Margaret Fuller spent the summer of 1843 on the lakes, and left a charming account of her impressions. Chicago she found rather commercial, “with no provision for the student or the idler,” but she recognized its commanding position. “There can be no two places in the world more completely thoroughfares,” she says, “than this place and Buffalo.” They were to her two correspondent valves that opened and shut all the time, as the life blood rushed from east to west and back again. Yet, even in this business place, she saw for the first time in her drives along the lake shore the beautiful prairie flowers of the West. To her the most picturesque sight in all Chicago were the lines of Hoosier wagons, in which the rough farmers who had driven in from the country camped on the edge of the city, living on their own supplies of provisions and seeming as they walked about the town like foreign peasantry put down among the “active, inventive business people” of Chicago. With the characteristically sharp contrasts of this wonderful new land, the other sight which interested her especially was the arrival of the great lake steamers, magnificent floating palaces of six and eight hundred tons, which “panted in from their rapid and marvellous journey” of a thousand miles from Buffalo. When she went out to watch the lights of these boats as they came in at night she heard as she walked along on one side the Hoosier dialect, on another, cultivated French, and the very next moment the sounds of German, Dutch, and Irish. Then as now Chicago was a cosmopolitan city. Miss Fuller found the boats so comfortable that her trip to Milwaukee was a “pleasure party.” The beautiful situation of this town on a bluff eighty feet above Lake Michigan made a great impression on all visitors. If the other towns had grown up recently and rapidly, Milwaukee could be seen in the very process. With a population of only two thousand people, who were erecting buildings as quickly as they could on newly laid-out broad avenues, it had received in one week from Buffalo three thousand emigrants on their way to the interior, not to mention the numbers which came weekly from Chicago and Ohio. Here, as at Chicago, Miss Fuller was delighted at the gathering of pleasant people drawn from all over the world. The great interest of the town was in its new arrivals. Boats came and went every day, and crowds swarmed down to the pier to meet them. The poorer emigrants who landed were taken to rude “shantees” in a particular part of the town, and then walked off the next morning into the country, “the mothers carrying the babies, and the fathers leading the little children.” She stayed only a fortnight at Milwaukee, but she declares that had she been rich in money she might in that time have built a house or set herself up in business, so swiftly did matters move there.