FROM St.Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of the presence of active,energetic,intelligent,prosperous,practical nineteenth-century populations.The people don't dream,they work.
The happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outside aspect of things,and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort that everywhere appear.
Quincy is a notable example--a brisk,handsome,well-ordered city;and now,as formerly,interested in art,letters,and other high things.
But Marion City is an exception.Marion City has gone backwards in a most unaccountable way.This metropolis promised so well that the projectors tacked 'city'to its name in the very beginning,with full confidence;but it was bad prophecy.
When I first saw Marion City,thirty-five years ago,it contained one street,and nearly or quite six houses.
It contains but one house now,and this one,in a state of ruin,is getting ready to follow the former five into the river.
Doubtless Marion City was too near to Quincy.It had another disadvantage:it was situated in a flat mud bottom,below high-water mark,whereas Quincy stands high up on the slope of a hill.
In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England town:and these she has yet:broad,clean streets,trim,neat dwellings and lawns,fine mansions,stately blocks of commercial buildings.
And there are ample fair-grounds,a well kept park,and many attractive drives;library,reading-rooms,a couple of colleges,some handsome and costly churches,and a grand court-house,with grounds which occupy a square.The population of the city is thirty thousand.
There are some large factories here,and manufacturing,of many sorts,is done on a great scale.
La Grange and Canton are growing towns,but I missed Alexandria;was told it was under water,but would come up to blow in the summer.
Keokuk was easily recognizable.I lived there in 1857--an extraordinary year there in real-estate matters.The 'boom'was something wonderful.
Everybody bought,everybody sold--except widows and preachers;they always hold on;and when the tide ebbs,they get left.
Anything in the semblance of a town lot,no matter how situated,was salable,and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground had been sodded with greenbacks.
The town has a population of fifteen thousand now,and is progressing with a healthy growth.It was night,and we could not see details,for which we were sorry,for Keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city.
It was a pleasant one to live in long ago,and doubtless has advanced,not retrograded,in that respect.
A mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now.
This is the canal over the Rapids.It is eight miles long,three hundred feet wide,and is in no place less than six feet deep.
Its masonry is of the majestic kind which the War Department usually deals in,and will endure like a Roman aqueduct.
The work cost four or five millions.
After an hour or two spent with former friends,we started up the river again.Keokuk,a long time ago,was an occasional loafing-place of that erratic genius,Henry Clay Dean.
I believe I never saw him but once;but he was much talked of when I lived there.This is what was said of him--He began life poor and without education.But he educated himself--on the curbstones of Keokuk.He would sit down on a curbstone with his book,careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce and the tramp of the passing crowds,and bury himself in his studies by the hour,never changing his position except to draw in his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed;and when his book was finished,its contents,however abstruse,had been burnt into his memory,and were his permanent possession.
In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning,and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectual hand on it whenever it was wanted.
His clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,'except that they were raggeder,more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore more extravagantly picturesque),and several layers dirtier.
Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself.
He was an orator--by nature in the first place,and later by the training of experience and practice.When he was out on a canvass,his name was a lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around.
His theme was always politics.He used no notes,for a volcano does not need notes.In 1862,a son of Keokuk's late distinguished citizen,Mr.Claggett,gave me this incident concerning Dean--The war feeling was running high in Keokuk (in '61),and a great mass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new Athenaeum.
A distinguished stranger was to address the house.
After the building had been packed to its utmost capacity with sweltering folk of both ***es,the stage still remained vacant--the distinguished stranger had failed to connect.
The crowd grew impatient,and by and by indignant and rebellious.
About this time a distressed manager discovered Dean on a curb-stone,explained the dilemma to him,took his book away from him,rushed him into the building the back way,and told him to make for the stage and save his country.