THE PRAIRIES.
“The wondrous, beautiful prairies,
Billowy bays of grass, ever rolling in shadow and sunshine,
Bright with luxuriant clusters of roses and purple amorphas;
And over all is the sky, the clear and crystalline heaven,
Like the protecting hands of God inverted above them.”
EVANGELINE.
It looked quite homelike; the house shaded by tall trees, the garden,
the hedge of Osage orange shutting out the wide expanse of prairie. The
house was in the corner of Tazewell county; the barn in McLean, and the
greater part of the farm in a third county. Norman found two new aunts
to know and love, and a tall cousin of six feet three.
It was not long before he became acquainted with two little girls of ten
and twelve, cousins, who lived on a farm near, with whom he had many
pleasant hours of play. They had, too, a great deal to talk over of
their journings in the West, for these little girls had always before
lived in a New England home. They had seen a great many Indians, painted
in all their bravery, in Wisconsin. They had seen a squaw, with her
papoose strapped on her back, riding on a small Indian pony, with a
child before and a child behind.
“This, mother,” said Norman, “is pleasanter than all; one day on a
prairie is worth ten days in town.” He was up early in the morning to
see the horses watered before they were sent off to the field. There
were more then twenty of them, and Norman’s cousin, Justin, selected the
handsomest colt on the farm, and gave it to Norman for his own. Norman
was enchanted. He took an ear of corn, and Prince followed him about,
eating it from his hand. Even after Prince had gone down into the field,
he followed Norman and the ear of corn home.
“Mother, look at my colt,” said Norman in triumph; “how am I to get him
home?” There were various plans discussed, as the one idea took
possession of his mind, but no satisfactory conclusions were arrived at.
The glow of delight somewhat faded away. “I really do not know what good
my colt is going to do me,” said Norman, despondingly; “I cannot ride
him here, and I cannot take him home.”
His face brightened, however, when David brought up a horse for him to
ride. He had never rode before but once, when the pony threw him over
his head; but he said this was the sort of riding he would like, to
charge over the prairies.
He did ride off several miles over the prairies by himself, and then he
rode four miles with his Aunt Clara.
It was the time of harvest, and Norman loved to watch the mowing machine
as it so rapidly cut down the tall grass, and the hay-making, and the
tossing it into the great hay-stack. But what most interested him was to
watch the progress of the great header, with its three attendant wagons,
as it loomed up so grandly in the harvest field. Three horses urged
onward the machine, which cut off the heads of the wheat and threw it on
a platform, whence it was taken up in an elevator and received into a
wagon, which accompanied the gigantic machine till it was loaded, and
then, giving place to another, drove to the great stack with its burden.
This machine requires three attendant wagons and six men, who thus cut
down as much wheat as fifteen men can do in the ordinary way, and stack
it to boot. These mowing and reaping machines seem especially intended
for the extensive level grain fields of Illinois, which would look in
vain for reapers and mowers with the old sickle and scythe. Something is
lost however in picturesque effect, as was most manifest in the field
next to that which the great header was so rapidly despoiling of its
riches. This field was dotted over with the graceful sheaves of wheat,
while a number of men were engaged in the work of binding and stacking
them together.
Norman had watched too the ploughman, who, with a cultivator passing
between the shining corn, did the work more laboriously done at the East
by hoeing.
He liked to watch the herds of cattle and sheep feeding on the prairies;
great herds, for everything was on a great scale on these western farms.
But better even than this were the stories his cousin Justin told him
about his boyish days. He was twenty-three years old, and he had lived
on the prairie sixteen years. It used to be the custom, he said, to
plant a flagstaff in some central position, and invite horsemen to leave
the groves all around and ride to this point at a certain hour. As the
hour approached horsemen would be seen issuing from all the groves,
riding rapidly onward, driving before them wolves, and the timid deer,
till a dense ring of three or four hundred horsemen inclosing the
frightened animals who were then dispatched by the clubs with which the
men were armed. Sometimes the desperate wolves broke through the ring
where it was weakest, and then there was waving of hats, and cheering,
and galloping after the animals, and all was wild uproar. “I can
remember” said he “the charm these wolf-hunts had for me when I was a
boy of twelve; how I armed myself with my club, mounted my spirited
horse, and galloped off to the stirring scene.”
