ST. LOUIS.— JEFFERSON CITY.— RETURN TO ST. LOUIS.— ALTON.— SPRINGFIELD.— FIRES ON THE PRAIRIES.— CHICAGO.— GRANARIES.— PACKING HOUSES.— LAKE MICHIGAN.— ARRIVAL AT INDIANAPOLIS.

Jefferson City, on the Missouri,
Nov. 6th, 1858.

Here we are really in the Far West, more than 150 miles from the junction of the Missouri with the Mississippi, though still 2950 from the source of this great-grandfather of waters—for I can give it a no less venerable name. We first caught sight of it, or struck the river, as the phrase is here, about 98 miles below this city, and for a long time we followed its banks so closely, that we could at any point have thrown a stone from the car into the river. At Hermann, a little German settlement on its banks, we stopped and had an excellent dinner, but it was so late before we left St. Louis, that we passed the greater part of what seemed very pretty scenery in the dark, so that I shall defer any further description of it till we return over the ground on Monday.

We were most unfortunate in our weather during our stay at St. Louis, and I had no opportunity of seeing the beauties of the neighbourhood, which we hear much extolled, but respecting which we are rather sceptical. The only drive we took, was to a new park being made outside the town, called Lafayette Park, which gave us anything but a pleasant impression of the entourage of St. Louis; we must admit, however, that a very short distance by railway brought us into a very pretty country, and no doubt the dismal weather and bad roads made our drive very different to what it might have been on a fine day. Still, with the impression fresh in our memory of our drive in the neighbourhood of Cincinnati in much the same sort of weather, we are compelled to think that the country about the Queen of the West and the banks of the Ohio greatly surpasses in beauty St. Louis and the muddy river which has so great a reputation in the world.

Springfield, Illinois, November 9th.—Although our damp disagreeable weather has not left us, we have contrived to see a good deal of Jefferson City. We made a dash a short way up the Missouri in a steamboat, and landed and took a walk on the northern side of the river, and as we exchanged a mud for a sandy soil, it was less disagreeable than on the south side. The northern shore, which from the opposite side seemed hilly and well wooded, is very pretty, but on landing the hills had receded to a distance, and we found a considerable plain between them and the river. Up to the water's edge, however, the country is well wooded. On the spot where we landed we saw a large tree, at least ten feet in diameter, burnt almost to its centre, and its fine head destroyed by fire; and on asking some bystanders if any one had intended to burn it down, they said, "Oh, no, some one has merely made a fire there to warm himself;" a strong proof of the little value put here on fine timber.

The view of Jefferson City from the opposite bank, looking down the river, is very striking. Being the capital of the state of Missouri, there was the usual Capitol or state-house, and, unlike most others that we have seen, the building with its large dome was completed. It is a fine edifice of white stone, standing at a great height above the river, on what is here called a bluff, namely, a rock rising perpendicularly from the water's edge. The principal part of the town is built along the heights, but the ground slopes in places, and the houses are then carried down to the river side. The railway runs under the cliff, and can be seen winding along up and down the river, for some distance each way; it has not yet been carried much further, as this is the last large town to which railways in the west reach; but, as its name, the Pacific Railway, implies, it is intended ultimately to be carried "right away" west till it joins the ocean. We went on Sunday to the Episcopal church. There was the Communion service, and a very good sermon on the subject of that ordinance.

We yesterday returned to St. Louis, and after a brief halt came on here. As our journey back to St. Louis was in the daytime, we had an opportunity of seeing the very interesting country which we passed on Saturday in the dark. The most remarkable feature of the road was crossing the Osage within 200 or 300 yards of its confluence with the Missouri. It is about 1,200 feet broad, and we saw in it one of those beautiful steamboats which give so much character here to the rivers. The Osage is navigable for these large boats for 200 miles above this place. We passed various other rivers, among others the Gasconade, at a spot memorable for a terrible catastrophe which happened on the day of the opening of the railway, when the first bridge which crossed it gave way as the train was passing, and nine out of thirteen cars were precipitated into the bed of the river; thirty people, chiefly leading characters of St. Louis, were killed, and many hundreds desperately hurt.

We have little more to say of St. Louis, as the museum was the only public building we visited. The great curiosity there is the largest known specimen of the mastodon. It is almost entire from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail, and measures ninety-six feet in length. We left St. Louis, and were glad to escape for a time at least out of a slave state. The "institution" was brought more prominently before us there than it has yet been, as St. Louis is the first town where we have seen it proclaimed in gold letters on a large board in the street, "Negroes bought and sold here." In the papers, also, yesterday, we saw an advertisement of a "fine young man" to be sold, to pay a debt.

