A body can’t make no calculations ’bout it.’
I had lost two hours and a half; but I had learned a fact worth four.
Chapter 57
An Archangel
FROM St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of
the presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical
nineteenth-century populations. The people don’t dream, they work.
The happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outside
aspect of things, and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort
that everywhere appear.
Quincy is a notable example–a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city;
and now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things.
But Marion City is an exception. Marion City has gone backwards
in a most unaccountable way. This metropolis promised
so well that the projectors tacked ‘city’ to its name in the
very beginning, with full confidence; but it was bad prophecy.
When I first saw Marion City, thirty-five years ago,
it contained one street, and nearly or quite six houses.
It contains but one house now, and this one, in a state of ruin,
is getting ready to follow the former five into the river.
Doubtless Marion City was too near to Quincy. It had
another disadvantage: it was situated in a flat mud bottom,
below high-water mark, whereas Quincy stands high up on the slope
of a hill.
In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England town:
and these she has yet: broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellings
and lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings.
And there are ample fair-grounds, a well kept park, and many
attractive drives; library, reading-rooms, a couple of colleges,
some handsome and costly churches, and a grand court-house, with grounds
which occupy a square. The population of the city is thirty thousand.
There are some large factories here, and manufacturing, of many sorts,
is done on a great scale.
La Grange and Canton are growing towns, but I missed Alexandria;
was told it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer.
Keokuk was easily recognizable. I lived there in 1857–an extraordinary
year there in real-estate matters. The ‘boom’ was something wonderful.
Everybody bought, everybody sold–except widows and preachers;
they always hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left.
Anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated,
was salable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground
had been sodded with greenbacks.
The town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing with
a healthy growth. It was night, and we could not see details, for which we
were sorry, for Keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city.
It was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has advanced,
not retrograded, in that respect.
A mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now.
This is the canal over the Rapids. It is eight miles long,
three hundred feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep.
Its masonry is of the majestic kind which the War Department
usually deals in, and will endure like a Roman aqueduct.
The work cost four or five millions.
After an hour or two spent with former friends, we started up
the river again. Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional
loafing-place of that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean.
I believe I never saw him but once; but he was much talked of
when I lived there. This is what was said of him–
He began life poor and without education. But he educated himself–
on the curbstones of Keokuk. He would sit down on a curbstone
with his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce
and the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his
studies by the hour, never changing his position except to draw
in his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed;
and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse,
had been burnt into his memory, and were his permanent possession.
In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning,
and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectual