Minnesota ("sky-coloured water"), how aptly did it describe that home
which was no longer theirs! They have left it for ever; the Norwegian and
the Swede now call it theirs, and nothing remains of the red man save
these sounding names of lake and river which long years ago he gave them.
Along the margins of these lakes many comfortable dwellings nestle
amongst oak openings and glades, and hill and valley are golden in
summer with fields of wheat and corn, and little towns are springing up
where twenty years ago the Sioux lodge-poles were the only signs of
habitation; but one cannot look on this transformation without feeling,
with Longfellow, the terrible surge of the white man, "whose breath, like
the blast of the east wind, drifts evermore to the west the scanty smoke
of the wigwams." What savages, too, are they, the successors of the old
race--savages! not less barbarous because they do not scalp, or
war-dance, or go out to meet the Ojibbeway in the woods or the
Assineboine in the plains.

We had passed a beautiful sheet of water called Lake Osakis, and reached
another lake not less lovely, the name of which I did not know.

"What is the name of this place?" I asked the driver who had stopped to
water his horses.

"I don't know," he answered, lifting a bucket of water to his thirsty
steeds; "some God-dam Italian name, I guess." This high rolling land
which divides the waters flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from those of
Hudson Bay lies at an elevation of 1600 feet above the sea level. It is
rich in every thing that can make a country prosperous; and that portion
of the "down-trodden millions," who "starve in the garrets of Europe,"
and have made their homes along that height of land, have no reason to
regret their choice.