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In August 1869 journalist John Trowbridge visited Duluth Township, and his lofty description of the nascent community appeared in Atlantic magazine the following year. Here are his first impressions of the Head of the Lakes after his party boarded two steamships at Fond du Lac:
[inset] As the two little steamers found their way out from among the windings of the St. Louis River (where half the time one boat appeared, to those on board the other, to be gliding about, not on any stream, but breast-deep in a grassy sea of flat meadows), and desperately puffing and panting, put their noses into the white teeth of an easterly gale on St. Louis Bay, a bleak cluster of new-looking wooden houses, on a southward-fronting hillside, was pointed out to us as the Mecca of our pilgrimage.
The first sight, to us shivering on deck, was not particularly cheering. But as we passed on into Superior Bay, and a stroke of light from a rift in the clouds fell like a prophetic finger on the little checkered spot brightening in the wilderness, the view became more interesting. The town lies on the lower terraces of wooded hills which rise from the water’s edge, by easy grades, to the distant background of a magnificent mountain range—a truly imposing site, to one who can look beyond those cheap wooden frames—the staging whereby the real city is built—and see the civilization of the future clustering along the shore, and hanging upon the benches of that ample amphitheater.
The two bays were evidently once an open basin of the lake, from which they have been cut off, one after the other, by points of land formed by the action of its waves meeting the current of the river. Between the lake and bay is Minnesota Point—an enormous bar seven miles in length, covered by a long procession of trees and bushes, which appear to be marching in solid column, after their captain, the lighthouse, across the head of the lake, towards the land of Wisconsin. It is like a mighty arm thrust down from the north shore to take the fury of the lake storms on one side, and to protect the haven'thus formed on the other. Seated on the rocky shoulder of this arm, with one foot on the lake, and the other on the bay, is the infant city of Duluth….
Situated at the western extremity of the grandest lake and river chain in the world—that vast freshwater Mediterranean which reaches from the Gulf of St. Lawrence almost to the center of North America—it required no great degree of sagacity to perceive that here was to be the key to the quarter of the hemisphere—or hereabouts. Wherever was established the practical head of navigation between the northern range of States and the vastly more extensive undeveloped region beyond, there must be another and perhaps even a greater Chicago….” [inset]