The Continental Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 2, February, 1862

Of rocks rising above or nearing the surface, the Plains are all but destitute; hence their eminent lack first of wood, then of moisture. Your foot will scarcely strike a pebble from Lawrence to Denver; and the very few rocky terraces or perpendicular ridges you encounter appear to be a concrete of sand and clay, hardened to stone by the persistent, petrifying action of wind and rain. Of other rock, save the sandstone ridges already noticed, there is none: hence the rivers, though running swiftly, are never broken by falls; hence the prairie-fires are nowhere arrested by swamps or marshes; hence the forests, if this region was ever generally wooded, have been gradually swept away and devoured, until none remain. In fact, from the river bottoms of the lower Kansas to those of the San Joaquin and Sacramento, there is no swamp, though two or three miry meadows of inconsiderable size, near the South Pass, known as 'Ice Springs' and 'Pacific Springs,' are of a somewhat swampy character. Beside these, there is nothing approximating the natural meadows of New England, the fenny, oozy flats of nearly all inhabited countries. Bilious fevers find no aliment in the dry, pure breezes of this elevated region; but this exemption is dearly bought by the absence of lakes, of woods, of summer rains, and unfailing streams.

Vast, rarely-trodden forests are wild and lonely: the cit who plunges into one, a stranger to its ways, is awed by its gloom, its silence, its restricted range of vision, its stifled winds, and its generally forbidding aspect. He may talk bravely and even blithely to his companions, but his ease and gayety are unnatural: Leatherstocking is at home in the forest, but Pelham is not, and can not be. On the better portion of the Plains—say in the heart of the Buffalo region—it is otherwise: though you are hundreds of miles from a human habitation other than a rude mail-station tent or ruder Indian lodge, the country wears a subdued, placid aspect; you rise a gentle slope of two or three miles, and look down the opposite incline or 'divide,' and up the counterpart of that you have just traversed, seeing nothing but these gentle, wave-like undulations of the surface to limit your gaze, which contemplates at once some fifty to eighty square miles of unfenced, treeless, but green and close-cropped pasturage; and it is hard to realize that you are out of the pale of civilization, hundreds of miles from a decent dwelling-house, and that the innumerable cattle moving and grazing before you—so countless that they seem thickly to cover half the district swept by your vision—are not domestic and heritable—the collected herds of some great grazing county, impelled from Texas or New Mexico to help subdue some distant Oregon. It seems a sad waste to see so much good live-stock ranging to no purpose and dying to no profit: for the roving, migrating whites who cross the Plains slaughter the buffalo in mere wantonness, leaving scores of carcasses to rot where they fell, perhaps taking the tongue and the hump for food, but oftener content with mere wanton destruction. The Indian, to whom the buffalo is food, clothing, and lodging (for his tent, as well as his few if not scanty habiliments, is formed of buffalo-skins stretched over lodge-poles), justly complains of this shameful improvidence and cruelty. Were he to deal thus with an emigrant's herd, he would be shot without mercy; why, then, should whites decimate his without excuse?

Beyond the Buffalo region the Plains are bleak, monotonous, and solitary. The Antelope, who would be a deer if his legs were shorter and his body not so stout, is the redeeming feature of the well-grassed plains next to Kansas, and which recur under the shadow of the Rocky Mountains; but he is an animal of too much sense to remain in the scantily grassed desert which separates the buffalo range from the latter. There the lean Wolf strolls and hunts and starves; there the petty Prairie-Wolf, a thoroughly contemptible beast, picks up such a dirty living as he may; while the sprightly, amusing little Prairie-Dog, who is a rather short-legged gray squirrel, with a funny little yelp and a troglodyte habitation, lives in villages or cities of from five hundred to five thousand dens, each (or most of them) tenanted in common with him by a harmless little Owl and a Rattlesnake of questionable amiability. The Owl sits by the mouth of the hole till driven away by your approach, when he follows his confrere's example by diving; the Rattlesnake stays usually below, to give any prowling, thieving prairie-wolf, or other carnivorous intruder, the worst of the bargain, should he attempt to dig out the architect of this subterranean abode. But for this nice little family arrangement, the last prairie-dog would long since have been unearthed and eaten. As it is, the rattlesnake gets a den for nothing, while the prairie-dog sleeps securely under the guardianship of his poison-tongued confederate. The owl, I presume, either pays his scot by hunting mice and insects for the general account, or by keeping watch against all felonious approaches. Even man does not care to dig out such a nest, and prefers to drown out the inmates by pouring in pail after pail of water till they have to put in an appearance above ground. The only defense against this is to construct a prairie-dog town as far as possible from water, and this is carefully attended to. I heard on the Plains of one being drowned out by a sudden and overwhelming flood; but of the hundreds I passed, not one was located where this seemed possible.

