y hot, and
finally settled down to a fierce east-windy cold, difficult to endure.
It was free and breezy, however, and my horse was companionable.
Sometimes herds of cattle were browsing on the sun-cured grass, then
herds of horses. Occasionally I met a horseman with a rifle lying
across his saddle, or a wagon of the ordinary sort, but oftener I saw a
wagon with a white tilt, of the kind known as a "Prairie Schooner,"
laboring across the grass, or a train of them, accompanied by herds,
mules, and horsemen, bearing emigrants and their household goods in
dreary exodus from the Western States to the much-vaunted prairies of
Colorado.

The host and hostess of one of these wagons invited me to join their
mid-day meal, I providing tea (which they had not tasted for four
weeks) and they hominy. They had been three months on the journey from
Illinois, and their oxen were so lean and weak that they expected to be
another month in reaching Wet Mountain Valley. They had buried a child
en route, had lost several oxen, and were rather out of heart. Owing
to their long isolation and the monotony of the march they had lost
count of events, and seemed like people of another planet. They wanted
me to join them, but their rate of travel was too slow, so we parted
with mutual expressions of good will, and as their white tilt went
"hull down" in the distance on the lonely prairie sea, I felt sadder
than I often feel on taking leave of old acquaintances. That night
they must have been nearly frozen, camping out in the deep snow in the
fierce wind. I met afterwards 2,000 lean Texan cattle, herded by three
wild-looking men on horseback, followed by two wagons containing women,
children, and rifles. They had traveled 1,000 miles. Then I saw two
prairie wolves, like jackals, with gray fur, cowardly creatures, which
fled from me with long leaps.

The windy cold became intense, and for the next eleven miles I rode a
race with the coming storm. At the top of every prairie roll I
expected to see Denver, but it was not till nearly five that from a
considerable height I looked down upon the great "City of the Plains,"
the metropolis of the Territories. There the great braggart city lay
spread out, brown and treeless, upon the brown and treeless plain,
which seemed to nourish nothing but wormwood and the Spanish bayonet.
The shallow Platte, shriveled into a narrow stream with a shingly bed
six times too large for it, and fringed by shrivel