An Ocean of Grass.--The Red Man.--Whence comes he?--The
Buffalo.--Puritans and Pioneers.--The Red Man’s Friend.
The general term “prairie” comprises many varieties of open landscape.
There are the level, alluvial prairies of Illinois, long since settled
and colonized; there are the low, fertile prairies of the Red River,
where the rich black mould, fallow under five months of snow, puts
forth the rank luxuriance of a hot-bed during the half tropic heat of
summer; there are the sandy prairies of the Assineboine and Qu’Appelle,
intermixed with clusters of aspen and of willow, and broken by lakes
and saline ponds: but above each and all--exceeding all other prairies
and open spaces--wild, treeless, and ocean-like in everything save
motion, there stands forth in dreary grandeur the Great Prairie.
What the Irish Sea, the Channel, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean are
to the Atlantic, so are these various outlying regions of plain to the
vast rigid ocean of the central continent. It is true that on the Red
River, or the Qu’Appelle, or along the line I have lately passed, one
may frequently “get out of sight of land;” there are spaces where no
tree or bush breaks the long monotony of the sky-line; but all these
expanses are as nothing compared to the true prairie.
The unending vision of sky and grass, the dim, distant, and
ever-shifting horizon; the ridges that seem to be rolled upon one
another in motionless torpor; the effect of sunrise and sunset, of
night narrowing the vision to nothing, and morning only expanding it to
a shapeless blank; the sigh and sough of a breeze that seems an echo in
unison with the solitude of which it is the sole voice; and, above all,
the sense of lonely, unending distance which comes to the _voyageur_
when day after day has gone by, night has closed, and morning dawned
upon his onward progress under the same ever-moving horizon of grass
and sky.
Only two wild creatures have made this grassy desert their home.
Back, since ages at whose birth we can only guess, but which in all
human probability go deeper into the past than the reign of Arab in
Yemen, or Kirghis in Turkestan, the wild red man has roamed these
wastes: back into that dark night which hangs for ever over all we
know or shall know of early America. “The time before the white man
came,” what a measureless eternity lies hidden under the words! This
prairie was here when the stones of the pyramid were unhewn, and the
site of Babylon was a river meadow--here as it is to-day, treeless,
desolate, and storm-swept. But where and whence came the wild denizens
of the waste? Who shall say? Fifty writers have broached their various
theories, a hundred solutions have been offered. The missionary claims
them as the lost tribes of Israel, one ethnologist finds in them a
likeness to the Tartar, another sees the Celtic eye, another the Roman
nose, another traces them back to Japan, or China, or Australasia;
the old world is scarcely large enough to give them room for their
speculations. And what say we? Nothing; or if aught, a conjecture
perhaps more vague and shadowy than the rest. It has seemed to us when
watching this strange, wild hunter, this keen, untutored scholar of
nature, this human creature that sickens beneath our civilization,
and dies midst our prosperity--it has seemed to us that he was of a
race older and more remote than our own, a stock coeval with a shadowy
age--a remnant, perchance, of an earlier creation which has vanished
from the earth, preserved here in these wilds--a waif flung by the
surge of time to these later ages of our own.
This New World is older than our old one. Its 30,000 feet in depth of
Arzoic rock tell us of an age when nought of living form moved over
the iron earth. And here, probably first of all, the molten sands
rose above the boiling floods, and cooled and crusted into a chaotic
continent.
These are but idle speculations; still the antiquity of the Indian race
rests upon other foundations. Far to the south, where the prairies rise
into the lofty plateau of New Mexico, ruined monuments, weed-grown, and
hidden beneath ivy and trailing parasites, stand like spectres from
the tomb of time. Before these mouldering rock-hewn cities conjecture
halts; the past has drawn over them a veil that no research can pierce,
no learning solve. Inscrutable as the vestiges of an earlier earth they
stand, the lonely, ruined wrecks of the Red man’s race.
So much for the earlier existence of the human dweller on the prairie;
to us he is but a savage--the impediment to our progress--the human
counterpart of forests which have to be felled, mountains which must be
tunnelled, rivers whose broad currents are things to conquer; he is an
obstacle, and he must be swept away. To us it matters not whether his
race dwelt here before a Celt had raised a Druid altar. The self-styled
heirs to all the centuries reck little of such things.
