DIMINISHED but undaunted, the great herd swept north once more into the wide, sweet, unknown world. The mingled grasslands and narrow timber tracts which lay between the heads of the water courses made for cattle drovers a land of plenty where man had not yet come. In every hollow the wild deer sprang away, the head of every draw contained its flocks of great wild turkeys. On the grassy flats were uncounted coveys of the prairie grouse. The air was enlivened with the wild calls of the giant sickle-billed curfew; and from above came the mysterious, baffling liquid tremolo of the upland plover, honey sweet to hear. Glossy green parakeets showed in the timber mottes, meadow larks made gay the air with their metallic clankings, mixed with the broken strains of melody all their own. There was life, motion, all the time in the wild landscape.
The vegetable world also was rich, richer than our Government had thought when in ignorance it gave this domain to the savages in a treaty which, like all our treaties, later was to be repealed. Fruits began to appear, few of them yet ripening; wild grapes, plums. They crossed one strip of sand dunes which ran through the grassy knolls, and found an astonishing growth of dwarfed grapevines, showing not more than a foot or so above the sand, but promising fruit of great size.
In the timbered valleys there was an admirable growth of elms, cottonwoods, black walnuts. Haws and persimmons, not yet ripe, young acorns of the oak trees, showed what the fall mast would be. The black bears and the deer even now were hunting mushrooms. Abundance of food was there for every species. The spotted wildcat made no unusual sight. Now and then a panther passed ghostlike from one covert to the next. A rich land and a contented, indolent, assured. The white men had not yet come. Nor was there even here either weed or bee.
Though really near the eastern edge of their range of that day, distant bands of the buffalo still showed; and adding yet keener zest to an enlivened landscape, frequent bands of wild horses passed in their easy drifting over the grasslands, or stood at gaze in superb confidence in their own speed. It was the open country, the free country, of the old West. In it these men were as much adventurers as had been the sailors of Columbus or Cabot, Leif Ericson or Magellan. It had taken three Army expeditions and a half century of time to find the head of the Red River, which made the drovers’ Rubicon. Young in the youth of their world, they exulted as they rode.