"Prairie" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... remarks concerning the country at large. "What do we want?" he exclaimed, "with this vast, worthless area? This region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts, of those endless mountain ranges, impenetrable and covered to their very base with eternal snow? What can we ever hope to do with ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... beloved forests by the axe and the smoke of the white settler. "The Last of the Mohicans" takes the reader back before this period, to a time when the red man was in his vigour, and was a power to be reckoned with in the east of America. The third of the famous tales is "The Prairie," in which Cooper's picturesque hero is laid in his grave. Despite this, the author resuscitates him in the two remaining volumes—"The Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer." Of these five novels, and, as a matter of fact, of all Cooper's works, "The ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Lady Brassey, the first glimpse of the far-spreading prairie was most striking in all its variations of colour. The true shade of the Pampas grass, when long, is a light dusty green; when short, it is a bright fresh green. But it frequently happens that, owing to the numerous prairie fires, either ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... flashes by, for the west-winds awake On pampas, on prairie, o'er mountain and lake, To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine With incense they stole from the rose ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... have walked a bit together and have come to the edge of the field where we look off and see the unending stretch of prairie ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... War we all jes' stayed on de place. Mister Choate and Old Missy stayed too. After peace was made my mother and all of we went up to Prairie Grove to live. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... tell you what the child's first effort was? It was a fearful burst of laughter. Has he not cause for mirth on his broad prairie, far away from the Spanish dungeons and the "immured" of Toulouse? The whole world is his In pace. He comes, and goes, and walks to and fro. His is the boundless forest, his the desert with its far horizons, his the whole earth, in ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... passed, and we left behind us the patches of forest and came into the open prairie,—as far as the eye could reach a long, level sea of waving green. The scanty provisions ran out, hunger was added to the pangs of thirst and weariness, and here and there in the straggling file discontent smouldered and angry undertone was heard. Kaskaskia was somewhere to the west and north; ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... over, and there were two fresh graves—the only ones in the bit of prairie set apart for a graveyard. I have written enough in this melancholy strain. Why should I pause to describe in detail the solemn services held in the grove by the lake? It is enough that the land-shark forgot his illegal traffic in claims; the money-lender ceased ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... off before climbing the palisade, and the Highland cap which stuck fast to a picket as I alighted below. At dawn, bootless and hatless, I came in sight of Fort Gibraltar and Father Holland, who was scanning the prairie for my return, came running to ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... pride and rebellion that I helped you to nurse. It was like a wedge, driving us farther and farther apart; and now that it is gone, and you will close up again, when you are kind and yielding to Henry—what a happy peaceful home you may make out in the prairie land!' ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... suffering a loss of one hundred million dollars a year by reason of the ravages of the boll weevil. Why? Because the quails, the prairie chickens, the meadow larks and other birds which were formerly there in millions have been swept away by gunners. The grain growers are losing over one hundred million dollars a year on account of the work of the chinch bug. They are losing ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... again opened his eyes it was to behold real stars shining down from a velvet sky, to hear the river lapping gently at the landing, and the night birds calling in the forest. From the prairie beyond the fringe of woods to the east there came the yapping of the coyotes, and far to the ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... well for your father to talk about land recovering itself, but at present, at any rate, nobody can see the faintest chance of anything of the sort. The probabilities are, on the contrary, that as the American competition increases, land will gradually sink to something like a prairie value." ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... of the valley. The grass of the slopes was exceedingly fine, and would not exceed a height of about two feet, while that of the table lands would exceed nine feet, and become impassable, until sufficiently dry to be cleared by fire. In November, the entire country would become a vast prairie of dried straw, the burning of which would then render travelling ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... intentional or otherwise, about the destitution of the refugees. It was inconceivably horrible. The winter weather of late December and early January had been most inclement and the Indians had trudged through it, over snow-covered, rocky, trailless places and desolate prairie, nigh three hundred miles. When they started out, they were not any too well provided with clothing; for they had departed in a hurry, and, before they got to Fall River, not a few of them were absolutely naked. They ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... railway system was deliberately permitted to become disorganized. Hunger reigned in the cities and the food reserves for the army were deliberately reduced to a two days' supply. The terror of hunger spread through the large cities and through the army at the front like prairie fire. ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... church as a religious center, we do not mean that there is to be no religious activity in the home or in other walks of life; as for the center of population of a large and populous country, it may be out in the prairie where neither man nor his dwellings are to be seen. All these centers are what they are because of certain relationships. It is so with a social center. But social relationships cover a wide field. The ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... of hell. The flashes were almost as a steady white and greenish-orange blaze, and showed the earth spurting in great bunches upward; stiff winds that had sent clouds scurrying the day before now caught the ground smoke and drew it, as a sweeping prairie fire, back upon the enemy. This was a propitious wind, and on its wings ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... Colonists reached Red River. The French Captain saw only a few Indian teepees at the Forks, and ascended the Assiniboine. It was a very dry year, and the water in the Assiniboine was so low that it was with difficulty he managed to pull over the St. James rapids, and reached where Portage la Prairie now stands, and sixty miles from the site of Winnipeg claimed the country for his Royal Master. Here he collected the Indians, made them his friends, and proceeded to build a great fort, and named it after Mary of Poland, ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... corral flooded with sufficient water to puddle the yellow clay into a six-inch layer of stiff, healing mud, then thrown out on the open range to fatten and grow strong. But transitions were swift and sweeping. Steel rails were crowding close behind the prairie schooners and the ox-bows. Bull trains grew fewer every year and eventually Cal Warren made his last trade ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... that the snakes and owls and prairie dogs are great friends," suggested Grant. "They all live together in the ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... since Mrs. Bennet had left Elsie Marley. As she returned the letter to the satchel she became aware that the train was at a standstill and not before a station. Indeed, there was not a building in sight: only a dreary waste of sunburnt prairie-grass extended flatly to the glare of the burning horizon. She looked about wonderingly, vaguely aware that they must already have waited ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... even with the establishment of railroads in the Eastern states; farther and farther west it penetrated, ever chosen by emigrants and travellers to the frontiers; and at last in its old age it had an equal career of usefulness as the "prairie-schooner," in which vast numbers of families safely crossed the prairies of our far West. The white tilts of the wagons thus passed and repassed till our ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... wild, busily dangerous life with Old Joe's Brigade, with that brigade of Missouri's young firebrands. Once, stretched on the prairie, where he had dropped from exhaustion and hunger and loss of blood, the Storm Centre awoke to find a Pin Indian stooping over him for his scalp. On that occasion, the deft turning of the wrist from ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... device of an hour-glass to more than three-score drawings between the years 1870 and 1880. Save for their ingenuity, they were not of first-rate importance. Mr. Sands had been an Edinburgh and Arbroath solicitor; a prairie farmer; an art-student under Charles Keene, who made him practise drawing until he became dyspeptic and melancholy at the sight of his own feeble work; an emigrant to Buenos Ayres, where he practised most trades in turn, including that of newspaper artist; a contributor and ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... had thrown the responsibility of a decision on his bride. Selma was equal to the occasion. "Of course he will address you," she exclaimed. "What more suitable place could there be for offering homage to the father of our country than this majestic prairie?" She added, proudly, "And I am glad you should have the opportunity to ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... when Festing stopped at the edge of a ravine on the Saskatchewan prairie. The trail that led up through the leafless birches was steep, and he had walked fast since he left his work at the half-finished railroad bridge. Besides, he felt thoughtful, for something had happened during the visit of a Montreal superintendent engineer ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... strange peace of God which is found in the forest or on the prairie, where God is near and ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... Scythian, bond nor free,' but all are one. Get high enough up upon the hill, and the hedges between the fields are barely perceptible. Live on the elevation to which the Gospel of Jesus Christ lifts men, and you look down upon a great prairie, without a fence or a ditch or a division. So my text comes with profound significance, 'Let us do good to all,' because all are included in the sweep of that great purpose of love, and in the redeeming possibilities of that great death on the Cross. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... strident creaking of the wheels. Sometimes there was the dull sound of a native sledge's worn runners. In the fields grazed the herds, and among them white herons gravely promenaded, or sat tranquil on the backs of sleepy oxen beatifically chewing their cuds of prairie grass. Let us leave the young man, wholly occupied now with his thoughts. The sun which makes the tree-tops burn, and sends the peasants running, when they feel the hot ground through their thick shoes; the sun which halts the countrywoman under a clump of great reeds, and makes ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... nomadic Indians were living there in rude cabins made of branches, pasturing immense herds of milch cows, sheep, oxen, and horses. They went from one prairie to another, always finding a well-spread table for their ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... the mountain with the most barefaced aspect of cosmopolitanism. Was this, then, Jena, the home of traditions? Or were we entering some Iowa village, where the first settlers still live who but yesterday banished the prairie-dog and the buffalo? ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... provided with a trapped animal, brought upon the ground in a sack and let out when the proper time came,—a process known in sporting parlance as "shaking a fox." The usual amount of "law" having been conceded, the hounds were laid on, and went away, as Button said, like a fire-flake over a prairie. No sooner did "The Buffer" hear the cry of the pack, than he started forward with a suddenness and force by which his wretched rider was jerked back at least a foot behind the saddle, into which place of rest he never once again fell ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... officers who forbade their senseless slaughter to make food only for the worthless, prowling coyotes. No wonder the trooper hated to leave the foothills of the mountains, with the cold, clear trout streams and the bracing air, to take to long days' marching over dull waste and treeless prairie, covered only by sage brush, rent and torn by dry ravines, shadeless, springless, almost waterless, save where in unwholesome hollows dull pools of stagnant water still held out against the sun, or, further still southeast ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... that they would alight at the first favorable place. They found that they should have to make a prolonged halt, and take a careful inspection of the balloon: so the flame of the cylinder was moderated, and the anchors, flung out from the car, ere long began to sweep the grass of an immense prairie, that, from a certain height, looked like a shaven lawn, but the growth of which, in reality, was from seven to eight ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... by land and sea the fortunes of war may, with the single exception of Plattsburg, be most conveniently followed territorially, from one point to the next, along the enormous irregular curve of five thousand miles which was the scene of operations. This curve begins at Prairie du Chien, where the Wisconsin joins the Mississippi, and ends at New Orleans, where the Mississippi is about to join the sea. It runs easterly along the Wisconsin, across to the Fox, into Lake Michigan, across to Mackinaw, eastwards through Lakes Huron, Erie, and ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... unholy fire of envy but the mighty God Himself. It is like a prairie fire: once kindled it is beyond our power to stamp it out. But God's coolness is more than a match for all our feverish heat. His quenchings are transformations. He converts the perverted and changes envy into goodwill. The bitter pool is made sweet. For confusion He gives order, ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... blights the field, he blasts the wood, With breath as fierce as prairie flame; And where sweet works of Nature stood, He ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 8, 1892 • Various
... that I remember of,' says he. 'But I thought I had when we struck the prairie country. But I ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... The darker shades are true only of the rotting refuse, the scum of the whole. Among the married millions most are, fortunately, still struggling through the earlier types from the pioneer to the economist. But as the water runs there lies the sea beyond. From the prairie village to the city tenement, the American woman sees in marriage the fulfilment of her heart's desire,—to be Queen, to rule and not ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... cold ride and of the snow down his back, he was standing before the feathered head-dress of a Sioux Chief and touching the tomahawk below it. He turned as she spoke. "Those must be scalp-locks—three." He saw the prairie, the wild pursuit—saw them as she could not. He went after her upstairs, the girl talking, the boy rapt, lost in far-away battles on ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... out of the Revolution, there were several French settlements lying to the north of the Ohio and scattered from Detroit to the Mississippi. Among these were Mackinac, Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, Vincennes, Kaskaskia and Cahokia. The English were in possession of all these and held them usually by a single commanding officer and a very small garrison. The French inhabitants had made friends with the Indians, and in many instances had intermarried ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... impress me as fantastically as it had impressed Colonel McClure. I was more familiar with the Western type than Colonel McClure, and, whilst Mr. Lincoln was certainly not an Adonis, even after prairie ideals, there was about him a dignity ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... banqueting halls of Versailles or Windsor. Water-fowl of gorgeous plumage sport in the stream, unintimidated by the approach of man. The plaintive songs of forest-birds float in the evening air. On the opposite side of the stream, herds of deer and buffalo crop the rich herbage of the prairie, which extends far away, till it is lost in the horizon of the south. Daniel retires from the converse of the cabin to an adjoining eminence, where silently and rapturously he gazes upon the scene of loveliness ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... value most; yet I think the letter of manly kind advice and friendship which accompanied these gifts was cherished still more; for I know that when the faded flag was stowed away—long years afterwards—in an old bureau, and the field-glass had been lost on a wild Western prairie, Yaspard still kept lying near his heart