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Show 376 WESTERN WILDS. Joe Agnew, of Pontoosuc, fourteen miles above Nauvoo, afterwards confessed that he set it on fire. He had suffered at the hands of the Mormons, and sworn no trace ' of them should cumber the soil of Illinois. The walls long stood in such perfect preservation that the citizens determined again to refit it for an academy. But in November, 1850, a fearful hurricane swept down the river, and threw down most of the structure. From the deck of a Mississippi steamer Nauvoo, which once had fourteen thousand inhabitants, now looks like a suburb of retired country seats, stretching for two or three miles up a handsome slope ; and thousands yearly pass on the river admiring the rural beauty of the place, but little thinking that a third of a century since it was the largest city in Illinois, and the most notorious in America, the chosen stronghold of a most peculiar faith and destined capital of a vast religious empire. Thence by steamer to Burlington, and thence by the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad to Council Bluffs. There I took the north-ward route, and in due time arrived at Sioux City, which had greatly improved in the year since 1 last visited it. The " Hawkeyes," ( State designation for Iowa people), are a progressive race ; but the " lay of the country " is such that their energy must ever tend to build up a great State rather than any one great city. The growth of Iowa in wealth and population is amazing, but she has no metropolis which takes the place Chicago does in Illinois or St. Louis in Missouri. Her development is destined to proceed on a different plan. We staged it again to Yankton, along the line where the S. C. & Y. Railroad now runs ; and found the inhabitants hotly engaged in the great job of saving the country. Dakota Territory has always been noted for the heat and acrimony of her politics ; and though the Grant- Greeley campaign was marked for its bitterness, the storm in the rest of the nation was as the balminess of a May morning com-pared with its fury in Dakota. Now, General McCook, Secretary of the Territory, and one of the " Fighting McCook's," was the central figure of a local quarrel. A year or two later he attacked a delicate little banker named Wintermute, and pounded him almost to a jelly. Wintermute walked out, procured a pistol, and returning, shot Mc- Cook dead in the ball- room ! I could not join in the cry for venge-ance which went over the country, for I knew the slayer to be a naturally inoffensive man, who had been cruelly outraged. Most of the Federal officials made it a personal matter to assist in the pros-ecution of Wintermute, but western juries are proverbially lenient |