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Updated: June 29, 2025
His life had made it impossible to keep one horse very long at a time, and this one was an unknown quantity. Duane had only one plan the only plan possible in this case and that was to make the river-bottoms, where he might elude his pursuers in the willow brakes. Fifteen miles or so would bring him to the river, and this was not a hopeless distance for any good horse if not too closely pressed.
In one of his May walks in 1860, Thoreau sees the trail of the musquash in the mud along the river-bottoms, and he is taken by the fancy that, as our roads and city streets often follow the early tracks of the cow, so "rivers in another period follow the trail of the musquash." As if the river was not there before the musquash was!
"Quite like watering-place belles with extensive wardrobes," remarked Frank. "And takes about as long to put on the paint as to put on a fashionable dress," said Henry, "but not so long to remove it." Another thing that amused the boys was a balsa, or raft, made by the Mojaves, of the cane-grass which grew in the river-bottoms to the height of fifteen feet.
There were saw-logs and whole trees with their branching tops, lengths of fence and hen-coops and pig-pens; once there was a stable; and if the flood continued, there began to come swollen bodies of horses and cattle. This must have meant serious loss to the people living on the river-bottoms above, but the boys counted it all gain.
With the exception of narrow strips of woodland along the water-courses, almost the whole of this region is prairie, at least nine-tenths being wholly destitute of trees. The alluvial patches or river-bottoms are extensive, particularly on the Missouri, and generally of great fertility; and the soil of the upland is equal, if not superior, to that of any other upland tract in the United States.
Gooseberries of the common red kind are in abundance and just beginning to ripen, but there are no currants. The river has now widened to one hundred yards; it is deep, crowded with islands, and in many parts rapid. At the distance of seventeen miles, the timber disappears totally from the river-bottoms.
It was that spring, about fifty-four years ago, when the freshet, which always came in the spring, was the worst that anybody could remember. The country above the Boy's Town was under water for miles and miles. The river-bottoms were flooded so that the corn had to be all planted over again when the water went down.
When the first settlers of Illinois and Indiana came up from south of the Ohio River they had their choice of timber and prairie lands. Thinking the prairies worthless since land which could not raise a tree certainly could not raise crops these first occupants of the Middle West spent a generation or more, axe in hand, along the heavily timbered river-bottoms. The prairies were long in settling.
With the exception of a narrow strips of woodland along the water-courses, almost the whole of this region is prairie, at least nine-tenths being wholly destitute of trees. The alluvial patches or river-bottoms are extensive, particularly on the Missouri, and generally of great fertility; and the soil of the upland is equal, if not superior, to that of any other upland tract in the United States.
It is only the wariness born of fear which nowadays causes him to cling to the thick brush of the large river-bottoms throughout the plains country. When there were no rifle-bearing hunters in the land, to harass him and make him afraid, he roved thither and thither at will, in burly self-confidence.
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