Excerpt from A Few Days at Nashotah

A short ride and we entered the broad belt of forest which for hundreds of miles stretches along the western shore of the lake. Occasionally we passed heavily loaded wagons, filled with the household utensils of German emigrants, who are crowding into the North West. Women, still wearing the picturesque head-dress they used at home, and young children, were sitting among the furniture, while the men, in their blue frocks, were trudging along wearily on foot. It was a sorrowful contrast to a scene I once witnessed on the Rhine. We were descending the river in a steamer which also carried some hundreds of emigrants who had just left the Father land for the distant regions of the New World; but notwithstanding their recent parting from the old familiar scenes of home, they seemed cheerful and buoyant, ' and beguiled the time by singing their national songs. They were looking forward to a new home, which the imagination represented to them as an El Dorado. But with these, the feeling was far different. They appeared sad and dispirited. Worn down by the long confinement of their sea-voyage, they were now in a land whose very tongue to them was strange, and they were beginning to encounter the realities of Western life.

For miles our road led through the forest - sometimes, entirely unbroken, its giant trees towering high above us - then a partial clearing, with the log-cabin of the first settler - then a better house of wood, being the second generation of buildings - or more gene rally, the wooden house built adjoining the log cabin, so that the latter could be used for the kitchen. The corn of the settler was growing among the charred and blackened trunks of trees, which the fire had left unconsumed, while the road at times wound among the stumps which remained as they had been left by the axe of the first emigrant. Then we would come to a tract covered with giant trees, dead and leafless, presenting the appearance of a winter forest. They had been girdled the previous year, and thus killed, while the owner of the soil had not yet had time to fell them.

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