Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/58

40 The Canadian voyageurs first named it La Platte, the Flat River, discarding, or rather translating after their fashion, the musical and picturesque aboriginal term, "Nebraska," the "shallow stream:" the word has happily been retained for the Territory. Springing from the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, it has, like all the valley streams westward of the Mississippi, the Niobrara, or Eau qui court, the Arkansas, and the Canadian River, a declination to the southeast. From its mouth to the junction of its northern and southern forks, the river valley is mostly level, and the scenery is of remarkable sameness: its singularity in this point affects the memory. There is not a tributary, not a ravine, in places not a tree to distract attention from the grassy intermediate bottom, which, plain as a prairie, extends from four to five and even twelve miles in width, bounded on both sides by low, rolling, sandy hills, thinly vegetated, and in few places showing dwarf bluffs. Between the forks and Fort Laramie the ground is more accented, the land near its banks often becomes precipitous, the road must sometimes traverse the tongues and ridges which project into the valley, and in parts the path is deep with sand. The stream averages about a mile in breadth, and sometimes widens out into the semblance of an estuary, flowing in eddies where holes are, and broken by far-reaching sand-bars and curlew shallows. In places it is a labyrinth of islets, variously shaped and of all sizes, from the long tongue which forms a vista to the little bouquet of cool verdure, grass, young willows, and rose-bushes. The shallowness of the bed causes the water to be warm in summer; a great contrast to the clear, cool springs on its banks. The sole is treacherous in the extreme, full of quicksands and gravel shoals, channels and cuts, which shift, like those of the Indus, with each year's flood; the site being nearly level, the river easily swells, and the banks, here of light, there of dark colored silt, based, like the floor, on sand, are, though vertical, rarely more than two feet high. It is a river willfully wasted by nature. The inundation raises it to about six feet throughout: this freshet, however, is of short duration, and the great breadth of the river causes a want of depth which renders it unfit for the navigation of a craft more civilized than the Indian's birch or the Canadian fur-boat. Colonel Frémont failed to descend it in September with a boat drawing only four inches. The water, like that of the Missouri, and for the same reason, is surcharged with mud drained from the prairies; carried from afar, it has usually a dark tinge; it is remarkably opaque after floods; if a few inches deep, it looks bottomless, and, finally, it contains little worth fishing for. From the mouth to Fort Kearney, beyond which point timber is rare, one bank, and one only, is fringed with narrow lines of well-grown cotton-wood, red wil-