"Cottonwood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of ceremonies, the Flute priests return to their kiva to prepare for the public dance on the morrow. When at 3:00 a.m. the belt of Orion is at a certain place in the heavens, the priests file into the plaza, where a cottonwood bower has been erected over the shrine called the entrance to the underworld. Here the priests sing, accompanied with flutes, the shrine is ceremonially opened and prayer-sticks placed within, and they return to the kiva. At some ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... shelter, yielding nothing in the way of food for either man or beast. Can any one invent a reasonable excuse for planting miles and miles of roadside trees of such kinds as elm, maple, ash, willow, cottonwood and many other similar kinds, where shellbark hickory, walnut, butternut, pecan and chestnut would thrive just as well, cost no more, and yet yield bushels of delicious and highly prized nuts, and this annually or in alternate years, continuing, and increasing ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... and grass was carried into it and arranged in a comfortable nest. The place selected for it was a dry sunny nook among the hills, half a mile west of the Little Missouri. Thirty yards from it was a ridge which commanded a wide view of the grassy slopes and cottonwood groves by the river. Men would have called the spot very beautiful, but it is tolerably certain that that side of it never touched the ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... of a camp can be made in the temperate zone of smaller trees and shingled with browse, or in the South of cane or bamboo and shingled with palmetto leaves, or in the Southwest of cottonwood where it may be covered with adobe or mud. Fig. 134 shows a Stefansson shack roofed with sod. The front is left uncovered to show its construction and also to show how the doorway is made by simply leaving an opening ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... the Grape Vines, which shortens to Las Uvas for common use, the land dips away to the river pastures and the tulares. It shrouds under a twilight thicket of vines, under a dome of cottonwood-trees, drowsy and murmurous as a hive. Hereabouts are some strips of tillage and the headgates that dam up the creek for the village weirs; upstream you catch the growl of the arrastra. Wild vines that begin among the willows lap over to the ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... fell in with a number of these Grosbeaks. They were feeding in the tree tops on the seeds of the sugar maple, just then ripening, and were excessively fat. They were very unsuspicious, and for a long time suffered him to observe them. They also ate the buds of the cottonwood tree in ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... had made her way through the brush and scrub cottonwood-trees that lined the opposite bank, she found herself upon the border of a field where the white, bursting cotton, with the dew upon it, gleamed for acres and acres like frosted silver in the ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... face looks back at him from the mirrored waters of the Cottonwood, the Merced, and the Mariposa. The prisoner sees there only the worn features of his strangely altered self. He catches no gleam of the unreaped golden harvest lying under the feet of the wild mustangs. These are the treasure ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... seedlings emerged triumphantly from the yellow froth, broke into spring leaf, shot up into summer growth, and with their mesh of roots bound together the moist sand beneath them against the batterings of another April. Here and there a cottonwood soon glittered among them, quivering in the low current of air that, even on breathless days when the dust hung like smoke above the wagon road, trembled along the face of ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... transcontinental travelers cross the Little Colorado River at Winslow. From that point it flows in a northwesterly direction, through the sands of the Painted Desert, its banks bearing many and large cottonwood trees. ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... of making the savages more wary, but they were still bold enough to make two more assaults before mid-day. Each of these ending like the first, the Indians thereafter contented themselves with shooting all the horses, which had been tied up to some scraggy little cottonwood-trees, and then proceeded to lay siege ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... spruce are used with success for fire-drills and fireboards, but all must be dry. These are soft maple, cedar, balsam, tamarack, cottonwood root, and ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... magnificent caons of the Wahsatch we passed, their mouths seeming mere gashes in the massive rock, but promising wild and rugged variety to him who enters—a promise which I have abundantly tested in other days. Parley's Caon, the Big and Little Cottonwood, and most wonderful of all, the caon of the American Fork, form a series not inferior to those of Boulder, Clear Creek, the Platte, and the Arkansas, in the front range of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... implanted in these trees also?" Similarly, the Hidatsa Indians of North America believe that every natural object has its spirit, or to speak more properly, its shade. To these shades some consideration or respect is due, but not equally to all. For example, the shade of the cottonwood, the greatest tree in the valley of the Upper Missouri, is supposed to possess an intelligence which, if properly approached, may help the Indians in certain undertakings; but the shades of shrubs and grasses are of little account. When the Missouri, swollen by a freshet in spring, carries away ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... '59 prospectors had spread into Lillooet and up the river as high as Chilcotin, Soda Creek, Alexandria, Cottonwood Canyon, Quesnel, and Fort George. It was safer to ascend such wild streams than to run with the current, though countless canoes and their occupants were never heard of after leaving Yale. Where the turbid yellow flood began to rise and 'collect'—a boatman's phrase—the ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... coward. He was a miser, and such a miser that he made himself face danger. You should have seen him running a blockade, with the Yankees chasing behind. He trembled—I tell you, he trembled like a withered cottonwood leaf on a broken stem. Yet he whined against stoking with turpentine, because it cost a little more. I'd 'a' thought, I did then, that the miser was in his bones until the last trumpet. But to-night, back ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... the deathless springs would have been contaminated. Long ago it had been a Hopi camp; in their tongue it was called the 'Half-Way between Here and There.' Later a handful of treacherous devils from below the border had swooped down into the cottonwood hollow. They had dissipated the Indian group, for the sake of robbery and murder. They had squatted by the water-holes, prototypes of the crooked buildings which now recalled them; they had builded ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... she was, Spears, the naval historian, calls the most powerful warship afloat at that date. As a snag-boat, formerly used by Eads, she had "had two hulls so joined and strengthened that she could get the largest kind of a cottonwood tree between them, hoist it out of the mud, and drag it clear of the channel." These hulls were now joined together; and while the boat was armored on the same general plan as the seven contract gunboats, she was so much more completely iron clad as to avoid the danger that they ...