“My cousin Walter,” continued Justin, “liked to hunt the wolf alone. One
day he encountered a prairie wolf, whom he pursued till the wolf plunged
into the stream to escape him. Seizing him by the tail, he cut the
strings of his hind legs, during which operation the wolf bit his foot,
leaving the mark of his long teeth through his boot. The disabled wolf,
however, as it emerged from the water, made but slow progress, and
Walter, disengaging his stirrups, gave him a blow in the forehead which
killed him, and stripping off his skin, he returned home with his
trophy, afterward to do good service in the form of a muff for his
sister.”
Then he told of the prairie fires that came every year. To be prepared
for the approach of this fiery invader they ploughed several furrows
near the fence of their farm, and then several furrows at the distance
of about four rods, and to the grass on that interval they set fire,
that this bared strip might oppose a barrier to the flames. Onward they
would come when the wind was from the same quarter, with the speed of a
locomotive, crackling, flashing, leaping high in the air, rolling great
waves of lurid light onward with fierce rapidity. They would watch the
on-coming of this sheeted flame, terrible in its fiery glare, crimsoning
the heavens with its ruddy glow, consuming everything in its path,
sending up fiery messengers into the sky, and wonder whether it would be
possible for them to escape. “It was a magnificent sight,” continued he;
“never do I expect to see anything so terrible in its sublimity and
beauty. Now that the prairies are covered over with the habitations of
men, we have no more prairie fires, and no more wolf hunts. No more
fierce pursuer did the prairie wolf find than this untiring adversary of
flame, driving before it the terrified wolves and the gentle deer,
flying for life till they reached some timber where the fire would be
arrested.”
Norman was very sorry when the day came for him to leave. He was sorry
to leave his aunts and cousins, to whom he had become very much
attached; he was sorry to leave his colt, and to give up his pleasant
rides on horseback. The day they were to leave they were to dine with
another aunt of Norman’s, and Norman, accompanied by David, rode there
on horseback, while his cousin Justin was to drive his mother in his
buggy. She had very much enjoyed her daily drives over the prairies,
enamelled with flowers, of every new variety of which Justin stopped to
gather for her, and which she prized as memorials of those pleasant
hours.
At his aunt’s Norman saw the picture of his Cousin Walter—the hero of
the wolf story—a face full of intelligence and sweetness, a slender
form. He was a brilliant youth, with high hopes and aspirations, when,
in the midst of his collegiate course, he was stricken down by cholera,
and in a few days was numbered with the dead.
After dinner Norman mounted his horse, and, attended by David, who rode
beautifully, he took his way toward the station. His mother and his
cousin started about half an hour afterward, and pursued their winding
way. The road on the prairies is continually changing; as the new farms
are fenced, the owners divert the road from their fields to the exterior
of their farms. One memorable place Mrs. Lester had passed on her drive
to the village the evening before. It was a slough where, in the spring,
a pair of horses were so completely buried that it was necessary to
employ oxen to drag them out by the head. One field, on their way to the
station, looked as if it were covered with pansies, the rather coarse
flowers with which it was filled being softened by distance into this
likeness.
They drove across a grassy field that looked as if it must at some time
have been the bed of a great river, so strikingly did the woodlands
resemble the banks. Indeed, one is often struck, in looking out upon the
prairies, with the resemblance to a sea view. At the margin there will
frequently be a mist, such as bounds the view on the water; the groves
of timber jut out into the prairie like headlands, and the eye often
follows these indentations as if tracing the shore of a vast lake.
Proofs are not wanting to establish the fact that Illinois was once the
bed of a great lake, probably an expansion of the Mississippi, till it
broke though on its headlong course to the Gulf of Mexico. The prairie
breezes come every day to moderate the intense heat of summer, and sweep
over these vast plains as on the bosom of a great inland sea. Those who
build in the timber lose these refreshing winds.
Mrs. Lester was somewhat troubled on arriving at the station to find
that Norman was not there, though he had left so long before her, and
she looked rather anxiously over the prairie for some signs of his
coming. The boys were not visible, and she was contemplating the
prospect of returning to the kind friends whom she had left when they
came in sight. She waved her handkerchief to them to hasten, as the
train was due in five minutes. Just in time; the train was in sight as
Norman stepped on the platform; and as Justin accompanied them into the
cars to find them seats, Mrs. Lester hurried him off, lest he should be
taken on, so short was the pause at the station.