For five miles the line bisected a bottom formed by a bend in the river, with about a mile's diameter at the neck. The scene was of a luxuriant vegetation. A deep tangled wood—rather a thicket or a jungle than a forest—of oaks and elms, hickory, basswood,[1] and black walnut, poplar and hackberry (Celtis crassifolia), box elder, and the common willow (Salix longifolia), clad and festooned, bound and anchored by wild vines, creepers, and huge llianas, and sheltering an undergrowth of white alder and red sumach, whose pyramidal flowers were about to fall, rested upon a basis of deep black mire, strongly suggestive of chills—fever and ague. After an hour of burning sun and sickly damp, the effects of the late storms, we emerged from the waste of vegetation, passed through a straggling "neck o' the woods," whose yellow inmates reminded me of Mississippian descriptions in the days gone by, and after spanning some very rough ground we bade adieu to the valley of the Missouri, and emerged upon the region of the Grand Prairie,[2] which we will pronounce "perrairey."
Differing from the card-table surfaces of the formation in Illinois and the lands east of the Mississippi, the Western prairies are rarely flat ground. Their elevation above sea-level varies from 1000 to 2500 feet, and the plateau's aspect impresses the eye with an exaggerated idea of elevation, there being no object of comparison—mountain, hill, or sometimes even a tree—to give a juster measure. Another peculiarity of the prairie is, in places, its seeming horizontality, whereas it is never level: on an open plain, apparently flat as a man's palm, you cross a long groundswell which was not perceptible before, and on its farther incline you come upon a chasm wide and deep enough to contain a settlement. The aspect was by no means unprepossessing. Over the rolling surface, which, however, rarely breaks into hill and dale, lay a tapestry of thick grass already turning to a ruddy yellow under the influence of approaching autumn. The uniformity was relieved by streaks of livelier green in the rich soils of the slopes, hollows, and ravines, where the water gravitates, and, in the deeper "intervales" and bottom lands on the banks of streams and courses, by the graceful undulations and the waving lines of
- ↑ The basswood (Tilia Americana) resembles our linden: the trivial name is derived from "bast," its inner bark being used for mats and cordage. From the pliability of the bark and wood, the name of the tree is made synonymous with "doughface" in the following extract from one of Mr. Brigham Young's sermons: "I say, as the Lord lives, we are bound to become a sovereign state in the Union, or an independent nation by ourselves; and let them drive us from this place if they can—they can not do it. I do not throw this out as a banter. You Gentiles, and hickory and basswood Mormons, can write it down, if you please; but write it as I speak it." The above has been extracted from a "Dictionary of Americanisms," by John Russell Bartlett (London, Trubner and Co., 1859), a glossary which the author's art has made amusing as a novel.
- ↑ The word is somewhat indefinite. Hunters apply it generally to the bare lands lying westward of the timbered course of the Mississippi; in fact, to the whole region from the southern Rio Grande to the Great Slave Lake.