Absence of rock in place—that is, of ridges or strata of rock rising through the soil above or nearly to the surface—has determined the character not only of the Plains but of much of the roll of the great rivers east and south of them. Even at the very base of the Rocky Mountains, the Chugwater shows a milky though rapid current, while the North Platte brings a considerable amount of earthy sediment from the heart of that Alpine region. After fairly entering upon the Plains, every stream begins to burrow and to wash, growing more and more turbid, until it is lost in 'Big Muddy,' the most opaque and sedimentary of all great rivers. I suspect that all the other rivers of this continent convey in the aggregate less earthy matter to the ocean than the Missouri pours into the previously transparent Mississippi, thenceforth an unfailing testimony that evil company corrupts and defiles. Louisiana is the spoil of the Plains, which have in process of time been denuded to an average depth of not less than fifty and perhaps to that of two or three hundred feet. I passed hills along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains where this process is less complete and more active than is usual,—hills which are the remaining vestiges of a former average level of the plain adjacent, and which have happened to wear away so steeply and sharply that very little vegetation ever finds support on their sides, which every rain is still abrading. At a single point only do I remember a phenomenon presented by some other mountain bases,—that of a water-course (dry perhaps half the year, but evidently a heady torrent at times), which had gradually built up a bed and banks of boulders, pebbles and gravel, washed down from a higher portion of its headlong course, so that its current, when it had a current, was considerably above the general surface on either side of it. Away from the mountains, however, boulders or loose stones of any size are rarely seen in the beds of even the largest and deepest channeled streams, which are usually swift, but never broken by a fall, because never down to the subjacent rock in place, assuming that such rock must be.

In the rare instances of rocky banks skirting the immediate valley of a stream, the seeming rock is evidently a modern concrete of clay and the usual sand or gravel composing the soil,—a concrete slowly formed by the action of sun and rain and wind, on a bank left nearly or quite perpendicular by the wearing action of the stream. In the neighborhood of Cheyenne Pass,—say for a distance of fifty to a hundred miles S.S.W. of Laramie,—this effect is exhibited on the grandest scale in repeated instances, and in two or three cases for an extent of miles. Along either bank of the Chugwater, at distances of twenty to forty miles, above its junction with the Laramie affluent of the North Platte, stretch perpendicular rocky terraces, thirty to forty feet high, looking, from a moderate distance, as regular and as artificial as the façade of any row of city edifices. I did not see 'Chimney Rock,' farther down the Platte; but I presume that this, too, is a relic of what was once the average level of the adjacent country, from which all around has been gradually washed away, while this 'spared monument' has been hardened by exposure and the action of the elements from earth to enduring rock—a gigantic natural adobe.

The Plains attest God's wisdom in usually providing surface-rock in generous abundance as the only reliable conservative force against the insidious waste and wear of earth by water. Storms, rills, and rivers are constantly at work to carry off the soil of every island and continent, and lose it in the depths of seas and oceans. Rock in place impedes this tendency, by arresting the headlong course of streams, and depositing in their stiller depths the spoils that the current was hastening away; still more by the formation of swamps and marshes, which arrest the sweep of fires, and so protect the youth and growth of trees and forests. An uninhabited, moderately-rolling or nearly flat country, wherein no ridges of stubborn rock gave protection to fire-repelling marshes, would gradually be swept of trees by fires, and converted into prairie or desert.

