THE PLAINS
"On to the Platte! The buffalo!" New cheer seemed to come to the hearts
of the emigrants now, and they forgot bickering. The main train ground
grimly ahead, getting back, if not all its egotism, at least more and
more of its self-reliance. By courtesy, Wingate still rode ahead, though
orders came now from a joint council of his leaders, since Banion would
not take charge.
The great road to Oregon was even now not a trail but a road, deep cut
into the soil, though no wheeled traffic had marked it until within the
past five years. A score of paralled paths it might be at times, of
tentative location along a hillside or a marshy level; but it was for
the most part a deep-cut, unmistakable road from which it had been
impossible to wander. At times it lay worn into the sod a half foot, a
foot in depth. Sometimes it followed the ancient buffalo trails to
water--the first roads of the Far West, quickly seized on by hunters and
engineers--or again it transected these, hanging to the ridges after
frontier road fashion, heading out for the proved fords of the greater
streams. Always the wheel marks of those who had gone ahead in previous
years, the continuing thread of the trail itself, worn in by trader and
trapper and Mormon and Oregon or California man, gave hope and cheer to
these who followed with the plow.
Stretching out, closing up, almost inch by inch, like some giant
measuring worm in its slow progress, the train held on through a vast
and stately landscape, which some travelers had called the Eden of
America, such effect was given by the series of altering scenes. Small
imagination, indeed, was needed to picture here a long-established
civilization, although there was not a habitation. They were beyond
organized society and beyond the law.
Game became more abundant, wild turkeys still appeared in the timbered
creek bottoms. Many elk were seen, more deer and very many antelope,
packed in northward by the fires. A number of panthers and giant gray
wolves beyond counting kept the hunters always excited. The wild
abundance of an unexhausted Nature offered at every hand. The
sufficiency of life brought daily growth in the self-reliance which had
left them for a time.
The wide timberlands, the broken low hills of the green prairie at
length began to give place to a steadily rising inclined plane. The soil
became less black and heavy, with more sandy ridges. The oak and
hickory, stout trees of their forefathers, passed, and the cottonwoods
appeared. After they had crossed the ford of the Big Blue--a hundred
yards of racing water--they passed what is now the line between Kansas
and Nebraska, and followed up the Little Blue, beyond whose ford the
trail left these quieter river valleys and headed out over a high
table-land in a keen straight flight over the great valley of the
Platte, the highway to the Rockies.
Now the soil was sandier; the grass changed yet again. They had rolled
under wheel by now more than one hundred different varieties of wild
grasses. The vegetation began to show the growing altitude. The cactus
was seen now and then. On the far horizon the wavering mysteries of the
mirage appeared, marvelous in deceptiveness, mystical, alluring, the
very spirits of the Far West, appearing to move before their eyes in
giant pantomime. They were passing from the Prairies to the Plains.
Shouts and cheers arose as the word passed back that the sand hills
known as the Coasts of the Platte were in sight. Some mothers told their
children they were now almost to Oregon. The whips cracked more loudly,
the tired teams, tongues lolling, quickened their pace as they struck
the down-grade gap leading through the sand ridges.
Two thousand Americans, some of them illiterate and ignorant, all of
them strong, taking with them law, order, society, the church, the
school, anew were staging the great drama of human life, act and scene
and episode, as though upon some great moving platform drawn by
invisible cables beyond the vast proscenium of the hills.