And now let us turn for a moment to that other wild creature which has
made its dwelling on the Great Prairie.
Over the grassy ocean of the west there has moved from time immemorial
a restless tide. Backwards and forwards, now north, now south--now
filling the dark gorges of the Rocky Mountains--now trailing into the
valleys of the Rio del Norte--now pouring down the wooded slopes of the
Saskatchewan, surged millions on millions of dusky bisons.
What led them in their strange migrations no man could tell, but all
at once a mighty impulse seemed to seize the myriad herds, and they
moved over the broad realm which gave them birth as the waves of the
ocean roll before the storm. Nothing stopped them on their march;
great rivers stretched before them with steep, overhanging banks, and
beds treacherous with quicksand and shifting bar; huge chasms and
earth-rents, the work of subterraneous forces, crossed their line of
march, but still the countless thousands swept on. Through day and
night the earth trembled beneath their tramp, and the air was filled
with the deep bellowing of their unnumbered throats.
Crowds of wolves and flocks of vultures dogged and hovered along their
way, for many a huge beast, half sunken in quicksand, caught amidst
whirling ice flow, or bruised and maimed at the foot of some steep
precipice, marked their line of march, like the wrecks lying spread
behind a routed army. Nearly two millions of square miles formed their
undivided domain; on three sides a forest boundary encircled it, on
the fourth a great mountain range loomed up against the western sky.
Through this enormous area countless creeks and rivers meandered
through the meadows, where the prairie grass grew thick and rank,
and the cotton woods spread their serpentine belts. Out in the vast
prairie the Missouri, the Platte, the Sweet Water, the Arkansas, the
South Saskatchewan, the Bighorn, the Yellowstone, rolled their volumes
towards the east, gathering a thousand affluents as they flowed.
Countless ages passed, tribes warred and wandered, but the life of the
wilderness lay deep beneath the waves of time, and the roll of the
passing centuries disturbed not its slumber.
At last the white man came, and soon from south and north the restless
adventurers of Latin Europe pierced the encircling forests, and beheld
the mighty meadows of the Central Continent. Spaniards on the south,
Frenchmen on the north, no one in the centre; for the prudent Plymouth
Puritan was more intent on flogging witches and gathering riches
than on penetrating the tangled forest which lay westward of his
settlement. No; his was not the work of adventure and discovery. Others
might go before and brave the thousand perils of flood and forest; he
would follow after, as the Jew pedlar follows the spendthrift, as the
sutler dogs the footsteps of the soldier.
What though he be in possession of the wide dominion now, and the names
of France and Spain be shrunken into a shapeless dream; _that_ only
proves what we knew before, that the men who lead the way to a great
future are fated never to reap the golden harvest of their dreams.
And ever since that advent of the white man the scene has changed;
the long slumber of the wilderness was broken, and hand in hand with
the new life death moved amidst the wild denizens of the Prairies.
Human life scattered over a vast area, animal life counted by tens
of millions, take a long time to destroy; and it is only to-day--370
years after a Portuguese sailor killed and captured a band of harmless
Indians, and 350 since a Spanish soldier first beheld a herd of
buffaloes beyond the meadows of the Mississippi--that the long,
hopeless struggle of the wild dwellers of the wilderness may be said to
have reached its closing hour.
In thus classing together the buffalo and the red man as twin dwellers
on the Great Prairie, I have but followed the Indian idea.
“What shall we do?” said a young Sioux warrior to an American officer
on the Upper Missouri some fifteen years ago. “What shall we do? the
buffalo is our only friend. When he goes all is over with the Dacotahs.
I speak thus to you because like me you are a Brave.”
It was little wonder that he called the buffalo his only friend. Its
skin gave him a house, its robe a blanket and a bed, its undressed hide
a boat, its short, curved horn a powder-flask, its meat his daily food,
its sinew a string for his bow, its leather a lariot for his horse,
a saddle, bridle, rein, and bit. Its tail formed an ornament for his
tent, its inner skin a book in which to sketch the brave deeds of his
life, the “medicine robe” of his history. House, boat, food, bed, and
covering, every want from infancy to age, and after life itself had
passed, wrapt in his buffalo robe the red man waited for the dawn.
[Illustration: SUNSET SCENE WITH BUFFALO.]