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Updated: May 21, 2025
And if I had ever returned, we should have passed by the thundering ledges of New England, Jersey surfs and shallows, the sand-bars of the Carolinas, the shores of Florida lying like a faint green cloud long and low upon the horizon, sailing a thousand miles again in our own waters. Enormous borders! and throughout their vast stretch happiness and promise!
It was a winding and sluggish creek, encumbered with driftwood and choked by sand-bars; but it flowed through a country already filled with ambitious settlers, where the roads were atrociously bad, becoming in rainy seasons wide seas of pasty black mud, and remaining almost impassable for weeks at a time.
It was considerably after noon when we left Petropavlovsk, and owing to the incompetency of our Kamchadal crew, and the frequency of sand-bars, night overtook us on the river some distance below Okuta. Selecting a place where the bank was dry and accessible, we beached our whale-boat and prepared for our first bivouac in the open air.
In the other direction several sand-bars showed brown, ribbed backs, sparsely covered with coarse grass, and Leigh wished that he could find himself dropped upon one of them, that he might have the pleasure of wading ashore. The fancy put him in a better frame of mind, and the afternoon began to brighten.
Riding at anchor on a sunny sea, they lowered their boats, crossed the bar that obstructed the entrance, and floated on a basin of deep and sheltered water, alive with leaping fish. Indians were running along the beach and out upon the sand-bars, beckoning them to land. They pushed their boats ashore and disembarked, sailors, soldiers, and eager young nobles.
Now we had issued into the untrammeled prairies, here and there humanized by an isolated shack or a lonely traveler by horse or wagon, but in the main a vast sun-baked dead sea of gentle, silent undulations extending, brownish, clear to the horizons. The only refreshing sights were the Platte River, flowing blue and yellow among sand-bars and islands, and the side streams that we passed.
This would carry them past any treacherous sand-bars. They would then take another tack and resume their former course. At a few minutes before noon that day they rose far from the island. The sun, a pale yellow disk, shone through a thin haze close to the surface of the pack. And yet it was high noon. This was, perhaps, to be their last bearing taken by the light of the sun.
We were now at the Arctic Circle. For three days we had no sunshine, and flurries of snow were frequent. The mountain tops, as well as the banks and sand-bars of the river, were spread with a thin covering of snow; enough at least to give a wintry aspect. This added to the leaden sky above, made the warmth of big coal fires acceptable indoors, and fur coats comfortable on the decks.
Most rivers have sand-bars, sunken rocks or logs in the channel, making the passage of boats difficult and dangerous. Others are well suited for navigation, except at points where rapids and falls make it impossible for boats to pass. The Ohio, the Tennessee, the Missouri and the upper Mississippi abound in such dangerous places and these should be canalized.
In the long summer afternoons we would sometimes sit on the piazza, when there was no work to be done, for an hour or two at a time, watching the cattle on the sand-bars, and the sharply channeled and strangely carved amphitheater of cliffs across the bottom opposite; while the vultures wheeled overhead, their black shadows gliding across the glaring white of the dry river-bed.
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