Here we are! September 15, 2 p.m. You will see, if you have got my last from Sioux City, that the above heading is somewhat wild. The fact is, that just as I had written the three first words (in fact, while I was writing them, which accounts for their jerky look), our little train moved on from Fort Dodge and I couldn’t write, even on our superb springs. Now we are at Council Bluffs, opposite Omaha. Why, hang it! here we go again moving on, and I must stop again.

3 p.m.—We only ran three miles and then stopped to lunch and let a Union-Pacific train pass. Now after a famous lunch in our second or commissariat car, I am getting a smoke and a few more lines to you before we are off eastward again. Thank Heaven! after all the wonderful new sights and sensations of the last three and a half days since we left Niagara, I confess to the utmost delight at feeling that we have made our farthest point, and that I am already some three miles plus the breadth of the Missouri River and Omaha City on my way back to you. It is still more than a month before we embark for home (if I can hold out as long); still, we are on our way! However, you must not think that I am not enjoying myself wonderfully. I am, and am also, I hope, good company, for when one is treated like the Grand Turk or the Emperor of Russia, the least one can do is to be pleasant. But if I go on with my sensations, I shall never pick up my narrative; as it is, I shall be obliged to leave thousands of things till we meet, when I do hope I shan’t have forgotten anything. Well, didn’t I leave off at Niagara? We left the hotel in front of the Falls there on Monday morning after breakfast with O——, who had no power except for himself till we got to Chicago; we had been furnished with free passes, and rode in the ordinary cars through Ontario province to Windsor, opposite Detroit. In Canada, again, the difference was at once visible between the two peoples; but I am not at all prepared to admit that the Canadians have the worst of it, certainly not in the roadside cookery, for we had the best joint of beef we have seen since we left home at dinner, and the best bread and butter at tea. At Windsor the train ran quietly on to the huge ferry-boat-steamer, and we had a moonlight passage to the railway station at Detroit. Here we secured berths in the Pullman sleeping car, for which you pay rather more than you would for a bed at a first-class hotel. However, they are an admirable institution, and enable one to get through really wonderful travelling feats. We were at Chicago early next morning, and transferred ourselves directly into our small express train, getting glimpses of the city of forty years, which within living men’s memory was a small Indian station.

It is enormous, spreading over certainly three times the space which an English city of 250,000 inhabitants would occupy. We shall see the town on our return; meantime, as we ran out of the suburbs, we saw a house of considerable size waiting at the crossing for our train to pass before it went over, as coolly as a farmer’s waggon of hay would wait in England. O———told us that all the old houses in Chicago are moved in this way. As building is very expensive, when one of the big folk wants to put up some splendid new structure—bank, store, or the like—there are always men ready to buy the old house as it stands. They then just cut away its foundation, put it on rollers, and tote it away to the site they have bought in the suburbs. We fell upon breakfast in a half-famished state as we steamed away westward, and through the whole day were kept on the stretch. Not that there was any great beauty in the scenery, but the interest of getting actually into half-settled country was exceedingly absorbing. The most notable town we passed was Galena, in Northern Illinois, from which Grant went to the war, leaving his leather yard for that purpose. The citizens of Galena have bought and presented him a good square house of red brick on the top of the hill there. Then we ran along a tributary of the Mississippi, and about 4.30 came out on the father of waters; where we struck the mighty stream it was not impressive. We came upon a mighty swamp, not a river, miles and miles of trees, some of them fine large ones, standing in the water and covered with creepers. The river was luckily high, so that we had this effect of a forest rising out of water to perfection. Then there were miles of swamp, half water, half land, dreary and horrible to look at, sometimes sound enough for cattle to pick about, and then only fit for alligators and wild-fowl; of the latter we saw a number, including a white heron. At last we came upon the river, some three-quarters of a mile wide-up there, 1600 miles from the sea, and crossed by a gossamer bridge, a real work of high art. On the opposite side we