A Fortnight in the Wilds

Written on the Steamboat ‘The Superior’. Begun on (1st August 1831)

One of the things that pricked our most lively curiosity in going to America, was the chance of visiting the utmost limits of European civilisation, and even, if time allowed, visiting some of those Indian tribes who have chosen to retreat into the wildest open spaces rather than adapt themselves to what the whites call the delights of social life. But it is harder than one would have thought to get to the wilds nowadays, Leaving New York, the farther we got to the northwest, the farther did the end of our journey seem to flee before us. We passed through places celebrated in the history of the Indians, we found valleys that they bad named, we crossed rivers still bearing the names of their tribes, but everywhere the savage's hut had given way to the civilised man's house. The forest was felled; solitude turned to life.

But still we seemed to be following the tracks of the natives. Ten years ago, we were told, they were hue; there, five years; there, two years, In the place where you see the prettiest village church, a man would tell us, I cut down the Ent tree of the forest.' 'Here,' another told us, 'the grand council of the Confederation of the Iroquois used to be held.'--'And what has become of the Indians,' said I?--'The Indians,' our host replied, 'are I do not quite know where, beyond the Great Lakes. It is a race that is dying out; they are not made for civilisation; it kills them.'

Man gets accustomed to everything. To death on the field of battle, to death in hospital, to kill and to suffer. He gets used to every sight. An ancient people, the first and legitimate master of the American continent, is van- daily like the snow in sunshine, and disappearing from view over the land. In the same spots and in its place another race is increasing at a rate that is even more astonishing. It fells the forests and drains the marshes; lakes as large as seas and huge rivers resist its triumphant march in vain. The wilds become villages, and the villages towns. The American, the daily witness of such wonders, does not see anything astonishing in all this. This incredible destruction, this even more surprising growth, seem to him the usual progress of things in this world. He gets accustomed to it as to the unalterable order of nature.

In this way, always looking for the savages and the wilds, we covered the 360 miles between New York and Buffalo.

The first sight that struck us was a great number of Indians, who had assembled that day in Buffalo to collect the rent for the lands they had handed over to the United States.

I do not think I have ever suffered a more complete disappointment than the sight of those Indians. I was full of memories of M. de Chateaubriand and of Cooper, and I had expected to find in the natives of America savages in whose features nature had left the trace of some of those proud virtues that are born of liberty. I expected to find them men whose bodies bad been developed by hunting and war, and who would lose nothing by being seen nude. You can guess my astonishment as I got close to the sight described hem:

The Indians that I saw that evening were small in stature; their limbs, as far as could be seen under their clothes, were thin and far from muscular; their skin, instead of being of the copper-red colour that is generally supposed, was dark bronze, so that at first sight it seemed very like that of mulattoes. Their shiny, black hair fell with a peculiar stiffness over neck and shoulders. Their mouths were generally disproportionately large, and the expression of their faces ignoble and vicious. Their physiognomy told of that profound degradation that can only be reached by a long abuse of the benefits of eivilisation. One would have said they were men from the lowest mob of our great European cities. And yet they were still savages. Mixed up with the vices they got from us was something barbarous and uncivilised that made them a hun- times more repulsive still. These Indians carried no arms; they wore European clothes; but they did not use them in the same way as we do. One could see that they were not at all made for their use, and they found themselves imprisoned in their folds. To European orna- they added articles of barbarian luxury, feathers, enormous ear-rings and necklaces of shells. These men's movements were quick and jerky, their voices shrill and discordant, their glances restless and savage. At first sight one was tempted to think that each of them was but a beast from the forest, to whom education had given the appearance of a man but who had nonetheless remained an animal. These weak, depraved beings belonged however to one of the most renowned tribes of the ancient American world. We bad before us, it is sad to say it, the last remnants of that famous Confederation of the Iroquois, who were no less well-known for manly wisdom than for courage, and who long held the balance between the two greatest European nations.