— James B. Eads • Louis How
... was marked by thickets of birch. In places it disappeared under the leafy tunnels of aspen groves, their pale silvery trunks and leaves contrasting with the heavy blue-green of an occasional water-spruce. In a narrowing of the valley it was choked from wall to wall by a cottonwood jungle, opening out once more into wide meadows immediately below the neck. Long open parks extended their tongues well back ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... depression suggests the dry bed of a stream through which the water may not have flowed for years. It is sometimes a few feet only in width, and again it may be a number of rods. The rich, alluvial soil often causes a luxuriant growth of grass, cottonwood or bush, which affords the best of grazing and refuge for any one when ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... beneath the rays of the silvery Southern moon to sing their tribal melodies on the melon-lined shores of the old Oswego; and by day he will study them at their customary employment as they climb from limb to limb of the cottonwood trees, picking cotton. On Sunday he will arrange and revise his notes, and on Monday morning he will sail ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... chalice-cup and bird's-bill! There was trillium, too, although it was not in bloom, and devil's-club, a plant which stings and sets up a painful swelling. There were yew trees, those trees which the Indians use for making their bows, wild white rhododendron and spirea, cottonwood, white pine, hemlock, Douglas spruce, and white fir. Everywhere there was mountain-ash, the berries beloved of bears. And high up on the mountain there was always heather, beautiful to look at but slippery, uncertain footing for ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... he was a little boy and all the neighbours were poor, they and their houses and farms had more individuality. The farmers took time then to plant fine cottonwood groves on their places, and to set osage orange hedges along the borders of their fields. Now these trees were all being cut down and grubbed up. Just why, nobody knew; they impoverished the land... ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... these little streams would have made a delightful picnic ground, covered as they were by a luxuriant growth of grasses and bushes and some large trees also, mostly of the cottonwood variety. But there were no families of ladies and children here to enjoy the lovely spot. A feeling of intense uneasiness seemed to pervade the very air and a weird presentiment of impending horror covered the prairie as with a ghostly ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... far different with their stock. During the severe weather, the only food that could be obtained was the bark of the cottonwood. The inner lining of this is quite palatable to animals and in cases of extremity it affords temporary sustenance to men. With its help actual starvation was kept away, though ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... level tops) rise like giant pyramids here and there, and one may almost imagine that he is in the land of the Pharaohs. Bench lands diversify the wide plains. Ranches and great flocks are everywhere; armies of cattle; creeks shaded with cottonwood and box-elder; birds and flowers; and golden eagles gleaming in the air. The Rockies wall ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... a young cottonwood tree in full leaf and a scaly, red-barked cedar, clothes that had been washed were flapping lazily in the little breeze. Marie stopped and looked at them. A man's shirt and drawers, two towels gray for want of bluing, a little ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... He reached Cottonwood at 6 o'clock in the evening and through sheer exhaustion was compelled to leave the water for rest, after a continuous run of thirty-two hours. About 2 o'clock the next afternoon he met a heavy head wind and a high sea. He kept up a pretty good rate of speed, however, until he was ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... too much for Racey Dawson. He got up and went out. Savagely he pulled his hat over his eyes and strode to where his horse stood in the shade of a cottonwood. But he did not pick up the trailing reins. For as he reached the animal he saw approaching across the flat the figures of a horse and rider. And the ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... moonlight. He slipped on and on, and when beyond the branching paths that led toward the house he breathed freer. The grove appeared deserted. At last he crossed the runway from the spring, smelled the cool, wet moss and watercress, and saw the big cottonwood, looming dark above the other trees. A patch of moonlight brightened a little glade just at the edge of dense shade cast by the cottonwood. Here the ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... continue their journey on foot. They spent a day making moccasins, packing their meat in bundles of twenty pounds for each man to carry, then leaving the river they marched toward the northeast. It was a slow, wearisome tramp, as a part of the way lay through the bottoms covered with cottonwood and willows, and over rough hills and rocky prairies. Some antelope came within rifle range, but they dared not fire, fearing the report would betray ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... ranch's other full-time hand and Hetty's assistant manager, drove the pickup into the yard just before noon. He parked in the shade of the huge cottonwood tree beside the house and bounced out with an armload of mail and newspapers. Inside the kitchen door, he dumped the mail on the sideboard and started to toss his hat on a wall hook when he noticed the condition of the room. ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... The cottonwood grove, at the western curve of the oasis, shaded the five log huts where August's grown sons lived with their wives, and his own cabin, which was of considerable dimensions. It had a covered porch on one side, an open one on the other, ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... to travel in style, get to Big Spring by ridin' two miles to where I could only make one on this stove. Then I'll head north along Sulpher Spring Creek an' have water an' grass all th' way, barrin' a few stretches. While you are bein' fricasseed I'll be streakin' through cottonwood groves an' ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... rode downstream an eighth of a mile, splashed through to the other side, and tied her pony to a stunted live-oak. Rifle in hand she crept cautiously along the bank and came to a halt behind a cottonwood thirty yards from the cave. Here she waited, patiently, silently, as many a time she had done while stalking the game she was used ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... horse. It happened over there, about two miles." Here Billy pointed across the prairie to where a slight hump showed where the dead horse lay. "I got him over here," he continued, looking about at the scrub poplar and cottonwood trees, "where there was shelter and slough water, but he can't go on. Our father is Mr. MacIntyre, the Hudson's Bay Factor at ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... interest in our journey, and we went on to the mail station, called the Chug, a place not of much note,—for beside a company of cavalry, there were not a dozen ranches there on the beautiful stream, along whose banks were growing willow-trees, and the cottonwood also. Besides, there were half a dozen tepees filled with half-breeds, who are herders and wood-choppers ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... long distances on the wind before they drop to the ground and are covered with leaves. Maple seeds fly by means of double-winged sails which carry them far afield before they settle. Ash seeds have peculiar appendages which act like a skate-sail in transporting them to distant sections. Cottonwood seeds have downy wings which aid their flight, while basswood seeds are distributed over the country by means of parachute-like wings. The pods of the locust tree fall on the frozen ground or snow crust and are blown long distances from their source. On the other hand, oak, hickory, and chestnut ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... of the depressions between the swells a stunted cottonwood, to which he hitched his horse, knowing it would be well hidden there from the observation of the herd. He then advanced on foot. He had heard that the antelope was a slave to its own curiosity, and through that weakness he intended ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... Bela was a duck for water. Since no one would give her a boat, she had travelled twenty miles on her own account to find a suitable cottonwood tree, and had then cut it down unaided, hollowed, shaped, and scraped it, and finally brought it home as good a boat as any in ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... touching me on the shoulder. I told her my name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it. She pointed into the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood and said ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... I should have thought of that before." He gave the other a small flask. The cavalryman drank. "Ah! in '55, when I was with Walker in Nicaragua, I got pinned like that beneath a falling cottonwood." He gave the flask back. "You are the kind of Samaritan I like to meet. I feel ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... terrific thunderstorm. In winter there was often need to save the wandering cattle from a sudden and deadly blizzard. The log cabin or "shack" in which he dwelt was rough, and so was the fare; comforts were few. He chopped the cottonwood which they used for fuel; he knew how to care for the ponies; and once at least he passed more than twenty-four hours in the saddle without sleep. According to the best standards, he says, he was not a fine horseman, but it is clear that he could do everything with a horse which had to ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... of the mint-julep. It is cheaper than the latter compound, too, and much more conducive to health. Continuing to indulge our fancy in cool images connected with fur and its finders, we shall see what contrasts will arise. The blue shadow of a cottonwood-tree stretching over a mountain-spring. By the edge of the sparkling water sits, embroidering buckskin, a red-legged squaw, keeper of the wigwam to the ragged mountain-man who set the traps that caught the martens which furnished the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... letter written by Mrs. S. N. Wood for the Lawrence Tribune, May, 1867: "The women of Cottonwood Falls have passed through this horrid furnace of an election, and come out unscathed. Our laws require that a majority of all the legal voters in the district must vote to issue bonds to build a school-house, before bonds can be issued. As women were legal ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... was able to determine by holding his watch, face up, to the moonlight, it was nearly midnight when the silent cavalcade of four turned aside from the main road into an avenue of spreading cottonwood trees. At its head the avenue became a circular driveway; and fronting the driveway a stately house, with a massive Georgian facade and colonnaded portico, flung its shadow across the white gravel of the ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... kin get the right stuff. Ye see, it ain't every wood that will do it. It's got to be jest right. The Plains Injuns use Cottonwood root, an' the Mountain Injuns use Sage-brush root. I've seen the Canadian Injuns use Basswood, Cedar and dry White Pine, but the Chippewas mostly use Balsam Fir. The easiest way is with a bow-drill. ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... disappeared ahead of us in the cottonwood trees. Colonel Sampson got out of the buckboard and waited for us. His face wore the best expression I had seen upon it yet. There was warmth and love, and something ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... DIPHTHERIA.—A French physician expresses his preference for lemon juice, as a local application in diphtheria, to chlorate of potash, nitrate of silver, perchloride of lime water. He uses it by dipping a little plug of cottonwood, twisted around a wire, in the juice, and pressing it against the diseased surface four or five ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... Doubler in the presence of his rival, he shunted his own horse off the edge of a sand dune and down into the bed of a dry arroyo. Urging the animal along this, he presently reached a sand flat on whose edge arose a grove of fir-balsam and cottonwood. ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... gathering wood for the camp the next morning, when they came to an old buffalo skull. The plains were dotted with these relics of the chase, for already the hide-hunting white man had played havoc with the great herds of buffalo. This skull was in a grove of cottonwood-trees near the river, and as they approached two Mice scampered into it to hide. Muskrat, in great glee, secured a stick and was about to turn the skull over and kill the Mice, when his grandmother said: "No, our people never ...
