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Show 136 Early Western Travels [ VoL 26 At their base is spread out a beautiful prairie, its tall grass-tops and bright- died flowerets nodding to the soft summer wind. Along its eastern border is extended a range of neat edifices, while lower down sleep the calm, dear waters of the lake, unruffled by a ripple, and reflecting from its placid bosom the stupendous vegetation of the wooded alluvion beyond. It was near the dose of a day of withering sultriness that we reached Peoria. Passing the Kickapoo, or Red Bud Creek,* a sweep in the stream opened before the eye a panorama of that magnificent water- sheet of which I have spoken, so calm and motionless that its mirror surface seemed suspended in the golden mistiness of the summer atmosphere which floated over it. As we were approaching the village a few sweet notes of a bugle struck die ear; and in a few moments a lengthened troop of cavalry, with baggage- cars and military paraphernalia, was behdd winding over a distant roll of the prairie, their arms glittering gayly in the horizontal beams of the sinking sun as the ranks appeared, were lost, reappeared, and then, by an inequality in the route, were concealed from the view. The steamer " Helen Mar " was lying at the landing as we rounded up, most terribly shattered by the collapsing of the flue of one of her boilers a few days before in the vicinity. She had been swept by the death- blast from one extremity [ 109] to the other, and everything was remaining just as when the acddent occurred, even to the pallets upon which had been stretched the mangled bodies, and the remedies applied for their relief. The disasters of steam have become, till of late, of such ordinary occurrence upon the waters of the West, that they have been thought of comparatively but little; yet in no aspect does the angel of • Kickapoo Creek rises in Peoria County, flows southeasterly and enters Illinois River two miles below Peoria.- ED. |