with a population of twenty-five thousand, and belted with busy factories
of nearly every imaginable description. It was a very sober city, too–
for the moment–for a most sobering bill was pending; a bill to forbid
the manufacture, exportation, importation, purchase, sale, borrowing,
lending, stealing, drinking, smelling, or possession, by conquest,
inheritance, intent, accident, or otherwise, in the State of Iowa, of each
and every deleterious beverage known to the human race, except water.
This measure was approved by all the rational people in the State;
but not by the bench of Judges.
Burlington has the progressive modern city’s full equipment of devices
for right and intelligent government; including a paid fire department,
a thing which the great city of New Orleans is without, but still employs
that relic of antiquity, the independent system.
In Burlington, as in all these Upper-River towns, one breathes
a go-ahead atmosphere which tastes good in the nostrils.
An opera-house has lately been built there which is in strong
contrast with the shabby dens which usually do duty as theaters
in cities of Burlington’s size.
We had not time to go ashore in Muscatine, but had a daylight
view of it from the boat. I lived there awhile, many years ago,
but the place, now, had a rather unfamiliar look; so I
suppose it has clear outgrown the town which I used to know.
In fact, I know it has; for I remember it as a small place–
which it isn’t now. But I remember it best for a lunatic
who caught me out in the fields, one Sunday, and extracted
a butcher-knife from his boot and proposed to carve me up with it,
unless I acknowledged him to be the only son of the Devil.
I tried to compromise on an acknowledgment that he was the only
member of the family I had met; but that did not satisfy him;
he wouldn’t have any half-measures; I must say he was the sole
and only son of the Devil–he whetted his knife on his boot.
It did not seem worth while to make trouble about a little thing
like that; so I swung round to his view of the matter and saved
my skin whole. Shortly afterward, he went to visit his father;
and as he has not turned up since, I trust he is there yet.
And I remember Muscatine–still more pleasantly–for its summer sunsets.
I have never seen any, on either side of the ocean, that equaled them.
They used the broad smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it every
imaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintinesses and delicacies
of the opal, all the way up, through cumulative intensities, to blinding
purple and crimson conflagrations which were enchanting to the eye,
but sharply tried it at the same time. All the Upper Mississippi
region has these extraordinary sunsets as a familiar spectacle.
It is the true Sunset Land: I am sure no other country can show so good
a right to the name. The sunrises are also said to be exceedingly fine.
I do not know.
Chapter 58
On the Upper River
THE big towns drop in, thick and fast, now: and between stretch
processions of thrifty farms, not desolate solitude. Hour by hour,
the boat plows deeper and deeper into the great and populous North-west;
and with each successive section of it which is revealed,
one’s surprise and respect gather emphasis and increase.
Such a people, and such achievements as theirs, compel homage.
This is an independent race who think for themselves, and who are
competent to do it, because they are educated and enlightened;
they read, they keep abreast of the best and newest thought,
they fortify every weak place in their land with a school,
a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live under law.
Solicitude for the future of a race like this is not in order.
This region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its babyhood.
By what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecast
what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity. It is so new
that the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not visited it.