— Indian Why Stories • Frank Bird Linderman
... extensive prospect, including several small areas of good bottom land, one of which lies directly in front of it; but the number of other ruins in the cove suggests that there was once a much larger area of bottom land here, and this suggestion is supported by the presence of several large cottonwood trees, now standing out in the midst of the sand, in the bed of the stream, where these trees never grow. Some of these trees are not yet entirely dead, indicating that the change in the bed of the stream was a recent ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... oriole, it is the song You sang me from the cottonwood, Too young to feel that I was young, Too glad to guess if ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... on the eastern plains patches of a small pine (Pinus contorta) are found, and a scattering growth of juniper, used by the settlers mostly for fence posts and firewood. Along the stream bottoms there is usually more or less of cottonwood and willow, which, though yielding inferior timber, is yet highly prized in this bare region. On the Blue Mountains there is pine, spruce, fir, and larch in abundance for every use, but beyond this range there is nothing that may be called a forest in the Columbia River basin, until ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... Dogwood make beautiful bowers over swift, cool streams at an elevation of from 3000 to 5000 feet, mixed more or less with willows and cottonwood; and above these in lake basins the aspen forms fine ornamental groves, and lets its light shine gloriously in ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... whose judgment and experience I appreciated and valued, came to me and said: "Judge, if this goes on, the Indians will bag us in about two hours." I said: "It looks that way; what remedy have you to suggest." His answer was, "We must make for the cottonwood timber." Two miles and a half lay between us and the timber referred to, which, of course, rendered his suggestion utterly impracticable with two thousand noncombatants to move, and I said: "White, they would slaughter us like ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... the scant shelter of the cottonwood, it was evident the wind had risen. It was blowing straight out of the north and into their faces. There were times when you could lean your whole ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... sky the sun's heat poured down in floods. A monotonous locust was chirr-chirr-chirring from a nearby cottonwood ... and in the long hedge of Osage ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Missouri, of which country they had heard glowing accounts. They made the journey as far as Lake Traverse, the headwaters of the St. Peter's river, four hundred miles, in Red River carts, which need no description here; where they remained long enough to make canoes, or dugouts, of the cottonwood trees abundant there, when they began the descent of the river, and after perils by land and by water, and perils by savages, who were very hostile to them, they reached "St. Anthony" in September, and were warmly welcomed by the friends ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... kill a cayuse," rejoined Pete. "I've seen 'em flourish on cottonwood leaves and alkali water—yep, and git fat on it, too. Be like a cayuse, my son, and adapt ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... between them also from east to west, and reflects what is between them. On him rise solid growths that offset the growths of pine and cedar and hemlock and live-oak and locust and chestnut and cypress and hickory and lime-tree and cottonwood and tulip-tree and cactus and wild-vine and tamarind and persimmon, and tangles as tangled as any cane-brake or swamp, and forests coated with transparent ice and icicles, hanging from the boughs and crackling in the wind, and ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... sun was shining hot, but it was cool and pleasant inside the mill. The brown water in Sawny Creek lapped softly against the rocks in its bed, and the sycamore and cottonwood trees, which grew from the water's edge up the steep, muddy banks, stood straight and motionless in the warm sunny air, no touch of autumn upon them yet; only the sweet-gums were turning slightly yellow, and the black-gums were tinging ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... the other side, above the big cottonwood," decided Frank. "There's a weedy little bight up there where I predict a two- pound bass in ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... wind blows—and he is not alone in this peculiarity in Kansas, as I say—Jonathan steadily toiled against the wind, he stopped altogether, and taking out his lunch basket, he removed a pie and sat down on a log to eat it, while his horse, moving a little further along, propped himself against a cottonwood tree to keep from being entirely ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... entered on an absolutely straight line, and, with one long whistle from the engine, settled down to its work. Through the night hours it sped on, past lonely ranches and infrequent stations, by and across shallow streams fringed with cottonwood trees, over the greenish-yellow buffalo grass; near the old trail where many a poor emigrant, many a bold frontiersman, many a brave soldier, had laid his bones ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... already striding away in the direction of a thicket of cottonwood where he heard the ripple of women's and children's voices. When he had penetrated it, he found his sister sitting on a stump, surrounded by a laughing, gesticulating crowd of young girls and old women, with a tightly swaddled papoose in her lap. Some ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... it—where many household treasures might be safely hidden, if one went carefully, wading in the creek to hide the tracks. She followed Buddy out, and called to Ezra who was chopping wood with a grunt for every fall of the axe and many rest—periods in the shade of the cottonwood tree. ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... almost entirely surrounded by trees, there was one spot where a thin man, like Hopkins or Baldy, could draw his body through and climb a luxuriant cottonwood, whose top have a wide ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... trail crossing the river followed a little draw that climbed the hills to the level upland. All animals use these trails, Wolves and Foxes as well as Cattle and Deer: they are the main thoroughfares. A cottonwood stump not far from where it plunged to the gravelly stream was marked with Wolf signs that told the wolver of its use. Here was an excellent place for traps, not on the trail, for Cattle were here in numbers, but twenty yards away on a level, sandy spot he set four traps ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the cottonwoods. The details of her new existence, the dirt, the roughness, were beginning to sink in on her. She paced back and forth, lips compressed, eyes black. Kut-le stood with his back against a cottonwood eying the slender figure with frank delight. Now and again he chuckled as he rolled a cigarette with his facile finger. His hands were fine as only an Indian's can be: strong and sinewy yet supple with slender fingers ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... some prairie, and our cultivated land increased. By the fall of 1857, my little cottonwood trees showed up in a pretty grove of green for a distance of two or three miles, and were ten to fifteen feet high: so I could lie in the shade of ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... rumored that he had an army behind him and an empire before him. It was a great day—his arrival—to poor Nolan. Burr had not been at the fort an hour before he sent for him. That evening he asked Nolan to take him out in his skiff, to show him a canebrake or a cottonwood tree, as he said—really to seduce him; and by the time the sail was over, Nolan was enlisted body and soul. From that time, though he did not yet know it, he lived as ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... in a grove of Cottonwood trees up the valley, there came forth from the side of the hill a spring of singularly bright and cool water, of which Uncle Jeff was particularly fond; as were, indeed, the rest of us. Clarice made it a practice every evening, just before we returned home from ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... have had no trouble in finding some cave in the rocks which we could have fitted up into as good a house as this. There are places, too, where the horses would have been sheltered from the storms, and we could gather plenty of cottonwood bark when grass was beyond reach, and thus kept the ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... was dusty that afternoon, and the sun was hot. It would be cooler under the willows by the river. At Cottonwood Corners, Dorian left the road and took the cut-off path. The river sparkled cool and clear under the overhanging willows. He saw a good-sized trout playing in the pool, but as he had no fishing tackle with him, the boy could only watch the fish in its graceful ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... he added, stopping under a cottonwood that flung a big branch out over the narrow cow-trail they were traveling. "The chances are friend Floyd will be ambling around this way in a day or two," he said hearteningly. "He can tend to the last sad rites and take charge of your horse. He's liable to be sore when he reads your ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... Buffalo skins and buffalo tongues are on sale at most of the stations. We reach South Platte on the 2d, and Fort Kearney on the 3d. The 7th Iowa Calvary are here, under the command of Captain Wood. At Cottonwood, a days ride back, we had taken aboard Major O'Brien, commanding the troops there, and a ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... that the grass spiders had seamed together overnight were spangled with dew, so that each out-thrown thread was a glittering rosary and the center of each web a silken, cushioned jewel casket. Likewise each web was outlined in white mist, for the cottonwood trees were shedding down their podded product so thickly that across open spaces the slanting lines of the drifting fiber looked like snow. It would be hot enough after a while, but now the whole world was sweet and fresh and ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... another town that had a railroad. The people seldom came this way, as there were other places more accessible to them. The trail was little used, and might be hard to find in some places; but, if they kept the Cottonwood Creek in sight, and followed on to the end of the valley, and then crossed the bench to the right, they would be in sight of it, and couldn't miss it. It was a good twenty miles beyond their house; but, if the travellers didn't miss the way, they might reach it before dark. Yes, the ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... spoken, and the men in silence followed after. They had seen a thing of strong medicine, and the Great Mystery had sent power quickly. That palsy by which the man had been touched had come with the swiftness of the wind when it whirls the leaves of the cottonwood. They all knew that the tongue would be dumb, and the eyes would be blind in the given time ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Law School and of West Point Military Academy; another, one of the Renvilles, had been interpreter for Nicollet; another was an Indian Trader, Joe La Framboise, who was returning to his post at the mouth of Little Cottonwood. He was noted for his linguistic ability and attainments and could acquire a talking acquaintance with an Indian language if given a day or two opportunity; another was a noted Winnebago half breed, Baptiste, whose Indian dress and habits ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... green and colorful and verdant beauty, the almost level floor of the canyon, the banks of soft earth, the thickets and clumps of cottonwood, the shelving caverns and bulging walls—these features were gradually lost, and Nonnezoshe began to deepen in bare red and white stone steps. The walls sheered away from one another, breaking into sections and ledges, ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... other side of the river, or divide, dark shadows stood under the few cottonwood trees, motionless and quiet as the grave, their ears strained to catch the first sound of their quarry, and their hands grasping ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... laden freight wagon, piled high with ranch supplies, stood in the dooryard before a long loghouse. The yard was fenced with crooked cottonwood poles so that it served also as a corral, around which the leaders of the freight team wandered, stripped of their harness, looking for a place ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... the junction of Pine and North Water Streets. The grounds sloped toward the banks of the river. It had a broad piazza looking south, and before it lay a green lawn shaded by Lombardy poplars and a cottonwood tree. Across the river rose Fort Dearborn, amid groves of locust trees, the national flag blooming, as it ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... as the agent spoke. The store was a barn-like building, with a row of poplars at the north, and a big cottonwood in front. A few houses were clustered about. Bill Talpers, store-keeper and postmaster, looked out of the door as the automobile went past. Generally there were Indians sitting in front of the store, but to-day there were none. Plenty Buffalo volunteered the information that there ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... purchases in the stores, and found much amusement in watching a bevy of Mojave Indian girls buying pigments to be used in adorning their necks, arms, and faces. Following the bronze maidens to the shore of a lagoon that backed up to the town from the river, they seated themselves beneath