“A Gathering Storm”—the unbroken prairies! We are brought by this subject to grand phenomena. Heavens what piles of cloud, what solemn loneliness! The clouds—no wonder that the Indian of the plain has many a legend about them!
“Gloomy and dark art thou, O chief of the mighty Omahas;
Gloomy and dark as the driving cloud whose name thou hast taken.”
“Billowy bays of grasses ever rolling in shadow and sunshine.”
Magnificent! But this imperfect little sketch cannot reveal the truth, can only suggest. Nowhere are the clouds more wonderful than when over, never is solitude more impressive than in the open prairies.
The clouds, the clouds! Yes, through many a twilight hour, I watched, lying upon the tufted prairie as the camp-fires died away, the clouds. Weird was the hectic flushing, the glow of the sheet lightning among the July and August cumuli. But these clouds in the sketch are filled with portent. Not only is the prairie darkened with the approach of night, but with the coming storm.
Here are two famous objects; famous, at least, in those days, not far apart, and following each other in the book—“The Court House,” and “The Chimney Rock.” Distinctly I remember the day on which we first sighted the latter—a pale blue shaft above the plain. We had just formed the last semi-circle of our noon corral and through its western opening was seen the Chimney, wavy through the haze that arose from the heated ground. It was my father who pointed it out to me. It afterwards seemed to us that the slow-going oxen would never reach it; or, rather, that they would never arrive at the point in the road opposite that natural curiosity; for the emigrant trail passed several miles to the northward of the low range of bluffs of which “the Chimney Rock” is a part. One evening several of our company tried to walk from our nearest camp to the terraced hills that formed the Chimney’s base, but the distance proved too great. That was one of our first lessons in the deceptiveness of space—the distance to hills and mountains.
Morning at Chimney Rock.
From the banks of Lawrence Creek, from where the sketch was made, the bluffs, and the Half-Way-Post, the name by which the Chimney is sometimes suggestively referred to, are most picturesque. Strings of wild ducks arose from the rushes of the creek side as our train approached.