Without adventure of any kind, and with only those difficulties to overcome that lie in all undertakings of life where real effort has to be made, we had reached the confines of civilization; a kind of frontier settlement, half wigwam half village, had sprung up to meet the wants of those traders in furs and peltries who form the connecting link between the red man of the wilds and his white brothers in civilization. This settlement marked, as it were, the limits of the two regions—on one side of it lay judge and jury, sheriff, policemen, court-house, and fenced divisions; on the other, the wild justice of revenge held empire, and the earth was all man’s heritage.
I had only delayed long enough in this frontier settlement to procure the necessary means of travel in the wilds. I had purchased four good ponies, two for saddle use and two to act as pack animals for our baggage—arms we already possessed—ammunition, blankets, knives, a couple of copper kettles, a supply of tea, sugar, salt, pepper, flour, and matches, a few awls, and axes. These I had obtained at one of the Indian trading stores, and, keeping all our plans as much as possible to ourselves, we had on this very morning set our faces for the solitude, intent upon holding on steadily into the west during the months of summer that yet remained. By winter time I counted upon having reached the vicinity of those great herds of buffaloes which kept far out from the range of man, in the most remote recesses of the wilderness, and there we would build a winter hut in some sheltered valley, or dwell with any Indian tribe whose chief would bid us a welcome to his lodges.
Of the country that lay before us, or of the people who roved over it, I knew only what I had pictured from books in the old glen at home, or from the chance acquaintances I had made during our stay in the frontier settlement; but when one has a simple plan of life to follow, it usually matters little whether the knowledge of a new land which can be derived from books or men has been obtained or not; time is the truest teacher, and we had time before us and to spare.
We ate our supper that night with but few words spoken. The scene was too strange—the outlook too mysterious, to allow thoughts to find spoken expression.
Had I been asked that night by Donogh to define for him the precise objects I had in view in thus going out into the wilds, I do not think that I could have given a tangible reason. I did not go as a gold-seeker, or a trapper of furs, or a hunter of wild animals. We would follow the chase, trap the wild animals of the streams or marshes, look for gold too; but it was not to do all or any of these things that I had left civilization behind me. This great untamed wilderness, this home of distance and solitude, this vast unbroken dominion of nature—where no fence crossed the surface of the earth, where plough had never turned, where lakes lay lapped amid shores tenanted only by the moose and the rein-deer—all this endless realm of prairie, forest, rock, and rapid, which yet remains the grandest domain of savage nature in the world, had had for me a charm, not the less seductive because it could not then find expression in words, or give explanation for its fancy. Enough that we went forth with no sinister object in view against man or beast, tree or plain; we went not to annex, to conquer, nor to destroy; we went to roam and rove the world, and to pitch our camps wheresoever the evening sun might find us.
Before turning in for the night I left the light of the fire, and wandered out into the surrounding darkness. It was a wonderful sight. The prairie lay wrapt in darkness, but above, in the sky, countless stars looked down upon the vast plain; far away to the south, the red glow of a distant fire was visible; our own camp fire flamed and flickered, shedding a circle of light around it, and lighting up the nearer half of the lakelet and the aspen clumps on the shore. At times there passed over the vast plain the low sound of wind among grasses—a sound that seemed to bring to the ear a sense of immense distance and of great loneliness. For a moment I felt oppressed by this vague lonely waste; but I thought of the old priest’s words, and looking up again from the dark earth to the starlit heavens, I saw all the old stars shining that I used to know so well in the far-away glen at home. Then I knelt down on the prairie, and prayed for help and guidance in the life that lay before me.
Daylight had broken some time when I awoke, and rose from my blanket bed for a survey of the morning. How vast seemed the plain! Far away it spread on all sides; all its loneliness had vanished; it lay before me fresh, fair, and dew-sparkled—our trail leading off over distant ridges, until it lay like a faint thread vanishing into the western space.
As my eye followed this western path, I noticed a mounted figure moving along it about a mile distant, approaching our camping-place at an easy pace. I called to Donogh to get the fire going and make ready our breakfast, and we had barely got the kettle on the flames when the stranger had reached our camp.
The solitary Sioux.