which here rushes swiftly over a stony
bed, they confessed to the fever and ague. At Naperville, pleasantly
situated among numerous groves and little prairies swelling into hills, we
heard that the season was the most sickly the inhabitants had known. Here,
at Chicago, which boasts, and with good reason, I believe, of its healthy
site, dysenteries and bilious attacks are just now very common, with
occasional cases of fever.

It is a common remark in this country, that the first cultivation of the
earth renders any neighborhood more or less unhealthy. "Nature," said a
western man to me, some years since, "resents the violence done her, and
punishes those who first break the surface of the earth with the plough."
The beautiful Rock River district, with its rapid stream, its noble
groves, its banks disposed in natural terraces, with fresh springs gushing
at their foot, and airy prairies stretching away from their summits, was
esteemed one of the most healthy countries in the world as long as it had
but few inhabitants. With the breaking up of the soil came in bilious
fever and intermittents. A few years of cultivation will render the
country more healthy, and these diseases will probably disappear, as they
have done in some parts of western New York. I can remember the time when
the "Genesee Country," as it was called, was thought quite a sickly
region--a land just in the skirts of the shadow of death. It is now as
healthy, I believe, as any part of the state.

Letter XXXIV.

Voyage to Sault Ste. Marie.

Sault Ste. Marie, _August_ 13, 1846.

When we left Chicago in the steamer, the other morning, all the vessels in
the port had their flags displayed at half-mast in token of
dissatisfaction with the fate of the harbor bill. You may not recollect
that the bill set apart half a million of dollars for the construction or
improvement of various harbors of the lakes, and authorized the deepening
of the passages through the St. Clair Flats, now intricate and not quite
safe, by which these bulky steamers make their way from the lower lakes to
the upper. The people of the lake region had watched the progress of the
bill through Congress with much interest and anxiety, and congratulated
each other when at length it received a majority of votes in both houses.
The President's veto has turned these congratulations into expressions of
disappointment which are heard on all sides, sometimes expressed with a
good deal of