But one would be wrong to try and judge the Indian race by this shapeless sample, this straying sucker from a savage tree that has grown up in the mud of our cities. That would be to repeat the mistake that we ourselves commit and of which I shall have occasion to speak later.

We went out from the town that evening, and, not far from the last houses, we saw an Indian lying at the edge of the road. lie was a young man. He made no movement and we thought him dead. Some stifled sighs that hardly forced their way from his breast made us realise that he was still alive and struggling against one of those dangerous forms of drunkenness that are brought on by brandy. The sun had already gone down and the ground was getting more and more damp. There was every indication that the wretched man would breathe out his last sigh there, at least unless he was helped. It was the time at which the Indians were leaving Buffalo to return to their village; from time to time a group of them came and paced close by us. They came up, roughly turned their compatriot's body over to see who be was, and then went on their way without deigning to answer our questions. Most of these men were themselves drunk. Finally a young Indian woman arrived, who at first seemed to come up with some interest. I thought that it was the wife or sister of the dying man. She looked at him attentively, called him aloud by his name, felt his heart and, being sure that he was alive, tried to rouse him from his lethargy. But when her efforts were in vain, we saw her burst out in fury against his inanimate body lying in front of I struck his head, twisted his face with her bands, ai pled on him. While she applied herself to these ferocious acts, she uttered such inarticulate and savage cries that, at this moment, they still seem to vibrate in my ears. Finally we felt we must intervene and peremptorily ordered her to draw back. She obeyed, but as she went off, we beard her burst into a barbarous laugh.

When we got back to the town, we told several people about the young Indian. We spoke of the imminent danger to which be was exposed; we even offered to pay his expenses at an inn. All that was useless. We could not persuade anyone to bother about it. Some told us: these men are accustomed to drink to excess and sleep on the ground. They certainly will not die from such accidents. Others admitted that the Indian probably would die, but one could read on their lips this half expressed thought: 'What is the life of an Indian? That indeed was the basis of the general feeling. In the midst of this society, so wellpoliced, so prudish, and so pedantic about morality and virtue, one comes across a complete insensibility, a sort of cold and implacable egotism where the natives of America am concerned. Ile inhabitants of the United States do not hunt the Indians with hue and cry as did the Spaniards of Mexico. But it is the same pitiless feeling that animates the whole European race here as everywhere else.

How many times during our travels have we not met honest citizens who said to us of an evening, sitting peacefully by their fire: We number of the Indians is decreasing daily. However it is not that we often make war on them but the brandy that we sell them cheap every year carries off more than our arms could kill. This world here belongs to us, they add. God, in refusing the first inhabitants the capacity to become civilised, has destined them in advance to inevitable destruction. The true owners of this continent are those who know how to take advantage of As riches.

Satisfied with this reasoning, the American goes to the church, where he hears a minister of the Gospel repeat to him that men are brothers and that the Eternal Being who has made them all in the same mould has imposed on them the duty to help one another.

At ten o'clock in the morning of the 19th July we boarded the steamboat Ohio going towards Detroit. A strong breeze was blowing from the northwest and gave the waters of Lake Erie the very look of the waves of a stormy ocean. To the right stretched a limitless horizon. To the left we hugged the southern shores of the lake so close that we often came within earshot of it. These shores were perfectly level and different from those of all the lakes I have ever chanced to visit in Europe. Neither were they any more like the shores of the sea. Immense forests shaded them and formed round the lake, as it were, a thick belt that was seldom broken. From time to time, however, the country suddenly changes its look. Just round a wood one sees the elegant spire of a clock tower, houses striking in their whiteness and cleanness, and shops. Two paces further on, the primeval and apparently impenetrable forest reclaims its dominion and again reflects its foliage in the waters of the lake.