stopped for tea-dinner at Dubuque, one of the largest towns in Iowa, and the first border city we had seen,—very quaint to behold, with streets laid out as broad as Regent Street, here and there a huge block of stores full of dry goods or groceries, and then a lot of wooden hovels, a vacant plot perhaps, and then a big hotel, or another great store,—the streets all as soft as Rotten Row, and much deeper in dirt, side pavements of wood, every house placarded in huge letters with the name and business of the owner. Here, for the first time, we saw emigrants’ waggons packed with their household goods and lumber (sawed planks) for their houses, bound for the prairies beyond, on which they settle under the homestead acts. In short, the pushing slipshod character of the great West was thoroughly mirrored in the place, and above all the other buildings was a fine common school open to every child in the place. This is the one universal characteristic of these towns and villages; almost the first thing they do is to build a famous big school. The member of Congress for the place and one or two other notables came down to see us after tea, and smoked a cigar with us in our saloon car before we started. The talk was, of course, on the wonders of the West, and the chances of Dubuque to be a big city in a year or two. Then we turned in and ran all night to Fort Dodge, from which the first line of this letter was written, a village with the same characteristics as the towns, except that the only building not of wood was the station, which, strange to say, was built of gypsum, found in great quantities here, and the only sort of stone they have. The president of the line—a shrewd, honest, Western man named Douglas, one of our party—guessed that in another five years they would have to pull the station down and manure the land with it. From this place we ran right up into the wild prairies, and at the highest point between the Mississippi and Missouri, at Storm Lake, I wrote you the hasty note which, I hope, you have received from those unknown parts. It is about the largest settlement in the 180 miles, consisting of perhaps twelve or fourteen wooden houses, one of which was a billiard saloon kept by an old Cornish man. He said that quite a number of Cornish miners are over in this district, some at lead and coal mines of a very primitive kind, others farming. On the whole, the people seemed a good, steady, independent lot, and the children looked wonderfully healthy, running about barefooted on the shore of the little lake or amongst the prairie grass. We made acquaintance with prairie chicken and the little earth squirrel, a jolly little dog, with a prettily marked back, who frisks into his hole instead of up a tree like ours. Then we dropped down, still through wild prairie, over which the single line of rail runs with no protection at all, till we came to Sioux City on the Missouri, and the biggest town on the river for 2000 miles from its source. There are 12,000 inhabitants, and precisely the same features as at Dubuque, except that it is a far more rowdy place, being still almost under the dominion of Judge Lynch. Only the day before we arrived, a border ruffian had been swaggering about the town, pistol in hand, and defying arrest. However, they did take him at last, and he was safe in prison. A fortnight earlier a rascal, who confessed to nine murders, had been taken and hung on the other side of the river. There are sixty-three saloons, at most of which gambling goes on regularly every night. The editor of the Sioux Tribune, an Irish Yankee of queer morals and extraordinary “go,” took us into one, stood drinks round, and expounded the ingenious games by which the settlers and officers of the Indian fort up the stream are cleared of their money. A rowdy, loafing, vagabond city, but there they have three or four fine schools (one had just cost 45,000 dollars), for which they tax the saloons mercilessly. I have no doubt the place will be quite respectable in another five years. We slept quietly and dropped down south along the Missouri to Council Bluffs, from which the earlier part of this was written. The Missouri is a doleful stream, shallow, with huge sandbanks in the middle, and great swamps at the side, but striking green bluffs rising above on the east bank under which we went; and behind them I saw the sun rise in great beauty. We just crossed the river to Omaha to say we had been in Missouri and seen the terminus of the Union-Pacific Railway, and a fine go-ahead place it is, like Dubuque, only twice as big and finely situate on hills above the Missouri River. We are now back at Chicago, having seen more frontier towns and prairies on our way here, and in five days, by the good fortune of this private train, have done more than we could have managed otherwise in nine.