oneers_. No road or transport was
alleged to exist. We persevered. Indians and trappers beset us with
their projects of tracking and portage by the St. Croix and other
rivers, requiring a camp life with strange companions of nearly a month
to accomplish the distance of only one hundred and sixty-three miles,
equivalent to that of Albany from New York. A military road direct
through the wilderness had been often surveyed, and once cut through, of
about eighty feet width, to near Sunrise City, fifty miles from St.
Paul; at which point the dense forest spreads into oak openings and
beautiful prairies. This single cutting, long overgrown in lofty pines,
with the frequent surveys and contracts, from the year 1852 to 1857, had
cost the United States Government, for this distance of about one
hundred and twelve miles, $150,000; and no actual road had ever yet been
made. Fortunately for our enterprise, we met a gentleman who had just
groped through safely on horseback. We were reassured, and engaged the
only available wagon and team--a small, frail affair, devoid of cover,
seats, or springs; and, with ample provisions, perched upon our luggage,
we rolled out of Superior City that evening, and, passing its
significantly large cemetery, we at once entered the forest. These woods
are chiefly of pine, cedar, tamarack, or hemlock, gigantic in size, a
dreary solitude, unvisited by any bird or game, save an occasional hawk
or owl. They are but the southern outposts of that forest army which
begirds Hudson's Bay, and spreads its gloomy barrier of the same trees
around the dominions of the Ice King, while it is the only forest to be
met with in all the Mississippi Valley.

The width of about eighty feet--that theoretical road for which the
United States had paid so often and so well--was seen between the
mightiest sentinel trees; but in the midst had sprung up a fresh growth,
often nearly one hundred feet high, surrounded by huge stumps, and heavy
undergrowth of the renewing forest, varied with hopeless mudholes and
swamps, and only at intervals of about twenty miles was there any
habitation.

Such was the _great military road_. Perhaps its progress equalled the
actual wants of this region; for population had not yet crowded any of
the forest borders. It was then by the adjoining townships, under State
laws, feebly commencing to be really made as a road; and frequently we
halted at the camps of these hardy sons of toil. Our first twent