46 THE PLAINS. 



knowledge of geography or of the points of the com- 

 pass, have travelled at all without having at some time 

 experienced the curious sensation of being 'turned round.' 

 A man is going up the Hudson Eiver in a steam-boat, and, 

 walking from the cabin to the guards, finds himself ap- 

 parently going down the river. A traveller looks from 

 his book or paper out of a car window, and finds to his 

 disgust that he seems to be going back towards his 

 starting-point. 



This feeling is sometimes so strong that I have seen 

 passengers really alarmed, being sure that they must have 

 taken a wrong train. I myself have been so ' turned 

 round ' on Broadway, that it required all my knowledge 

 of the street, of its tremendous tide of population, which 

 constantly rushes along its west side, and the compara- 

 tively few people on the other, to force me against feeling 

 an instinct in the direction I ought to go. 



No power of mind or will can change this feeling, 

 which, however, generally goes off of itself after a while, as 

 mysteriously and with as little cause as it came. It does 

 not always go off, and a wrong impression once made 

 may cling through life, as to me Detroit is always in 

 Canada, and New Orleans always on the right bank of 

 the Mississippi, because I happened to be ' turned round ' 

 when I first arrived in those cities. Under such curious 

 circumstances the features of the best known localities 

 become strange ; everything looks different from what 

 it ought to look. This is 'getting lost' in the plains 

 sense. 



To the man whose ' head is level,' the mere being in 

 an unknown locality, or not knowing exactly where he is, 

 amounts to nothing. This is something that happens 

 every day, and no amount of turning among deep canons, 

 or wooded ravines, ever interferes with the instinct of the 

 true plainsman. Sometimes, however, he will arrive at a 

 stream which he knows ought to run in a particular 

 direction. To his astonishment it is running the other 



