Year: 1859

~"NNS ~A>~ANAA~, ~HSA~>~SS SAAS
sources of the Long Prairie and the Crow,
and which if I remember rightly was partly
the subject of former letter. But in a
distance of twenty or thirty miles further
westward, on the stage route to the Red
River, the traveller is carried across the al.
ternating breadths of wood and plain, on
the upward swell of the prairie ridges, into
district that with my enthusiasm for we'll
done lakes seemed the very realm of enchant.
ment.


1t is when the ridges rising gradually
westward reach their greatest elevation at a
certain point of view, present the aspect of
considerable hills-a continuation doubtless
of the Leaf Mountains, whose higher line of
blue banks the horizon far to the North.
Matchmaking the limits of the Mississippi
and Red River basins. The SUBMITS and
slopes of these hills are crowned with park
like masses Of timber, and a multitude of
lakelets glisten in the folds of the serpentine
wales, which open and shut as you pass like
the inches of winding galleries hung with
multitudinous mirrors. Among the won
ders of this district is Pelican Lake-as we
we called it before we knew that that was
its usual name-one of a group whose
shores we touch some twenty-five or thirty
miles from Alexandria. From the distant
ridges on the East where we first saw it, it
looked like low white marsh ofdry, autumn
al grass, stretched between the closing hills
of valley, that in the naked perspective
seemed to tower in the background till
their darkening colors were lost in the misty
outline of the Leaf Mountains. As we
approached, the sloping hills of the seeming
valley sunk to gently rolling plains, and
folding back like the covers Of a book,
opened, as if by chance, at lake, as at one
Of a store of pictures, which might be hid.
den in its pages. The peculiar whitish tint
of the lake was, we found, derived from
fine sand which its waters take up when
agitated, as now, by winds, and which sinks
in few hours of repose. Between two
islands whose masses of foliage gained a
fine effect of contrast from the light surface,
the eye rested on what might have been the
corpse of some dead island lying in shroud
of snow-if it had not happened to be some
thing else-for its low chalk-like outline
lay as motionless as rock above the water.
For full half hour, should think, that
M. and were wondering what it was and
then suddenly the mass was lifted up into air
as from some silent subterranean explosion,
and fell again in spray-like snow and set
tied into still bank of drift again upon the
bosom of the lake. 1t was an island of
pelicans sitting on shoal for some piscato-
rial purpose, l will undertake to suppose,
although l am not cOnversant with their
habits. There was something so spectral in
the apparition of this white mass rising
alive from the water, that it reminded me
of the way King ARTHUR got his fabled
sword EXcaliber, in the good old days when
lonely maidens used to live at the bottom
of lakes, making presents for Kings,


"For thou rememberest how,
In those old days, one summer morn, an arm
Rose up from out the bosom of the lake,


Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
Holding the sword"-


All these lakes are full of fine fish, among
which the bass, pickerel and sunfsh are
prominent. At Alexandria, which is the
last settlement on the road till you reach the
Otter-Tail River, we found some half dozen
families, who had taken claims about Peter
GREGoRYs pretty townsite-living almost
wholly on the fish caught before their doors,
eaten without bread and sometimes without
salt. 1t was a half hours work for a boy
to catch the mornings meal of his fathers
family.


AS their farms had only been opened the
previous fall, the settlers had not yet had
time, of course, to raise anything from the
soil. Their winters supply was exhausted /;
and the spring inundations having delayed
their communications with st. Paul, nothing
saved them from starvation but the abund-
ant supply of fish, aided by the neighborly
assistance of Messrs. GREGORY and KIN
CADE, who were more fortunate in procuring
supplies.


The value of the lakes of Minnesota, as
resource of subsistence, in their sure and
perennial crops of provisions of sort that
are q luxury in the Fifth Avenue, and a
delicacy anywhere, has never been properly
estimated.


The Indians of the Lake districts of Min.
nesota have lived from time imm emorial
upon the fish which their boys and squaws
gather, at will, in the lazy track of the canoe
with an expert dash of the spear. Here with
hook and line, for his sole capital, the aim
less dreamer, disdaining the vulgar wants of
social life, might rear his Castle of Indo.
lence, and live life without effort and
without passion; and where the fish leap out
the water into the boat, as they do here,
the Lotus Eaters of the sunny southern
isles would find it the very Paradise for
which they sighed-where they might lull
upon grassy couches in an endless "dolce
far niente," unless indeed the mosquitoes
should prove the Cherubim, "with flaming
swords that turned every way" replaced,
not only at the east, but all around the
garden, to keep out the intrusive sons of
Adam. JAW.