When Once Beyond The
Scattered Houses And Great Ring Fence Of The Vigorous Greeley
Colonists, We Were On The Boundless Prairie.
Now and then
horsemen passed us, and we met three wagons with white tilts.
Except where the prairie dogs have honeycombed the ground, you
can drive almost anywhere, and the passage of a few wagons over
the same track makes a road. We forded the river, whose course
is marked the whole way by a fringe of small cotton-woods and
aspens, and traveled hour after hour with nothing to see except
some dog towns, with their quaint little sentinels; but the view
in front was glorious. The Alps, from the Lombard Plains, are
the finest mountain panorama I ever saw, but not equal to this;
for not only do five high-peaked giants, each nearly the height
of Mont Blanc, lift their dazzling summits above the lower
ranges, but the expanse of mountains is so vast, and the whole
lie in a transparent medium of the richest blue, not
haze - something peculiar to the region. The lack of foreground
is a great artistic fault, and the absence of greenery is
melancholy, and makes me recall sadly the entrancing detail of
the Hawaiian Islands. Once only, the second time we forded the
river, the cotton-woods formed a foreground, and then the
loveliness was heavenly. We stopped at a log house and got a
rough dinner of beef and potatoes, and I was amused at the five
men who shared it with us for apologizing to me for being without
their coats, as if coats would not be an enormity on the Plains.
It is the election day for the Territory, and men were galloping
over the prairie to register their votes.
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