Those who have passed through the United States will find in this picture a striking emblem of American society. Everything there is abrupt and unexpected; everywhere, extreme civilisation borders and in some sense confronts nature left to run riot. That is something that one cannot conceive of in France. As for me, in my traveller's illusions -and what class of man has not its own--I was imagining something quite different. I had noticed in Europe that the more or less withdrawn position in which a province or town is placed, its wealth or its poverty, its smallness or its extent, exercised an immense influence on the ideas, the morals, the whole civilisation of its inhabitants, and often caused a difference of several centuries between the various parts of the same area.

I supposed that it was like that, but to an even greater extent, hi We New World, and that a country peopled as is America, in an incomplete and partial fashion, ought to show all conditions of existence and provide a picture of society in all its ages. America, according to me, was then the only country where one could follow step by step all the transformations which social conditions have brought about for man and where it was possible to discover someIle a vast chain descending ring by ring from the opulent patrician of the town right down to the savage in the wilds. It was there, in a word, that I counted on finding the history of the whole of humanity framed within a few degrees of longitude.

Nothing is true in this picture. Of all the countries of the world America is the least adapted to provide the sight that I went to seek. In America, even more than in Europe, there is one society only. It may be rich or poor, humble or brilliant, trading or agricultural, but it is made up everywhere of the same elements; it has been levelled out by an egalitarian civilisation. The man you left behind in the streets of New York, you will find again in the midst of almost impenetrable solitude: same dress, same spirit, same language, same habits and the same pleasures. Nothing rustic, nothing naive, nothing that smells of the wilds, nothing even that resembles our villages. The reason for this peculiar state of affairs is easy to understand. The parts of the territories which have been longest and most completely peopled have reached a high degree of civilisation. Education has been lavishly and profusely bestowed. The spirit of equality has stamped a peculiarly uniform pattern on the habits of private life. Now, note this well, A is precisely these same men who yearly go to people the wilds. In Europe each man lives and dies on the ground where he was born. In America nowhere does one meet the representatives of a race that has multiplied in isolation, having long lived there unknown to the world and left to its own devices. Those who dwell in isolated places arrived there yesterday. They came bringing with them the morals, the ideas and the needs of civilisation. They only compound with savage life to the extent that the nature of things makes absolutely necessary. Hence the oddest contrasts. One goes without transition from the wilds into the street of a city, from the most savage scenes to the most smiling aspects of civilisation. If night, overtaking you, does not force you to take shelter under a tree, you have a good chance of reaching a village, where you will find everything down to French fashions and poor copies of boulevards. The merchant of Buffalo or of Detroit is as well stocked as the one of New York; the factories of Lyon work for the one as for the other. When you leave the main roads you force your way down barely trodden paths. Finally, you see a field cleared, a cabin made from half-shaped tree trunks admitting the light through one narrow window only. You think that you have at last reached the home of the American peasant. Mistake. You make your way into this cabin that seems the asylum of all wretchedness, but the owner of this place is dressed in the same clothes as yours and he speaks the language of towns. On his rough table are books and newspapers; he himself is anxious to take you on one side to know exactly what is happening in old Europe and asks you to tell him what has most struck you in his country. He will scribble on the paper a plan of campaign for the Belgians, and will solemnly tell you what still needs to be done to make France prosperous. One might think one was meeting a rich landowner who had come to spend just a few nights in a hunting lodge. And in fact the log cabin is only a temporary shelter for the American, a concession circumstances have forced on him for the moment. When the fields that surround him are in full production, and the new owner has time to concern himself with the amenities of life, a more spacious dwelling and one better adapted to his needs will replace the log-house and make a home for those numerous children who will also go out one day to make themselves a dwelling in the wilds.

But to come back to our journey. We sailed slowly along the whole day in sight of the shores of Pennsylvania, and later of Ohio. We stopped for a moment at Presqu'Ile, now called Erie. It is there that the Pittsburgh canal will end. By means of this undertaking, the whole execution of which is, they say, easy and now assured, the Mississippi will be connected to the river of the north, and the wealth of Europe will flow freely along the five hundred leagues of land that lie between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.