a cottonwood and witnessed the designing of tracings in many colors, made with endless and musical chatterings, accompanied by an evident consciousness that they were objects of interest to two ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... affected silence of deep resignation: "Well! it's too bad folks can't just spend their lives listenin' to such elegant talk; I'd admire to do nothing else! But there's my family up at Cottonwood—and they must eat. They're that low that they expect me to waste my time getting food for 'em here, instead of drinking in the ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... failure of the Legislature to designate one. Leavenworth city aspired to this honor and polled six hundred votes; but it had an enterprising rival in Kickapoo city, ten miles up the river, and another, Delaware city, eight miles down stream. Both were paper towns—"cottonwood towns," in border slang—of great expectations; and both having more unscrupulous enterprise than voters, appealed to Platte County to "come over." This was an appeal Platte County could never resist, and accordingly a chartered ferry-boat brought voters ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... partly hidden by the cottonwood and the alders, stepped forward at this moment and prepared to moor the boat ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... ten words had passed, drew cold-blooded, point blank at the only man who saw fit to question the invader's right of absolute ownership. Pete it was once again who, when the smoke had cleared away, assisted in laying out that same misguided citizen, in decent fellowship, beneath the cottonwood bar, and thrust an adequate green roll in the stiffening hand for ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... really lived. Then all the little overcrowded houses were opened wide, and the wind blew through them with sweet, earthy smells of garden-planting. The town looked as if it had just been washed. People were out painting their fences. The cottonwood trees were a-flicker with sticky, yellow little leaves, and the feathery tamarisks were in pink bud. With the warm weather came freedom for everybody. People were dug up, as it were. The very old people, whom one had not seen all winter, came out and sunned themselves in the yard. ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... two classes, the harder woods, such as spruce, fir, etc., and the softer, such as poplar, cottonwood, etc. There are three ways of reducing or disintegrating wood fibres: first, by sulphurous acid or bi-sulphite of lime fumes, which gives the name "sulphite fibre"; second, by caustic soda, which is called "soda fibre"; and third, by grinding. The last is usually only used ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... tribes, their favorite game being to steal each other's horses. The Indian method of caring for their horses in the cold winter was to let them shift for themselves during the day, and to take them into their own lodges at night where they were fed with the juicy, brittle twigs of the cottonwood tree. With this spare fodder the animals thrive and keep their coats ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... three o'clock, and we were lying upon our oars in an eddy formed by a clump of cottonwood, and the light of the steamer is a solitary, bright star in the distance, when the silence is broken by the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... was wearing away as we pushed on and on through the drifting bergs without our having obtained a single glimpse of the great glacier. A Sum Dum seal-hunter, whom we met groping his way deftly through the ice in a very small, unsplitable cottonwood canoe, told us that the ice-mountain was yet fifteen miles away. This was toward the middle of the afternoon, and I gave up sketching and making notes and worked hard with the Indians to reach it before dark. About seven o'clock we approached ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... carry with them had given out. The winter-bleached prairie straw proved devoid of nourishment; and they could only keep them from starving by seeking for the "browse," as it is called, this being the green bark and tender buds and branches of the cottonwood and other stunted ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... used to live on Cottonwood and owned a little farm, I was called upon a mission that gave me much alarm; The reason that they called me, I'm sure I do not know. But to hoe the cane and ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... word of defiance as final, they dispatched a force to repel "the invading army," as General Houston called the troops advancing under the command of Santa Ana, the Mexican president. A portion of the Texan soldiers took their stand in the Alamo, an old Spanish mission in the cottonwood trees in the town of San Antonio. Instead of obeying the order to blow up the mission and retire, they held their ground until they were completely surrounded and cut off from all help. Refusing ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... rode out of a patch of wood which had hidden from the girls' eyes a piece of lowland fringed by a grove of northern cottonwood trees. On the air was borne a deep bellow—a sound that none of the three had ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... sidewalks, and to advance the other interests of their town, have been generously seconded and aided by the men of their community. Among the most prominent of the women mayors were Mrs. Mary D. Lowman of Oskaloosa, Mrs. Minnie D. Morgan of Cottonwood Falls, and Mrs. Antoinette Haskell of Gaylord. Mrs. Lowman, the second woman to be elected, conducted a great work in improving the conditions of the municipality, morally and physically. She held her office two terms with ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... Red River. A beautiful meadow about half a mile wide, colored with yellow autumnal flowers, stretched for two or three miles along the foot of the hills, bordered on the opposite side by the river, whose bank was fringed with cottonwood trees. ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... we were led to the small open court of the home, perhaps forty by eighty feet, upon which all doors of the one-storied structures opened. It was dry and bare of everything green, but a row of very tall handsome trees, close relatives of our cottonwood, with trunks thirty feet to the limbs, looked down into the court over the roofs of the low thatched houses. Here we met the father and grandfather of the man with the drill, so that, with the boy carrying the baby in ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... July, 1857, the people of Salt Lake City were having a grand celebration in Big Cottonwood canyon. They were having a happy time. The band played, the choirs sang, the cannon roared, while the Stars and Stripes waved from trees and mountain peaks. Suddenly four dusty travelers rode into the camp. They brought news from the East, and startling news it was: the president ...
