"Slowly and thoughtfully I walked down to the bridge leading to Goat Island, and when I stood upon this frail support, and saw a quarter of a mile of tumbling, rushing rapids, and heard their everlasting roar, my emotions overpowered me. A choking sensation rose to my throat, a thrill rushed through my veins, my blood ran rippling to my fingers' ends. This was the climax of the effect which the falls produced upon me." At Buffalo she embarked for a voyage on Lake Erie. Making a brief stop at Cleveland, the steamer passed on to the St. Clair River. The sight of an encampment of Indians on its bank gave Margaret her first feeling of what was then "the West." "The people in the boat were almost all New Englanders, seeking their fortunes. They had brought with them their cautious manners, their love of polemics. It grieved me to hear Trinity and Unity discussed in the poor, narrow, doctrinal way on these free waters. But that will soon cease. There is not time for this clash of opinions in the West, where the clash of material interests is so noisy. They will need the spirit of religion more than ever to guide them, but will find less time than before for its doctrine." The following passage will show us the spirit which Margaret carried into these new scenes:-- "I came to the West prepared for the distaste I must experience at its mushroom growth. I know that where 'Go ahead!' is the motto, the village cannot grow into the gentle proportions that successive lives and the gradations of experience involuntarily give.... The march of peaceful, is scarcely less wanton than that of war-like invention. The old landmarks are broken down, and the land, for a season, bears none, except of the rudeness of conquest and the needs of the day. I have come prepared to see all this, to dislike it, but not with stupid narrowness to distrust or defame. On the contrary, I trust by reverent faith to woo the mighty meaning of the scene, perhaps to foresee the law by which a new order, a new poetry, is to be evoked from this chaos." Charles Dickens's "American Notes" may have been in Margaret's mind when she penned these lines, and this faith in her may have been quickened by the perusal of the pages in which he showed mostly how _not_ to see a new country. Reaching Chicago, she had her first glimpse of the prairie, which at first only suggested to her "the very desolation of dulness."