CHAPTER VIII.

NORTH AND WEST.

From Niagara we determined to proceed Northwest—­as far to the Northwest as we could go with any reasonable hope of finding American citizens in a state of political civilization, and perhaps guided also in some measure by our hopes as to hotel accommodation.  Looking to these two matters, we resolved to get across to the Mississippi, and to go up that river as far as the town of St. Paul and the Falls of St. Anthony, which are some twelve miles above the town; then to descend the river as far as the States of Iowa on the west and Illinois on the east; and to return eastward through Chicago and the large cities on the southern shores of Lake Erie, from whence we would go across to Albany, the capital of New York state, and down the Hudson to New York, the capital of the Western World.  For such a journey, in which scenery was one great object, we were rather late, as we did not leave Niagara till the 10th of October; but though the winters are extremely cold through all this portion of the American continent—­fifteen, twenty, and even twenty-five degrees below zero being an ordinary state of the atmosphere in latitudes equal to those of Florence, Nice, and Turin—­nevertheless the autumns are mild, the noonday being always warm, and the colors of the foliage are then in all their glory.  I was also very anxious to ascertain, if it might be in my power to do so, with what spirit or true feeling as to the matter the work of recruiting for the now enormous army of the States was going on in those remote regions.  That men should be on fire in Boston and New York, in Philadelphia and along the borders of secession, I could understand.  I could understand also that they should be on fire throughout the cotton, sugar, and rice plantations of the South.  But I could hardly understand that this political fervor should have communicated itself to the far-off farmers who had thinly spread themselves over the enormous wheat-growing districts of the Northwest.  St. Paul, the capital of Minnesota, is nine hundred miles directly north of St. Louis, the most northern point to which slavery extends in the Western States of the Union; and the farming lands of Minnesota stretch away again for some hundreds of miles north and west of St. Paul.  Could it be that those scanty and far-off pioneers of agriculture—­those frontier farmers, who are nearly one-half German and nearly the other half Irish, would desert their clearings and ruin their chances of progress in the world for distant wars of which the causes must, as I thought, be to them unintelligible?  I had been told that distance had but lent enchantment to the view, and that the war was even more popular in the remote and newly-settled States than in those which have been longer known as great political bodies.  So I resolved that I would go and see.