Sharp County record., 1885-04-09
A MAN AND A BROTHER,
A True Story Of the Gallant Act
of a Fettered Prisoner.

Lie Culcl UOlu IHe SIOIy' lIc SdIu II
was true; and whatever else might be
said of him, no one had ever accused
him of telling a falsehood willfully in
his life. A rigid disoiplinarian, and
something of martinez in the service
of the great trading company at whose
head he stood in America, in his own
house he was simply the perfect host,
the most courteous and the most sos,
pitable of men. When his subordinate
officers came from. the interior to the
capital, his residence was their natural
resort of an evening when the business
of the day was done. Twice | heard
him tell the story that am about to
narrate here, each time with the same
words and with the same gestures.
believe 1t to be true, and when he said
he witnessed the incident which is the
center of it, l have no doubt whatever
but that he did see it. 1t is a story
finely touched with that human interest
which appeals to all hearts. I have
never thought of it without feeling that
there is grandeur and dignity in life
that 90 far to counterbalance its too ap-
parent meannesses and its too evident
sins.
The story itself takes us back a dozen
years or more, to somewhere about
1870, when the Northwestern States and
provinces were in the first dawn of the
day of that amazing vigor which has
surprised and astonished the world.
Chicago, standing on the eastern edge
of this vast territory, had not yet tri-
umphantly emerged from its baptism of
fire, The smoke of Milwaukee hung
like a cloud over the western shores of
Lake Michigan. St. Paul and Mime
apolis, young twin giants of lusty
growth, were rapidly rising into i'm
portance in the higher waters of the
. Mississippi, while four hundred and
fifty miles north of them Fort Garry,
on the banks of the Red River, had
hardly as yet begun to show the prom
Use that its descendant, Winnipeg, more
than fulfills of being the capital of Cen
tral Canada.
That day of beginnings had features
of its own, some of which have disap-
peared already, and all of which are
fated eventually to pass away. For one
thing, the western man" is fast dying
out; the railways, rather than the sa-
looms, have killed him. To some extent
he still survives in the cowboy of Mon
tana and the Rocky Mountains; but no
writer has so far had either the temerity
or the strength of imagination to invest
him with the picturesque and some
times tender coloring of that romance
in which the Westerner has been painted
for us.
Among these features so rapidly pass
inc away none was more constantly a
part of the scene, and none more char
acteristic and noticeable, than the fiat
bottomed, heavy-looking, sternwheel
propeller-the true pioneer in the West
of civilization when as yet railways
were not Creeping up the shallow
waters of some stream hardly broader
than the steamer itself, crashing through
the overhanging branches, shooting
rapids and jumping sand banks, never
safe from "snags," with its driving
wheel gashed and mangled by the float
ing drift-timber, it held bravely on its
way, carrying supplies for the distant
settlements. Time was no great object,
so long as it got thar. The present
writer we'll remembers in 1874 spending
three days in getting over sixty miles Of
the snaky bends and tortuous twists of
the Red Lake River from Crookston to
Grand Forks, in Northern Dakota, in
lust such a steamer. Now the railways
have driven it away far northward and
westward, north as far as the Saskatche-
wan and the Peace River and west as
far as the smaller tributaries OF the
Yellowstone and the Missouri.
During the summer of 1870, we will
say, one of these steamers was making
its way down the Red River of the
North for Fargo. In design and ap-
pearance it was of the usual Western
type. And the Red River is of the
same general order as most streams of
the WesT-a shallow zigzag of Il
stream, apparently going nowhere in
particular, but, for all that, in its own
feisurely fashion, knowing its own
business very well as it heads north
ward for Lake Winnepeg. now wide,
now narrow, with here bluff of pop
lar or oak upon its banks, and thlre
belt of willow bending down into the
vellow-brown waters, with few soli-
tary log shanties at wide intervals tell
of the settlers presence.
There are but few passengers on the
cabin deck of the steamer-one or two
a, ,.- of tho Hudson Raw COMPANY