CHAPTER XVII.THE PRAIRIES.
“The wondrous, beautiful prairies,Billowy bays of grass, ever rolling in shadow and sunshine,Bright with luxuriant clusters of roses and purple amorphas;And over all is the sky, the clear and crystalline heaven,Like the protecting hands of God inverted above them.”Evangeline.
“The wondrous, beautiful prairies,Billowy bays of grass, ever rolling in shadow and sunshine,Bright with luxuriant clusters of roses and purple amorphas;And over all is the sky, the clear and crystalline heaven,Like the protecting hands of God inverted above them.”Evangeline.
“The wondrous, beautiful prairies,Billowy bays of grass, ever rolling in shadow and sunshine,Bright with luxuriant clusters of roses and purple amorphas;And over all is the sky, the clear and crystalline heaven,Like the protecting hands of God inverted above them.”
“The wondrous, beautiful prairies,
Billowy bays of grass, ever rolling in shadow and sunshine,
Bright with luxuriant clusters of roses and purple amorphas;
And over all is the sky, the clear and crystalline heaven,
Like the protecting hands of God inverted above them.”
Evangeline.
Evangeline.
It looked quite homelike; the house shaded by tall trees, the garden, the hedge of Osage orange shutting out the wide expanse of prairie. The house was in the corner of Tazewell county; the barn in McLean, and the greater part of the farm in a third county. Norman found two new aunts to know and love, and a tall cousin of six feet three.
It was not long before he became acquainted with two little girls of ten andtwelve, cousins, who lived on a farm near, with whom he had many pleasant hours of play. They had, too, a great deal to talk over of their journings in the West, for these little girls had always before lived in a New England home. They had seen a great many Indians, painted in all their bravery, in Wisconsin. They had seen a squaw, with her papoose strapped on her back, riding on a small Indian pony, with a child before and a child behind.
“This, mother,” said Norman, “is pleasanter than all; one day on a prairie is worth ten days in town.” He was up early in the morning to see the horses watered before they were sent off to the field. There were more then twenty of them, and Norman’s cousin, Justin, selected the handsomest colt on the farm, and gave it to Norman for his own. Norman was enchanted. He took an ear of corn, and Prince followed him about, eating itfrom his hand. Even after Prince had gone down into the field, he followed Norman and the ear of corn home.
“Mother, look at my colt,” said Norman in triumph; “how am I to get him home?” There were various plans discussed, as the one idea took possession of his mind, but no satisfactory conclusions were arrived at. The glow of delight somewhat faded away. “I really do not know what good my colt is going to do me,” said Norman, despondingly; “I cannot ride him here, and I cannot take him home.”
His face brightened, however, when David brought up a horse for him to ride. He had never rode before but once, when the pony threw him over his head; but he said this was the sort of riding he would like, to charge over the prairies.
He did ride off several miles over the prairies by himself, and then he rode four miles with his Aunt Clara.
It was the time of harvest, and Norman loved to watch the mowing machine as it so rapidly cut down the tall grass, and the hay-making, and the tossing it into the great hay-stack. But what most interested him was to watch the progress of the great header, with its three attendant wagons, as it loomed up so grandly in the harvest field. Three horses urged onward the machine, which cut off the heads of the wheat and threw it on a platform, whence it was taken up in an elevator and received into a wagon, which accompanied the gigantic machine till it was loaded, and then, giving place to another, drove to the great stack with its burden. This machine requires three attendant wagons and six men, who thus cut down as much wheat as fifteen men can do in the ordinary way, and stack it to boot. These mowing and reaping machines seem especially intended for the extensive level grain fields of Illinois,which would look in vain for reapers and mowers with the old sickle and scythe. Something is lost however in picturesque effect, as was most manifest in the field next to that which the great header was so rapidly despoiling of its riches. This field was dotted over with the graceful sheaves of wheat, while a number of men were engaged in the work of binding and stacking them together.
Norman had watched too the ploughman, who, with a cultivator passing between the shining corn, did the work more laboriously done at the East by hoeing.
He liked to watch the herds of cattle and sheep feeding on the prairies; great herds, for everything was on a great scale on these western farms.
But better even than this were the stories his cousin Justin told him about his boyish days. He was twenty-three years old, and he had lived on the prairie sixteenyears. It used to be the custom, he said, to plant a flagstaff in some central position, and invite horsemen to leave the groves all around and ride to this point at a certain hour. As the hour approached horsemen would be seen issuing from all the groves, riding rapidly onward, driving before them wolves, and the timid deer, till a dense ring of three or four hundred horsemen inclosing the frightened animals who were then dispatched by the clubs with which the men were armed. Sometimes the desperate wolves broke through the ring where it was weakest, and then there was waving of hats, and cheering, and galloping after the animals, and all was wild uproar. “I can remember” said he “the charm these wolf-hunts had for me when I was a boy of twelve; how I armed myself with my club, mounted my spirited horse, and galloped off to the stirring scene.”
