118 BUFFALO LAND. 



V 



the ground. The hair would be about the color and 

 nearly the length of the grass, at the season in ques- 

 tion. In the spring the plains are fresh and green, 

 but the grass cures rapidly on the stalk, and before 

 the end of July is brown and ripe. It will then burn 

 readily, but the fire is like that eating along a carpet, 

 and by no means terrifying to either man or brute. 

 The only occasion when it could possibly prove dan- 

 gerous is when it reaches, as it sometimes does, some 

 of the narrow valleys where the tall grass of the 

 bottom grows ; but even then, a run of a hundred 

 yards will take one to buffalo grass and safety. This 

 latter fact we learned from actual experience, later on 

 our trip. 



What a wild land we were in ! A few puffs of a 

 locomotive had transferred us from civilization to 

 solitude itself. This was the "great American 

 desert " which so caught our boyish eyes, in the days 

 of our school geography and the long ago. A myste- 

 rious land with its wonderful record of savages and 

 scouts, battles and hunts. We had a vague idea 

 then that a sphynx and half a score of pyramids were 

 located somewhere upon it, the sand covering its 

 whole surface, when not engaged in some sort of si- 

 moon performance above. No trains of camels, with 

 wonderful patience and marvelous internal reservoirs 

 of water, dragged their weary way along, it was 

 true ; yet that animal's first cousin, the American 

 mule, was there in numbers, as hardy and as useful 

 as the other. Many an eastern mother, in the days 

 of the gold fever, took down her boys discarded atlas, 

 and finding the space on the continent marked " Great 



