ed in days seeming now
so remote, when the buffalo rode, like a mad cavalry troop, across the
wide interior plains of our continent; Eagle River, for here this royal
bird used to love to linger as if it were his native stream. These are
the scattered, miscellaneous reminiscences of men and acts, and things
and achievements. In Kansas is a village called Lane, a name which, to
the old settler in Kansas, is big with meaning, seeing it brings to
life one of the strange, romantic, contradictory, and brilliant
characters of the "Squatter Sovereignty" days, when Jim Lane wrought,
with his weird and wonderful eloquence, his journeys oft, and his
tireless industry, in championing the cause of State freedom. Him and
his history, reading like a tale told by a campfire's fitful light,
this name embodies. What an archive of history does such a name
become! Portage is a name pregnant with memories of the old days of
discovery, when America was still an unknown limit. "Grand Portage"
you shall see on the map, neighboring the Great Lakes, whereby you see,
as through a magic glass, the boats, loaded on the shoulders when
navigation was no longer possible, and the journey made over the
watershed till a stream was followed far enough to float the birch-bark
canoe once more. Prairie is another word full of interest. Pampas is
a word, Peruvian in origin, designating the prairies of South America;
while prairie is a French word, meaning meadow. Pampas is the Peruvian
word for field. The words are synonyms, but come from different
hemispheres of the world. Does it not seem strange that a word
descriptive of these treeless wildernesses of North America should be a
gift, not of the Indian hunter who used to scurry across them swift as
an arrow of death, but should really be the gift of those hardy and
valorous French voyagers who had no purpose of fastening a name on the
flower-sown, green meadows that swayed in the wind like some emerald
sea? So the Incas have christened the plains of South America, and the
French adventurer the plains of North America! Though, who that
crosses our prairies, sweet with green, and lit with flowers like lamps
of many-colored fires, thinks he is speaking the speech of the French
trapper of long ago? Savannah is an Indian word, meaning meadow, and
gives name to these dank meadowlands under warmer skies, where reeds
and swamp-grasses grow; and the name of Savannah in Georgia is thus
bestowed. How muc