Breaking prairie was the most beautiful, the most epochal, and most hopeful, and as I look back at it, in one way the most pathetic thing man ever did, for in it, one of the loveliest things ever created began to come to its predestined end.

The prairies must have remained flowery deserts, visited as a curiosity every year by strangers, but without dwellings for want of wood.

Grass grew wherever the seed was sown, provided anything like soil existed, and the prairie was now a vast range, most of which was green, and all of which was firm enough to bear a hoof.

Sometimes the prairies were long, narrow strips of meadow land; again they were so broad as to be a day's journey across, and to the American, bred in a wooded country where the largest openings were the beaver meadows and the clearings of the frontier settlers, the stretches of grass land seemed limitless.

Now the white prairie was sky, and the stars lay under my feet.

The sedile Caesar Vopicus, in pleading a cause before the Censors, once said that the prairie of Rosea was the nurse of Italy, because if one left his surveying instruments there on the ground over night they were lost next day in the growth of the grass.

The prairie, in particular, was every way worthy of his attention.

The forest lay about a mile to the right of our hunters, like some dark mainland, of which the prairie was the sea and the scattered clumps of wood the islands.

Up to that fateful moment, the prairie of the farm and of the township had been virgin sod; but now it bowed its neck to the yoke of wedlock.