The Ottawa free trader. [volume] (Ottawa, Ill.) 1843-1916, 1849-09-14

The West.

We extract the following eloquent
passages from sermon recently de.
livered before the American Home
Missionary Society, by the Rev. AL
BERT BARNES.
BY the West Mr.. Barnes under
stands the vast territory now divid-
ed into eleven states, which, without
including an acre of Minnesota, Mis-
souri,, Nebraska and Indian terrific
tories OF Oregon, or California, COW
ers more ground, and is capable Of
sustaining a larger population than
England, Scotland, Ireland, Den
mark, Belgium, France, Holland,
and Portugal united. These limits
now embrace six or eight millions of
people, who are urging on the various
forms Of activity-plowing, reaping,
building, mining, forging-under the
most powerful stimulus, and with
UMPIRE cedented success.
81 visited" said Mr.. Barnes, "the
falls Of st. Anthony.
81 know not how other men may
feel when standing there, nor how
men will feel century hence when
standing there--then not in the west
but almost in the centre of our grcat
nation. But when stood there, and
reflected on the distance between
that and the place of my birth and
my home; on the prairies over which
| had passed, and the stream-the
Father of Rivers,-u which | had
sailed some five hundred miles, into
a new and unsettled land where the
children of the forest still live and
roam-I had views Of the greatness
of my country such as | have never
had in the crowded capitals, and the
smiling villages of the East,-Far in
the distance did they seem to be,
and there came over the soul the
idea of greatness and vastness, which
no figures, no description had ever
conveyed to my mind. TO an mex
perienced traveller, too, how strange
is the appearance of all that land
Those boundlcss praries seem as if
they had been cleared by the patient
labor of another race Of men, reno.
wing all the forests, and stumps, and
roots, and brambles, and smoothing
them down as if with mighty rollers,
and sowing them with grass and
howers-a race which then passed
away, having built no houses of their
own, and made no fences, and set
ont no trees, and established no land
marks, to lay the foundation to- any
future claim. The mounds which
you here and there see, look, indie ed,
as if portion OF them had died, and
had been buried there: but those
mounds and those bounhless fields
had been forsaken together.
"You ascend the Mis- sissippi amid
scenes unsurpassed in beauty,
probably, in the world. You see the
waters making their way along an
interval of from two to four miles in
width-betwecn bluffs from a hun
drcd to five hundred feet in height.
Now the river makes its way along
the eastern range of bluffs, and now
the western, and now it divides it.
self into numerous channels. forming
thousands of beautiful islands
vered with long grass, ready for the
svthe Of the mower. Those bluffs,
rounded with taste and skill, such as
could be initiated by no art of man,
and set out with trees here and
there gracefully arranged like or
chards, seem to have been sown with
grain to the summit and are clothed
with green. You look out instinct
lively for the house and barn; for
flocks and herds for men and wo.
men and childrcn-bnt they are not
there. A race that is gone seems to
have cultivated those fields, and then
to have silently disappcared-leav-
ing them for the first man that
should come from the older parts OF
our own country, Or from foreign
lands, to take possession of them.
1t is only by a process of reflection,
that you are convinced that it is not
so. But it is not the work of man.
1t is God who has done it, when
there was no man there, save the
wandering savage, alike ignorant
and unconcerned as to the design OF
the great processes in the land where
he roamed God, who did all this
that he might prepare it for the
abode of a civilized. and Christian
people,"
After giving a full and judicious
exposition of the moral dangers to be
apprehended from the influence OF
the west, Mr.. Barnes pays the fol-
lowing deserved tribute to the west
ern character.