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New pine houses dotted prairies, unbroken save for the mile-long score of the delimiting plow. Long trains of emigrant-cars moved continually westward. The world seemed drunk with hope and enthusiasm. The fulfillment of Jim's careless prophecy had burst suddenly upon us. Such things as these were fresh in our memories when we reached Lattimore.
In the same manner the encroaching particles, drifting like the light dry snows of the prairies, have almost engulfed the Sphinx. Many times in the past the sand has been shoveled away to prevent the Sphinx from being hidden from sight, and if this excavation in which it now stands should be neglected for a time, the desert winds would fill the pit again and gradually cover the monument.
There was much need, too, for the utmost proficiency they could attain, for the very existence of the Indian tribes of the prairies depends on their success in hunting the buffalo. There are hundreds and thousands of North American savages who would undoubtedly perish and their tribes become extinct if the buffaloes were to leave the prairies or die out.
Its rivers and lakes teemed with edible fish; its great forests abounded with deer, elk, bears and raccoons; its vast plains and prairies were filled with herds of buffalo that existed up almost to the close of the eighteenth century; every swamp and morass was filled with countless thousands of geese, ducks, swan and cranes, and rodents like the beaver and other animals furnished the red man with the warmest of raiment in the coldest winter.
But if I have made your eyes see what I have tried to show, the colors and figures of the background still show themselves. I have now to put against that wonderful background, dim as it is, the new habitants. I suggested earlier the emergence of their gaunt figures from the forests and the processional of their ships of the prairies through the tall grass that seemed as the sea itself.
Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.
He went by rail as far as Felixopolis. There he takes a horse, and goes across the prairies to Broncho Junction; a three days' journey. I told him he wouldn't do much business on that route, but he said he was going partly for his health, and partly to see the country. He expected to reach Broncho Thursday night."
Then, early in June, the adventurers broke through the interminable wastes of dim woodland, and stood on the threshold of the beautiful blue-grass region of Kentucky; a land of running waters, of groves and glades, of prairies, cane-brakes, and stretches of lofty forest. It was teeming with game.
This broad but shallow stream flows for an immense distance through a wide and verdant valley scooped out of boundless prairies. It draws its main supplies, by several forks or branches, from the Rocky Mountains.
Wise men should have anticipated this, and, instead of reasoning from the size of our lakes, prairies, and mountains, and demanding epics and philosophies of us before we are fairly out of our primitive woods, the critics should have hastened to say, A colony must have time to strike root, and to draw up therefrom a new life, before it can arrive at valuable and genuine literary expression.
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