Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/66

48 rage appeared, doubling to four the strata of river and vegetation on the banks. The sight and song of birds once more charmed us after a desert where animal life is as rare as upon the plains of Brazil. After fifteen miles of tossing and tumbling, we made "Seventeen-mile Station," and halted there to change mules. About twenty miles above the fort the southern bank began to rise into mounds of tenacious clay, which, worn away into perpendicular and precipitous sections, composes the columnar formation called O'Fallon's Bluffs. At 1 15 P.M. we reached Plum Creek, after being obliged to leave behind one of the conductors, who had become delirious with the "shakes." The establishment, though new, was already divided into three; the little landlady, though she worked so manfully, was, as she expressed it, "enjoying bad health;" in other words, suffering from a "dumb chill." I may observe that the Prairie Traveler's opinions concerning the power of encamping with impunity upon the banks of the streams in this country must not be applied to the Platte. The whole line becomes with early autumn a hotbed of febrile disease. And generally throughout this season the stranger should not consider himself safe on any grounds save those defended from the southern trade-wind, which, sweeping directly from the Gulf of Mexico, bears with it noxious exhalations.

About Plum Ranch the soil is rich, clayey, and dotted with swamps and "slews," by which the English traveler will understand sloughs. The dryer portions were a Gulistan of bright red, blue, and white flowers, the purple aster, and the mallow, with its parsnip-like root, eaten by the Indians, the gaudy yellow helianthus—we remarked at least three varieties—the snowy mimulus, the graceful flax, sometimes four feet high, and a delicate little euphorbia, while in the damper ground appeared the polar plant, that prairie compass, the plane of whose leaf ever turns toward the magnetic meridian. This is the "weed-prairie," one of the many divisions of the great natural meadows; grass prairie, rolling prairie, motte prairie, salt prairie, and soda prairie. It deserves a more poetical name, for

Buffalo herds were behind the hills, but we were too full of sleep to follow them. The plain was dotted with blanched skulls and bones, which would have made a splendid bonfire. Apparently the expert voyageur has not learned that they form good fuel; at any rate, he has preferred to them the "chips" of which it is said that a steak cooked with them requires no pepper.

We dined at Plum Creek on buffalo, probably bull beef, the