In place of buffalo we found
plenty of prairie hens, and we bagged them by dozens without leaving the
trail. In three or four days we saw before us the broad woods and the
emerald meadows of Council Grove, a scene of striking luxuriance and
beauty. It seemed like a new sensation as we rode beneath the resounding
archs of these noble woods. The trees were ash, oak, elm, maple,
and hickory, their mighty limbs deeply overshadowing the path, while
enormous grape vines were entwined among them, purple with fruit. The
shouts of our scattered party, and now and then a report of a rifle,
rang amid the breathing stillness of the forest. We rode forth again
with regret into the broad light of the open prairie. Little more than a
hundred miles now separated us from the frontier settlements. The whole
intervening country was a succession of verdant prairies, rising in
broad swells and relieved by trees clustering like an oasis around some
spring, or following the course of a stream along some fertile hollow.
These are the prairies of the poet and the novelist. We had left danger
behind us. Nothing was to be feared from the Indians of this region, the
Sacs and Foxes, the Kansas and the Osages. We had met with signal
good fortune. Although for five months we had been traveling with an
insufficient force through a country where we were at any moment liable
to depredation, not a single animal had been stolen from us, and our
only loss had been one old mule bitten to death by a rattlesnake. Three
weeks after we reached the frontier the Pawnees and the Comanches began
a regular series of hostilities on the Arkansas trail, killing men and
driving off horses. They attacked, without exception, every party, large
or small, that passed during the next six months.

Diamond Spring, Rock Creek, Elder Grove, and other camping places
besides, were passed all in quick succession. At Rock Creek we found a
train of government provision wagons, under the charge of an emaciated
old man in his seventy-first year. Some restless American devil had
driven him into the wilderness at a time when he should have been seated
at his fireside with his grandchildren on his knees. I am convinced
that he never returned; he was complaining that night of a disease, the
wasting effects of which upon a younger and stronger man, I myself had
proved from severe experience. Long ere this no doubt the wolves have
howled their moonlight carnival over the old man's attenuated