We took our departure in the Alton steamboat, in order to see the first twenty-four miles of the Upper Mississippi, and the junction of that river and the Missouri, which takes place about six miles below Alton; both rivers, however, are very tame and monotonous, and it was only as we were reaching Alton, that the banks of the Mississippi assumed anything like height. Alton itself stands very high, and as it was getting dark when we arrived, the lights along the hills had a fine effect. We are told it is a pretty town, but it was dark when we landed, and we had to hurry into the train that brought us to this place. The steamboat in which we went up the river was a very fine one, but not at all fitted up in the sumptuous manner of our Newport boat. Papa paced the cabin, and made it 276 feet long, beyond which there was an outside smoking cabin, and then the forecastle.

Springfield is in the midst of the Grand Prairie, and, as we are not to leave it till the afternoon, we have been exploring the town, and, as far as we could, the prairie which comes close up to it; but the moment the plank pavement ceased, it was hopeless to get further, owing to the dreadfully muddy state of the road. This mud must be a great drawback to residing in a prairie town, as the streets are rendered impassable for pedestrians, unless at the plank crossings. On our way back to the hotel, we accosted a man standing at his door, whose strong Scotch accent, in reply to a question, told us at once where he came from. He asked us into his house, and gave us a good deal of information about the state of the country. He was originally a blacksmith at Inverary, and had after that pursued his calling in a very humble way in Fife and in Edinburgh, and came out here penniless twenty-six years ago, when there were only a few huts in the place; but he has turned his trade to better account here, for he lives in a comfortable house, and has $50,000, or 10,000l. invested in the country. He seemed very pleased to see us, and talked of the Duke of Argyle's family, as well as of the Durhams, Bethunes, Anstruthers, &c. Having lived when in Fife, at Largo, he seemed quite familiar with the Durhams, with the General's little wife, and with Sir Philip's adventures, from the time of the loss of the Royal George downwards.

This is the capital of Illinois, and the state-house here, too, is finished, and is a fine building. The governor has a state residence, which is really a large and handsome building, but is altogether surpassed by the private residence of an ex-governor, who lives in a sumptuous house, to judge from its external accompaniments of conservatory, &c.; it is nearly opposite our Scotch friend's abode, but the ex-governor dealt in "lumber" instead of iron, and from being a chopper of wood, has raised himself to his present position.

Chicago, Nov. 10th.—We did not reach Chicago last night till 12 o'clock, our train, for the first time since we have been in America, having failed to reach its destination at the proper time; but the delay of two hours on this occasion was fairly accounted for by the bad state of the rails, owing to the late rains. Before it became dark we saw one or two wonderful specimens of towns growing up in this wilderness of prairie. The houses, always of wood and painted white, are neat, clean, and well-built. There is, generally, a good-looking hotel, and invariably a church, and often several of these, for although one would probably contain all the inhabitants, yet they are usually of many denominations, and then each one has its own church. About twenty or thirty miles from Chicago, we saw a very extensive tract of prairie on fire, which quite illuminated the sky, and, as the night was very dark, showed distinctly the distant trees and houses, clearly defining their outline against the horizon. On the other side of us, there was a smaller fire, but so close as to allow us to see the flames travelling along the surface of the ground. These fires are very common; we saw no less than five that night in the course of our journey.

We have been busily employed to-day in going over Chicago. The streets are wide and fine, but partake too abundantly of prairie mud to make walking agreeable: some of the shops are very large; a bookseller's shop, to which papa and I made our way, professes to be the largest in the world, and it is certainly one of the best supplied I ever saw with all kinds of children's books. From the bookseller's we went to papa's bankers, Messrs. Swift and Co.; Mr. Swift took us to the top of the Court-house, a wonderful achievement for me, but well worth the trouble, as the view of the town was very surprising. We went afterwards to call on William's friend, Mr. Wilkins, the consul, where we met Lord Radstock. Mr. Wilkins kindly took us to see Mr. Sturge's great granary; there are several of these in the town, but this, and a neighbouring one, capable of holding between them four or five million bushels of corn, are the two largest. The grain is brought into the warehouse, without leaving the railway, the rails running into the building. It is then carried to the top of the warehouse "in bulk," by means of hollow cylinders arranged on an endless chain. The warehouse is built by the side of the river, so that the vessels which are to carry the corn to England or elsewhere, come close under the walls, and the grain is discharged into the vessels by means of large wooden pipes or troughs, through which it is shot at once into the hold. Mr. Wilkins has seen 80,000 bushels discharged in this manner, in one day.

We afterwards drove about six miles into the country, through oceans of mud, to see one of the great slaughter and packing-houses. I did not venture out of the carriage, but the proprietor took Mr. Wilkins, Lord Radstock, and papa through every part of the building. In a yard below were a prodigious number of immense oxen, and the first process was to see one of these brought into the inside of the building by means of a windlass; which drew it along by a rope attached to its horns and passing through a ring on the floor.

