494 CLOUD SCENERY OF THE HIGH PLAINS 



There are towns on the High Plains. At least there were 

 towns in the days of the great " boom." Of some of these there 

 now remain neither population nor buildings; others show a 

 scattering of buildings, though empty ones, and in a few, among 

 many empt} r buildings, is to be found a family here and there. 

 These vestiges of boom creation have been merely waiting for 

 something that has never happened, that never can happen — 

 the blossoming of the desert. At one time across the interspaces 

 the farmer swarmed, but he, too, now is gone, as a class. As in 

 the towns, so on the great flats in between, of the flocks that once 

 settled down and then took flight again a lingering representa- 

 tive is still to be found here and there ; and he is waiting for a 

 change of climate, for the farm on the High Plains is nothing 

 more than a body of land surrounded by wire fence. It can 

 never be anything else except as, in half a decade or so, sod 

 finally heals the furrows of the futile plow and it goes back to 

 prairie and to cattle. 



The diversions of the people of the great uplands are alto- 

 gether indoors. For those of the " towns " there is nowhere to 

 go ; beyond the sky-line there is nothing, only extended myriads 

 of other empty acres and townships; and for the occasional 

 farmer, except it be the oiling of his windmill, there is nothing 

 to do. It is of no use to plant wheat that does not grow ; that 

 again and again in this fertile soil, through arid seasons of un- 

 answered prayer, has refused to grow. To be sure, once in a 

 decade, more or less, there will come a year of plenty — a year 

 of general and comparatively abundant rainfall — as, for exam- 

 ple, this present one of 1898, behind which the lean years in un- 

 broken succession were just a dozen; but these exceptions are 

 not answers to pra}^er; they are rather to be regarded as inter- 

 positions of the evil one and a trap. 



The single diversion of the people of the High Plains is the 

 dance. Mention of it here is not irrelevant. The dance of the 

 upland plains country is properly to be regarded as a psycho- 

 logical phenomenon to which the mute emptiness of all outdoors 

 is a compelling cause. It is not the celebration of an event, but 

 is the event itself, and enlists the serious energies of old and 

 young alike. It is spontaneously recurring — an impulsive get- 

 ting together out of the void ; and the impulse is as mysterious 

 in origin, as swift and all-embracing, as a prairie fire. It is a 

 galvanic, nervous reaction from the strain of monotony. 



The High Plains are the central plains region, or, more accu- 