the words of love and Christian counsel written to him by his boyhood hero in the golden days ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... next to nothing. Not but that it might export, if it only had an outlet or a market; but being eight hundred miles removed from the sea, and five hundred miles from the nearest market, with a series of rivers, lakes, rapids, and cataracts separating from the one, and a wide sweep of treeless prairie dividing from the other, the settlers have long since come to the conclusion that they were born to consume their own produce, and so regulate the extent of their farming operations by the strength of their appetites. Of course, there are many of the necessaries, ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... tent the breeze blew the flap lazily back and forth. A light rain fell with muffled gentle insistence on the canvas over their heads, and out through the opening the landscape was blurred—the wide stretch of monotonous, billowy prairie, the sluggish, shining river, bending in the distance about the base of Black Wind Mountain—Black Wind Mountain, whose high top lifted, though it was almost June, a white point of snow above dark pine ridges of the hills below. The five officers talked a little as they waited, but spasmodically, ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... on the broad Kansas prairie, and just before her was the new farmhouse Uncle Henry built after the cyclone had carried away the old one. Uncle Henry was milking the cows in the barnyard, and Toto had jumped out of her arms and was running toward ...
— The Wonderful Wizard of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... He remembered having heard that click once before. It was the night he determined to evolve the final theory of social progress, which would wipe out all other theories as the steam locomotive had wiped out the prairie schooner. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... has many points of resemblance with a prairie fire. A man on a prairie lights his pipe, and throws away the match. The flame catches a bunch of dry grass, and, before any one can realise what is happening, sheets of fire are racing over the country; and the interested neighbours are ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... resided at the corner of St. Louis and Parloir street, previous to joining the Sulpiciens. In October, 1661, he was roasted alive and partly eaten by the Mohawks at Isle a la Pierre, la Prairie de la Magdeleine, near Montreal. In our day, the judicial and parliamentary heads, and the Bar have monopolized the street. In it have resided at various times, Sir N. F. Belleau, Chief Justice Duval, the Judges Taschereau, Tessier, Bosse, Caron, Routhier; Hon. H. L. Langevin, P. ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... obtained a view of intermingled forest, prairie, lake, and river, so resplendent that even his mind was for a moment diverted from its gloomy introspections, and a glance of admiration shot from his eyes and chased the wrinkles from his brow; but the frown quickly returned, and the glorious landscape was forgotten as the thought of his dreadful ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... church-door. A border of sod on either side melts gradually away into the beginning of a lawn of grass which will be fuller and better next year than this. On a couple of fan shaped lattices, in which I take a little pride as my own handiwork, a honey-suckle on one side of the church-door and a prairie rose on the other are planted. In imagination I already see them reaching out their tendrils in courtship over the door. I should not wonder if next Spring should celebrate their nuptials. Some ivy, planted by Miss Moore, on the eastern side of the church ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... could be. Mines of fabulous wealth were said to be hidden away in the hills and forests over which they were passing—rich outcroppings of gold, silver and copper. Perhaps the Major was trying to locate them from the air. Here and there they passed over broad stretches of prairie, the grass of which would feed numberless herds of cattle. Perhaps, too, the Major was examining these with an eye to future gain. Then, again Barney thought of the illegal wireless station and he idly speculated on how it could be ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... Rumors come from the agencies that the Indians are leaving in numbers. A feverish excitement among them has been easily to be detected. Their ponies are now in good condition, and forage can soon be had in abundance on the prairie, if it is not already. Everything points toward a sudden and startling outbreak ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... over to speak to our neighbour, who was engaged in tossing out shovelfuls of earth from an excavation into which he had nearly disappeared. At Johnny's hail, he straightened his back, so that his head bobbed out of the hole like a prairie dog. ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... ranches of the West are now being cut up into small farms. The nester has come, and come to stay. Gone is the buffalo, the Indian warwhoop, the free grass of the open plain;—even the stinging lizard, the horned frog, the centipede, the prairie dog, the rattlesnake, are fast disappearing. Save in some of the secluded valleys of southern New Mexico, the old-time round-up is no more; the trails to Kansas and to Montana have become grass-grown or lost in fields of ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... am. He's a liar. Sometimes I think I am the oldest bus in all the world, and that I ought to be enjoying myself in the Smithsonian, instead of dragging out my existence bumping over boulders and prairie grass. ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... circled with hydrophytes; her rigging is wreathed everywhere with creepers, fantastic as the untrammeled ten- drils of a vine, and as she works her arduous course, there are times when I can only compare her to an animated grove of verdure making its mysterious way over some illimitable prairie. ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... shaded her pleasant window, and looked out upon the snow- covered lawn and spacious garden beyond, Eugenia Grey, in her humble cabin, looked through her paper-curtained window upon the snow-clad prairie, which stretched away as far as eye could reach, and shed many bitter tears, as she heard the wind go wailing past her door, and thought of her home far to the east, towards the ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... BEARD-TONGUE (P. grandiflorus), one of the finest prairie species, whose lavender-blue, bell-shaped corolla is abruptly dilated above the calyx, measures nearly two inches long. Its sterile filament, curved over at the summit, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Cairns had whispered, as she entered. Other lives must explain it, but the Titian hair went straight to his heart. And those wine-dark eyes, now cryptic black, now suffused with red glows like a night-sky above a prairie-fire, said to him, "Better come over ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... the wish of a friend I was visiting I went to carry some comforts to a neglected almshouse on a Western prairie. In the insane ward I found a poor young fellow suffering from epilepsy. There had been some brutal treatment in the almshouse and he had tried to escape. Being overtaken he had fought for his liberty, and in consequence he was afterwards fastened ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... only one of many similar experiences which convinced me that poison would never avail to destroy this robber, and though I continued to use it while awaiting the arrival of the traps, it was only because it was meanwhile a sure means of killing many prairie wolves ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... She couldn't go any higher, so she hoped it couldn't, either; and as she sat, she sang all the songs and hymns she knew, to keep her spirits up,—"Out on an Ocean," "Shining Shore" (how she wished herself on one!), "Rosalie, the Prairie Flower," "Old Dog Tray," and ever so many others. It was a very miscellaneous concert, but did as well for Eyebright and the fishes as the most classical music could have done; better, perhaps, for Mozart ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... said: "The true Lethe after passing through a revolution is to be found in the opening out to men of every avenue of hope.—Revolutions leave behind them a general restlessness of mind, a need of movement." That need was met in America by man's warfare against the forest, the flood, and the prairie. France must therefore possess colonies as intellectual and political safety-valves; and in his graceful, airy style he touched on the advantages offered by Egypt, Louisiana, and West Africa, both for their intrinsic value and as opening the door of work and ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... enemy, furious, writes one of their officers, "as mad dogs." They heard of a country towards the north where maize could not be cultivated because the vast herds of wild cattle devoured it. They penetrated so far that they entered the range of the roving prairie tribes; for, one day, as they pushed their way with difficulty across great plains covered with tall, rank grass, they met a band of savages who dwelt in lodges of skins sewed together, subsisting on game alone, and wandering perpetually from place to place. Finding neither gold nor the South ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... never saw them. Pardon me, major, your rifle is slipping," and leaning forward the Engineer straightened up the endangered weapon and braced it with his foot. "A dreary landscape this," he added, glancing out at the barren stretches of rolling prairie ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... veered round to the south. It told of fugitives and, for a time, of pursuers. Ten minutes after the first discovery, down in the sandy bottom and close to the stream, the officers caught sight of a brace of prairie wolves, skulking away from the timber, among the branches of which some grewsome birds were flapping and fluttering, while two or three sailed slowly overhead. Presently the riders came in view of a little scooped-out shelter ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... California, being longer than ours, but not of a bitter taste. The squaws made flour of them. The Digger Indians were the next tribe east of them; they were probably the lowest grade. They would set fire to the prairie grass to burn the grasshoppers, and pick them up and eat them. They deemed them a luxury. The Oregon tribes were a higher grade, a warlike race, and superior in every respect. The highest grade of them, in the United States now, are ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... are the things which have pressed their influences upon the Jew until the fume and reek of the Ghetto, the bubble and squeak of the rabble, and the babble of bazaars are more acceptable to him than the breeze blowing across silent mesa and prairie, or the low, moaning ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... natural history make no mention of the marmot or woodchuck. In Europe this animal seems to be confined to high mountainous districts, as on our Pacific slope, burrowing near the snow line. It is more social or gregarious than the American species, living in large families like our prairie-dog. In the Middle and Eastern States our woodchuck takes the place, in some respects, of the English rabbit, burrowing in every hillside and under every stone wall and jutting ledge and large bowlder, from whence it makes raids upon the grass and clover ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... uncombed, harsh of voice and speech and nature, who drove the four oxen forward over lava rock and rough prairie and the scanty sage. I might tell you a great deal about Marthy, who plodded stolidly across the desert and the low-lying hills along the Blackfoot; and of her weak-souled, shiftless