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.
Early in the morning after we reached the Platte, a long procession
of squalid savages approached our camp. Each was on foot, leading
his horse by a rope of bull-hide. His attire consisted merely of a
scanty cincture and an old buffalo robe, tattered and begrimed by
use, which hung over his shoulders. His head was close shaven,
except a ridge of hair reaching over the crown from the center of the
forehead, very much like the long bristles on the back of a hyena,
and he carried his bow and arrows in his hand, while his meager
little horse was laden with dried buffalo meat, the produce of his
hunting. Such were the first specimens that we met - and very
indifferent ones they were - of the genuine savages of the prairie.
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