CHAPTER XVI

THE PLAINS

“On to the Platte!  The buffalo!” New cheer seemed to come to the hearts of the emigrants now, and they forgot bickering.  The main train ground grimly ahead, getting back, if not all its egotism, at least more and more of its self-reliance.  By courtesy, Wingate still rode ahead, though orders came now from a joint council of his leaders, since Banion would not take charge.

The great road to Oregon was even now not a trail but a road, deep cut into the soil, though no wheeled traffic had marked it until within the past five years.  A score of paralled paths it might be at times, of tentative location along a hillside or a marshy level; but it was for the most part a deep-cut, unmistakable road from which it had been impossible to wander.  At times it lay worn into the sod a half foot, a foot in depth.  Sometimes it followed the ancient buffalo trails to water—­the first roads of the Far West, quickly seized on by hunters and engineers—­or again it transected these, hanging to the ridges after frontier road fashion, heading out for the proved fords of the greater streams.  Always the wheel marks of those who had gone ahead in previous years, the continuing thread of the trail itself, worn in by trader and trapper and Mormon and Oregon or California man, gave hope and cheer to these who followed with the plow.

Stretching out, closing up, almost inch by inch, like some giant measuring worm in its slow progress, the train held on through a vast and stately landscape, which some travelers had called the Eden of America, such effect was given by the series of altering scenes.  Small imagination, indeed, was needed to picture here a long-established civilization, although there was not a habitation.  They were beyond organized society and beyond the law.

Game became more abundant, wild turkeys still appeared in the timbered creek bottoms.  Many elk were seen, more deer and very many antelope, packed in northward by the fires.  A number of panthers and giant gray wolves beyond counting kept the hunters always excited.  The wild abundance of an unexhausted Nature offered at every hand.  The sufficiency of life brought daily growth in the self-reliance which had left them for a time.

The wide timberlands, the broken low hills of the green prairie at length began to give place to a steadily rising inclined plane.  The soil became less black and heavy, with more sandy ridges.  The oak and hickory, stout trees of their forefathers, passed, and the cottonwoods appeared.  After they had crossed the ford of the Big Blue—­a hundred yards of racing water—­they passed what is now the line between Kansas and Nebraska, and followed up the Little Blue, beyond whose ford the trail left these quieter river valleys and headed out over a high table-land in a keen straight flight over the great valley of the Platte, the highway to the Rockies.