In the evening, the weather having turned favourable, we moved quickly towards Detroit across the middle of the lake. On the following morning we were in sight of the little island called Middle Sister, near to which Commodore Perry won a celebrated naval victory over the English.

Soon afterwards the level coast of Canada seemed to be moving quickly towards us, and we saw the Detroit River opening in front of us and the houses of Fort Malden in the distance. This place, founded by the French, still bears many traces of its origin. The houses are placed and shaped like those of our peasants. The Catholic bell-tower with a cock on top rises in the middle of the hamlet. One might think it a village near Caen or Evreux. A strange sight turned our attention away from these sentimental reminders of France: on the bank to our right was a Scot- soldier, mounting guard in full uniform. It was the uni- made so famous by the field of Waterloo. Feather in cap, jacket, all complete; his clothes and arms glinted in the sunlight. To our left, as if on purpose to point the contrast, two stark naked Indians, their bodies streaked with dyes, rings in their noses, came up at the same moment from the opposite bank. They were in a little bark canoe with a coverlet for sail. Letting their frail boat run with wind and current, they shot like an arrow towards our ship and in an instant had turned round it. Then they went off quietly to fish near the English soldier who, still glinting and unmoving, seemed put then; as the symbol of the high civilisation of Europe in arms.

We reached Detroit at three o'clock. Detroit is a little town of two or three thousand souls, founded by the Jesuits in the middle of the forest in 1710, and still having a great number of French families.

By this time we had crossed the whole State of New York, and gone a hundred leagues over Lake Erie; by now me were touching the limits of civilisation, but we bad no idea whatsoever whither to wend our way next. To get information was not as easy as one might hme thought 11 break through almost impenetrable forests, to cross deep rivers, to brave pestilential marshes, to sleep out in the damp woods--those are exertions that the American readily contemplates-if it is a question of earning a guinea; for that is the point. But that one should do such things from curiosity is more than his mind can take in. Besides, living in the wilds, he only prizes the works of man. He will gladly send you off to see a road, a bridge, or a fine village. But that one should appreciate great trees and the beauties of possibility completely passes him by.

So nothing is harder than to find anyone able to understand what you want. You want to see forests, our hosts said, smiling, go straight ahead and you will find what you want. They are there, all right, around the new roads and well-trod paths. As for Indians, you will see only too many in our public places and in the streets; there is no need to go very far for that. Those here are at least beginning to get civilised and have a less savage look. We were not slow to realise that we should not get the truth out of them by a frontal atack and that it was necessary to manoeuvre.

So we went to call on the official appointed by the United States to see to the sale of the still uninhabited land that covers the district of Michigan; we represented ourselves to him as people who, without any very decided intention of settling in the country, might yet have distant interest in knowing what land cost and how it was situated. Major Biddle--that was his name-this time understood wonderfully well, what we wanted to do, and entered at once into a mass of details to which we paid avid attention. 'This part here; he said to us, pointing out on the map the St. Joseph River, which, after many a bend, -flows into Lake Michigan, 'seems to me the best suited for your scheme; the soil is good there; there are already some fine villages established there, and the road leading thither is so well maintained that public conveyances traverse it daily.' 'Good!' we said to ourselves. 'Now we know where not to go, at least unless we want to visit the wilds in a mail van.' We thanked Mr. Biddle for his advice, and asked him with an air of casualness and a pretended scorn, what part of the district had so far least attracted the attention of emigrants '!In this direction,' be told us without attaching more importance to his answer than we to our question, 'towards the northwest. As far as Pontiac and in the neighbourhood of that village some fairly good settlements have been established. But you must not think of settling further on; the ground is covered by almost impenetrable forest which stretches endlessly to the northwest, where one only finds wild beasts and Indians. The United States are always considering opening up a road; but so far it has barely been begun and stops at Pontiac. I say again, that is a part you should not think about.' We thanked Mr. Biddle again for his good advice, and left determined to take it in just the contrary sense. We could not contain ourselves for joy at having at last discovered a place to which the torrent of European civilisation had not yet come

On the next day, the 23rd July, we hastened to hire two horses. As we contemplated keeping them for ten days or so, we wanted to leave a sum of money with their owner, but be refused to take it, saying that we could pay on our return. He showed no alarm. Michigan is surrounded on all sides by lakes and wilds; be let us in to a sort of riding-school of which he held the door. When we bad bought a compass as well as provisions, we set out on our way, rifle on shoulder, as thoughtless of the future and happy as a pair of schoolboys leaving college to spend their holidays at their father's house.

