The Plains

Game became more abundant, wild turkeys still appeared in the timbered
creek bottoms. Many elk were seen, more deer and very many antelope,
packed in northward by the fires. A number of panthers and giant gray
wolves beyond counting kept the hunters always excited. The wild
abundance of an unexhausted Nature offered at every hand. The
sufficiency of life brought daily growth in the self-reliance which had
left them for a time.

The wide timberlands, the broken low hills of the green prairie at
length began to give place to a steadily rising inclined plane. The soil
became less black and heavy, with more sandy ridges. The oak and
hickory, stout trees of their forefathers, passed, and the cottonwoods
appeared. After they had crossed the ford of the Big Blue--a hundred
yards of racing water--they passed what is now the line between Kansas
and Nebraska, and followed up the Little Blue, beyond whose ford the
trail left these quieter river valleys and headed out over a high
table-land in a keen straight flight over the great valley of the
Platte, the highway to the Rockies.

Now the soil was sandier; the grass changed yet again. They had rolled
under wheel by now more than one hundred different varieties of wild
grasses. The vegetation began to show the growing altitude. The cactus
was seen now and then. On the far horizon the wavering mysteries of the
mirage appeared, marvelous in deceptiveness, mystical, alluring, the
very spirits of the Far West, appearing to move before their eyes in
giant pantomime. They were passing from the Prairies to the Plains.