It's the American axe, the axe you and I know, with its curved handle and counterweighted head. His eye immediately lands on the axe that opened up our wilderness. Heinrich's odyssey then moves up the Mississippi . He works on a farm in Illinois. He tries woodcutting in Minnesota.
Wages run about five dollars a week.
A meal costs fifteen cents, and it's usually just this side of inedible. It's a world of bed bugs, fever, and hardship. He's like Candide, trying to wear his innocence in a world where deceit or violence might arise any moment. They're supposed to be about the 1840s, but Mark Twain describes technologies of a later and more settled world. Dickens, who visited the Mississippi in 1840, gives a better picture of the harsh life.