I pass by the following day or two of our journey, for nothing occurred worthy of record.  Should any one of my readers ever be impelled to visit the prairies, and should he choose the route of the Platte (the best, perhaps, that can be adopted), I can assure him that he need not think to enter at once upon the paradise of his imagination.  A dreary preliminary, protracted crossing of the threshold awaits him before he finds himself fairly upon the verge of the “great American desert,” those barren wastes, the haunts of the buffalo and the Indian, where the very shadow of civilization lies a hundred leagues behind him.  The intervening country, the wide and fertile belt that extends for several hundred miles beyond the extreme frontier, will probably answer tolerably well to his preconceived ideas of the prairie; for this it is from which picturesque tourists, painters, poets, and novelists, who have seldom penetrated farther, have derived their conceptions of the whole region.  If he has a painter’s eye, he may find his period of probation not wholly void of interest.  The scenery, though tame, is graceful and pleasing.  Here are level plains, too wide for the eye to measure green undulations, like motionless swells of the ocean; abundance of streams, followed through all their windings by lines of woods and scattered groves.  But let him be as enthusiastic as he may, he will find enough to damp his ardor.  His wagons will stick in the mud; his horses will break loose; harness will give way, and axle-trees prove unsound.  His bed will be a soft one, consisting often of black mud, of the richest consistency.  As for food, he must content himself with biscuit and salt provisions; for strange as it may seem, this tract of country produces very little game.  As he advances, indeed, he will see, moldering in the grass by his path, the vast antlers of the elk, and farther on, the whitened skulls of the buffalo, once swarming over this now deserted region.  Perhaps, like us, he may journey for a fortnight, and see not so much as the hoof-print of a deer; in the spring, not even a prairie hen is to be had.

Yet, to compensate him for this unlooked-for deficiency of game, he will find himself beset with “varmints” innumerable.  The wolves will entertain him with a concerto at night, and skulk around him by day, just beyond rifle shot; his horse will step into badger-holes; from every marsh and mud puddle will arise the bellowing, croaking, and trilling of legions of frogs, infinitely various in color, shape and dimensions.  A profusion of snakes will glide away from under his horse’s feet, or quietly visit him in his tent at night; while the pertinacious humming of unnumbered mosquitoes will banish sleep from his eyelids.  When thirsty with a long ride in the scorching sun over some boundless reach of prairie, he comes at length to a pool of water, and alights to drink, he discovers a troop of young tadpoles sporting in the bottom of his cup.  Add