Early Candlelight. Maud Hart Lovelace

      I

      THE Ojibways called it Oskibugi Sipi, the Young Leaf River, for on its banks the trees bud early. But the Ojibways came from the north country, from that somber land of pines and lakes; they were enemies to the valley; it was not their river. The Dakotas called it Minisota, the Sky-tinted Water, for it has a look like a sky made opaline by clouds; and that was the name to which, years later, it was to return. The Frenchmen called it the St. Pierre. They had come for furs and adventure. They were a wild, singing, lawless crew. Perhaps they thought it might remit them their sins to name a river for a saint. The Americans who arrived with tape and yardstick, with blankets and vermilion for the Indians and treaties to be signed, called it for a time the St. Peters.

      It was called the St. Peters when young Jasper Page built his stone house upon the island. He found it a lovely river from the moment when his long birch bark canoe, manned by six voyageurs with high red plumes and gaudy sashes, singing in lusty unison, slipped from the Mississippi into its waters. It flows into the Mississippi, a proud end for any stream.

      For days the seven had paddled beneath the shadow of majesty; the Mississippi in these upper reaches runs between grim cliffs. It was pleasant to see the St. Peters in its broad and sunny valley. It advanced in pretty twists and turns, faithfully followed by twin lines of cottonwood and willow, flanked by slopes which drifted gently back to the rolling prairies and the arching sky. This was an early June morning, and the slopes were pale green plush, tufted with tree clumps. Wild roses sprawled over the banks. The river sparkled in the sunshine as it fanned out about that great flat island at its mouth, where Lieutenant Zebulon Pike once made negotiations with the Indians.

      It was not that island which caught Jasper Page’s eye. It was another, a round, trim, shapely little land rising far out of reach of the spring freshets, looking like a cupcake.

      “Dat island, she lak nice leetle galette,” offered Gamelle the steersman, having the same thought.

      “That’s it, Gamelle, exactly. I think,” said Jasper Page, “that I shall build my house there.”

      He said it casually, but Gamelle had learned to know him in their month-long trip up the Fox and down the Wisconsin and up the Mississippi.

      “Oui, Bourgeois,” he said, and began to visualize upon the island a house like a house of dear memory in Quebec.

      The island could not detain them, for they had come but shortly before within sight of the settlement. It was the first sign of civilized habitation since Prairie du Chien, if one except a lone trader’s cabin at the lower end of Lake Pepin. Here, on one bank of the St. Peters, mud roofs appeared among the bark canopies of Sioux summer houses, and on the other, on the bluff which rises boldly where the two rivers meet, gleamed the white towers of Fort Snelling.

      The very young nation, pushing its way westward in bulging Conestoga wagons and on heavy-laden flatboats, fighting the Indians, felling trees, building homes and churches and pushing on again, had reached this point and halted. It had paused for a few years to look behind it at a lengthening chain of hamlets, villages and towns which grew ever less rude as they went eastward until they reached those cities on the seaboard, as fine to Yankee eyes as London herself. It had paused, out of breath and full of pride, to look behind and perhaps to look ahead, to dream of the prairies, the painted desert, the Stony Mountains, the Pacific. And where it had paused it had put up this fort, as one puts a slip of paper in a book to keep the place.

      With its stone walls enclosing a diamond, its stone turrets crowning each point, its spirited position overlooking the two rivers, the fort was impressive. Jasper ordered the canoe beached and camp made. Then he struck up the wagon road which climbed the chalky cliff, observing the swallows going in and out of their holes with the same preoccupation he had noted in swallows back in Boston.

      Jasper Page was received at the fort from that first moment with liking and enthusiasm. Newcomers were always welcome at this outpost of civilization, held by homesick soldiers and a bored command. He was quartered with the commandant and his lady; he was given tea; he was pressed for news of the outside world. It was a full day before he was able to report at the Indian Agency