husband whom she called Jase, when she did not ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... in taking. As for the so-called amenities of civilized life, what are they worth to one who, like me, has no longer the means of enjoying them? After all, it is a question whether freedom and the prairie would not be preferable to Pall-Mall and a limited income of, say—twelve hundred a year—the sort of income that is just enough to make one the slave of society, but is not sufficient to pay for gilding its fetters. A station, by Jove! and with it the possibility of getting ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... their nests in ruin; and the fierce herdsmen, clad in sheepskins, who now and then scowled out upon us from their sleeping nooks, were housed in ruin. The aspect of the desolate Campagna in one direction, where it was most level, reminded me of an American prairie; but what is the solitude of a region where men have never dwelt, to that of a desert, where a mighty race have left their footprints in the earth from which they have vanished; where the resting-places of their dead have fallen like their dead; and the broken hour-glass ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... "I see the prairie, too," she went on half dreamily. "It is brown now, but the green is beginning to shine through it just a very little. And out beyond there is a sparkle. That is the Cheyenne. And beyond that there is something white, and that is the ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... stumbled. The cause was a prairie-dog hole, concealed under a clump of matted mesquite. Ferguson lunged forward, caught at the saddle horn, missed it, and pitched head-foremost out of the saddle, turning completely over and alighting upon his feet. He stood erect for an instant, but the ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... for Bill was proud of his long, blond hair, as was General Custer and many another man of the West at that time. In this fight, Bill was struck by seven pistol balls and barely escaped alive by flight to a ranch on the prairie near by. He lay there three weeks, while General Phil Sheridan had details out with orders to get him dead or alive. He later escaped in a box-car to another town, and his days as marshal of Hays ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... panic; there was never an end to it all. And far out in the distance the sun went down in a flame-red mist. A streak of cloud lay across it, stretching far out into infinity. A conflagration like a glowing prairie fire surrounded the horizon, and drove the hordes before it in panic-stricken flight, and on the beach shouted the naked swarm of boys. Now and again they sprang up with outspread arms, and, shouting, chased the wild ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... sold his place in Wadsworth, and moved to the Sandusky Plains, a level, marshy prairie, in northwestern Ohio. Part of the Plains belonged to the Wyandotte Indian Reservation, and was opened to settlement, a few years afterward, by the removal of the ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... an illustration taken from the earth. I well remember when a boy upon the fat alluvium of the Illinois prairie, how recklessly the farmers then exhausted the resources of their fields. So opulent was the black soil that little care was taken save to sow the seed and crudely cultivate it; and the simple prudences, such as rotation of crops, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... tribes in Chinese Tartary, but here used for Mongolian. Look up etymology and trace relation of the word to Turk.—steppes. A Russian word indicating large areas more or less level and devoid of forests; these regions are often similar in character to the American prairie, and ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... Europe was at war, and the old country fighting for its life. A most wonderful and touching patriotism welled up in the heart of the Canadians. The air became electric with excitement and enthusiasm. The prairie was indeed on fire. Passing through English towns on my journey to London the calm and peaceful demeanor of the people and the even flow of life seemed in strange contrast with the land I had just left, where the population was throbbing with loyal passion, and the war ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... behind glass, but he did, for in those days they were quite the proper thing, cases of them, fitting enough for museums, often being seen in private homes. I can remember taking lessons in taxidermy from Father, and of skinning and mounting wildfowl, and today there are a loon and a prairie chicken here in the house at Riverby that he mounted in those early years. The collections of birds he made are scattered far and wide or were destroyed long ago. All of them were shot with the little muzzle-loading cane gun or with a little muzzle-loading fowling piece: those were the days of the ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... the mail, carried by a two-wheeled sulky. He started in a blinding snow storm, and the track across the prairie was lost. ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... slept under a roof; who, during those long years, with his rifle alone, killed over two thousand buffalo, between four and five thousand deer, antelope and elk, besides wild game, such as bears, wild turkeys, prairie chickens, etc., etc. in numbers beyond calculation. On account of their originality, daring and interest, the real facts, concerning this race of trappers and hunters, will be handed down to posterity as matters ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... eyebrows and looked out of the window upon a great stretch of open, rolling prairie, clothed sparely in grass that was showing faint green in the hollows, and with no water for miles—as he knew well—except for the rivers that hurried through narrow bottom lands guarded by high bluffs that were for the most part barren. The land ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... Cranberry as a dark, inky fluid instead; gazed upon suspiciously by the guests, and tasted sparingly by the family.