Douceur
"The strongest stomachs of the party made tea, and found some milk which was not more than one quarter flies. This succulent meal was followed by the usual douceur. On this road, however…
Mile 177: Rock Creek
"A weary drive over a rough and dusty road, through chill night air and clouds of musquetoes, which we were warned would accompany us to the Pacific slope of the Rocky Mountains,…
Mile 137: Marysville
"Passing by Marysville, in old maps Palmetto City, a county town which thrives by selling whisky to ruffians of all descriptions, we forded before sunset the 'Big Blue,' a well-known tributary of the…
Mile 120: Guittard’s Station
"Beyond Guittard's the prairies bore a burnt-up aspect. Far as the eye could see the tintage was that of the Arabian Desert, sere and tawny as a jackal's back."
Whisky
"He [the stagecoach driver] can do nothing without whisky, which he loves to call tarantula juice, strychnine, red-eye, corn juice, Jersey lightning, leg-stretcher, 'tangleleg,' (for instance, 'whisky is now tested by the…
Stagecoach Driver
"The 'ripper,' or driver, who is bound to the gold regions of Pike's Peak, is a queer specimen of humanity. He usually hails from one of the old Atlantic cities in fact,…
The White-Topped Wain
"That day's chief study was of wagons, those ships of the great American Sahara which, gathering in fleets at certain seasons, conduct the traffic between the eastern and the western shores of a…
Prairie Fever
"Refreshed by breakfast and the intoxicating air, brisk as a bottle of veuve Clicquot—it is this that gives one the 'prairie fever'—we bade glad adieu to Seneca, and prepared for another…
Bullboat
"Our next obstacle was the Walnut Creek, which we found, however, provided with a corduroy bridge; formerly it was a dangerous ford, rolling down heavy streams of melted snow, and then crossed by means…
Crik
"Beyond Kennekuk we crossed the first Grasshopper Creek. Creek, I must warn the English reader, is pronounced 'crik,' and in these lands, as in the jargon of Australia, means not 'an arm of…
Mile 48: Kennekuk
"Without changing mules we advanced to Kennekuk, where we halted for an hour's supper under the auspices of Major Baldwin, whilom Indian agent; the place was clean, and contained at least one charming face. Kennekuk…
Mile 27: Valley Home
"The next settlement, Valley Home, was reached at 6 P.M. Here the long wave of the ocean land broke into shorter seas, and for the first time that day we saw stones,…
Mile 16: Troy
"Passing through a few wretched shanties called Troy—last insult to the memory of hapless Pergamus—and Syracuse (here we are in the third, or classic stage of United States nomenclature), we made, at 3…
Prairie Horizontality
"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…
Mile 1: Kansas
"Landing in Bleeding Kansas—she still bleeds—we fell at once into 'Emigration Road,' a great thoroughfare, broad and well worn as a European turnpike or a roman military route, and undoubtedly the best and the…