It was on a dark, rainy evening in the month of September, 1830, that we
went on board the steamer "Henry Clay," to take passage for Green Bay.
All our friends in Detroit had congratulated us upon our good fortune in
being spared the voyage in one of the little schooners which at this
time afforded the ordinary means of communication with the few and
distant settlements on Lakes Huron and Michigan.

Each one had some experience to relate of his own or Of his friends'
mischances in these precarious journeys--long detentions on the St.
Clair flats--furious head-winds off Thunder Bay, or interminable Calms
at Mackinac or the Manitous. That which most enhanced our sense of
peculiar good luck, was the true story of one of our relatives having
left Detroit in the month of June and reached Chicago in the September
following, having been actually three months in performing what is
sometimes accomplished by even a sail-vessel in four days.

But the certainty of encountering similar misadventures would have
weighed little with me. I was now to visit, nay, more, to become a
resident of that land which had, for long years, been to me a region of
romance. Since the time when, as a child, my highest delight had been in
the letters of a dear relative, describing to me his home and mode of
life in the "Indian country," and still later, in his felicitous
narration of a tour with General Cass, in 1820, to the sources of the
Mississippi--nay, even earlier, in the days when I stood at my teacher's
knee, and spelled out the long word Mich-i-li-mack-i-nac, that distant
land, with its vast lakes, its boundless prairies, and its mighty
forests, had possessed a wonderful charm for my imagination. Now I was
to see it!--it was to be my home!

Our ride to the quay, through the dark by-ways, in a cart, the only