Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, September, 1880. Various
into a stumbling conversation with the only man of the whole lot who wore breeches or could compass a little English, and soon the dirty, laughing, wondering, chattering gang came down to inspect us and our, to them, marvellous craft, and to fully enjoy what was perhaps the most interesting event in many a long month of their uneventful lives. Then we paddled across the bay, or upper lake, out into the broader swells of Cass Lake itself, pulled four miles across to the northernmost point of Colcaspi, or Grand Island, and made our second Saturday night's camp upon its white sands at or very near the spot where Schoolcraft and his party had encamped in July, forty-seven years before. The landward side of the beautiful beach is skirted by an almost impenetrable jungle. We had frequently seen traces, old and new, of deer, moose, bears and smaller animals, but had seen none of the animals themselves save one fine deer, and our sleep had been wholly undisturbed by prowlers; so we sank to rest on Grand Island with no fears of invasion. At midnight the occupant of the Kleiner Fritz was aroused by a scratching upon the side of the canoe and low, whining howls. He partially arose, confused and half asleep, in doubt as to the character of his disturber, which went forward, climbed upon the deck and confronted him through the narrow gable of his rubber roof with a pair of fiery eyes, which to his startled imagination seemed like the blazing of a comet in duplicate. The owner of the eyes was at arm's length, with nothing but a mosquito-bar intervening. Then the eyes suddenly disappeared, and the scratching and howling were renewed in a determined and partially successful effort to get between the overlapping rubber blankets to the captain of the Fritz. This movement was defeated by a quick grasp of the edges of the blankets, and while the animal was snarling and pawing at the shielded fist of his intended victim lusty shouts went out for the camp to arouse and see what the enemy might be, as the Fritz was unwilling to uncover to his unknown assailant. The Hattie's skipper, hard by, saw that something unusual was on hand, peered out, and so increased the uproar as to draw the adversary's attack. Then the Betsy bore down upon us all just as the hungry and persistent beast was crouching for a leap at the Hattie's jugular, the loud bang of a Parker rifle rang out upon the stillness, and a fine, muscular lynx lay dead at the Cincinnati Nimrod's feet. The animal's trail showed that he had prowled around our bacon and hard tack in contempt, had inspected the Betsy's commander as he lay on the sand in his blanket and under a huge yellow mosquito-bar, but had evidently concluded that any man who could snore as that man usually did was not a good subject for attack, and so came on down the beach in search of blood less formidably defended. We renewed our fire, examined our dead disturber, and turned in again to sound sleep under the assuring suggestion of the Cincinnati man that, whatever else the jungle might hide, two cannon-balls rarely enter the same hole.
Our heavy and late slumber was broken by the laugh and chatter of two Indian women and a child, who in a bark canoe a little way from shore were regarding our camp in noisy curiosity. My blanket suddenly thrown aside and a good-morning in English took them by surprise, and they paddled away vigorously toward a group of lodges some four miles across the lake. In the glorious sunset of a restful Sunday we crossed the glassy lake to its outlet, taking two fine lake-trout of four pounds as we went, and glided out of as beautiful a lake as sun and moon shine upon into the swift, steady, deep current of what for the first time in its long way Gulfward bears the full dignity of a river. Its green banks are some two hundred feet apart. The water has a regular depth of from five to six feet, and all the way to Lake Winnibegoshish affords an unbroken channel for a medium-sized Western steamer. The shores, alternating between low, firm, grass-grown earth and benches of luxuriant green twenty feet high, grown over with open groves of fine yellow pines, were so beautiful and regular that we could hardly persuade ourselves that we should not see, as we rounded the graceful curves, some fine old mansion of which these turfed knolls and charming groves seemed the elegant lawns and parks. Our fleet unanimously voted the river between Cass and Winnibegoshish Lakes the most beautiful of all its upper course.
