36 EARLY DAY STORIES. 



of an approaching shower to see the men strike out from 

 the wagons, each one provided with a sack to gather up a 

 supply of dry buffalo chips for use at the next camp. It 

 was not necessary to carry a supply along in dry weather, 

 because it was found in incredible quantities everywhere on 

 the prairie. The emigration this year, 1852, was very large, 

 and in fact it had been quite large every year since 1843, 

 so that at camping places where there was timber, all the 

 dry wood had been used up, but no impression whatever 

 had been made on the buffalo chips, except in the immed- 

 iate vicinity of favorite camping grounds, and even there 

 it was plentiful within a quarter of a mile of the camp. 

 When it is called to mind that this was the condition every- 

 where on the Nebraska prairies in the vicinity of living 

 water where the buffalo came to drink, one may form a 

 faint idea of the incredible numbers of these wild native 

 cattle that once roamed all over the land that we have now 

 appropriated to ourselves, pasturing and growing fat upon 

 the wild grasses that grew and flourished in a land that had 

 been named a desert, and of which Washington Irving, in 

 his Astoria, among many other dreadful things, has this 

 to say : "It spreads forth into undulating and treeless 

 plains and desolate and sandy wastes, wearisome to the eye 

 from their extent and monotony, and which are supposed 

 by geologists to have formed the ancient floor of the ocean, 

 countless ages since when its primeval waves beat against 

 the granite bases of the Rocky mountains. It is a land 

 where no man permanently abides; for in certain seasons 

 of the year there is no food for the hunter or his steed. The 

 herbage is parched and withered ; the brooks and streams 

 are dried up; the buffalo, the elk, and the deer have wan- 

 dered to distant parts keeping within the verge of expiring 

 verdure and leaving behind them a vast uninhabited soli- 

 tude, seamed by ravines, the beds of former torrents, but 

 now serving only to tantalize and increase the thirst of the 