—And now prepare for blunder No. 7, bearing in mind that it is the third course. Four prairie hens instead of two! The effect on the Rev. Mrs. E. Prentiss was a resort to her handkerchief, and suppression of tears on finding none in her pocket. Blunder 8th. Iauch's biscuit glace stuffed with hideous orange-peel. Delight 1st, delicious dessert of farina smothered in custard ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... private consumption, of course. Dick had no wish to invite the attention of the predatory; and, in any case, buyers and sellers of dogs do not talk in thousands of dollars on the prairie. ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... that part of Western Kansas which is left blank on the maps. Two hunters, Thompson and Hughes, had joined us; and we were coming back from a buffalo-chase. We had been crawling lazily along, over prairie, through valley, up and down hill, since sunrise, and it ...
— The Nursery, No. 106, October, 1875. Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... was becoming desperate, for he must soon get himself back to his prairie farm. So, after a lengthy twilight consultation with his heart's desire, he came tramping awkwardly into the ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... recollections are set in a scene of rural beauty, unusual at least for Illinois. The prairie around the village was broken into hills, one of them crowned by pine woods, grown up from a bag full of Norway pine seeds sown by my father in 1844, the very year he came to Illinois, a testimony perhaps that the most vigorous pioneers gave at least an occasional thought ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... the Sangamon Here rise in gentle swells, and the long grass Is mixed with rustling hazels. Scarlet tufts Are glowing in the green, like flakes of fire; The wanderers of the prairie know them well, And call that brilliant flower the ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... earth, seemed to live another and higher life in the contemplation of infinite purity and happiness. A friend once related an incident concerning him which made a deep impression upon my mind. They had been travelling through a summer's forenoon in the prairie, and had lain down to rest beneath a solitary tree. The Doctor lay for a long time, silently looking upwards through the openings of the boughs into the still heavens, when he repeated the following lines, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... lie—that there was no earth, no sun, no song or gladness in all the world, if that world held no hope for him. It was there. It was beyond the rim of forest. It was beyond the yellow plains, beyond the farthest timber of the farthest prairie, beyond the foothills; in the heart of the mountains was its abiding place. As he had dreamed of those mountains in boyhood and youth, so now he dreamed his dreams over again with Mary Josephine. For her he painted ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... no exaggeration in Mr. Emerson's words of address to Kossuth: "You have got your story told in every palace, and log hut, and prairie ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... sound information, at the time Nietzsche planned "The Antichrist," actually believed that the world was created in seven days, or that its fauna was once overwhelmed by a flood as a penalty for the sins of man, or that Noah saved the boa constrictor, the prairie dog and the pediculus capitis by taking a pair of each into the ark, or that Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt, or that a fragment of the True Cross could cure hydrophobia. Such notions, still almost ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... pounds, Aggy 215, and Delia 185; and on Saturday of that week all the twenty-eight men and boys together picked an average of 160 pounds, and all the eighteen women and girls an average of 125.[6] But these were dwarfed in turn by the pickings on J.W. Fowler's Prairie plantation, Coahoma County, Mississippi, at the close of the ante-bellum period. In the week of September 12 to 17, 1859, Sandy, Carver and Gilmore each averaged about three hundred pounds a day, and twelve other men and five women ranged above ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... its site is on the peninsula of Corea. . . . There was a time when the rocky barriers of the Thracian Bosphorus gave way and the Black Sea subsided. It had covered a vast area in the north and east. Now this area became drained, and was known as the ancient Lectonia: it is now the prairie region of Russia, and ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... let us glance at Montgomery County, Alabama, which, although not in the belt we are studying, is on the same prairie formation crossed by the Georgia Pacific Railway, on the edge of Mississippi. Compare it with Butler County, Ohio, which "shows the best record of any county in the West." In live stock Montgomery ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... the entrance of Werner's Creek 35 yds. wide through a high extensive prairie on N. side. hills low and timbered with the long leafed pine, larch, and some fir. the road passes at some distance to the left of the river and this couses is with ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... get out!' said Mr. Childers, thrusting his young friend from the room, rather in the prairie manner. 