Before a European ever looked upon it, the Platte Valley was for centuries, in all probability, a gateway to the mountains. The prehistoric mound-builders, perhaps, travelled its lonely course, and on through the portals of the great Continental Divide, to the southern sea. The rude, primitive savage of North America, with whom the hairy mammoth and primeval elephant were contemporary, in a geological epoch, whose distance in the misty past appalls, traversed the silent trail across the continent. He packed on his back the furs of the colder regions, where he lived. He carried copper from the mines on the shores of Lake Superior; the horns of the moose, elk, and deer; robes of the buffalo, the wolf, and kindred animals. Among his merchandise were masses of red pipestone from the sacred quarries east of the Missouri. He journeyed with these treasures to the people of the southwest and exchanged them for what to him were equally precious: brilliant feathers of tropical birds; valuable gems, like the revered turquoise; rare metals; woven fabrics, and other commodities foreign to his own wind-swept and snow-bound plains.
The Platte Valley, for untold ages, was a beautiful, awful wilderness, thronged by stately headed elk, and the resort of vast herds of buffalo, deer, and antelope. Until a few years ago their skulls and bones could still be seen in some localities, scattered thick upon the ground between the bluffs and the river. Now all the game has vanished, excepting, perhaps, a few antelope and deer in some favoured mountain recess, where the white man has not invaded the rocky soil with his plough.
Until fifty years ago the whole region watered by the Platte was regarded as a veritable desert, never to be brought under the domain of agriculture, but forever doomed to a hopeless sterility. Its inhabitants were a wild, merciless horde of savages, whose only aim was murder, and an unceasing warfare against any encroachment upon their domain by the hated palefaces.
The river is very shallow, and for that reason was called by the Otoes, whose country embraced the region at its mouth, the Ne-bras-ka, and re-christened the Platte by the French trappers, a term synonymous to that given by the Indians.
The Platte River, nearly three-quarters of a century ago, was called
by Washington Irving,
The most magnificent and most useless of streams. Abstraction
made of its defects, nothing can be more pleasing than the
perspective which it presents to the eye. Its islands have
the appearance of a labyrinth of groves floating on the waters.
Their extraordinary position gives an air of youth and
loveliness to the whole scene. If to this be added the
undulations of the river, the waving of the verdure, the
alternations of light and shade, the succession of these
islands varying in form and beauty, and the purity of the
atmosphere, some idea may be formed of the pleasing sensations
which the traveller experiences on beholding a scene that
seems to have started fresh from the hands of the Creator.
The valley is wide, and once was covered with luxuriant grass and dotted with many-coloured flowers. For a great distance along its lower portions, the banks were fringed with a heavy growth of cottonwood, willow, and other varieties of timber.
In its solitude at the beginning of the present century, it might properly be claimed as the arena of the tornado and the race course of the winds. Climatic changes, which follow the empire of the plough, have dissipated such atmospheric phenomena as characterized the vast wilderness in its days of absolute isolation from the march of civilization, as they have elsewhere in the central regions of the continent.
The revered Father De Smet, who traversed the then dreary wilderness of the Platte Valley, as long ago as fifty-seven years, thus writes in his letters to the bishop of St. Louis, of a tornado he witnessed:—
However, it happens sometimes, though but seldom, that the clouds, floating with great rapidity, open currents of air so violent as suddenly to chill the atmosphere and produce the most destructive hailstorms. I have seen some hailstones the size of an egg. It is dangerous to be abroad during these storms. A Cheyenne Indian was lately struck by a hailstone, and remained senseless for an hour.
Once as the storm raged near us, we witnessed a sublime sight. A spiral abyss seemed to be suddenly formed in the air. The clouds followed each other into it with great velocity, till they attracted all objects around them, whilst such clouds as were too large and too far distant to feel its influence turned in an opposite direction. The noise we heard in the air was like that of a tempest. On beholding the conflict, we fancied that all the winds had been let loose from the four points of the compass. It is very probable that if it had approached nearer, the whole caravan would have made an ascension into the clouds. The spiral column moved majestically toward the north, and lighted on the surface of the Platte. Then another scene was exhibited to view. The waters, agitated by its powerful function, began to turn round with frightful noise, and were suddenly drawn up to the clouds in a spiral form. The column appeared to measure a mile in height; and such was the violence of the winds, which came down in a perpendicular direction, that in the twinkling of an eye the trees were torn and uprooted, and their boughs scattered in every direction. But what is violent does not last. After a few minutes the frightful visitation ceased. The column, not being able to sustain the weight at its base, was dissolved almost as quickly as it had been formed.