"The day is lowering; stilly black
Sleeps the grim waste, while heaven's rack,
Dispersed and wild, 'tween earth and sky
Hangs like a shatter'd canopy!"
_Fire-worshippers._
"Rent is the fleecy mantle of the sky;
The clouds fly different; and the sudden sun
By fits effulgent gilds the illumined fields,
And black by fits the shadows sweep along."
THOMSON.
"The bleak winds
Do sorely ruffle; for many miles about
There's scarce a bush."
_Lear, Act 2._
"These are the Gardens of the Desert."
BRYANT.
Merrily, merrily did the wild night-wind howl, and whistle, and rave
around the little low cabin beneath whose humble roof-tree the
traveller had lain himself to rest. Now it would roar and rumble down
the huge wooden chimney, and anon sigh along the tall grass-tops and
through the crannies like the wail of some lost one of the waste. The
moonbeams, at intervals darkened by the drifting clouds and again
pouring gloriously forth, streamed in long threads of silver through
the shattered walls; while the shaggy forest in the back-ground,
tossing its heavy branches against the troubled sky, {90} roared forth
a deep chorus to the storm. It was a wild night, and so complete was
the illusion that, in the fitful lullings of the tempest, one almost
imagined himself on the ocean-beach, listening to the confused
weltering of the surge. There was much of high sublimity in all this;
and hours passed away before the traveller, weary as he was, could
quiet his mind to slumber. There are seasons when every chord, and
nerve, and sinew of the system seems wound up to its severest tension;
and a morbid, unnatural excitement broods over the mind, forbidding
all approach to quietude. Every one has _experienced_ this under
peculiar circumstances; few can _describe_ it.
The night wore tediously away, and at the dawn the traveller was again
in the saddle, pushing forth like a "pilgrim-bark" upon the swelling
ocean-waste, sweeping even to the broad curve of undulating horizon
beyond. There is always something singularly unpleasant in the idea of
going out upon one of these vast prairies _alone_; and such the sense
of utter loneliness, that the solitary traveller never fails to cast
back a lingering gaze upon the last low tenement he is leaving. The
winds were still up, and the rack and clouds were scudding in wild
confusion along the darkened sky;
"Here, flying loosely as the mane
Of a young war-horse in the blast;
There, roll'd in masses dark and swelling,
As proud to be the thunder's dwelling!"
From time to time a heavy blast would come careering {91} with
resistless fury along the heaving plain, almost tearing the rider from
his horse. The celebrated "Grand Prairie," upon which I was now
entering, stretched itself away to the south thirty miles, a vast,
unbroken meadow; and one may conceive, not describe, the terrible
fury of a storm-wind sweeping over a surface like this.[203] As the
morning advanced, the violence of the tempest lulled into fitful
gusts; and, as the centre of the vast amphitheatre was attained, a
scene of grandeur and magnificence opened to my eye such as it never
before had looked upon. Elevated upon a full roll of the prairie, the
glance ranged over a scene of seemingly limitless extent; for upon
every side, for the first time in my ramble, the deep blue line of the
horizon and the darker hue of the waving verdure blended into one.
The touching, delicate loveliness of the lesser prairies, so
resplendent in brilliancy of hue and beauty of outline, I have often
dwelt upon with delight. The graceful undulation of slope and swell;
the exquisite richness and freshness of the verdure flashing in native
magnificence; the gorgeous dies of the matchless and many-coloured
flowers dallying with the winds; the beautiful woodland points and
promontories shooting forth into the mimic sea; the far-retreating,
shadowy _coves_, going back in long vistas into the green wood; the
curved outline of the dim, distant horizon, caught at intervals
through the openings of the forest; and the whole gloriously lighted
up by the early radiance of morning, as with rosy footsteps she came
dancing {92} over the dew-gemmed landscape; all these constituted a
scene in which beauty unrivalled was the sole ingredient. And then
those bright enamelled clumps of living emerald, sleeping upon the
wavy surface like the golden Hesperides of classic fiction, or, like
another cluster of Fortunate Isles in the dark-blue waters, breathing
a fragrance as from oriental bowers; the wild-deer bounding in
startled beauty from his bed, and the merry note of the skylark,
whistling, with speckled vest and dew-wet wing, upon the resin-weed,
lent the last touchings to Nature's _chef d'oeuvre_.