If we had indeed only wanted to see forests, our hosts in Detroit would have been right in telling us that we need not go very far, for, a mile out of the town, the road goes into the forest and never comes out of it. The land it passes over is completely flat and often marshy. From time to time along the road one comes to new clearings. As all these settlements are exactly like one another, whether they are in the depths of Michigan or just close to New York, I will try and describe them here once and for all.

The bells which the pioneer is careful to hang round his beasts' necks, so as to find them again in the dense forest give warning in the far distance that one is getting near a clearing. Soon one hears the echoes of the axe that is cutting down the forest trees, and as one gets closer, signs of destruction make man's presence ever more evident. Severed branches cover the road, and trunks half scorched by fire or cut about by the axe yet stand still erect in your path. As you go on your way, you come to a wood where all the trees seem to have been struck by sudden death. In full summer their withered branches seem the image of winter. Looking at them close-up, you see that a deep circle has been cut in their bark, which, by preventing the circulation of the sap, has brought them to a speedy death. That in fact is usually the planter's first beginning. A he cannot, in the first year, cut all the trees that adorn his new property, he sows corn under their branches, and, by striking them to death, prevents them from shading his crop. After this field which is an unfinished sketch, a first step of civilisation in the wilds, one suddenly sees the owner's cabin. It is generally placed in the middle of some land more carefully cultivated than the rest, but where man is yet sustaining an unequal fight against nature. There be bees have been cut but not grubbed up; their trunks still cover and block the land they used to shade. Round this withered debris, wheat, shoots of oak, plants of all kinds, and weeds of all sorts are scattered pell-mell and grow up together in the untamed and still half-wild ground. It is in the middle of this vigorous and variegated growth of vegetation that the planter's dwelling or, as it is called in this country, his log-house, rises. just like the field around it, this rustic dwelling shows every sign of new and hurried work. It is seldom more than 30 feet long. It is 20 feet wide and 1. 5 high. Both its walls and its roof are made of unsquared treetrunks between which moss and earth have been rammed to keep the cold and rain out from the inside of the house. The closer the traveller gets, the more animated the scene becomes. As they hear his footsteps, the children, playing in the surrounding debris, get up in a hurry and run for shelter to their father's house, as if they were frightened at the sight of a man, while two great, halfwild dogs with ears pricked and long muzzles, come out of the cabin and growling, cover their young masters' retreat.

It is then that the pioneer himself appears at the door of his dwelling; be takes a good look at the new arrival; signs to his dogs to go back under cover and himself hastens to give them the example without a sign of curiosity or anxiety.

When he gets to the threshold Of the log-house, the European cannot help casting an astonished glance round the sight before him.

Such a cabin generally has but one window, at which perhaps a muslin curtain is hanging, for in these parts where necessities are not seldom lacking, superfluities often abound. A resinous fire crackles on the hearth of beaten earth, and, better than the daylight, lights up the inside of the place. Over this rustic fire one sees trophies of war or hunt: a long rifle, a deerskin, some eagle's feathers. To the right of the chimney a map of the United States is often stretched, and the draught that blows through the gaps in the wall keeps raising and fluttering A. By A on a single shelf of ill-squared planks are a few tattered books; there one finds a Bible, with its cloth and boards already worn out by the piety of two generations, a prayerbook, and, sometimes, a poem of Milton or a tragedy of Shakespeare. Along the wall are some rough seats, made by the hands of Cie owner himself, some trunks instead of cupboards, some agricultural implements and samples of the harvest. In the middle of the room is a rickety table whose legs, still sprouting foliage, seem to have grown by themselves on the ground they cover. It is One that me whole family assembles every day to take their meals. One also sees an English china teapot, some spoons usually of wood, some cracked cups, and newspapers.

