Until fifty years ago the whole region watered by the Platte was regarded as a veritable desert, never to be brought under the domain of agriculture, but forever doomed to a hopeless sterility.  Its inhabitants were a wild, merciless horde of savages, whose only aim was murder, and an unceasing warfare against any encroachment upon their domain by the hated palefaces.

The river is very shallow, and for that reason was called by the Otoes, whose country embraced the region at its mouth, the Ne-bras-ka, and re-christened the Platte by the French trappers, a term synonymous to that given by the Indians.

The Platte River, nearly three-quarters of a century ago, was called
by Washington Irving,
        The most magnificent and most useless of streams.  Abstraction
        made of its defects, nothing can be more pleasing than the
        perspective which it presents to the eye.  Its islands have
        the appearance of a labyrinth of groves floating on the waters. 
        Their extraordinary position gives an air of youth and
        loveliness to the whole scene.  If to this be added the
        undulations of the river, the waving of the verdure, the
        alternations of light and shade, the succession of these
        islands varying in form and beauty, and the purity of the
        atmosphere, some idea may be formed of the pleasing sensations
        which the traveller experiences on beholding a scene that
        seems to have started fresh from the hands of the Creator.

The valley is wide, and once was covered with luxuriant grass and dotted with many-coloured flowers.  For a great distance along its lower portions, the banks were fringed with a heavy growth of cottonwood, willow, and other varieties of timber.

In its solitude at the beginning of the present century, it might properly be claimed as the arena of the tornado and the race course of the winds.  Climatic changes, which follow the empire of the plough, have dissipated such atmospheric phenomena as characterized the vast wilderness in its days of absolute isolation from the march of civilization, as they have elsewhere in the central regions of the continent.

The revered Father De Smet, who traversed the then dreary wilderness of the Platte Valley, as long ago as fifty-seven years, thus writes in his letters to the bishop of St. Louis, of a tornado he witnessed:—­

However, it happens sometimes, though but seldom, that the clouds, floating with great rapidity, open currents of air so violent as suddenly to chill the atmosphere and produce the most destructive hailstorms.  I have seen some hailstones the size of an egg.  It is dangerous to be abroad during these storms.  A Cheyenne Indian was lately struck by a hailstone, and remained senseless for an hour.

Once as the storm raged near us, we witnessed a sublime sight.  A spiral