"Oh, beautiful, still beautiful,
Though long and lone the way."
But the scene amid which I was now standing could boast an aspect
little like this. Here, indeed, were the rare and delicate flowers;
and life, in all its fresh and beautiful forms, was leaping forth in
wild and sportive luxuriance at my feet. But all was vast,
measureless, Titanic; and the loveliness of the picture was lost in
its grandeur. Here was no magnificence of _beauty_, no _gorgeousness_
of vegetation, no _splendour_ of the wilderness;
"Green isles and circling shores _ne'er_ blended here
In wild reality!"
All was bold and impressive, reposing in the stern, majestic solitude
of Nature. On every side the earth heaved and rolled like the swell of
troubled waters; now sweeping away in the long heavy wave of ocean,
and now rocking and curling like the abrupt, broken bay-billow
tumbling around the {93} crag. Between the lengthened parallel ridges
stretch the ravines by which the prairie is drained; and, owing to the
depth and tenacity of the soil, they are sometimes almost impassable.
Ascending from these, the elevation swells so gradually as to be
almost imperceptible to the traveller, until he finds himself upon the
summit, and the immense landscape is spread out around him.
"The clouds
Sweep over with their shadows, and beneath,
The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye;
Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase
The sunny ridges."
The diversity of light and shade upon the swells and depressions at
the hour of sunrise, or when at midday clouds are drifting along the
sky, is endless. A few points here and there are thrown into prominent
relief; while others, deeply retreating, constitute an imaginary
back-ground perfect in its kind. And then the sunlight, constantly
changing its position, is received upon such a variety of angles, and
these, too, so rapidly vary as the breeze rolls over the surface, that
it gives the scene a wild and shifting aspect to the eye at times,
barely reconcilable with the idea of reality.
As the sun reached the meridian the winds went down, and then the
stillness of death hung over the prairie. The utter desolateness of
such a scene is indescribable. Not a solitary tree to intercept the
vision or to break the monotony; not a sound to cheer the ear or
relieve the desolation; not a living {94} thing in all that vast wild
plain to tell the traveller that he was not
"Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea!"
It is at such a season that the question presents itself with more
than ordinary vehemence to the mind, _To what circumstance do these
vast prairies owe their origin_? Amid what terrible convulsion of the
elements did these great ocean-plains heave themselves into being?
What mighty voice has rolled this heaped-up surface into tumult, and
then, amid the storm and the tempest, bid the curling billows stand,
and fixed them there?
"The hand that built the firmament hath heaved
And smooth'd these verdant swells."
The origin of the prairie has given rise to much speculation. Some
contend that we are to regard these vast plains in the same light as
mountains, valleys, forests, and other grand features of Nature's
workmanship. And, it is very true, plains of a character not
dissimilar are to be met with all over our earth; at every degree of
elevation of every extent, and of every stage of fertility, from the
exhaustless fecundity of the delta of the Nile to the barren sterility
of the sands of the desert. Northern Asia has her boundless _pastures_
and _steppes_, where the wild Tartar feeds his flock; Africa may boast
her Bedouin _sands_, her _tablelands_, and her _karroos_; South
America her grassy _llanos_ and _pampas_; Europe her purple _heather_;
India her _jungles_; the southern sections of our own land their
beautiful _savannas_; and wherefore not the {95} vast regions of the
"Far West" their broad-rolling _prairies_? The word is of French
derivation, signifying _meadow_; and is applied to every description
of surface destitute of timber and clothed with grass. It was, then,
upon their own fair prairies of Judea and Mesopotamia that the ancient
patriarchs pitched their tents. The tough sward of the prairie, when
firmly formed, it is well known, refuses to receive the forest; but,
once broken into by the ploughshare or by any other cause, and
protected from the autumnal flames, and all is soon rolling with
green; and the sumach, the hazel, and the wild-cherry are succeeded by
the oak. Such is the argument for the _natural_ origin of the prairie,
and its cogency none will deny. But, assuming for a moment a
_diluvial_ origin to these vast plains, as a thousand circumstances
concur to indicate, and the phenomena are far more satisfactorily and
philosophically resolved. In a soil so exhaustlessly fertile, the
