Tuesday, July 24, 2012

A Beleaguered City


That’s been our fix for nearly a week.  To be sure, no foreign or traitor foe, with bristling bayonets and shotted guns, ready to deal death on our heads, hems us in, and threatens our conquest, but an insidious worker, noiselessly and irresistibly advancing, has surrounded us with breastworks, embankments and walls of multitudinous, crystalline particles.  For three days of this week communication with the rural districts was about as frequent as the visits of a Southern darkey to the school house; and the country people were becoming desperately hard up for news, and town folks began to scent afar off shortness of fodder.  Yesterday, however, a few farmers broke the blockade, and forced their way into town with their teams.  They were mostly from the neighborhood of the ‘Summit,’ where some thirty farmers clubbed together and extricated themselves from the wilderness of snow.  The river roads, both east and west, have been in quite good condition for several miles out.  One man yesterday morning, who lives about eight miles on the Hickory Grove road and walked into town, says that two sleighs that passes his house at 1 o’clock Wednesday afternoon, hadn’t reached town when he arrived yesterday morning.  Such an accumulation of snow of course prevents much enjoyment of it in the shape of sleigh riding, but we have had our share of that this winter, and can dispense with it if the clerk of the weather will hurry up the opening of the river. – Davenport Gazette, 7th.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 15, 1862, p. 4

No comments: