riginal natures.

We had passed the more toilsome and monotonous part of the journey; but
four hundred miles still intervened between us and Fort Laramie; and to
reach that point cost us the travel of three additional weeks. During
the whole of this time we were passing up the center of a long narrow
sandy plain, reaching like an outstretched belt nearly to the Rocky
Mountains. Two lines of sand-hills, broken often into the wildest and
most fantastic forms, flanked the valley at the distance of a mile or
two on the right and left; while beyond them lay a barren, trackless
waste--The Great American Desert--extending for hundreds of miles to the
Arkansas on the one side, and the Missouri on the other. Before us and
behind us, the level monotony of the plain was unbroken as far as the
eye could reach. Sometimes it glared in the sun, an expanse of hot,
bare sand; sometimes it was veiled by long coarse grass. Huge skulls
and whitening bones of buffalo were scattered everywhere; the ground
was tracked by myriads of them, and often covered with the circular
indentations where the bulls had wallowed in the hot weather. From every
gorge and ravine, opening from the hills, descended deep, well-worn
paths, where the buffalo issue twice a day in regular procession down
to drink in the Platte. The river itself runs through the midst, a thin
sheet of rapid, turbid water, half a mile wide, and scarce two feet
deep. Its low banks for the most part without a bush or a tree, are of
loose sand, with which the stream is so charged that it grates on
the teeth in drinking. The naked landscape is, of itself, dreary and
monotonous enough, and yet the wild beasts and wild men that frequent
the valley of the Platte make it a scene of interest and excitement to
the traveler. Of those who have journeyed there, scarce one, perhaps,
fails to look back with fond regret to his horse and his rifle.

Early in the morning after we reached the Platte, a long procession of
squalid savages approached our camp. Each was on foot, leading his horse
by a rope of bull-hide. His attire consisted merely of a scanty cincture
and an old buffalo robe, tattered and begrimed by use, which hung
over his shoulders. His head was close shaven, except a ridge of hair
reaching over the crown from the center of the forehead, very much like
the long bristles on the back of a hyena, and he carried his bow and
arrows in his hand, while his meager little horse was laden with drie