grasses and herbs would first secure possession of the surface. Even
now, whenever the earth is thrown up, from whatever depth, it is
immediately mossed with verdure by the countless embryos buried in
its teeming bosom; a proof incontestable of secondary origin. After
the grasses succeeded flowering shrubs; then the larger weeds;
eventually, thickets were formed; the surface was baked and hardened
by the direct rays of the sun, and the bosom of the soil, bound up as
if by bands of brass and iron, utterly refused to receive or nourish
the seeds of the forest now strewn over it. This is the unavoidable
conclusion wherever natural {96} causes have held their sway. Upon the
borders of rivers, creeks, and overflowing streams, or wherever the
soil has become broken, this series of causes was interrupted, and the
result we see in the numerous island-groves, and in the forests which
invariably fringe the water-courses, great and small. The autumnal
fires, too, aboriginal tradition informs us, have annually swept these
vast plains from an era which the memory of man faileth to record,
scathing and consuming every bush, shrub, or thicket which in the
lapse of ages might have aspired to the dignity of a tree; a nucleus
around which other trees might have clustered. Here and there, indeed,
amid the heaving waste, a desolate, wind-shaken, flame-blackened oak
rears its naked branches in the distance; but it is a stricken thing,
and only confirms the position assumed. From a concurrence of
fortuitous circumstances easily conceived, the solitary seed was
received into a genial soil; the tender shrub and the sapling were
protected from destruction, and at length it had struggled into the
upper air, and defied alike the flames and blasts of the prairie.
The argument of _analogy_ for the _natural origin_ of the prairie may
also be fairly questioned, since careful examination of the subject
must convince any unprejudiced mind that the similarity of feature
between these plains and others with which we are acquainted is not
sufficiently striking to warrant comparison. The _pampas_, the
_steppes_, and the _sand-plains_, though not unlike in the more
prominent characteristics, are yet widely different {97} in
configuration, extent, and soil. The prairie combines characteristics
of each, exhibiting features of all in _common_, of no one in
_particular_. Who would institute comparison between the dark-rolling
luxuriance of the North American prairie, and the gloomy moor of
Northern Europe, with its heavy, funereal mantle of heather and
_ling_. Could the rifest fancy conjure up the _weird sisters_, all "so
withered and so wild in their attire," upon these beautiful plains of
the departed Illini! Nor do we meet in the thyme-breathing downs of
"merry England," the broad rich levels of France, the grape-clad
highlands of Spain, or in the golden mellowness of the Italian
_Campagna_, with a similitude of feature sufficiently striking to
identify our own glorious prairies with them. Europe can boast,
indeed, no peculiarity of surface assuming like configuration or
exhibiting like phenomena.
When, then, we reflect, that of all those plains which spread out
themselves upon our globe, the North American prairie possesses
characteristics peculiar to itself, and to be met with nowhere beside;
when we consider the demonstrations of a soil of origin incontestably
diluvial; when we wander over the heaving, billowy surface, and behold
it strewed with the rocky offspring of another region, and, at
intervals, encased in the saline crust of the ocean-sediment; when we
dive into its fathomless bosom, and bring forth the crumbling relics
of man and animal from sepulchres into which, for untold cycles, they
have been entombed; and when we linger along those rolling streams by
which they {98} are intersected, and behold upon their banks the
mighty indications of whirling, subsiding floods, and behold buried in
the heart of the everlasting rock productions only of the sea, the
conviction is forced upon us, almost resistlessly, that here the broad
ocean once heaved and roared. To what circumstance, indeed, but a
revolution of nature like this, are we to refer that uniform
deposition of earthy strata upon the alluvial bottom-land of every
stream? to what those deep-cut race-paths which the great streams
have, in the lapse of centuries, worn for themselves through the
everlasting rock, hundreds of feet? to what those vast salt-plains of
Arkansas? those rocky heaps of the same mineral on the Missouri, or
those huge isolated masses of limestone, rearing themselves amid the
lonely grandeur, a wonder to the savage? Or to what else shall we
refer those collections of enormous seashells, heaped upon the soil,
or thrown up to its surface from a depth of fifty feet?
