The Shouts Of Our Scattered Party,
And Now And Then A Report Of A Rifle, Rang Amid The Breathing
Stillness Of The Forest.
We rode forth again with regret into the
broad light of the open prairie.
Little more than a hundred miles
now separated us from the frontier settlements. The whole
intervening country was a succession of verdant prairies, rising in
broad swells and relieved by trees clustering like an oasis around
some spring, or following the course of a stream along some fertile
hollow. These are the prairies of the poet and the novelist. We had
left danger behind us. Nothing was to be feared from the Indians of
this region, the Sacs and Foxes, the Kansas and the Osages. We had
met with signal good fortune. Although for five months we had been
traveling with an insufficient force through a country where we were
at any moment liable to depredation, not a single animal had been
stolen from us, and our only loss had been one old mule bitten to
death by a rattlesnake. Three weeks after we reached the frontier
the Pawnees and the Comanches began a regular series of hostilities
on the Arkansas trail, killing men and driving off horses. They
attacked, without exception, every party, large or small, that passed
during the next six months.
Diamond Spring, Rock Creek, Elder Grove, and other camping places
besides, were passed all in quick succession. At Rock Creek we found
a train of government provision wagons, under the charge of an
emaciated old man in his seventy-first year.
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