Page:The Oregon Trail by Parkman.djvu/15



HE following sketches first appeared in 1847. A summer's adventures of two youths just out of college might well enough be allowed to fall into oblivion, were it not that a certain interest will always attach to the record of that which has passed away never to return. This book is the reflection of forms and conditions of life which have ceased, in great measure, to exist. It mirrors the image of an irrevocable past.

I remember that, as we rode by the foot of Pike's Peak, when for a fortnight we met no face of man, my companion remarked in a tone any thing but complacent, that a time would come when those plains would be a grazing country, the buffalo give place to tame cattle, farm-houses be scattered along the water-courses, and wolves, bears and Indians be numbered among the things that were. We condoled with each other on so melancholy prospect, but that was more or less fold in the seams of those untrodden mountains; but we did not foresee that it would build cities in the waste and plant hotels and gambling-houses among the haunts of the grizzly bear. We knew that a few fanatical outcasts were groping their