We see no longer any traces of European cultivation on shore, nothing but Indian huts and encampments. The shores have become flatter since we left Lake Pepin, and the scenery tamer.

LETTER XXVII.

St. Paul's, Minnesota, October 25th. Ar about three miles from St. Paul's we saw a large Indian village, consisting of about twenty hide-covered wigwams, with their ascending columns of smoke. In the midst of these stood a neat log-house. This was the home which a Christian missionary had built for himself among the savages, and here he had established a schoo. for the children. Upon a hill beyond the village, a number of stages were placed in a half circle, upon which rested coffins of bark. Small white flags distinguished those among the departed who had been most recently brought there. The village, which is called Kaposia, and is one of the established Indian villages, looked animated from its women, children, and dogs. We sped rapidly past it, for the Mississippi was here as clear and deep as our own Rivor Götha, and the next moment, taking an abrupt turn to the left, St. Paul's was before us, standing upon a high bluff on the eastern bank of the Mississippi; behind it the blue arch of heaven, and far below it the Great River, and before it, extending right and left, beautiful valleys, with their verdant hill-sides scattered with wood-a really grand and commanding situation-affording the most beautiful views.

We lay to at the lower part of the town, whence the upper is reached by successive flights of steps, exactly as with us on the South Hill by Mose-back in Stockholm. Indians were sitting or walking along the street which runs by the shore. Wrapped in their long blankets, they

marched on with a proud step, and were some of them stately figures. Just opposite the steamer, and at the foot of the steps, sat some young Indians, splendidly adorned with feathers and ribbons, and smoking from a long pipe which they handed from one to the other, so that they merely smoked a few whiffs each.

Scarcely had we touched the shore when the governor of Minnesota, Mr. Alexander Ramsay, and his pretty young wife, came on board, and invited me to take up my quarters at their house. And there I am now; happy with these kind people, and with them I make excursions into the neighborhood. The town is one of the youngest infants of the Great West, scarcely eighteen months old, and yet it has in this short time increased to a population of two thousand persons, and in a very few years it will certainly be possessed of twenty-two thousand, for its situation is as remarkable for beauty and healthiness as it is advantageous for trade. Here the Indians come with their furs from that immense country lying between the Mississippi and the Missouri, the western boundary of Minnesota, and the forests still undespoiled of their primeval wealth, and the rivers and lakes abounding in fish, offer their inexhaustible resources, while the great- Mississippi offords the means of their conveyance to the commercial markets of the world, flowing, as it does, through the whole of Central America down to New Orleans. Hence it is that several traders here have already acquired considerable wealth, while others are coming hither more and more, and they are building houses as fast as they can.

As yet, however, the town is but in its infancy, and people manage with such dwellings as they can get. The drawing-room at Governor Ramsay's house is also his office, and Indians and work-people, and ladies and gentlemen, are all alike admitted. In the mean time, Mr. Ramsay is building himself a handsome, spacious house, upon a hill, a little out of the city, with beautiful trees VOL. II.-B

around it, and commanding a grand view over the river. If I were to live on the Mississippi, I would live here. It is a hilly region, and on all hands extend beautiful and varying landscapes; and all abounds with such youthful and fresh life.

The city is thronged with Indians. The men, for the most part, go about grandly ornamented, and with naked hatchets, the shafts of which serve them as pipes. They paint themselves so utterly without any taste that it is incredible. Sometimes one half of the countenance will be painted of a cinnamon-red, striped and in blotches, and the other half with yellow ditto, as well as all other sorts of fancies, in green, and blue, and black, without the slightest regard to beauty that I can discover. Here comes an Indian who has painted a great red spot in the middle of his nose; here another who has painted the whole of his forehead in small lines of yellow and black; there a third with coal-black rings round his eyes. All have eagles' or cocks' feathers in their hair, for the most part colored, or with scarlet tassels of worsted at the ends. The hair is cut short on the forehead, and for the rest hangs in elf-locks or in plaits on the shoulders, both of men and women. The women are less painted, and with better taste than the men, generally with merely one deep red little spot in the middle of the cheeks, and the parting of the hair on the forehead is died purple. I like their appearance better than that of the men. They have a kind smile, and often a very kind expression; as well as a something in the glance which is much more human; but they are evidently merely their husbands' beasts of burden. There goes an Indian with his proud step, bearing aloft his plumed head. He carries only his pipe, and when he is on a journey, perhaps a long staff in his hand. After him, with bowed head and stooping shoulders, follows his wife, bending under the burden which she bears. on her back, and which a band, passing over the forehead,