The beast, by means of men belabouring it from behind, and this rope dragging it in front, was brought in and its head drawn down towards the ring, when a man with a sledge-hammer felled it instantaneously to the ground; and without a struggle it was turned over on its back by the side of eight or ten of its predecessors who had just shared the same fate, and were already undergoing the various processes to which they had afterwards to be subjected. The first of these was to rip up and remove the intestines of the poor beast, and it was then skinned and cut lengthways into two parts, when the still reeking body was hung up to cool. The immense room was hung with some hundreds of carcases of these huge animals thus skinned and cleft in two. The process, from the time the animal leaves the yard alive till the time it is split and hung up in two pieces, occupied less than a quarter of an hour. At the end of two days they are dismembered, salted, packed in casks, the best parts to be shipped to England, and the inferior parts to be eaten by the free and enlightened citizens of this great continent. The greater number of these beasts come from Texas, and have splendid horns, sometimes three feet long.

The next thing they saw was the somewhat similar treatment of the poor pigs; but these are animals, of which for size there is nothing similar to be seen in England, excepting, perhaps, at the cattle show. At least, one which papa saw hanging up weighed 400 lbs., and looked like a young elephant. In the yard below there was a vast herd of these, 1500 having arrived by railway the night before; the number killed and cut up daily averages about 500. It takes a very few minutes only from the time the pig leaves the pen to its being hung up, preparatory to its being cut up and salted. They first get a knock on the head like the more noble beasts already mentioned; they are then stuck, in order to be thoroughly bled; after this they are plunged headlong into a long trough of boiling water, in which they lie side by side in a quiescent state, very different to the one they were in a few minutes before, when they were quarrelling in a most unmannerly manner in the yard below. From this trough the one first put in is, by a most ingenious machine, taken up from underneath, and tossed over into an empty trough, where in less than a minute he is entirely denuded of his bristles, and passed over to be cleft and hung up. The trough holds about eight or ten thus lying side by side, and the moment one is taken out at one end, another is put in at the other, and they thus all float through the length of the trough, and are taken out in order; but so rapid is the process, that no one pig is long in; in fact, the whole business occupies only a very few minutes per pig. Every part is turned to account, the mass of bristles being converted into tooth brushes, &c. In the huge larder, in the story next above the oxen, there were about 1500 unhappy pigs hung up to cool, before being cut up, salted, packed, and sent off. There are several establishments of this nature in Chicago, but only one of equal extent to the one papa saw. About 400,000 pigs are shipped every year from Chicago. I do not know the total number of cattle, but this house alone slaughters and sends away 10,000. There were places on an enormous scale for preparing tallow and lard, and there were many other details equally surprising, which I have not now time to describe; but papa says that the smells were most offensive, and that it was altogether a very horrible sight, and it was one I was well pleased to escape.

Among the other wonders of Chicago, I must do honour to its hotel, which I should say was as good as any we have yet seen in America. These American hotels are certainly marvellous "institutions," though we were getting beyond the limits of the good ones when we reached Jefferson City. That, however, at St. Louis is a very fair sample of a good one.

Indianapolis, Nov. 11th.—We arrived here late this afternoon, and have not been able as yet to see anything of the town, I shall therefore defer a description of it to my next. The road from Chicago was not without its interest, though we are becoming very tired of the prairies. At first starting we went for many miles along the borders of Lake Michigan, which we again came upon at a very remarkable spot, Michigan city, about sixty miles from Chicago. Along the first part of the lake, in the neighbourhood of Chicago, the shore consists of fine sand, in strips of considerable width, and flat like an ordinary sea beach; but at Michigan city the deep sand reached to a considerable distance inland, and then rose into high dunes, precisely like those on the French coast. As we had to wait an hour there, papa and I scrambled up one of these, and although below there was deep loose sand, yet above it was hard and solid, and bound together with little shrubs like the French dunes. The view of the lake from the top was very pretty, and boundless towards the north, we being at the southern extremity. I picked up a few stones on the beach as a memorial of this splendid lake. We were very much tempted, when at Chicago, to see more of it, and to go to Milwaukee and Madison, but we were strongly advised by Mr. Wilkins not to go further north at this season. The wreaths of snow which during the night have fallen in patches along the road, and greeted our eyes this morning, confirmed us in the wisdom of this advice, and we are now bending our steps once more towards the south. We are still here in the midst of prairie, but more wooded than in our journey of Tuesday. We crossed to-day, at Lafayette, the Wabash, which we had crossed previously at Vincennes, and here, as there, it is a very noble river. This must end my journal for the present.