At length we seemed to leave all human habitations behind; and in the majesty of loneliness we were crossing the desert, on a single track, in the midst of the lone prairie lands.
Those beautiful rolling plains--millions of acres, covered with the short, yellow buffalo grass--extend to the horizon in undulating lines, a wide, uninhabited, lifeless, uplifted solitude. The blue of the sky overhead and the dried-up grass are the only blending of colours. Monotonous as they are, there is the greatest fascination about the prairies. Involuntarily you cannot help looking for some sign of life, some tree or green plant. Sometimes too, far-distant specks resolve themselves into the cattle, roaming at will over the boundless plain.
Buffaloes there are to be seen now and again, but they are dying out fast. The indigenous prairie dog alone remains. These curious little animals are of a grayish-brown colour, always fat, with the long body and bushy tail of a dog, and the head of a ferret. They scamper away at the first sign of the train to their "villages," uttering a short, yelping bark. Their mounds are burrowed as much as two or three yards underground; and the rattlesnake and the burrowing owl are supposed always to share the home.
In the evening we had a grand sight, when a storm swept with terrific force over the prairie. A dense blackness enveloped the previously lurid sky, against which the forked lightning played in jagged edges, and the thunder pealed overhead, mingling with the rattling of the hailstones. The engine ploughed along,--we were swallowed up in darkness and gloom, till the sky lightened and gradually broke, and from a confused mass of purple clouds the rays of the setting sun converged into a pale gold mist on the distant hills.
When the storm cleared we found ourselves in the fertile little valley of the Platte River, the narrow stream winding and circling among green meadow-land, the banks fringed with waving grass and rushes; a scene of quiet beauty.
That night we longed to see a prairie fire, but I suppose such good fortune rarely happens to any traveller. It must be an awful but marvellously grand scene. The heavens and the horizon are first seen like a furnace, and then the long line of flame, banked up with dark smoke clouds, comes sweeping on its resistless course. The wonderful thing is how they are ever checked, but most of these prairie fires are said to burn themselves out. And when they approach within two or three miles' range of the settler's ranch a counter fire is started, which eats up all before it, and, joining with the greater fire, leaves it nothing to feed upon. The flames will often travel twenty miles an hour, and leap angrily into the air to a height of fifteen feet. Sometimes they are started by the careless dropping of a match, or some ashes shaken from a pipe, but more often from the spark of a locomotive. It touches the grass, dry as tinder, and the breeze fans into life the little flame destined so soon to burn millions of acres. There is a very curious feature in connection with these prairie fires. So long as they rage, nothing but tufted or prairie-grass will grow; but so soon as they cease, trees, shrubs, and bushes of all sorts spring up spontaneously--in fact it ceases to be prairie. "It is an ill-wind which blows nobody good," for the next year the grass comes darker and richer than ever, and strange as it seems, this burnt-up grass is the finest feeding pasture in the world for cattle and horses. With this unfulfilled wish we lay down to sleep peacefully.