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Show 20 WESTERN WILDS. had started an invalid, every day's walk made it easy to walk a little farther the next; and at the end of the second week I easily made twenty miles a day. If a man would be cured by nature, he must trust her be taken to her bosom, as it were. Many an invalid goes West for health, and imagines the climate has cured him, when, in truth, he has only forgotten his physic, and been charmed out of his cares, and taken to open air and abundant exercise. Iowa Falls, where the Iowa River leaves the " summit divide " prairies and plunges down a series of beautiful cascades to the level of the lower valley, was the location of the prettiest city on my route, and then the terminus of the Dubuque and Sioux City road. Thence I journeyed up Coon River and out to Wall Lake. To visit this place had been a dream of my boyhood. Twenty- five years ago it was represented as a marvelous work of the " mound builders." I found the " walls" there not so wonderful as described, but well worthy a visit ; not the work of any prehistoric race, but due entirely to the expansive force of ice. In the vicinity are at least a dozen lakes with the same formation some even more curious than the one most noted. They are on the " divide," between the waters which flow northward into the Minne-sota and those which drain southward; and in all countries such a region abounds in lakes. The Iowa winters freeze the lakes almost solid, and the ice gathers up stones, pebbles and mud, and year after year pushes them toward the shore;, then when the lake is full and frozen, it drives them Avith resistless energy into the " wall," till the latter looks like the most compact of man- made masonry. In some instances the water has cut a new outlet and drained the lake, and within a few years nature has begun the formation of a new wall inside the old one. Swans and wild geese abound in this region, which warmly invites the tourist, the scientist and the sportsman". Westward again, and nothing but prairie to be seen; an average of two or three families to the township, and half a day's travel at a time without sight of a house. The swiftly running streams, with hard bot-toms and pebbly banks, disappear, and sluggish sloughs take their place. Down a long slope for six or eight miles, the road brings one at last to a slough, sometimes with current enough to be called a creek, along which is found a scattering growth of timber, and sometimes a few en-closed farms. Thence one rises by slow degrees to another divide, and again down a slope to the next creek and settlement, from ten to thirty miles from the last. But the wave of immigration was rolling in; the railroad had been located on this route, and now the line I traversed presents a constant succession of cultivated fields and tasty homes; a |
