We had not gone far until I began to hear the sweetest music. I could not imagine from whence it fell, as I knew there was not a human home in all that plain between the two settlements. Then I heard personal conversation; in fact, the night was full of pleasant travelers. The awful storm seemed not to affect them in the least. They seemed to have an open road too, while we were plunging through deep snowdrifts, my feet already dragging along their tops.
When the first carriage load came up I saw it was only a desert juniper. The boreal gale sweeping through its shivering branches made converse in the music of the wild, Jenny and I being the only seat-holders in that grand opera. Soon another caravan of belated folks drove up; but it was only a load of hay that had been over-tipped. Others came, but they were only bushes or some inanimate object. There was little life out on that perishing night.
After hours of fearsome and benumbing travel, Jenny stumbled with me into the little home town. A good feed of oats and a warm shelter doubtless ended the story happily for her. But for me--the ghost of the desert and the wraith of the blizzard had become real. They spoke to me that night and I understood.
God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting.--_Longfellow_.
Westward the course of empire takes its way.--_Berkeley_.
In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water.--_Isaiah_.
Possibly there are those who find themselves thinking that Western tales are travelers' tales and must be taken with "a grain of salt." Some also say that the man who crosses the Missouri never is able to tell the truth again; this is crude, I know, and in some cases true, but they who are so afflicted were just the same before they ever saw the Missouri.
Our waterless areas were considered by Captain Bonneville (as told by Washington Irving) utterly barren and forever hopeless wastes. In Astoria--chapter thirty-four--these words are used:
"In this dreary desert of sand and gravel of the Snake here and there is a thin and scanty herbage, insufficient for the horse or the buffalo. Indeed, these treeless wastes between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific are even more desolate and barren than the naked, upper prairies on the Atlantic side; they present vast desert tracts that must ever defy cultivation, and interpose dreary and thirsty wilds between the habitations of man, in traversing which the wanderer will often be in danger of perishing."