The looks of the master of this dwelling is no less remarkable than the place that gives him shelter.

His angular muscles and thin limbs make one recognise at first glance the inhabitant of New England. This man has not been bonr in the solitude where he lives. His temperament alone makes that clear. His first years were passed in a society used to thought and argument. It is the strength of his will that has taken him to do work in the wilds to which he seems little adapted. But if his physical powers seem too slight for this undertaking, his features, lined by the cares of life, bespeak a practical intelligence, and a cold, persevering energy that strike one at first sight. His movements are slow and stiff, his words measured, and his appearance austere. Habit and still more pride have given his features that stoic stiffness that his deeds belie: it is true that the pioneer scorns things that often move men's hearts most violently; his goods and life will, never depend on the chance of a throw of dice, or the fate of a woman; but to win affluence, he has braved exile, Cie solitude and innumerable wretchednesses of life in the wilds, he has slept on the bare ground and risked fever in the forest and the Indian's tomahawk. He has cue day made that effort, and renewed it through the years; perhaps he will carry on with it for twenty years more without discouragement or complaint. Can a man capable of such sacrifices be a cold, unfeeling being? Should one not rather recognise that he is consumed by some burning, tenacious, implacable passion of the mind? Concentrating on the single object of making his fortune, the emigrant has ended by making an altogether exceptional mode of existence. Even his feelings for his family have become merged in a vast egotism, and one cannot be sure whether he regards his wife and children as anything more than a detached part of himself. Deprived of the usual contacts with his fellow men, he has learnt to make solitude a pleasure. When one presents oneself on the threshold of his isolated dwelling, the pioneer comes forward to meet you; he shakes hands as custom provides, but his features express neither good will nor pleasure. He only starts talking to ask you questions, satisfying a need of the head rather than of the heart, and, as soon as he has found out the news he wanted to learn from you, he relapses into silence. One might think one was meeting a man who bad come back home in the evening tired by the importunities and noise of the world. Ask him questions in your turn, and he will give you the information you lack intelligently, he will even provide for your needs, and he will take care of your safety as long as you are under his roof. But there is so much of constraint and pride in all he does, and one is aware of such a profound indifference even about the result of his own efforts, that gratitude is frozen. But the pioneer is hospitable in his way, only his hospitality has nothing about it that touches you, for you feel that be himself in doing what he does is submitting to an unpleasant obligation of life in the wilds. He sees it as a duty which his situation imposes, not as a pleasure. This unknown man is the representative of a race to whom the future of the New World belongs, a restless, calculating, adventurous race which sets coldly about deeds that can only be explained by the fire of passion, and which trades in everything, not excluding even morality and religion.

A nation of conquerors that submits to living the life of a savage without ever letting itself be carried away by its charms, that only cherishes those parts of civilisation and enlightenment which are useful for well-being, and which shuts itself up in the solitudes of America with an axe and a newspaper; a people who, like all great peoples, has but one thought, and presses forward to the acquisition of riches, the single end of its labours, with a perseverance and a scorn of life which one could call heroic, if that word were properly used of anything but the strivings of virtue. It is a wandering people whom rivers and lakes cannot hold back, before whom forests fall and prairies are covered in shade; and who, when they have reached the Pacific Ocean, will come back on its tracks to trouble and destroy the societies which it will have formed behind it.

In speaking of the pioneer one cannot forget the companion of his trials and dangers, Look at that young woman at the other side of the hearth who as she sees to cooking the meal rocks her youngest son on her knees. Like the emigrant this woman is in the Rower of her age; like him, she can remember the affluence of her first years. Her dress still shows an ill-suppressed taste for clothes but time has pressed heavily on her. By her features worn before their time, by her wasted limbs, it is easy to see that existence has been a heavy burden for her.

