Crossing The Mississippi

The one event I would most like to have participated in was hardly recorded—the first vision of that endless sea of grass, when the first explorers crossed the Mississippi and headed west across those plains the like of which no other world boasted, the plains that extended to the horizon, deep with grass to a man’s armpits. There buffalo lazily wandered, headless and secure, feeding on this natural abundance, fearless of man, be he white or red. That ocean of land would vanish as men cut it, plowed it, burned it, ravaged it, killed the buffalo, killed the Indians, turned it into a network of steel, concrete, and plowed furrows, and exterminated one of the wonders of the world. I can not get the sight of it out of my eyes, and it brings me close to tears.