'Tight-Jeff or Slack-Jeff, it don't much signify: it's only tight-rope and slack- rope. You were going to give ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... and dreaming that Winnie was a rattlesnake and Gypsy a prairie-dog, when somebody gave her a little pinch and woke ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... scarlet gash in the brown level of the Dakota prairie, for the sumach, dyed by the frosts of the early autumn, covered its sides like a cloth whose upper folds were thrown far over the brinks of the winding ravine and, southward, half-way to the new cottonwood shack of the Lancasters. Near it, a dark band against the flaming ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... Mississippi, 1800 miles from its mouth. The father of Wabashaw was a noted Indian; and during the past summer, the son has given some indications that he inherits the father's talents and courage. When the Winnebagoes arrived at Wabashaw's prairie, the chief induced them not to continue their journey of removal; offered them land to settle upon near him, and told them it was not really the wish of their Great Father, that they should remove. His bribes and eloquence induced the Winnebagoes to refuse ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... chauffeur-effect with blobs of fat womankind trailing snapping veils. The car trailed a long streamer of dust that tasted of the road. When this was penetrated they entered upon a stretch of pleasant travel for eyes and wheels, on a long, long channel through a fruitful prairie, a very allegory of ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... youth whose rosy cheeks proclaimed the shores of Albion. On Sunday he made ready. That night and the following two days there came a calamity that horrified the civilized world—perhaps the barbarians as well. The employers who had refused him shelter and food ran like droves of wolves before a prairie-fire, and filled their famished bodies off a charity that has been likened to that of the Savior of the world, so freely was it given. His hotel was not burned. In the arduous labors of housing three where one had before been quartered he ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... cattle. By noon he and his cowboys would have driven many herds into one big herd moving towards a wagon that had come out from the ranch. This wagon brought food for the men, and Mr. Roosevelt has remarked, "No meals ever tasted better than those eaten out on the prairie." ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... their friends and supporters in the country that in their opinion it was desirable to support the Volunteer movement, with the result that within the last six weeks the movement has spread like a prairie fire, and all the Nationalists of Ireland will ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... the first word, and waved his hand toward the enemy; how the solitary fife struck up, "Will you come to the bower I have shaded for you?" while those seven hundred gaunt, starved, ragged phantoms, burning with rage at the thought of their comrades foully slain, deployed on the open prairie and charged the unsuspecting Mexican army. It was over in half an hour—the enemy annihilated, 630 killed, 200 wounded, 700 prisoners—among the prisoners Santa Anna himself, begging for mercy. And Aaron Burr, dying in New York with ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... form, colour, and nearly in size, but that the howl of both animals "is prolonged so exactly in the same key that even the practised ear of an Indian fails at times to discriminate them." He adds of the dog of the Hare Indians, a distinct breed, that it is almost the same as the prairie wolf (Canis latrans), the skull of the dog appeared to him a little smaller, otherwise he could detect no difference in form, nor fineness of fur, nor the arrangement of spots ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... the Mortons' farmhouse in the Middle West—on the rolling prairie just back from the Mississippi. A room that has been long and comfortably lived in, and showing that first-hand contact with materials which was pioneer life. The hospitable table was made on the place—well and strongly made; there are braided rugs, and the wooden ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... me about that. I am tired of this endless stretch of sea-like country, these regular ground-swells; and it's a good two-hours' ride yet to yonder headland, which juts out into the prairie, between us and the setting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... of this solitary voyaging, one day they saw a well-trodden path {177} that led to the adjacent prairie. Joliet and Marquette determined to follow it, leaving the canoes in charge of their men. After a walk of some miles inland, they came to an Indian village, with two others in sight. They advanced with beating hearts. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... cloud of tobacco smoke. "You see, Steele, I know who you are. I know that your father is Philip Steele, the big Chicago banker. I know that you are up here for romance and adventure rather than for any other thing there is in the service. I know, too, that you are no prairie chicken, and that most of your life has been spent where you see beautiful women every hour of the day, and where soft voices and tender smiles aren't the most wonderful things in the world, as they sometimes are up here. Fact is, we ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... water. Numerous natural clearings or prairies relieve the sameness of the luxuriant forests. On the western side, the land invades the lake in long, low capes and peninsulas. The fragrance of the air, the exquisite verdure of the trees, the gorgeous colours of the prairie flowers, and the artist-like arrangements of the "oak openings," and wild meadows, are delights never to be forgotten. The most elaborate and cultivated scenery in Europe falls into insignificance in comparison. I was struck with astonishment that such "a garden of Eden" should be ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... there is little as yet in American literature that shows much advance beyond the merely conventional and scholastic,—little, I mean, in which one gets a whiff of the strong, unbreathed air of mountain or prairie, or a taste of rude, new power that is like the tonic of the sea. Thoreau occupies a niche by himself. Thoreau was not a great personality, yet his writings have a strong characteristic flavor. He is anti-scorbutic, like leeks and onions. ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs |
