[191] United States soldiers are not adapted to travelling in Indian canoes. Comparatively clumsy, formal, and used to the comforts of good quarters and shelter, they flinch under the activities and fatigue of forest life, and particularly of that kind of life and toil, which consists in the management of canoes, and the carrying forward canoes and baggage over bad portages, and conducting these frail vessels over dangerous rapids and around falls. No amount of energy is sufficient on the part of the officers to make them keep up, on these trips, with the gay, light, and athletic _voyageur_, who unites the activity and expertness of the Indian with the power of endurance of the white man. Lieut. Allen deserves great credit, as an army officer, for urging his men forward as well as he did on this arduous journey, for they were a perpetual cause of delay and anxiety to me and to him. They were relieved and aided by my men at every practicable point; but, having the responsibility of performing a definite duty, on a fixed sum of money, with many men to feed in the wilderness, it was imperative in me to push on with energy, day in and day out, and to set a manful example of diligence, at every point; and, instead of carping at my rapidity of movement, as he does in his official report of the ascent of the St. Croix, he having every supply within himself, and being, moreover, in a friendly tribe, where there was no danger from Indian hostilities, he should not have evinced a desire to control my encampments, but rather given his men to understand that he could not countenance their dilatoriness. [192] It is, at this time, a part of the boundary between the State of Wisconsin and the Territory of Minnesota, and is the site of several flourishing towns and villages. On its western head is the town of Stillwater, the seat of justice for Washington County, Minnesota. This town has a population of 1,500 inhabitants, containing a court house, several churches, schools, printing offices, a public land office, and territorial penitentiary, with stores, mills, &c. Hudson is a town seated on its east bank, at Willow River, being the seat of justice for St. Croix County, Wisconsin. It contains a United States land-office, two churches, and 94 dwellings, besides stores and mills. Steamboats freely navigate its waters from the Mississippi. [193] FALLS OF ST. CROIX.--A thriving post town is now seated on the Wisconsin side of these falls in Polk County, Wisconsin, which contains several mills, at which it is estimated, four millions of feet of pine lumber are sawed annually. It is at the head of steamboat navigation of St. Croix River. [194] _Vide_ Owen's Geological Report, for the first attempt to delineate the order of the various local and general formations. Philada., Lippincott & Co., 1852.