The Emigrant Trail

hardly more than a glistening veil, stretched over the sandy bottom. Sometimes the veil was split by islands, its transparent tissue passing between them in sparkling strands a

ape, where there was no work and no time a

here were quicksands stirring beneath it where the same man would sink in above his waist, above his shoulders, above his head. The islands that broke its languid currents were close grown with small trees, ri

the buffalo trooped, thirsty, to the river. When the sun sloped westward, shadows lay clear in the hollows, violet and amethyst and sapphire blue, transparent washes of color as pure as the r

feathered yellow grasses, they looked as if the monstrous creatures of dead epochs might still haunt them, might still sun their horny sides among the sand hills, and wallow in the shallows of the river. I

he curve of the earth. Here tribe had fought with tribe, old scores had been wiped out till the grass was damp with blood, wars of extermination had raged. Here the migrating villages made a moving streak of color like a bright patch on a map where there were no boundaries, no mountains,

s on the fawn-colored face of the prairie. Twice a day they went to the river to drink. Solemnly, in Indian file, they passed down the trails among the sand hills, worn into gutters by their continuous hoofs. From the wall of the

ary between the frontier and the wild, to the second great barrier, the mountains which blocked the entrance to the unknown distance, where the lakes

t a scattered few, then a broken line,

ountain men in fringed and beaded buckskins, long haired, gaunt and weather scarred; men whose pasts were unknown and unasked, who trapped and hunted and lived in the lodges with their squaws. There were black-eyed Canadian voyageurs in otter-skin caps and coats made of blankets, hardy as In

intervals, a few wagons crawling down the valley and then the long, bare road with the buffaloes crossing it to the river and the occasional red spark of a trapper's camp fire. In '43 came the first great em

wagons, the dust of moving flocks and herds rose like a column at the end of the caravan. Their camps at night were like the camps of the patriarchs, many women to work for each man, thousands of cattle grazing in the grass. From the hills above the Indians watched the

A cloud of dust moved with them, showed their coming far away as they wheeled downward at Grand Island, hid their departure as they doubled up for the fording of the Platte

eople in the Great Father's Country were numerous as t