Finding Her Wholly Uncontrollable,
We Exchanged Her For Another, With Which We Were Furnished By Our
Friend Mr. Boone Of Westport, A Grandson Of Daniel Boone, The
Pioneer.
This foretaste of prairie experience was very soon followed
by another.
Westport was scarcely out of sight, when we encountered
a deep muddy gully, of a species that afterward became but too
familiar to us; and here for the space of an hour or more the car
stuck fast.
CHAPTER II
BREAKING THE ICE
Both Shaw and myself were tolerably inured to the vicissitudes of
traveling. We had experienced them under various forms, and a birch
canoe was as familiar to us as a steamboat. The restlessness, the
love of wilds and hatred of cities, natural perhaps in early years to
every unperverted son of Adam, was not our only motive for
undertaking the present journey. My companion hoped to shake off the
effects of a disorder that had impaired a constitution originally
hardy and robust; and I was anxious to pursue some inquiries relative
to the character and usages of the remote Indian nations, being
already familiar with many of the border tribes.
Emerging from the mud-hole where we last took leave of the reader, we
pursued our way for some time along the narrow track, in the
checkered sunshine and shadow of the woods, till at length, issuing
forth into the broad light, we left behind us the farthest outskirts
of that great forest, that once spread unbroken from the western
plains to the shore of the Atlantic.
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