“My cousin Walter,” continued Justin, “liked to hunt the wolf alone. One day he encountered a prairie wolf, whom he pursued till the wolf plunged into the stream to escape him. Seizing him by the tail, he cut the strings of his hind legs, during which operation the wolf bit his foot, leaving the mark of his long teeth through his boot. The disabled wolf, however, as it emerged from the water, made but slow progress, and Walter, disengaging his stirrups, gave him a blow in the forehead which killed him, and stripping off his skin, he returned home with his trophy, afterward to do good service in the form of a muff for his sister.”
Then he told of the prairie fires that came every year. To be prepared for the approach of this fiery invader they ploughed several furrows near the fence of their farm, and then several furrows at the distance of about four rods, and to thegrass on that interval they set fire, that this bared strip might oppose a barrier to the flames. Onward they would come when the wind was from the same quarter, with the speed of a locomotive, crackling, flashing, leaping high in the air, rolling great waves of lurid light onward with fierce rapidity. They would watch the on-coming of this sheeted flame, terrible in its fiery glare, crimsoning the heavens with its ruddy glow, consuming everything in its path, sending up fiery messengers into the sky, and wonder whether it would be possible for them to escape. “It was a magnificent sight,” continued he; “never do I expect to see anything so terrible in its sublimity and beauty. Now that the prairies are covered over with the habitations of men, we have no more prairie fires, and no more wolf hunts. No more fierce pursuer did the prairie wolf find than this untiring adversary of flame,driving before it the terrified wolves and the gentle deer, flying for life till they reached some timber where the fire would be arrested.”
Norman was very sorry when the day came for him to leave. He was sorry to leave his aunts and cousins, to whom he had become very much attached; he was sorry to leave his colt, and to give up his pleasant rides on horseback. The day they were to leave they were to dine with another aunt of Norman’s, and Norman, accompanied by David, rode there on horseback, while his cousin Justin was to drive his mother in his buggy. She had very much enjoyed her daily drives over the prairies, enamelled with flowers, of every new variety of which Justin stopped to gather for her, and which she prized as memorials of those pleasant hours.
At his aunt’s Norman saw the picture of his Cousin Walter—the hero of thewolf story—a face full of intelligence and sweetness, a slender form. He was a brilliant youth, with high hopes and aspirations, when, in the midst of his collegiate course, he was stricken down by cholera, and in a few days was numbered with the dead.
After dinner Norman mounted his horse, and, attended by David, who rode beautifully, he took his way toward the station. His mother and his cousin started about half an hour afterward, and pursued their winding way. The road on the prairies is continually changing; as the new farms are fenced, the owners divert the road from their fields to the exterior of their farms. One memorable place Mrs. Lester had passed on her drive to the village the evening before. It was a slough where, in the spring, a pair of horses were so completely buried that it was necessary to employ oxen to drag them out by the head. One field, on theirway to the station, looked as if it were covered with pansies, the rather coarse flowers with which it was filled being softened by distance into this likeness.
They drove across a grassy field that looked as if it must at some time have been the bed of a great river, so strikingly did the woodlands resemble the banks. Indeed, one is often struck, in looking out upon the prairies, with the resemblance to a sea view. At the margin there will frequently be a mist, such as bounds the view on the water; the groves of timber jut out into the prairie like headlands, and the eye often follows these indentations as if tracing the shore of a vast lake. Proofs are not wanting to establish the fact that Illinois was once the bed of a great lake, probably an expansion of the Mississippi, till it broke though on its headlong course to the Gulf of Mexico. The prairie breezes come every day to moderate the intense heat of summer, and sweep overthese vast plains as on the bosom of a great inland sea. Those who build in the timber lose these refreshing winds.
Mrs. Lester was somewhat troubled on arriving at the station to find that Norman was not there, though he had left so long before her, and she looked rather anxiously over the prairie for some signs of his coming. The boys were not visible, and she was contemplating the prospect of returning to the kind friends whom she had left when they came in sight. She waved her handkerchief to them to hasten, as the train was due in five minutes. Just in time; the train was in sight as Norman stepped on the platform; and as Justin accompanied them into the cars to find them seats, Mrs. Lester hurried him off, lest he should be taken on, so short was the pause at the station.