Minnesota -- Description and travel; Northwest, Canadian; Northwestern States; Red River of the North
This farmer says that Montana is destined to be a great stock-growing
State. Cattle thrive on the bunch-grass. The hills are covered with it,
and millions of acres that cannot be readily cultivated will furnish
pasturage for flocks and herds. This testimony accords with statements
made by those who have visited the Territory, as well as by others who
have resided there.
We have met to-day a long train of wagons filled with emigrants, who
have come from Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and some from Ohio.
Look at the wagons, each drawn by four oxen,--driven either by the
owner or one of his barefoot boys. Boxes, barrels, chairs, tables,
pots, and pans constitute the furniture. The grandmother, white-haired,
old, and wrinkled, and the wife with an infant in her arms, with three
or four romping children around her, all sitting on a feather-bed
beneath the white canvas covering. A tin kettle is suspended beneath
the axle, in which a tow-headed urchin, covered with dust, is swinging,
clapping his hands, and playing with a yellow dog trotting behind the
team. A hoop-skirt, a chicken-coop, a pig in a box, are the most
conspicuous objects that meet the eye as we look at the hinder part of
the wagon. A barefooted boy, as bright-eyed as Whittier's ideal,--now
done in chromo-lithograph, and adorning many a home,--marches behind,
with his rosy-cheeked sister, driving a cow and a calf.
To-night they will be fifteen miles nearer their destination than
they were in the morning. Some of the teams have been two months on
the road, and a few more days will bring them to the spot which the
emigrant has already selected for his future home. They halt by the
roadside at night. The oxen crop the rich grasses; the cow supplies
the little ones with milk; the children gather an armful of sticks,
the mother makes a cake, and bakes it before the camp-fire in a tin
baker such as was found in every New England home forty years ago;
the emigrant smokes his pipe, rolls himself in a blanket, and snores
upon the ground beneath the wagon, while his family sleep equally well
beneath the canvas roof above him. Another cake in the morning, with a
slice of fried pork, a drink of coffee, and they are ready for the new
day.
Not only along this road, but everywhere, we may behold just such
scenes. A great army of occupation is moving into the State. The
advance is all along the line. Towns and villages are springing up as
if by magic in every county. Every day adds thousands of acres to
those already under cultivation. The fields of this year are wider than
they were a year ago, and twelve months hence will be much larger than
they are to-day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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