256 HOME OF DESOLATION. 



Here also game abounds in great quantities, including, buflalo, wild 

 horses, deer, antelope, elk, and turkeys. 



We frequently encountered four or five hundred head of wild horses in 

 a single band, and turkeys showed themselves in every direction. 



The pleasant moonlight nights, that favored our journey through this 

 delightful valley, were the source of great success in turkey-hunting, and 

 afforded us no small sport. Nearly every large cottonwood tree was occu- 

 pied as a roost, and the season as yet had not far enough advanced to 

 hide its tenants amid the growing foliage. Each night, as the moon reached 

 a suitable position, my practice was to seek out these perching-trees, from 

 which I rarely failed to return heavily laden. 



One night myself and companion killed ten of these fowls — some of 

 them having an inch thickness of pure fat upon the back. It is unnecesary 

 to say that with such abudance, strown so lavishly on every side, the fare 

 upon our march adown this thrice-enchanting valley was one continued 

 scene of sumptuous entertainment. 



But, loveliness gives place to arid sterility, and verdure to dreary desola- 

 tion, as the traveller makes his exit from the mountains. 



Almost the entire expanse, from the Arkansas nearly to the Gulf of 

 Mexico, an interval ranging south-southeast, from fifty to two hundred miles 

 in width, between longitudes 100'=' and 104*^ west from Greenwich, is said to 

 be little else than a vast desert of barrenness, destitute of tree or shrub, 

 or spire of grass relieve the aching eye, nor favoring stream with kindly 

 flow to quench the fevered thirst. 



The whole country is subject to high winds, that sweep over it at brief 

 intervals in maddened fury, bearing in their course immense clouds of 

 dust, and engendermg amid the waste landscape a scene of frequent change. 

 To-day the wayfarer may find his progress impeded by no inconsiderable 

 hills of loose sand, and to-morrow he may pass in the same direction and 

 find a level prairie, — a fact not unaptly expressed in the words of the 

 Psalmist, " the mountains skipped like rams, and the little kills like 

 lambs!" 



Between the Cimarone and the Arkansas, back from the watercourses, 

 the prospect is but little better. 



In the vicinity of the former are numerous spreads of rolling sand- 

 prairie, if not entirely naked, but scantly clothed with coarse, scattering 

 grass, growing upon a surface so loose that a horse or mule will sink to 

 his fetlocks at every step in passing over it ; then come broad reaches of 

 slightly undulating plains, mantled with sickly, dwarf vegetation, and sus- 

 tained by a thin clayey soil, so baked and indurated by the sun as to be- 

 come almost impervious to water. 



The snows of spring and the rains of autumn, as before hinted, afTord 

 the only moisture ever known to these arid regions. Here dews, alike 

 with transient showers, are entire strangers to the summer months, and 

 leave the scorching heat of a vertical sun to snatch the fading beauties of 

 spring and turn their loveliness into stubble. 



The following lines, written upon the spot, as our little party were about 

 to withdraw from this dreary solitude, but poorly portray some of the dis- 

 mal realities then presented : 