Life on the Plains—the life of white men, by courtesy termed civilized—is a rough and rugged matter. I can not concur with J.B. Ficklin, long a mail-agent ranging from St. Joseph to Salt Lake (now, I regret to say, a quarter-master in the rebel army), who holds that a man going on the Plains should never wash his face till he comes off again; but water is used there for purposes of ablution with a frugality not fully justified by its scarcity. A 'biled shirt' lasts a good while. I noted some in use which the dry, fine dust of that region must have been weeks in bringing to the rigidity and clayey yellow or tobacco-stain hue which they unchangeably wore during the days that I enjoyed the society of the wearers. Pilot-bread, a year or so baked, and ever since subjected to the indurating influences of an atmosphere intensely dry, is not particularly succulent or savory food, and I did not find it improved by some minutes' immersion in the frying-pan of hot lard from which our rations of pork had just been turned out; but others of more experience liked it much. The pork of the Plains is generally poor, composed of the lightly-salted and half-smoked sides of shotes who had evidently little personal knowledge of corn. The coffee I did not drink; but, in the absence of milk, and often of sugar also, and in view of its manufacture by the rudest and rawest of masculine cooks, I judge that the temptation to excessive indulgence in this beverage was not irresistible. Most of the water of the Plains, unlike that of the Great Basin, is pretty good; but as you near the Rocky Mountains, 'alkali' becomes a terror to man and beast.

The present Buffalo range will, doubtless, in time, be covered with civilized herdsmen and their stock; but beyond that to the fairly watered and timbered vicinity of the Rocky Mountains, settlers will be few and far between for many generations. What the Plains universally need is a plant that defies intense protracted drouth, and will propagate itself rapidly and widely by the aid of winds and streams alone. I do not know that the Canada thistle could be made to serve a good purpose here, but I suspect it might. Let the plains be well covered by some such deep-rooting, drouth-defying plant, and the most of their soil would be gradually arrested, the quality of that which remains, meliorated, and other plants encouraged and enabled to attain maturity under its protection. Shrubs would follow, then trees; until the region would become once more, as I doubt not it already has been, hospitable and inviting to man. At present, I can only commend it as very healthful, with a cooling, non-putrefying atmosphere; and, while I advise no man to take lodgings under the open sky, still, I say that if one must sleep with the blue arch for his counterpane and the stars for its embellishments, I know no other region where an out-door roll in a Mackinaw blanket for a night's rest is less perilous or more comfortable.

SEVEN DEVILS: A REMEMBRANCE OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS

Once upon a time—see the Arabian Nights Entertainments—as the Caliph Haroun Alraschid—blessed be his memory!—walked, disguised, as was his wont, through the streets of Bagdad, he observed a young man lashing furiously a beautiful, snow-white mare to the very verge of cruelty. Coming every day to the same place, and finding the spectacle repeated, the curiosity of the humane Caliph, was excited to learn the cause of such treatment. Mr. Rarey had not yet been born; but the Arab knows, and always has known, how to subdue and to control his steed with equal skill, without resort to severity. The explanation of this afterwards appears in that wonderful book.

One Sidi Norman having married, as the custom was, without ever having seen his bride, was agreeably surprised, when the veil was removed, at finding her dazzlingly beautiful. He enfolded her in his arms with joy unspeakable, and so the honeymoon began. Short dream of bliss; she became capricious at once, and seven devils at least seemed to have nestled in her lovely bosom. Sid was touchy himself, and not the man to bear with such humors. Every day she sat at his bountiful board, and, instead of partaking the food which he set before her, she would daintily and mincingly pick out a few grains of rice with the point of a bodkin. Sid asked her what she meant by such conduct, and whether his table was not well supplied. To this she deigned no reply. When she ate no rice, she would choke down a few crumbs of bread, not enough for a sparrow. His indignation was aroused, but his curiosity also. He looked daggers; but he was a still man, kept his counsel to himself, and set himself to study out the solution of this problem.

One night, when his wife stole away from his side,—she thought he was asleep, did she?—he followed her with the stealthiness of a cat; and, oh horrible! tracked her steps to a graveyard, where she began to cut and carve; and he then discovered, to his great loathing, that he had been married to a ghoul!

Amina came home after a good feast. Sid was snoring away, apparently in the profound depths of sleep, hiding away from any Caudle lectures. He was about as sound asleep as a weasel. Breakfast passed off most charmingly without a word said by any one; and he walked round to the khan to scrutinize some figs.

'How does the lady?' said Ben Hadad, sarcastically.

'Very well indeed, I thank you,' replied Sid.

The dinner-bell rang, down they sat, and out came the bodkin. It did not, however, 'his quietus make.'

