As
Long As I Could See A Corn-Field Or A Tree I Was Not Satisfied.
Nor, Indeed, Was I Satisfied At Last.
To have been thoroughly on
the prairie, and in the prairie, I should have been a day's journey
from tilled land.
But I doubt whether that could now be done in
the State of Illinois. I got out into various patches and brought
away specimens of corn - ears bearing sixteen rows of grain, with
forty grains in each row, each ear bearing a meal for a hungry man.
At last we did find ourselves on the prairie, amid the waving
grass, with the land rolling on before us in a succession of gentle
sweeps, never rising so as to impede the view, or apparently
changing in its general level, but yet without the monotony of
flatness. We were on the prairie, but still I felt no
satisfaction. It was private property, divided among holders and
pastured over by private cattle. Salisbury Plain is as wild, and
Dartmoor almost wilder. Deer, they told me, were to be had within
reach of Dixon, but for the buffalo one has to go much farther
afield than Illinois. The farmer may rejoice in Illinois, but the
hunter and the trapper must cross the big rivers and pass away into
the Western Territories before he can find lands wild enough for
his purposes. My visit to the corn-fields of Illinois was in its
way successful, but I felt, as I turned my face eastward toward
Chicago, that I had no right to boast that I had as yet made
acquaintance with a prairie.
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