In fact, this frail creature has already had to face incredible trials. Scarcely embarked on life, she has had to tear herself away from her mother's tenderness and those dear fraternal links which no young girl gives up without a tear, even when she leaves them to share the opulent home of a new husband. The pioneer's wife, carried off in an instant and without hope of return from her innocent cradle of youth, has exchanged the charms of society and the joys of the domestic hearth for the solitude of the forest. Her nuptial couch was on the bare ground of the wilds. To devote herself to austere duties, to submit to privations once unknown to her, to embrace an existence for which she was not made-such has been the work of the best years of her life*, such for her have been the delights of conjugal union. Want, suffering and boredom have changed her fragile frame but not broken down her courage. Amid the deep sadness engraved on her delicate features it is easy to see something of religious resignation, a profound peace, and I cannot say what natural firmness and tranquillity that faces all the trials of life without fear or boast.

Half-naked children bursting with health, thoughtless of the morrow, true sons of the wilds, press around this woman. Their mother looks from time to time at them half in sadness half in joy. To see their strength and her weakness, one would say that she has drained herself to give them life and does not regret what they have cost her.

The dwelling in which the emigrants live has no internal division and no storehouse. The whole family comes to seek shelter of an evening in the single room, which it contains. This dwelling forms as it were a little world of its own. It is an ark of civilization lost in the middle of an ocean of leaves, it is a sort of oasis in the desert. A hundred paces beyond it the everlasting forest stretches its shades around it and solitude begins again.

It was only in the evening and after the sun was gone down that we arrived at Pontiac. Twenty very clean and very pretty houses making up as many well-furnished shops; a transparent stream; a clearing of a quarter of a league square; and the everlasting forest all around; that is a true picture of the village Of Pontiac which in twenty years perhaps-will be a lawn. The sight of this place re- me of what Mr. Gallatin had said to me a month before in New York: that Ilene is no village in America, at least in the some which we give to that word. Here the houses of the cultivators are scattered in the middle of the fields. People only assemble in a place to establish a sort of market for the use of the surrounding population. In these so-called villages one only finds lawyers, printers, or traders.

We had ourselves taken to the best hotel in Pontiac (for there are two) and were as usual ushered in to what is called the barroom. That is a room where drinks are served, and in which the humblest labourer and the richest tradesman in the place come to smoke, drink, and talk politics together on a basis, so far as externals go, of the most complete equality. The master of the house, or the landlord, was, I will not say a solid peasant, for there are no peasants in America, but anyhow a very solid gentleman whose features had that openness and simplicity one associates with the people of the maquis in Normandy. He was a man who, for fear of frightening you, never looked you in the face when he was talking to you, but waited until you were talking to someone else to look at you at leisure. For the rest, a deep politician and, as the American habit is, a pitiless questioner. This worthy citizen, in common with the others there, at first looked at us with astonishment. Our travelling clothes and rifles made us not look like business men, and to travel to see the sights was something completely unwonted. To make short work of explanations, we said straightway that we had come to buy land. Hardly had we said it--we found that, to escape one evil, we had fallen into a much more formidable one.

It is true that they stopped treating us as extraordinary beings, but each of them wanted to do a deal with us; to get rid of don and their farms, we told our host that before striking any bargain, we wanted useful information from him about the price of land and means of cultivation. He took us at once into another room, slowly and deliberately spread out a map of Michigan on the oak table which stood in the middle of the room, and putting a candle between us three, waited in impassive silence for what we had to tell him. The reader, without sharing our desire to settle in the open spaces of America, may yet be interested to know how so many thousands of Europeans and Americans who come every year to seek a new home deal with the matter. So I will note down here the information with which our host at Pontiac provided us. We were often afterwards able to verify how perfectly correct it was.