'My dear,' he said, smothering up his Arabian fury, 'do you not like this bill of fare, or does the sight of me take away your taste for food? Could you obtain a better meal even at the Bagdad St. Nicholas?'

No answer.

'All well,' said he; 'I suppose that this food is not so toothsome to you as dead men's flesh!'

Thunder and furies! A more dreadful domestic scene was never beheld. The lovely Amina turned black in the face, her eyes bulged out of her head, she foamed at the mouth, and, seizing a goblet of water, dashed it into the face of the unfortunate man.

'Take that,' said she, 'and learn to mind your own business.' Whereupon he became a dog, and a miserable dog at that.

Many adventures he then had. For full particulars, see the Arabian Nights. He used to fight for a bone, or lick up a mouthful from a gutter. He had not the spirit to prick up his ears, or to wag or curl up his tail, if he had one—for, shortly after his transformation, the end of it was wedged into a door by his wife, and he was cur-tailed.

Happy is he who gets into trouble by necromancy, who can get out of it by the same. The devil rarely bolts and unbolts his door for his own guests. He is not wont to say, 'Walk in, my friend,' and afterward, 'Good-by.' But it so turned out in the case of Sid Norman, because he had not been knowingly bewitched; and Mrs. Amina Ghoul Sid Norman learned to respect the motto, Cave canem!

While his canine sufferings lasted, he fell in with various masters, and nosed about to see if he could substitute reason for instinct, and get established on two legs again. He looked up wistfully into the faces of passers-by, as if to say, 'I am not a dog, but the man for whom a large reward has been offered.' On one occasion, seeing Amina come from a shop where she had just purchased a Cashmere shawl of great size and value, he set his teeth like a steel trap, and made a grab at her ankles. But she recognized him on all fours, with a diabolical grin, and fetching him a kick with her little foot, caused him to yelp most pitifully. Running under a little cart which stood in the way, he skinned his teeth, and growled to himself, 'By the prophet, but I can almost love her again; she distinguished herself by that kick, which was aimed with infinite tact; it went right to the spot, and struck me like a discharge from a catapult, drove all the wind out of me, and left an absolute vacuum, as if a stomach-pump had sucked me out. Yap—yow—eaow—yeaow—yap—snif—xquiz;' and, after a good deal of panting and distress, he at last yawned so wide as nearly to dislocate his jaws, sneezed once or twice, and then trotted off on three legs, with his half a tail tucked up underneath, and lay down disconsolate in an ash-hole.

'Oh, how distressing it is,' said he, 'to be bewitched by a bad woman! It metamorphoses one entirely. He loses all semblance to his former self, parts with all his reason, no more walks upright, and bids philosophy adieu. One drop from the cup of her incantations, and the gossamer net-work which she threw about him is changed into prisonbars, her silken chain into links of forged iron; strong will is dwindled, and he who on some 'heaven-kissing hill' stood up to gaze upon the stars, is fit to grovel in a sty.—Miserable dog! Bow-wow, bow-wow!'

One day, as the story proceeds, Sid's master was offered a base coin in his shop, when this 'learned dog' at once put his foot upon it, and in fact put his foot in the bargain.

'Ah, indeed!' said a Bagdad lady, who stood by; 'that's no dog, or, if he is, the Caliph ought to have him.' So, snapping her fingers slyly as she went out, he followed her.

'Daughter,' said she to the fair Xarifa, who was working embroidery, 'I have brought the baker's famous dog that can distinguish money. There is some sorcery about it.—You have once walked on two legs,' said she, looking down upon the fawning animal, 'have you not? If so, wag your tail.'

Sid thumped the floor most furiously with the stump of it, whereupon she poured liquid into a phial, threw it into his face, and he stood up once more a man,—Sid Norman, lost and saved by a woman, his eyes beaming one moment with the tenderest gratitude, but on the next flashing with the most deadly revenge. Heaven and hell, the one with its joyous sunshine, the other with its lurid lights, appeared to struggle and mix up their flashes on Sid Norman's countenance, till gratitude, that rarest grace, was quenched, and hell triumphed.

'Than all the nectar ever served in golden cups and brewed by houries in Mahomet's paradise, revenge is sweeter,' he murmured to himself.

