A Tour on the Prairies
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.