“I tell you what it is, stranger,” said Gerrian, halting and looking proudly over the landscape, “I wouldn’t swop my place with General Price at the White House.”
“I should think not,” said I; “bullocks are better company than office-seekers.”
It was a grand, simple scene. All open country, north and south, as far as the eye could see. Eastward rose the noble blue barrier of the Sierra, with here and there a field, a slope, a spot, or a pinnacle of the snow that names it Nevada. A landscape of larger feeling than any we can show in the old States, on the tame side of the continent. Those rigorous mountain outlines on the near horizon utterly dwarf all our wooded hills, Alleghanies, Greens, Whites. A race trained within sight of such loftiness of nature must needs be a loftier race than any this land has yet known. Put cheap types of mankind within the influence of the sublimities, and they are cowed; but the great-hearted expand with vaster visions. A great snow-peak, like one of the Tacomas of Oregon, is a terrible monitor over a land; but it is also a benignant sovereign, a presence, calm, solemn, yet not without a cheering and jubilant splendor. A range of sharp, peremptory mountains, like the Sierra Nevada, insists upon taking thought away from the grovelling flats where men do their grubbing for the bread of daily life, and up to the master heights, whither in all ages seers have gone to be nearer mystery and God.
It was late August. All the tall grass and wild oats and barley, over lift, level, and hollow, were ripe yellow or warm brown,—a golden mantle over the golden soil. There were but two colors in the simple, broad picture,—clear, deep, scintillating blue in the sky, melting blue in the mountains, and all the earth a golden surging sea.
“It’s a bigger country’n old Pike or Missourer anywhar,” says Gerrian, giving his ‘curwolyow’ the spur. “I’d ruther hev this, even ef the shakes wuz here instidd of thar, and havin’ their grab reglar twicet a day all the year round.”
As we rode on, our ponies half hidden in the dry, rustling grass of a hollow, a tramp of hoofs came to us with the wind,—a thrilling sound! with something free and vigorous in it that the charge of trained squadrons never has.
“Thar they come!” cried Gerrian; “thar’s a rigiment wuth seeing. They can’t show you a eight like that to the old States.”
“No indeed. The best thing to be hoped there in the way of stampede is when a horse kicks through a dash-board, kills a coachman, shatters a carriage, dissipates a load of women and children, and goes tearing down a turnpike, with ‘sold to an omnibus’ awaiting him at the end of his run-away!”
We halted to pass the coming army of riderless steeds in review.
There they came! Gerrian’s whole band of horses in full career! First, their heads suddenly lifted above a crest of the prairie, then they burst over, like the foam and spray of a black, stormy wave when a blast strikes it, and wildly swept by us with manes and tails flaring in the wind. It was magnificent. My heart of a horseman leaped in my breast. “Hurrah!” I cried.