'Stay,' said Xarifa, who divined his thoughts; 'you will transform yourself back again. There will be no transmigration of soul for you, if you are lost by your own sorcery. Let dogs delight to bark and bite.'

'Hold your tongue, Xarifa,' said the mother, who was not so amiable. 'The man shall have revenge. Since he has trotted about so long on all fours, he must be paid for it. It is not revenge, it is sheer justice.'

'True as the Koran,' exclaimed Sid Norman, who was becoming infatuate again, and would have fallen down at the knees of this new charmer and worshiped her. The fact is, that he was too easily transformed, and submitted too quickly to the latest magic; otherwise he would have always walked erect, instead of wearing fur on his back, and a tail at the end of it. A coat of tar and feathers would have been a mere circumstance compared with such an indignity. Well, it was the fault, perhaps it should rather be called the misfortune, of character.

'Sidi Norman,' said the lady, fixing upon him an amorous glance, 'you shall not only have revenge, but the richest kind of it. You have a bone to pick with your wife. She was brought up in the same school of magic that I was, hence I hate her. She has the secret of the same rouge, and concocts the same potions and love-filters; but she shall smart for it. Excellent man! injured husband! Monopolize to yourself all the whip-cords of Bagdad.'

Sid Norman kneeled and kissed her hand. Xarifa looked up from her embroidery and frowned.

The benefactress withdrew to consult her books, but returned presently.

'Your wife,' she said, 'has gone out shopping, also to leave some cards, to fulfil an engagement with the French minister, and to engage a band of music for an entertainment at which Prince Schearazade is expected to be present. Wait patiently for her return, then confront her boldly, upbraid her, toss this liquor in her eyes, and then you shall see what you shall see.'

Sid Norman went to his late home, which was in the West End, the Fifth Avenue of Bagdad. He opened the door, but silence prevailed. Costly silks, and many extravagant and superfluous things, lay strewn about. He sat down in a rocking-chair and gazed at a full-length portrait of the Haroun Alraschid.

About noon the lady came in, with six shop clerks after her, bearing packages, tossed off her head-dress, and flung herself inanimately on the sofa.

'Ahem,' grunted Sid Norman, who was concealed in the shadow of an alcove.

Amina looked up. Furies! what an appalling rencontre! She looked as pale as the corpses which she adored; she would have shrieked, but had no more voice than a ghost; she would have fled, but was riveted as with the gaze of a basilisk.

'Dear,' said Sid Norman, with an uxorious smile, 'what ails you? Has the fast of Kamazan begun? Hardly yet, for this looks more like the carnival. How much gave you for this Cashmere, my love?'

A great sculptor was Sid Norman, for, without lifting a hand, or using any other tool than a keen eye and a sharp tongue, he had wrought out before him, carved as in cold marble, the statue of a beautiful, bad woman. Such is genius. Such is conscience!

'Mrs. Amina Sidi Ghoul Norman,' proceeded the husband, giving his wife time to relax a little from her rigor, 'is dinner ready? We want nothing but a little rice. Set on only two plates, a knife and fork for me, and a bodkin for you, if you please, madam.'

(A symptom of hysterics, checked by a nightmare inability of action.)

'Have you nothing to say? Is thy servant a dog? Why have you wrought this deviltry? Take that.'

Therewith he flung some liquid in her face, and the late fashionable lady of Bagdad became a mare. Sid seized a cow-skin, and laid on with a will.

'You may now cut up as many capers as you please,' said he, reining her in with a bit and bridle, and cutting her with the whip until the blood rolled. 'To-morrow you may go to grass in the graveyard.'

Every day he made a practice of lashing her around the square, if possible, to get the devil out of her. When the Caliph Haroun Alraschid learned the true cause of such conduct, he remarked that it was punishment enough to be transformed into a beast; and, while the stripes should be remitted, still he would not have the woman to assume her own shape again, as she would be a dangerous person in his good city of Bagdad.

The moral of this tale of sorcery, which is equal to any in Æsop's Fables, may be drawn from a posthumous letter which was found among the papers of Sidi Norman, and is as follows:—

'TO BEN HADAD, SON OF BEN HADAD.

'You, who stand upon the verge of youth,—for that is the age, and there is the realm, of genii, fairies, and wild 'enchantments,—learn wisdom from the said story of Sidi Norman.