At noon on the fifth day out, we arrived at the “Crossing
of the South Platte,” alias “Julesburg,”
alias “Overland City,” four hundred and
seventy miles from St. Joseph—the strangest,
quaintest, funniest frontier town that our untraveled
eyes had ever stared at and been astonished with.
It did seem strange enough to see a town again after
what appeared to us such a long acquaintance with
deep, still, almost lifeless and houseless solitude!
We tumbled out into the busy street feeling like meteoric
people crumbled off the corner of some other world,
and wakened up suddenly in this. For an hour
we took as much interest in Overland City as if we
had never seen a town before. The reason we had
an hour to spare was because we had to change our
stage (for a less sumptuous affair, called a “mud-wagon”)
and transfer our freight of mails.
Presently we got under way again. We came to
the shallow, yellow, muddy South Platte, with its
low banks and its scattering flat sand-bars and pigmy
islands—a melancholy stream straggling through
the centre of the enormous flat plain, and only saved
from being impossible to find with the naked eye by
its sentinel rank of scattering trees standing on either
bank. The Platte was “up,” they said—which
made me wish I could see it when it was down, if it
could look any sicker and sorrier. They said
it was a dangerous stream to cross, now, because its
quicksands were liable to swallow up horses, coach
and passengers if an attempt was made to ford it.
But the mails had to go, and we made the attempt.
Once or twice in midstream the wheels sunk into the
yielding sands so threateningly that we half believed
we had dreaded and avoided the sea all our lives to
be shipwrecked in a “mud-wagon” in the
middle of a desert at last. But we dragged through
and sped away toward the setting sun.
Next morning, just before dawn, when about five hundred
and fifty miles from St. Joseph, our mud-wagon broke
down. We were to be delayed five or six hours,
and therefore we took horses, by invitation, and joined
a party who were just starting on a buffalo hunt.
It was noble sport galloping over the plain in the
dewy freshness of the morning, but our part of the
hunt ended in disaster and disgrace, for a wounded
buffalo bull chased the passenger Bemis nearly two
miles, and then he forsook his horse and took to a
lone tree. He was very sullen about the matter
for some twenty-four hours, but at last he began to
soften little by little, and finally he said:
“Well, it was not funny, and there was no sense
in those gawks making themselves so facetious over
it. I tell you I was angry in earnest for awhile.
I should have shot that long gangly lubber they called
Hank, if I could have done it without crippling six
or seven other people—but of course I couldn’t,
the old ‘Allen’s’ so confounded comprehensive.
I wish those loafers had been up in the tree; they