We began our second week upon the Mississippi with a breakfast of baked lake-trout, slapjacks, maple syrup and coffee, which embodied the culinary skill of the entire fleet: then started for Winnibegoshish in the height of good spirits and physical vigor. In one of our easy, five-miles-an-hour swings around the graceful curves we were met by a duck flying close over our heads with noisy quacks. A little farther we came upon the cause of the bird's lively flight in an Indian boy, not above nine years old, paddling a large birch canoe, over the gunwale of which peeped the muzzle of a sanguinary-looking old shot-gun. The diminutive sportsman was for a moment dashed by our sudden and novel appearance, but, from the way he urged his canoe and from the determined set of his dirty face, we had small room to doubt the ultimate fate of the flying mallard. Another curve brought us in sight of the home of the little savage, where a dozen Indians, in all stages of nudity, were encamped upon a high bluff. A concerted whoop from our fleet brought all of them from their smoky lodges, and we swept by under their wondering eyes and exclamations. Then the high land was left behind, and half an hour between low meadows brought us out upon the yellow sands and heaving swells of Lake Winnibegoshish, the largest in the Mississippi chain, the dimensions of which, including its lovely north-eastern bay, are about eleven by thirteen miles. The name signifies "miserable dirty water lake," but save a faint tinge of brown its waters are as pure and sparkling as those of any of the upper lakes. Our entrance upon Winnibegoshish was under a driving storm of wind and mist, against which we paddled three miles to Duck Point, a slender finger of wooded sand and boulder reaching half a mile out, at whose junction with the main land is a miserable village of most villainous-looking Indians. One man alone could speak a little English, and through him we negotiated for replenishing our provisions. Meantime, the storm freshened and embargoed an eight-mile journey across an open and boiling sea; so we paddled to the outermost joint upon the jutting finger for a bivouac under the trees, waiting the hoped-for lull of wind and wave at sunset. The smoke of our fire invited to our camp the hungry natives, who dogged us at every turn all the long afternoon, in squads of all numbers under twenty, and of all ages between two and seventy. One club-footed and club-handed fellow of forbidding visage protested with hand and head that he neither spoke nor understood our vernacular. Later, he sidled up to the Hattie's skipper and said in an earnest sotto voce, "Gib me dime." Denied the dime, he intimated to the Betsy that he doted on bacon, of which we were each broiling a slice. The Betsy's captain was bent upon securing an Indian fish-spear, and he pantomimed to the twinkling eyes of the copper-skin that he would invest a generous chunk of bacon in barbed iron. The Indian strode back to his village, and soon returned with the spear, which he transferred to the Betsy's stores.
The conventional Indian maiden besieged the bachelor two-thirds of our expedition with all the wiles that could be embodied in a comely and clean-calicoed charmer up in the twenties, who finally bore away from the Betsy's private stores a fan of stunning colors and other odds and ends of a St. Paul notion-store; while the guileless commander of the Hattie, whose cumulative years should have taught him better, and whose thinly-clad brain-shelter and disreputable attempt at sailor costume should have blunted all feminine javelins, surrendered to the ugliest old septuagenarian in the village, and sent her heart away rejoicing in the ownership of a policeman's whistle courted by her leering eyes and already smirched by her dirty lips, together with a stock of tea, crackers and bacon for which her expanded corporosity evinced no imminent need. At last rid of our importunate acquaintances, we turned in for a sleep, which we resolved should be broken at the first moment, dark or light, when we might cross the lake. Before daylight the Betsy's resonant call awoke us, and in the earliest gray we paddled out upon a heavy but not foaming sea, and after two and a half hours of monotonous splashing in the trough of the waves landed for breakfast on the eastern shore, whence we crossed a lovely bay and passed out once more upon the river.
A mile on our way we came to the prettiest of the many Indian burying-grounds which we saw now and then. Formerly, the Indians deposited their dead upon rude scaffolds well up in the air. Now they seek high ground and place the bodies of the departed in shallow graves, over which they build little wooden houses a foot or two high with gabled roofs, and mark each with a white flag raised upon a pole a few feet above the sleeper's head. In this neighborhood we inquired of a stalwart brave concerning our proximity to a portage by means of which a short walk over to a small lake near the head of Ball Club Lake and a pull of six miles down the latter would bring us out again into the river, and save a tedious voyage of twenty-five to thirty miles through a broad savanna. The Indian in his old birch canoe joined our fleet, and led us to the beginning of the portage near the foot