A Trip to Manitoba by FitzGibbon, Mary, 1851-1915

I cannot leave Duluth without speaking of the "girls" in the hotel, as they were called, in order not to wound the sensitive democracy of the Yankee nature, which abhors the name of servant. There were three in the great dining-saloon, whose superabundance of empty chairs and tables gave even greater dreariness to the house than its long, empty corridors. Pretty fair girls they were, neat in dress, but so tightly laced that it was painful to look at them. Their slow, stiff, automatic movements were suggestive of machinery, and in keeping with the sleepy spell cast over the town. All the lithe, living gracefulness of their figures was destroyed for the sake of drawing in an inch or two of belt. Watching them, I attacked my breakfast with greater energy, to prove to myself that there was something substantial about the premises.

One word respecting the treatment of luggage in that part of the world by porters and officials, whose organ of destructiveness seems to be abnormally developed. Boxes were thrown pell-mell into the hold, or tossed on end out of high baggage-vans, with such unnecessary violence that nothing less than cases of solid iron or stronger metal could have stood it. Trunks, "stationary" boxes warranted to stand any ill-usage, were cracked and broken; and the poor emigrants' boxes, of comparatively slight construction, soon became a mass of ruins, with their contents scattered on the ground. It was the same everywhere--at Duluth, at Glyndon, and at Fisher's Landing, where we took the Red River boat. At Glyndon half the baggage was piled on an open truck, and the heavy rain we passed through that night completed the ruin the officials began. A member of the Hudson Bay Company, who had travelled a great deal over this continent, said he found it best to carry his baggage in a small hand-valise, or in a very large trunk so heavy that it required two men to move it; anything between the two was invariably smashed.

CHAPTER III.

The Mississippi--The Rapids--Aerial Railway Bridges--Breakfast at Braynor--Lynch Law--Card-sharpers--Crowding in the Cars--Woman's Rights!--The Prairie--"A Sea of Fire"--Crookstown--Fisher's Landing--Strange Quarters--"The Express-man's Bed"--Herding like Sheep--On board the _Minnesota_.