第23章

"Take your rifles, boys," said Kearslcy, "and we'll have fresh meat for supper." This inducement was quite sufficient.The ten men left their wagons and set out in hot haste, some on horseback and some on foot, in pursuit of the supposed buffalo.Meanwhile a high grassy ridge shut the game from view; but mounting it after half an hour's running and riding, they found themselves suddenly confronted by about thirty mounted Pawnees! The amazement and consternation were mutual.Having nothing but their bows and arrows, the Indians thought their hour was come, and the fate that they were no doubt conscious of richly deserving about to overtake them.So they began, one and all, to shout forth the most cordial salutations of friendship, running up with extreme earnestness to shake hands with the Missourians, who were as much rejoiced as they were to escape the expected conflict.

A low undulating line of sand-hills bounded the horizon before us.

That day we rode ten consecutive hours, and it was dusk before we entered the hollows and gorges of these gloomy little hills.At length we gained the summit, and the long expected valley of the Platte lay before us.We all drew rein, and, gathering in a knot on the crest of the hill, sat joyfully looking down upon the prospect.

It was right welcome; strange too, and striking to the imagination, and yet it had not one picturesque or beautiful feature; nor had it any of the features of grandeur, other than its vast extent, its solitude, and its wilderness.For league after league a plain as level as a frozen lake was outspread beneath us; here and there the Platte, divided into a dozen threadlike sluices, was traversing it, and an occasional clump of wood, rising in the midst like a shadowy island, relieved the monotony of the waste.No living thing was moving throughout the vast landscape, except the lizards that darted over the sand and through the rank grass and prickly-pear just at our feet.And yet stern and wild associations gave a singular interest to the view; for here each man lives by the strength of his arm and the valor of his heart.Here society is reduced to its original elements, the whole fabric of art and conventionality is struck rudely to pieces, and men find themselves suddenly brought back to the wants and resources of their original natures.

We had passed the more toilsome and monotonous part of the journey;but four hundred miles still intervened between us and Fort Laramie;and to reach that point cost us the travel of three additional weeks.

During the whole of this time we were passing up the center of a long narrow sandy plain, reaching like an outstretched belt nearly to the Rocky Mountains.Two lines of sand-hills, broken often into the wildest and most fantastic forms, flanked the valley at the distance of a mile or two on the right and left; while beyond them lay a barren, trackless waste--The Great American Desert--extending for hundreds of miles to the Arkansas on the one side, and the Missouri on the other.Before us and behind us, the level monotony of the plain was unbroken as far as the eye could reach.Sometimes it glared in the sun, an expanse of hot, bare sand; sometimes it was veiled by long coarse grass.Huge skulls and whitening bones of buffalo were scattered everywhere; the ground was tracked by myriads of them, and often covered with the circular indentations where the bulls had wallowed in the hot weather.From every gorge and ravine, opening from the hills, descended deep, well-worn paths, where the buffalo issue twice a day in regular procession down to drink in the Platte.The river itself runs through the midst, a thin sheet of rapid, turbid water, half a mile wide, and scarce two feet deep.Its low banks for the most part without a bush or a tree, are of loose sand, with which the stream is so charged that it grates on the teeth in drinking.The naked landscape is, of itself, dreary and monotonous enough, and yet the wild beasts and wild men that frequent the valley of the Platte make it a scene of interest and excitement to the traveler.Of those who have journeyed there, scarce one, perhaps, fails to look back with fond regret to his horse and his rifle.