“I had not rode more than an hour before I found, I was completely bewildered.  I looked around, and there was, as far as the eye could reach, spread before me a country apparently in the highest state of cultivation—­extended fields, beautiful and productive, groves of trees cleared from the underwood, and whose margins were as regular as if the art and taste of man had been employed upon them.  But there was no other evidence that the sound of the axe, or the voice of man, had ever here disturbed the solitude of nature.  My eyes would have cheated my senses into the belief that I was in an earthly paradise, but my fears told me that I was in a wilderness.

“I pushed along, following the sun, for I had no compass to guide me, and there was no other path than that which my mustang made.  Indeed, if I had found a beaten tract, I should have been almost afraid to have followed it; for my friend the bee-hunter had told me, that once, when he had been lost in the prairies, he had accidentally struck into his own path, and had travelled around and around for a whole day before he discovered his error.  This I thought was a poor way of going ahead; so I determined to make for the first large stream, and follow its course.”

For several hours Crockett rode through these vast and lonely solitudes, the Eden of nature, without meeting with the slightest trace of a human being.  Evening was approaching, still, calm, and bright.  The most singular and even oppressive silence prevailed, for neither voice of bird nor insect was to be heard.  Crockett began to feel very uneasy.  The fact that he was lost himself did not trouble him much, but he felt anxious for his simple-minded, good-natured friend, the juggler, who was left entirely alone and quite unable to take care of himself under such circumstances.

As he rode along, much disturbed by these unpleasant reflections, another novelty, characteristic of the Great West, arrested his attention and elicited his admiration.  He was just emerging from a very lovely grove, carpeted with grass, which grew thick and green beneath the leafy canopy which overarched it.  There was not a particle of underbrush to obstruct one’s movement through this natural park.  Just beyond the grove there was another expanse of treeless prairie, so rich, so beautiful, so brilliant with flowers, that even Colonel Crockett, all unaccustomed as he was to the devotional mood, reined in his horse, and gazing entranced upon the landscape, exclaimed: 

“O God, what a world of beauty hast thou made for man!  And yet how poorly does he requite thee for it!  He does not even repay thee with gratitude.”

The attractiveness of the scene was enhanced by a drove of more than a hundred wild horses, really beautiful animals, quietly pasturing.  It seemed impossible but that the hand of man must have been employed in embellishing this fair creation.  It was all God’s work.  “When I looked around and fully realized it all,” writes Crockett, “I thought of the clergyman who had preached to me in the wilds of Arkansas.”