Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 November 1884 — The Western Prairies. [ARTICLE]

The Western Prairies.

I was just thinking I would like to bo sent out West just about now on some commission for an able and enterprising journal, at a large saiury, railroad passes, nothing to do and two or three of the boys to help me do it. I just feel a little bit prairie hungry. A Western man never loses his lpve for the prarios. They call them “prurries” in Indiana, “peraries” in Illinois, “praris” in Nebraska, “perars” in Kentucky and “pararies” in Boston, but whatever you call them they are all the same. I would like to hear the wind blowing across the great plains in Kansas, over the beautiful treeless bluff at Manhattan, or along the great reaches out at Lamed. You know the wind never blows anywhere else as it does across the prairies. And there it blows all the time, 355 days a year. It roars in your ears now and then like the rush of many waters; it sighs and sings and whispers through the tall, swaying grasses; its song is never monotonous; it varies all day long; and as it sings and whistles it breathes into your soul a sense of perfect freedom, such as you can experience nowhere else. A mountain is a prison compared with the prairie. The mountain threatens you; it is not loving and "tender, it frowns upon you with great gray rocks; it never smiles; it scowls with dark, ravines and treacherous precipice.*; it terrifies you with blinding fogs and drifting mists; it swathes its stony, gorgon head in black clouds and speaks to you in muttering syllables of thunder. Yon cannot breathe in the narrow passes, you cannot run on the steep, rough winding paths, you bend your head back until your neck aches, to see a little strip of blue sky. But the prairie—boundless, immense, a billowy sea of emerald, dotted with the rank, bright-colored flowers that play with the singing, whispering, whistling winds; the prairie that seems bounded only by the bending sky and the stars; the resin weed gives you the compass and the compass gives you the path; go where yon will and as you please, at a foot pace or a headlong gallop, free as the free winds that make the prairie their only home. There is no room for them any where else. I don’t suppose I will get the commission I am hinting at, but I would like to go out to the prairies and cool off for about ten minutes. True, the walking is good, but—yes, oh yes, I can walk. I cax walk. I can walk. Oh, yes, I can walk. I don’t say I won’t But will say I hate to. I want to see the prairies. Yes; but under the peculiar circumstances attending this campaign, believe I will wait until the prairies come to Ardmore. That’s the way the mountain did with William H. Mahomet —Bob Burdette.