When wagon trains reached Independence, Missouri, and prepared to jump
off for the Far West, they faced some six hundred miles of prairie
before reaching the mountains. There was water, grass, and game
(especially buffalo) in abundance, but it was an awesome spectacle to
travel week after week across the empty plains. When Washington Irving
returned from many years in Europe, he wanted to see the prairie and
joined an expedition in 1832 which traveled as far west as the present
site of Oklahoma City. One of his companions was Henry Ellsworth, a
commissioner appointed by Andrew Jackson to help pacify the Indians. In
the selection that follows, Ellsworth describes the prairie in central
Oklahoma, tells how one of his men captured a wild horse, and recounts
his own experience in shooting a buffalo.