And I remember Muscatine—­still more pleasantly—­for its summer sunsets.  I have never seen any, on either side of the ocean, that equaled them.  They used the broad smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it every imaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintinesses and delicacies of the opal, all the way up, through cumulative intensities, to blinding purple and crimson conflagrations which were enchanting to the eye, but sharply tried it at the same time.  All the Upper Mississippi region has these extraordinary sunsets as a familiar spectacle.  It is the true Sunset Land:  I am sure no other country can show so good a right to the name.  The sunrises are also said to be exceedingly fine.  I do not know.

Chapter 58 On the Upper River

The big towns drop in, thick and fast, now:  and between stretch processions of thrifty farms, not desolate solitude.  Hour by hour, the boat plows deeper and deeper into the great and populous North-west; and with each successive section of it which is revealed, one’s surprise and respect gather emphasis and increase.  Such a people, and such achievements as theirs, compel homage.  This is an independent race who think for themselves, and who are competent to do it, because they are educated and enlightened; they read, they keep abreast of the best and newest thought, they fortify every weak place in their land with a school, a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live under law.  Solicitude for the future of a race like this is not in order.

This region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its babyhood.  By what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecast what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity.  It is so new that the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not visited it.  For sixty years, the foreign tourist has steamed up and down the river between St. Louis and New Orleans, and then gone home and written his book, believing he had seen all of the river that was worth seeing or that had anything to see.  In not six of all these books is there mention of these Upper River towns—­for the reason that the five or six tourists who penetrated this region did it before these towns were projected.  The latest tourist of them all (1878) made the same old regulation trip—­he had not heard that there was anything north of St. Louis.

Yet there was.  There was this amazing region, bristling with great towns, projected day before yesterday, so to speak, and built next morning.  A score of them number from fifteen hundred to five thousand people.  Then we have Muscatine, ten thousand; Winona, ten thousand; Moline, ten thousand; Rock Island, twelve thousand; La Crosse, twelve thousand; Burlington, twenty-five thousand; Dubuque, twenty-five thousand; Davenport, thirty thousand; St. Paul, fifty-eight thousand, Minneapolis, sixty thousand and upward.