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Show 382 WESTERN WILDS. bread, potatoes and " green truck," with an occasional mess of fish or game. It was a nice country for a delicate young student, just removed from school on account of bad health. I hoed corn, drove teams, chopped wood and cultivated muscle. There was plenty to eat, such as it was, but no luxuries, and before the close of the year I was again in sound health. But I have no desire to repeat the experi-ence. There was too much pure Darwinism in such a country " nat-ural selection and survival of the fittest." The man who could not accommodate himself rapidly to poverty and hardships, had to die or emigrate. Better crops came, and the settlers looked forward to the end of their troubles, when the Sioux war of 1862 suddenly cut off' their hopes, and many of my friends in Blue- earth County were ruined, a few losing their lives. But the country had natural wealth in abun-dance, and Yankee energy has triumphed over all difficulties. After thirteen years I entered a rich and prosperous county by rail, where I had tramped, knapsack in hand, through a comparative wilderness. The Winnebago Reservation, unbroken by the plow when I first crossed it, is now a populous farming district; and Mankato, then a straggling village of six or eight hundred, is now a flourishing city of five thousand people. But the effects of the " hard times" of 1857 7 59 still remain in many places, in the shape of interminable lawsuits, unsettled titles, broken fortunes, neighborhood feuds, and men whose energy is gone and their temper soured by disappointment. Many a Minnesota woman is prematurely old from the troubles of that period, and even in the faces of those I then knew as children I fancy I can see some pinching lines which ought not to mar the visage of bloom-ing youth, unpleasing reminders of a childhood passed without its natural pleasures, and stinted because of parental poverty. Thence to St. Paul I noted, with the pleasure of a pioneer, the great improvements of thirteen years. Hamlets have become large towns; unimportant towns have grown to cities. St. Paul I found nearly trebled in size, and lively with twenty thousand visitors attending the State Fair. On the grounds were specimens of vegetation from every spot for seven hundred miles north and west. Notable among these were bunches of wild rice from the northern lakes ; monster turnips and beets from the line of the Northern Pacific ; native grass from Red River Valley, four feet long, and wheat grown jat Fort Garry, Red River Settlement, B. A*., which yielded seventy bushels per acre. St. Paul is in the south- eastern corner, and is the natural entrcpdt, of a wheat-growing region four hundred miles square. Fertile land continues to |