The unending vision of sky and grass, the dim, distant, and ever-shifting horizon; the ridges that seem to be rolled upon one another in motionless torpor; the effect of sunrise and sunset, of night narrowing the vision to nothing, and morning only expanding it to a shapeless blank; the sigh and sough of a breeze that seems an echo in unison with the solitude of which it is the sole voice; and, above all, the sense of lonely, unending distance which comes to the voyageur when day after day has gone by, night has closed, and morning dawned upon his onward progress under the same ever-moving horizon of grass and sky.
Only two wild creatures have made this grassy desert their home.
Back, since ages at whose birth we can only guess, but which in all human probability go deeper into the past than the reign of Arab in Yemen, or Kirghis in Turkestan, the wild red man has roamed these wastes: back into that dark night which hangs for ever over all we know or shall know of early America. “The time before the white man came,” what a measureless eternity lies hidden under the words! This prairie was here when the stones of the pyramid were unhewn, and the site of Babylon was a river meadow—here as it is to-day, treeless, desolate, and storm-swept. But where and whence came the wild denizens of the waste? Who shall say? Fifty writers have broached their various theories, a hundred solutions have been offered. The missionary claims them as the lost tribes of Israel, one ethnologist finds in them a likeness to the Tartar, another sees the Celtic eye, another the Roman nose, another traces them back to Japan, or China, or Australasia; the old world is scarcely large enough to give them room for their speculations. And what say we? Nothing; or if aught, a conjecture perhaps more vague and shadowy than the rest. It has seemed to us when watching this strange, wild hunter, this keen, untutored scholar of nature, this human creature that sickens beneath our civilization, and dies midst our prosperity—it has seemed to us that he was of a race older and more remote than our own, a stock coeval with a shadowy age—a remnant, perchance, of an earlier creation which has vanished from the earth, preserved here in these wilds—a waif flung by the surge of time to these later ages of our own.
This New World is older than our old one. Its 30,000 feet in depth of Arzoic rock tell us of an age when nought of living form moved over the iron earth. And here, probably first of all, the molten sands rose above the boiling floods, and cooled and crusted into a chaotic continent.
These are but idle speculations; still the antiquity of the Indian race rests upon other foundations. Far to the south, where the prairies rise into the lofty plateau of New Mexico, ruined monuments, weed-grown, and hidden beneath ivy and trailing parasites, stand like spectres from the tomb of time. Before these mouldering rock-hewn cities conjecture halts; the past has drawn over them a veil that no research can pierce, no learning solve. Inscrutable as the vestiges of an earlier earth they stand, the lonely, ruined wrecks of the Red man’s race.
So much for the earlier existence of the human dweller on the prairie; to us he is but a savage—the impediment to our progress—the human counterpart of forests which have to be felled, mountains which must be tunnelled, rivers whose broad currents are things to conquer; he is an obstacle, and he must be swept away. To us it matters not whether his race dwelt here before a Celt had raised a Druid altar. The self-styled heirs to all the centuries reck little of such things.
And now let us turn for a moment to that other wild creature which has made its dwelling on the Great Prairie.
Over the grassy ocean of the west there has moved from time immemorial a restless tide. Backwards and forwards, now north, now south—now filling the dark gorges of the Rocky Mountains—now trailing into the valleys of the Rio del Norte—now pouring down the wooded slopes of the Saskatchewan, surged millions on millions of dusky bisons.
What led them in their strange migrations no man could tell, but all at once a mighty impulse seemed to seize the myriad herds, and they moved over the broad realm which gave them birth as the waves of the ocean roll before the storm. Nothing stopped them on their march; great rivers stretched before them with steep, overhanging banks, and beds treacherous with quicksand and shifting bar; huge chasms and earth-rents, the work of subterraneous forces, crossed their line of march, but still the countless thousands swept on. Through day and night the earth trembled beneath their tramp, and the air was filled with the deep bellowing of their unnumbered throats.
Crowds of wolves and flocks of vultures dogged and hovered along their way, for many a huge beast, half sunken in quicksand, caught amidst whirling ice flow, or bruised and maimed at the foot of some steep precipice, marked their line of march, like the wrecks lying spread behind a routed army. Nearly two millions of square miles formed their undivided domain; on three sides a forest boundary encircled it, on the fourth a great mountain range loomed up against the western sky. Through this enormous area countless creeks and rivers meandered through the meadows, where the prairie grass grew thick and rank, and the cotton woods spread their serpentine belts. Out in the vast prairie the Missouri, the Platte, the Sweet Water, the Arkansas, the South Saskatchewan, the Bighorn, the Yellowstone, rolled their volumes towards the east, gathering a thousand affluents as they flowed.