Many phenomena in the Valley of the Mississippi concur to confirm the
idea that its vast delta-plains, when first forsaken by the waters of
the ocean, were possessed by extensive canebrakes, covering, indeed,
its entire surface. If, then, we suppose the Indians, who passed from
Asia to America in the early centuries of the Christian era, to have
commenced the fires in autumn when the reed was like tinder, and the
conflagration would sweep over boundless regions, we at once have an
hypothesis which accounts for the origin of the prairies. It is at
least as plausible as some others. The occasions of the autumnal fires
may have been {99} various. The cane-forests must have presented an
insurmountable obstacle in travelling, hunting, agriculture, or even
residence; while the friction caused by the tempestuous winds of
autumn may have kindled numerous fires among the dry reeds.
The surface peculiar to the prairie is first perceived in the State of
Ohio. As we proceed north and west it increases in extent, until, a
few hundred miles beyond the Mississippi, it rolls on towards the
setting sun, in all the majesty and magnificence of boundlessness, to
the base of the Rocky Mountains. Such are the beautiful prairies of
the fair Far West; and if, gentle reader, my pen, all rapid though it
be, has lingered tediously to thee along their fairy borders, it may
yet prove no small consolation to thy weariness to reflect that its
errings upon the subject are wellnigh ended.
It was yet early in the day, as I have intimated, when I reached the
centre of that broad branch of the Grand Prairie over which I was
passing; and, mile after mile, the narrow pathway, almost obliterated
here and there by the waving vegetation, continued to wind itself
along. With that unreflecting carelessness which characterizes the
inexperienced wayfarer, I had left behind me the last human habitation
I was for hours to look upon, without the slightest refreshment; and
now the demands of unappeased nature, sharpened by exercise, by the
keen atmosphere of the prairies, and, probably, by the force of fancy,
which never fails to aggravate privations which we know to be
remediless, had become absolutely painful. The faithful animal beneath
{100} me, also, from the total absence of water along our path, was
nearly exhausted; and there, before and around, and on every side, not
an object met the view but the broad-rolling, limitless prairie, and
the dim, misty horizon in the distance. Above, the heavens were calm
and blue, and the bright sun was careering on in his giant course as
gloriously as if the storm-cloud had never swept his path. League
after league the prairie lay behind me, and still swell upon swell,
wave after wave, heaved up itself in endless succession before the
wearied eye. There _is_ a point, reader, in physical, not less than in
moral affairs, where forbearance ceases to be a virtue; and,
veritably, suggestions bordering on the horrible were beginning to
flit athwart the fancy, when, happily, a long, low, wavering
cloud-like line was caught stretching itself upon the extremest verge
of the misty horizon. My jaded animal was urged onward; and slowly,
_very_ slowly, the dim outline undulated upward, and the green forest
rose gradually before the gladdened vision! A few miles, the path
plunged into the green, fresh woods; crossed a deep creek, which
betrayed its meandering by the grove along its banks, and the hungry
traveller threw himself from his horse before a log cabin imbowered in
the trees. The spot was one of those luxuriant copses in the heart of
the prairie, comprising several hundred acres, so common in the
northern sections of Illinois. "_Victuals and drink!_" were, of
course, the first demand from a female who showed herself at the door;
and, "_I judge_" was the laconic but cheering {101} reply. She stared
with uncontrolled curiosity at her stranger-guest. At the moment he
must have looked a perfect incarnation of ferocity; a very genius of
famine and starvation; but, all in good time, he was luxuriating over
a huge fragment of swine's flesh, a bowl of honey, and a loaf of
bread; and soon were his _miseries_ over. What! honey and hog's flesh
not a luxury! Say ye so, reader! Verily, then, were ye never half
starved in the heart of a Western prairie!
_Salem, Ill._