Letter XXX.

Buffalo.—­Cleveland.—­Detroit.

Steamer Oregon, Lake Huron, Off Thunder Bay, July 24, 1846.

As I approached the city of Buffalo the other morning, from the east, I found myself obliged to confess that much of the beauty of a country is owing to the season.  For twenty or thirty miles before we reached Lake Erie, the fields of this fertile region looked more and more arid and sun-scorched, and I could not but contrast their appearance with that of the neighborhood of New York, where in a district comparatively sterile, an uncommonly showery season has kept the herbage fresh and deep, and made the trees heavy with leaves.  Here, on the contrary, I saw meadows tinged by the drought with a reddish hue, pastures grazed to the roots of the grass, and trees spreading what seemed to me a meagre shade.  Yet the harvests of wheat, and even of hay, in western New York, are said to be by no means scanty.

Buffalo continues to extend on every side, but the late additions to the city do not much improve its beauty.  Its nucleus of well-built streets does not seem to have grown much broader within the last five years, but the suburbs are rapidly spreading—­small wooden houses, scattered or in clusters, built hastily for emigrants along unpaved and powdery streets.  I saw, however, on a little excursion which I made into the surrounding country, that pleasant little neighborhoods are rising up at no great distance, with their neat houses, their young trees, and their new shrubbery.  They have a fine building material at Buffalo—­a sort of brown stone, easily wrought—­but I was sorry to see that most of the houses built of it, both in the town and country, seemed to have stood for several years.

We visited the new fort which the government is erecting on the lake, a little to the north of the town, commanding the entrance of Niagara river.  It is small, but of wonderful apparent strength, with walls of prodigious thickness, and so sturdy in its defences that it seemed to me one might as well think of cannonading the cliffs of Weehawken.  It is curious to see how, as we grow more ingenious in the means of attack, we devise more effectual means of defence.  A castle of the middle ages, in which a grim warrior of that time would hold his enemies at bay for years, would now be battered down before breakfast.  The finest old forts of the last century are now found to be unsafe against attack.  That which we have at St. Augustine was an uncommonly good sample of its kind, but when I was in Florida, three or four years since, an engineer of the United States was engaged in reconstructing it.  Do mankind gain any thing by these improvements, as they are called, in the art of war?  Do not these more dreadful engines of attack on the one side, and these more perfect means of protection on the other, leave the balance just where it was before?