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Wild North Land, The Story of a Winter Journey with Dogs across Northern North America

<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII.</h2></div> <div class="blockquot inhead medium"> An Ocean of Grass.—The Red Man.—Whence comes he?—The Buffalo.—Puritans and Pioneers.—The Red Man’s Friend. </div> The general term “prairie” comprises many varieties of open landscape. There are the level, alluvial prairies of Illinois, long since settled and colonized; there are the low, fertile prairies of the Red River, where the rich black mould, fallow under five months of snow, puts forth the rank luxuriance of a hot-bed during the half tropic heat of summer; there are the sandy prairies of the Assineboine and Qu’Appelle, intermixed with clusters of aspen and of willow, and broken by lakes and saline ponds: but above each and all—exceeding all other prairies and open spaces—wild, treeless, and ocean-like in everything save motion, there stands forth in dreary grandeur the Great Prairie. What the Irish Sea, the Channel, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean are to the Atlantic, so are these various outlying regions of plain to the vast rigid ocean of the central continent. It is50 true that on the Red River, or the Qu’Appelle, or along the line I have lately passed, one may frequently “get out of sight of land;” there are spaces where no tree or bush breaks the long monotony of the sky-line; but all these expanses are as nothing compared to the true prairie. 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 time51 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. 52 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. 53 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 amidst54 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. Countless ages passed, tribes warred and wandered, but the life of the wilderness lay deep beneath the waves of time, and the roll of the passing centuries disturbed not its slumber. At last the white man came, and soon from south and north the restless adventurers of Latin Europe pierced the encircling forests, and beheld the mighty meadows of the Central Continent. Spaniards on the south, Frenchmen on the north, no one in the centre; for the prudent Plymouth Puritan was more intent on flogging witches and gathering riches than on penetrating the tangled55 forest which lay westward of his settlement. No; his was not the work of adventure and discovery. Others might go before and brave the thousand perils of flood and forest; he would follow after, as the Jew pedlar follows the spendthrift, as the sutler dogs the footsteps of the soldier. What though he be in possession of the wide dominion now, and the names of France and Spain be shrunken into a shapeless dream; that only proves what we knew before, that the men who lead the way to a great future are fated never to reap the golden harvest of their dreams. And ever since that advent of the white man the scene has changed; the long slumber of the wilderness was broken, and hand in hand with the new life death moved amidst the wild denizens of the Prairies. Human life scattered over a vast area, animal life counted by tens of millions, take a long time to destroy; and it is only to-day—370 years after a Portuguese sailor killed and captured a band of harmless Indians, and 350 since a Spanish soldier first beheld a herd of buffaloes beyond the meadows of the Mississippi—that the long, hopeless struggle of the wild dwellers of the wilderness may be said to have reached its closing hour. In thus classing together the buffalo and the red man as twin dwellers on the Great Prairie, I have but followed the Indian idea. 56 “What shall we do?” said a young Sioux warrior to an American officer on the Upper Missouri some fifteen years ago. “What shall we do? the buffalo is our only friend. When he goes all is over with the Dacotahs. I speak thus to you because like me you are a Brave.” It was little wonder that he called the buffalo his only friend. Its skin gave him a house, its robe a blanket and a bed, its undressed hide a boat, its short, curved horn a powder-flask, its meat his daily food, its sinew a string for his bow, its leather a lariot for his horse, a saddle, bridle, rein, and bit. Its tail formed an ornament for his tent, its inner skin a book in which to sketch the brave deeds of his life, the “medicine robe” of his history. House, boat, food, bed, and covering, every want from infancy to age, and after life itself had passed, wrapt in his buffalo robe the red man waited for the dawn. <div id="i_057" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 41em;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i_057.jpg" width-obs="2561" height-obs="1576" alt="" /> <div class="caption">SUNSET SCENE WITH BUFFALO.</div> </div> <hr /> <div id="toclink_57" class="chapter"> 57 <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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