enables her to support. Above the burden peeps forth a little round-faced child, with beautiful dark eyes: it is her " papoose," as these children are called. Its little body is fastened by swaddling-clothes upon its back on a board, which is to keep its body straight; and it lives, and is fed, and sleeps, and grows, always fastened to the board. When the child can walk it is still carried for a long time on the mother's back in the folds of her blanket. Nearly all the Indians which I have seen are of the Sioux tribe.

Governor Ramsay drove me yesterday to the Falls of St. Anthony. They are some miles from St. Paul's. These falls close the Mississippi to steam-boats and other vessels. From these falls to New Orleans the distance is two thousand two hundred miles. A little above the falls the river is again navigable for two hundred miles, but merely for small vessels, and that not without danger.

The Falls of St. Anthony have no considerable height, and strike me merely as the cascade of a great mill-dam. They fall abruptly over a stratum of a tufa rock, which they sometimes break and wash down in great masses. The country around is neither grand, nor particularly picturesque; yet the river here is very broad, and probably from that cause the fall and the hills appear more inconsiderable. The shore is bordered by a rich luxuriance of trees and shrubs, springing up wildly from among pieces of rock, and the craggy tufa walls with their ruinlike forms, which, however, have nothing grand about them. River, falls, country, views, every thing here has more breadth than grandeur.

It was Father Hennepin, the French Jesuit, who first came to these falls, brought hither captive by the Indians. The Indians called the falls "Irrara," or the LaughingWater; he christened them St. Anthony's. I prefer the first name, as being characteristic of the fall, which has rather a cheerful than a dangerous appearance, and the

roar of which has nothing terrific in it. The Mississippi is a river of a joyful temperament. I have a painting of its springs a present from Mr. Schoolcraft-the little lake, Itaska, in the northern part of Minnesota. The little lake looks like a serene heavenly mirror set in a frame of primeval forest. Northern firs and pines, maples and elms, and other beautiful American trees, surround the waters of this lake like a leafy tabernacle above the cradle of the infant river. Afar up in the distant background lies that elevated range of country, called by the French "Hauteur des terres," resembling a lofty plateau, covered with dense forest, scattered over with blocks of granite, and interspersed with a hundred springs: five of these throw themselves from different heights into the little lake.

When the infant Mississippi springs forth from the bosom of Itaska, it is a rapid and clear little stream, sixteen feet broad, and four inches deep. Leaping forward over stocks and stones, it expands itself ninety miles below its spring into Lake Pemideji—a lake the waters of which are clear as crystal, and which is free from islands. Here it is met by the River La Place, from Assawa Lake. Forty-five miles lower down it pours itself down into Lake Cass, the terminal point of Governor Cass's expedition in 1820. When the Mississippi emerges from this lake, it is one hundred and seventy-two feet broad, and eight feet deep. Thus continues it increasing in width and depth, receiving richer and richer tribute from springs and rivers, now reposing in clear lakes, abounding in innumerable species of fish, then speeding onward, between banks covered with wild roses, elders, hawthorns, wild rice, wild plums, and all kind of wood fruit, strawberries, raspberries, cranberries, through forests of white cedar, pine, birch, and sugar-maple, abounding in game of many kinds, such as bears, elks, foxes, raccoons, martens, beavers, and such like; through the prairie country, the higher and lower full of bubbling fountains-the so-called Un