Here also game abounds in great quantities, including, buffalo, wild horses, deer, antelope, elk, and turkeys.
We frequently encountered four or five hundred head of wild horses in a single band, and turkeys showed themselves in every direction.
The pleasant moonlight nights, that favored our journey through this delightful valley, were the source of great success in turkey-hunting, and afforded us no small sport. Nearly every large cottonwood tree was occupied as a roost, and the season as yet had not far enough advanced to hide its tenants amid the growing foliage. Each night, as the moon reached a suitable position, my practice was to seek out these perching-trees, from which I rarely failed to return heavily laden.
One night myself and companion killed ten of these fowls — some of them having an inch thickness of pure fat upon the back. It is unnecessary to say that with such abundance, strown so lavishly on every side, the fare upon our march adown this thrice-enchanting valley was one continued scene of sumptuous entertainment.
But, loveliness gives place to arid sterility, and verdure to dreary desolation, as the traveller makes his exit from the mountains.
Almost the entire expanse, from the Arkansas nearly to the Gulf of Mexico, an interval ranging south-southeast, from fifty to two hundred miles in width, between longitudes 100° and 104° west from Greenwich, is said to be little else than a vast desert of barrenness, destitute of tree or shrub, or spire of grass relieve the aching eye, nor favoring stream with kindly flow to quench the fevered thirst.
The whole country is subject to high winds, that sweep over it at brief intervals in maddened fury, bearing in their course immense clouds of dust, and engendering amid the waste landscape a scene of frequent change. To-day the wayfarer may find his progress impeded by no inconsiderable hills of loose sand, and to-morrow he may pass in the same direction and find a level prairie, —a fact not unaptly expressed in the words of the Psalmist, "the mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs!"
Between the Cimarone and the Arkansas, back from the watercourses, the prospect is but little better.
In the vicinity of the former are numerous spreads of rolling sand prairie, if not entirely naked, but scantly clothed with coarse, scattering grass, growing upon a surface so loose that a horse or mule will sink to his fetlocks at every step in passing over it; then come broad reaches of slightly undulating plains, mantled with sickly, dwarf vegetation, and sustained by a thin clayey soil, so baked and indurated by the sun as to become almost impervious to water.
The snows of spring and the rains of autumn, as before hinted, afford the only moisture ever known to these arid regions. Here dews, alike with transient showers, are entire strangers to the summer months, and eave the scorching heat of a vertical sun to snatch the fading beauties of spring and turn their loveliness into stubble.
The following lines, written upon the spot, as our little party were about to withdraw from this dreary solitude, but poorly portray some of the dismal realities then presented:
