The Minute Man on the FrontierPuddefoot, William George
History
The Minute Man on the Frontier
Puddefoot, William George
Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.); Missions -- West (U.S.)
If it chanced to be summer-time he would see the tepees of the Indians
along the bay, and two blocks back civilized homes with all the
conveniences and luxuries of modern life. Here a huge canoe made of a
single log, and there a mammoth steamer with all the elegances of an
ocean-liner. Should he go on board of one of the steamers coasting
around the lakes with supplies, he would pass great bays with lovely
islands, and steam within a stone's throw of a comparatively rare
bird, the great northern diver, and suddenly find himself near a wharf
with a village in sight--a great saw-mill cutting its hundreds of
thousands of feet of lumber a day; and near by, Indian graves with the
food still fresh inside, and a tame deer with a collar and bell around
its neck trotting around the streets.
[Illustration: INDIAN CAMP, GRAND TRAVERSE BAY, MICHIGAN.
_Page 16._]
He can sit and fish for trout on his doorstep that borders the little
stream, or he can get on the company's locomotive and run twenty miles
back into the woods and see the coveys of partridges rising in clouds,
and here and there a timid doe and her fawn, whose curiosity is
greater than their fears, until the whistle blows, and they are off
like a shot into the deep forest, near where the black bear is
munching raspberries in a ten-thousand-acre patch, while millions of
bushels of whortleberries will waste for lack of pickers. He can sit
on a point of an inland lake and catch minnows on one side, and pull
up black bass on the other; and if a "tenderfoot" he will bring home
as much as he can carry, expecting to be praised for his skill. He is
mortified at the request to please bury them. He will ride over ground
that less than fifteen years ago could be bought for a song and to-day
produces millions, and is dotted with towns and huge furnaces glowing
night and day.
If in the older settled parts, he will ride through cornfields whose
tassels are up to the car windows, where the original settler paddled
his skiff and caught pickerel and the ague at the same time, and who
is still alive to tell the story. He can talk with a man who knew
every white man by name when he first went there, and remembers the
Indian peeping in through his log-cabin window, but whose
grandchildren have graduated from a university with twenty-seven
hundred students, where he helped build the log schoolhouse; who
remembers when he had to send miles for salt, and yet was living over
a bed of it big enough to salt the world down.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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