— A Young Folks' History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints • Nephi Anderson
... had wandered to the Cottonwood and were camped there in great destitution. Their chief food was hominy ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... see if he might swim his horse across. But even while he stared the stump of a cottonwood went whirling down the stream, struck a rock, perhaps, on the bottom, flung its entire bulk out of the water with the impact, and then floundered back into the stream again and whirled instantly out of sight ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... as they were old enough was like any one of ten thousand public schools—a large, square, many-windowed, extravagantly ugly building, once red brick, but long ago darkened almost to black by soft-coal smoke. About it, shaded by three or four big cottonwood-trees, was an inclosed space of perhaps two acres of ground, beaten perfectly smooth by hundreds of trampling little feet, a hard, bare earthen floor, so entirely subdued to its fate that even in the long summer vacation no spear of grass could penetrate ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... introduced varieties about the farmyard or along the streets. In this way a forest growth of oak, elm, beech, butternut, hemlock, basswood, and birch is cleared off to give room for saplings of soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is felt that the inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing would derogate from the dignity that should invest an article which is intended to serve a decorative ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Wonsits Valley, which succeeds Desolation, is the longest of the few valleys, being about 87 miles, with a width of 6 or 8 miles. There is a considerable amount of arable land, and along the river bank large groves of cottonwood trees. The river course is winding, the current sluggish, the width being 600 to 800 feet. At the head of this valley is Split-Mountain Canyon, 8 miles long, with ragged, craggy walls 2700 feet high. It ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... the country rises, and is well supplied with timber, such as white oak, pine of different kinds, wild crab, and several species of undergrowth, while along the borders of the river there were only a few cottonwood and ash trees. In this prairie were also signs of deer ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... the late afternoon, to that spot where the road for the first time crosses the alder and cottonwood bordered stream that, before it reaches the valley, is drawn from its natural course by the irrigation flumes ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... the time I swings over to the K-bar-8 ranch for corn—bein' I'm out of said cereal—an' runs up on a cow gent, spurs, gun-belt, big hat an' the full regalia, hangin' to the limb of a cottonwood, dead as George the Third, an' not a hundred foot from the ranch door. An' how inside I finds a half-dozen more cow folks, lookin' grave an' sayin' nothin'; an' the ranch manager has a bloody bandage about ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... Splinter. We won't hang him there at all. That old cottonwood down by the creek would do fine. It'll curdle her blood like Dutch cheese to see us marching him down there—and she can't see the hay sticking out of his sleeves, ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... point in a box canon in the Big Colorado River and here they found four gods, the Hostjobokon, at work, hewing cottonwood logs. ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... limbs of cottonwood and large-toothed aspen are much enlarged at the nodes, and at these places are brittle, often separating from the tree and breaking up into pieces. Under a small cottonwood were picked up a bushel or more of such limbs, all yet alive. These trees are common on low land, and, like snap-willows, ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... the river. In front of us, half embraced by the lagoon and half by the river, lay a little island-ranch of about ten acres, not cut up in crops, but all over green in pasture. A small cabin, propping up a large hop-vine, showed against a mass of birch and cottonwood on the river ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... long. Anyhow, Nels, you recollect them three hoss-thieves I hung all on one cottonwood-tree, an' likewise thet boo-tiful blond gurl I rescooed from a band of cutthroats who murdered her paw, ole Bill Warren, the buffalo-hunter? Now, which of them two scraps was the ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... you're a-goin' to flutter on the down end of a tight one. These here cross-arms on the railroad's telegraph poles is good an' stout an' has the added advantage of affordin' good observation for all, which if you use a cottonwood there's always some that can't see good on account of limbs an' branches ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... Red River. A beautiful meadow, about half a mile wide, enameled with yellow, autumnal flowers, stretched for two or three miles along the foot of the hills, bordered on the opposite side by the river, whose banks were fringed with cottonwood trees, the bright foliage of which refreshed and delighted the eye, after being wearied by the contemplation of monotonous wastes of ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... a cottonwood beside the river showed signs of life. One of them was scarcely more than a boy, perhaps twenty, a pleasant amiable youth with a weak chin and eyes that held no steel. His companion was nearer forty than thirty, ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... night the smoke-pipes were batting against the boughs of oak and cottonwood, and snapping the trailing vines. Some other regiments went by another route. The ironclads, followed in hot haste by General Sherman in a navy tug, had gone ahead, and were even then shoving with their ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... blood-hued Rio Colorado. If it had beauty, it was beauty that appalled. So riveted was my gaze that I could hardly turn it across the river, where Emmett proudly pointed out his lonely home—an oasis set down amidst beetling red cliffs. How grateful to the eye was the green of alfalfa and cottonwood! Going round the bluff trail, the wheels had only a foot of room to spare; and the sheer descent into the red, turbid, ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... trail I know about along this bank, sir," he replied respectfully, "but the big cottonwood with the dead branch forking out at the top ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... counted forty men,—he did not bother with the women. Fred Thurman had been known to every one of them. Some one had spread a piece of canvas over the corpse, and Swan did not go very near. The blaze-faced horse had been led farther away and tied to a cottonwood, where some one had thrown down a bundle of hay. The Sawtooth country was rather punctilious in its duty toward the law, and it was generally believed that the coroner would want to see the horse ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... I do not think they try to get the number of those that pass on the north side of the river, for it would be difficult to do. Opposite the town, & extending up & down the river for 16 or 18 ms, is an island,[45] it is covered with a fine growth of cottonwood timber, I was struck with its appearance with the mirage which I had seen on the plain, & believe it the ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... tires and, behind them, the pursuing car rattled, lurched, skidded. A third tire blew out and as Goodwin swung a corner with two wheels in the air the sheriff's machine smashed viciously across the sidewalk, poking its crumpling radiator into a cottonwood. ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... moments he was bound hand and foot. Lifting some strips of bark from the low roof, Ta-in-ga-ro pushed the Spaniard through the aperture and lowered him to the ground, outside the enclosure of which the house formed part. Then, at the embers of a fire he kindled an arrow wrapped in the down of cottonwood and shot it into a haystack in the court. In the smoke and confusion thus made, his own escape was unseen, save by a guardsman drowsily pacing his beat outside the square of buildings. The sentinel would have given the alarm, had not the Indian pounced on him like a panther and laid ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... our quarters was a ramada, [*] supported by rude poles of the cottonwood tree. Then came the sidewalk, and the acequia (ditch), then a row of young cottonwood trees, then the parade ground. Through the acequia ran the clear water that supplied the post, and under the shade of the ramadas, hung the large ollas from which we dipped the drinking ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... decorated with flags and accoutrements, but one missed the greens. There are no evergreen trees here, only cottonwood. Before coming out, General Phillips said a few pleasant words to the men, wishing them a "Merry Christmas" for all of us. Judging from the laughing and shuffling of feet as soon as we got outside, the men were glad to be allowed ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... obeying an impulse to ride into One Man coulee and spend the night under his own roof. And, say what you will, there is a satisfaction not to be denied in sleeping sometimes under one's own roof; and it doesn't matter in the least that the roof is made of prairie dirt thrown upon cottonwood poles. So he sang while he rode, and his voice boomed loud in the coulee and scared long stilled echoes ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... packs and began to go to work. Some of the men scraped away the snow from the ground where they were to sleep; others went off into the timber, and soon returned with loads of wood on their backs, and started fires; others brought poles with which to build lodges; others, bark from old cottonwood trees, and others, still, brush. ...
— When Buffalo Ran • George Bird Grinnell
... driver swung his head sharply to a picture he will never forget. A young woman was standing on the bank at the edge of the road covering him with a revolver, having apparently just stepped from behind the trunk of the cottonwood beside her. The color had fled her cheeks even to the edge of the dull red-copper waves of hair, but he could detect in her slim young suppleness no doubt or uncertainty. On the contrary, despite her girlish freshness, she looked very much like business. She was like some young wild ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... a half (feet). Stern on court-house, head on dead cottonwood above wood-yard, until you raise the first reef, then pull up square.' Then under head of Remarks: 'Go just outside the wrecks; this is important. New snag just where you ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... therefore comparatively little is known about its breeding habits. It is then silent and retiring and is seldom seen or heard. The nest is quite large, made of twigs, fibres, willow bark, and the down of the cottonwood tree, and lined with finer material. The eggs, so far as is known, number three or four. They are of a pale gray color, flecked and spotted over the surface with ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [April, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... on the grassy levels. Flowers were everywhere, but he did not notice them particularly. The canyon made many leisurely turns, and its size, if it enlarged at all, was not perceptible to him yet. The rims above him were perhaps fifty feet high. Cottonwood-trees began to appear along the brook, and blossoming buck-brush ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... on his journey. By this time he must surely be halfway to Tascosa if he had escaped the Kiowas.... Now he might have reached the cottonwood clump beyond Big Ford.... Perhaps he might jump up a camp outfit with horses. If so, that would cut down the time needed to ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... next day. I went out that night with Gully and hunted some time, but the snow was a foot deep or more, and a crust had frozen, so that it was difficult hunting. At last we found a large flock of turkeys at roost in the tall Cottonwood timber. I shot two by starlight; one fell in the river, and we lost it, but the other fell dead at the roots of the tree. This was a large and fat turkey. I considered that it would do, and we returned home with it. We had been gone only ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... should be soft enough to wear away, else it produces no punk, and hard enough to wear slowly, or the heat is not enough to light the punk, and, of course, it should be highly inflammable. Those that I have had the best luck with are balsam fir, cottonwood roots, tamarack, European larch, red cedar, white cedar, Oregon cedar, basswood, cypress, and sometimes second-growth white pine. It should always be a dry, sound stick, brash, but not in the ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... business man, however, and almost every enterprise he directly undertook proved to be a complete or partial failure. He did the most extraordinarily stupid things, as, for instance, when he planned the so-called Cottonwood Canal, the mouth of which was ten feet higher than its source! Nevertheless he had sense to utilize the business ability of other men, and was a good accumulator of properties. His estate at his death was valued at ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White |
