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Updated: September 19, 2025
In the early sixties a trail led from the broad Missouri, swirling yellow and turgid between its green-groved borders, for miles and miles out upon the grassy Nebraska plains, turning westward over the undulating prairie, with its swales and billows and long, winding lines of cottonwoods, to a slow, vast heave of rising ground Wyoming where the herds of buffalo grazed and the wolf was lord and the camp-fire of the trapper sent up its curling blue smoke from beside some lonely stream; on and on over the barren lands of eternal monotony, all so gray and wide and solemn and silent under the endless sky; on, ever on, up to the bleak, black hills and into the waterless gullies and through the rocky gorges where the deer browsed and the savage lurked; then slowly rising to the pass between the great bold peaks, and across the windy uplands into Utah, with its verdant valleys, green as emeralds, and its haze- filled canons and wonderful wind-worn cliffs and walls, and its pale salt lakes, veiled in the shadows of stark and lofty rocks, dim, lilac-colored, austere, and isolated; ever onward across Nevada, and ever westward, up from desert to mountain, up into California, where the white streams rushed and roared and the stately pines towered, and seen from craggy heights, deep down, the little blue lakes gleamed like gems; finally sloping to the great descent, where the mountain world ceased and where, out beyond the golden land, asleep and peaceful, stretched the illimitable Pacific, vague and grand beneath the setting sun.
Captain Dean was a very different character to Captain Swales, with whose conduct he was so thoroughly disgusted, that he refused to hold any further communication with him than business actually required. I had held out till I was in safety, and a severe attack of illness then came on. Captain Dean had me removed to a berth in his own cabin, and Mary became my nurse.
They would need to reach a spot, though, where the wind was blowing away from them and the cattle, and toward the main blaze. Such places can often be found in the rolling prairie, with its many glades and swales.
Father was path-master for a number of years and he crosswayed the lowest spots and across the black ash swales. He cut logs twelve feet long and laid them side by side across the center of the road. Some of the logs, that he put into the road on the lowest ground, were more than a foot through; of course smaller poles answered where the ground was higher. We called this our corduroy road.
In their stead, a limitless, upward shelving plain outspread, covered with a short, surly, hairlike grass and certain sturdy, resinous plants supporting flowers of an unpleasant odor, sticky and weedy. Bristling cacti bulged from the sod; small Quaker-gray sparrows and larks were the only birds. In the swales blue joint grew rank.
He pointed to a barren elevation on the already darkening horizon. "You hunters," he added, indicating Norman and Philip, "ought to spread out and look for game tracks in the swales to the right and left. But don't go too far. Work your way in toward those rocks before night. You'll find us there.
It was as though made to order for his purpose. He mounted his horse and spurred it around and quartering up the hill even as Sucatash wound in and out among the swales and depressions of the cañon wall, now coming into dim view and now vanishing behind a bend. Banker had plenty of time.
But no animals greeted their sight, as they passed over the long green swales of the prairie, mile after mile, now rising to the top of a little eminence, and now sinking into a shallow valley; but occasionally a sneaking, stealthy coyote would noiselessly trot into view, and then, after cautiously surveying them from a distance, disappear, as Sandy said, "as if he had sunk into a hole in the ground."
For a while all eyes seemed centred on the chase, now scattered miles toward the east, and, save for two of the number left behind, blown, spent and hopelessly out of the race, soon lost to view among the distant swales and ravines. Then everyone turned to welcome the coming harbinger, to congratulate him on his escape, to demand the reason for his daring essay.
What a spectacle of undulating board sidewalks built over swales of sand, running from hillock to hillock! What shacks used for stores, trading offices, marts for real estate! Truly it was a place as if built in a night, relieved but little by buildings of a more substantial sort.... Drinking saloons were everywhere. I heard music and entered one of these resorts.
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