. Oliphant now in his turn carries us
away with him at a tangent across the boundary
line of Upper Canada, and away farther north and
farther west than the lively and observant celebrant
of the " Wabash," beyond lowa and Wisconsin,
even to the innermost districts of " Minnesota."
It appears a strange time to have chosen for a
journey so far removed from the scene of the great
struggle, raging at this most imminent juncture on
the confines of ancient Europe and hoary Asia,
between the armies on the one hand of barbarism
and on the other of civilisation. Nevertheless, it
may seem stranger still to find the author of this
curious volume advancing a plea for the attention
of all observant readers on the very score of its
theme being so widely remote from the mighty
interests concentrated within the frontiers of the
Crimea, and until very recently almost exclusively
confined to the immediate vicinity of that minute
point of the Crimea occupied by the blood-stained
ruins of Sebastopol. Howbeit, the writer is, after
all, not so far wrong in surmising that "at a time
when the greatest powers of Europe have combined
to resist barbarian aggression, and public interest
is concentrated upon the East, the rapid advance
of civilisation in the West possesses claims upon
our notice which are in danger of being over-
looked. To obviate which, so far as that may be
at all practicable, these twenty-five chapters of
Travel in America have been penned, and printed,
and published. They are acceptable. Coming to
us when or how they might, they could scarcely
fail to be so under any circumstances—for, in-
asmuch as they are the record of the notes
jotted down from day to day by an intelligent
wanderer like Laurence Oliphant, a vigilant
wayfarer to whom English stay-at-homes are
already so largely indebted for the insight
afforded by him here into the state of affairs on
" The Russian Shores of the Black Sea," there, into
the actual condition of "Nepaul and the Nepaul-
ese." Erratic as ever he has shown himself to be,
Mr. Oliphant threatens to take yet more eccentric
flights hither and thither about this " terraqueous •
globe" or " orb terrene"—so that in time the trail
left upon Mercator's Chart by his pencilled pere-
grinations may be more wildly zigzagged than the
famous scrawl by which another Laurence (the
Rev. Sterne to wit) indicated the episodical course
pursued by his excursive pen while inditing the
meandered and circuitous narrative of " Tristram
Shandy." Already Mr. Oliphant, as our readers
have been herein reminded, has strayed along the
mountainous province of Nepaul between—on the
one side Thibet and on the other Delhi, Oude and
Bahar : or, to indicate the geographical situation
otherwise, between the broad lines scored upon the
Asiatic continent by the currents of the Ganges
and the Burhampooter. Presto! a flourish of Mr.
Oliphant's pen ! a smack of his courier's whip !
and we are with him—no longer in Hindostan,
but traversing slowly and watchfully the
rocky coasts of Muscovite possessions border-
ing the Euxine—looking in at Anapa, at Odessa,
at Kherson, at Sebastopol. Another flourish
cf the goosequill, another crack of the magic thong,
and hey ! we have leapt the Atlantic at a bound,
and are careering far away into the interior of the
vast American continent. This time we are neither
in Nepaul, nor in the Crimea—we are in Minnesota.
The scene is neither Asiatic nor European—it is in
the new world—we are crossing the great inland
seas dividing Canada from the United States—we
are piercing the green depths of the giant forests of
America. Yet, lo ! and behold ! when we turn to
the close of our author's preface, we find it dated
neither from New York nor from Liverpool, neither
from Quebec nor London--but, wonderful to tell,
simply thus—" August, 1855, Constantinople !"
For the brief and imperfect manner in which he ac-
knowledges ho has here to his own thinking
described the condition and prospects of the " Far
West," Mr. Oliphant observes apologetically
—" I have only to plead the more pressing inte-
rests which have since attracted me to another
part of the world." So—while he is roving, maybe
at this moment, in the footsteps of the great
Anglo-French expedition against the legions of
the Northern Autocracy—sauntering possibly
among the smouldering embers of Sebastopol, or
peering, perchance, among the violated museums
of Kertch—we may here follow in imagination his
recent progress from Toronto across Lake Simcoe,
across Lake Huron, across Lake Superior, almost
to the fountain-heads of the Mississippi, and thence
float back along the flow of its ample current as
far as the point where the boundary lines of lowa,
Illinois, and Wisconsin may be said to concentrate,
under the southernmost bend of the coast of Lake
Michigan, over the channel connecting Lake St.
Clair arid Lake Erie, eastwards again to the vi-
cinity of Lake Ontario to a spot about equi-
distant from Niagara and Buffalo. Such is a
rapidly-sketched outline of the track taken by
Mr. Oliphant in his wanderings in the Far West,
and his pouderings about Minnesota. Rovings
recounted, as we have remarked, in five-and-twenty
chapters, those five-and-twenty chapters being
grouped into three parts—the first part relating
to Canada, the second to Lake Superior, the third.
(from which the work derives its title) to Minnesota.
As a commentator upon, or censor of, things Cana-
dian, our author may be regarded as having been
to a certain extent qualified by the official position
among them occupied by him until very recently
in his capacity as Civil Secretary and Superinten-
dent-General of Indian affairs in Canada. Whence
may be traced at once the value and interest dif-
fused over his strictures upon Canadian Politics,
Canadian Society, Canadian Statistics, Canadian
Backwoods, and for that matter, too, upon the
broad principle of Reciprocity, as well as through
the course of his animated descriptions of a bark-
canoe voyage down the Severn, of a ride to the
Indian village of Saugeen, and of the Annual Dis-
tribution of Indian Presents at Monitonlin. About
the liveliest portion of Part Two—that relating to
Lake Superior—is the account given of " Bed and
Board in the Far West," as experienced, by our
writer in the remote state of Wisconsin. The
concluding division of the work, being the one de-
dicated to a detailed description of Minnesota,
will charm alike the humorist and the lover of na-
ture, with its graphic pictures of scenes and inci-
dents, comprising among their number the
Savannahs (wondered at of yore with such a
fish-eyed wonder by old John Willett as
the " Salwanners —in America where the
war is"), and the Sandy Lake, and the .Sauk
the
Rapids, and the Falls of St. Anthony, and
Bluffs, and the Prairies and the Head.
or the Mississippi. Many a passage,
comic of pictu-
resque,Black-
will be recognised by the Waters of
reprint in a collec-
tive volume before us being,
more nor less, after all, thanedfact, nothing
t iv e
littlefor m (prettily
w o dtof that series of
with sixteen grace-
fulunder the modest title
half-a-dozen contributions under
the North-West Staten
of " Notes on Canada, an
d in the six ea
eimllubsetlrlaisthionsaa
numbers of
Aprillast from last to September.
Maga, ranging
of America"
substantial
volume of upwards
Thus re-issued in a
which appeared
of
accompanied by a map,
as well
mentioned sixteen engravings,
as 3byoOtphea
and re-christened more epigrammatically and
euphoniously by the name of " Minnesota," this
gaeslr eeatadyve'
new book of travels by Laurence Oliphant, while
it may win for him many
new admirers, will fail,
among the old,
in any way to deteriorate the ex-
trinsic interest or intrinsic worth of his reputation.