Chapter XX

_Music and Art_ In the middle of the nineteenth century, many an artist whose canvases found no market in the older cities, found ready bidders for his brush, to decorate the thirty-foot paddle-boxes of the big side-wheelers with figures of heroic size; or, with finer touch, to embellish the cabins of Western steamboats with oil paintings in every degree of merit and demerit. The boat carrying my father and his family from Rock Island to Prescott, upon my first appearance on the Father of Waters, was the "Minnesota…