Two or three years ago this settlement of the Sault de Ste. Marie, was but a military post of the United States, in the midst of a village of Indians and half-breeds.  There were, perhaps, a dozen white residents in the place, including the family of the Baptist Missionary and the agent of the American Fur Company, which had removed its station hither from Mackinaw, and built its warehouse on this river.  But since the world has begun to talk of the copper mines of Lake Superior, settlers flock into the place; carpenters are busy in knocking up houses with all haste on the government lands, and large warehouses have been built upon piles driven into the shallows of the St. Mary.  Five years hence, the primitive character of the place will be altogether lost, and it will have become a bustling Yankee town, resembling the other new settlements of the West.

Here the navigation from lake to lake is interrupted by the falls or rapids of the river St. Mary, from which the place receives its name.  The crystalline waters of Lake Superior on their way through the channel of this river to Lake Huron, here rush, and foam, and roar, for about three quarters of a mile, over rocks and large stones.

Close to the rapids, with birchen-canoes moored in little inlets, is a village of the Indians, consisting of log-cabins and round wigwams, on a shrubby level, reserved to them by the government.  The morning after our arrival, we went through this village in search of a canoe and a couple of Indians, to make the descent of the rapids, which is one of the first things that a visitor to the Sault must think of.  In the first wigwam that we entered were three men and two women as drunk as men and women could well be.  The squaws were speechless and motionless, too far gone, as it seemed, to raise either hand or foot; the men though apparently unable to rise were noisy, and one of them, who called himself a half-breed and spoke a few words of English, seemed disposed to quarrel.  Before the next door was a woman busy in washing, who spoke a little English.  “The old man out there,” she said, in answer to our questions, “can paddle canoe, but he is very drunk, he can not do it to-day.”

“Is there nobody else,” we asked, “who will take us down the falls?”

“I don’t know; the Indians all drunk to-day.”

“Why is that? why are they all drunk to-day?”

“Oh, the whisky,” answered the woman, giving us to understand, that when an Indian could get whisky, he got drunk as a matter of course.

By this time the man had come up, and after addressing us with the customary “bon jour” manifested a curiosity to know the nature of our errand.  The woman explained it to him in English.

“Oh, messieurs, je vous servirai,” said he, for he spoke Canadian French; “I go, I go.”

We told him that we doubted whether he was quite sober enough.

“Oh, messieurs, je suis parfaitement capable—­first rate, first rate.”