La Salle and the discovery of the great West - North Central ...

168 LA SALLE ON THE ILLINOIS. [1679.left stretched the boundless prairie, dotted withleaflessgroves and bordered by gray wintry forests,scorched by the fires kindled in the dried grass byIndian hunters, and strewn with the carcasses andthe bleached skulls of innumerable buffalo. Theplains were scored with their pathways, and themuddy edges of the river were full of their hoofprints.Yet not one was to be seen. At night, thehorizon glowed with distant fires; and by day thesavage hunters could be descried at times roamingon the verge of the prairie. The men, discontentedand half-starved, would have deserted to them hadthey dared. La Salle's Mohegan could kill no gameexcept two lean deer, with a few wild geese andswans. At length, in their straits, they made ahappy discovery. It was a buffalo bull, fast miredin a slough. They killed him, lashed a cable abouthim,and then twelve men dragged out the shaggymonster, whose ponderous carcass demanded theirutmost efforts.The scene changed again as they descended. Oneither hand ran ranges of woody hills,following thecourse of the river; and when they mounted to theirtops, they saw beyond them a rolling sea of dull greenprairie, a boundless pasture of the buffalo and thedeer, in our own day strangely transformed, — yellowin harvest-time with ripened wheat, and dotted withthe roofs of a hardy and valiant yeomanry.1The change is very recent. Within the memory of men notyet old, wolves and deer, besides wild swans, wild turkeys, cranes,