270 NARRATIVE OF THE EXPEDITION. 



water in the West, being from two to three miles wide, and some 

 four-and-twenty or thirty in length* The next morning I reached 

 the head of the lake after a couple of hours of travel, and, by a 

 diligent and hard day's work, during which we passed between 

 perpendicular walls of sonorous trap-rock, reached and encamped 

 at the falls of St. Croix, at eight o'clock in the evening.f We 

 were now about fifty miles from the line of the Mississippi River. 

 For the last few miles, there had been either a very strong current 

 or severe eddies of water, around angular masses of trap-rock; 

 and we were encamped at the precise foot of the falls, where the 

 river, narrowed to some fifty feet, breaks its way through trap- 

 rock, falling some fifty feet in the course of six hundred yards. We 

 had been carried, at a tangent, from the great Mississippi series 

 of the Silurian period, beginning at St. Anthony's Falls, to the 

 vitric formations of trap and greenstone of the Lake Superior 



forward canoes and baggage over bad portages, and conducting these frail vessels 

 over dangerous rapids and around falls. No amount of energy is sufficient on the 

 part of the officers to make them keep up, on these trips, with the gay, light, and 

 athletic voyageur, who unites the activity and expertuess of the Indian with the 

 power of endurance of the white man. Lieut. Allen deserves great credit, as an 

 army officer, for urging his men forward as well as he did on this arduous journey, for 

 they were a perpetual cause of delay and anxiety to me and to him. They were 

 relieved and aided by my men at every practicable point ; but, having the re- 

 sponsibility of performing a definite duty, on a fixed sum of money, with many 

 men to feed in the wilderness, it was imperative in me to push on with energy, day 

 in and day out, and to set a manful example of diligence, at evei-y point ; and, in- 

 stead of carping at my rapidity of movement, as he does in his official report of 

 the ascent of the St. Croix, he having every supply within himself, and being, more- 

 over, in a friendly tribe, where there was no danger from Indian hostilities, he 

 should not have evinced a desire to control my encampments, but rather given his 

 men to understand that he could not countenance their dilatoriuess. 



* It is, at this time, a part of the boundai-y between the State of AVisconsin and 

 the Territory of Minnesota, and is the site of several flourishing towns and villages. 

 On its western head is the town of Stillwater, the seat of justice for Washington 

 County, Minnesota. This town has a population of 1,500 inhabitants, containing 

 ft court house, several churches, schools, printing offices, a public land office, and 

 territorial penitentiary, with stores, mills, &c. Hudson is a town seated on its east 

 bank, at Willow River, being the seat of justice for St. Croix County, Wisconsin. 

 It contains a United States land-office, two churches, and 94 dwellings, besides stores 

 and mills. Steamboats freely navigate its waters from the Mississippi. 



■}• Falls of St. Croix. — A thriving post town is now seated on the Wisconsin 

 side of these falls in Polk County, Wisconsin, which contains several mills, at which 

 it is estimated, four millions of feet of pine lumber are sawed annually. It is at 

 the head of steamboat navigation of St. Croix River. 



