"Prairie" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Evening Post, one of the ablest and most respectable papers in the United States, and the oldest organ, we believe, of the Democratic party in New York. He has been called, and with justice, a poet of nature. The prairie solitude, the summer evening landscape, the night wind of autumn, the water-bird flitting homeward through the twilight—such are the favorite subjects of inspiration. Thanatopsis, one of his most admired ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... wherever they happened to be, had successively surrendered—but not Price's Left Wing. There was the wide open West under its nose, and no Grant or Sherman infesting that void. Why surrender? Wingos, Claibornes, and all, they melted away. Price's Left Wing sailed into the prairie and passed below the horizon. To know what it next did you must, like Ballard or Hewley, pass below the horizon yourself, clean out of sight of the dome at Washington to remote, untracked Idaho. There, besides wild red men in quantities, would you find not very tame white ones, ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... Japan out of Manchuria, and reduced her to a third-rate power. He told me of his part in the invasion as we sat, after the bombardment of Tokio, on the ramparts of the Emperor's palace, watching the walls of the paper houses below us glowing and smoking like the ashes of a prairie fire. ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... them. B. Vernon and two or three other varieties will stand as much hot sunshine as Portulaca if given plenty of water at the roots and an overhead showering every day after the sun is gone, in dry weather. No Begonia will do well here on the prairie if bedded out, and plunging in pot is worse. I don't like earthen pots for them any way—the plants do better in wood or tin. I have a number of pots (?) made from gallon paint kegs; one keg makes two, which I use for my Tuberous Begonias. I use broken bones for drainage, ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there. Better the Far West with its grizzly bears and its untamed cow-boys, its free open- air life and its free open-air manners, its boundless prairie and its boundless mendacity! This is what Buffalo Bill is going to bring to London; and we have no doubt that London will fully appreciate ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... courtesy the Commandante lifts his bride from her charger. The hegira is over. The occupation of arranging abodes for all is the first task. Already the cattle, sheep, and horses are fattening on the prairie grasses. Peons are sawing lumber. A detachment is making bricks for the houses. These are one-storied mansions with wide porches, beloved by the Californians; to-day the most comfortable homes in the West. Quaintly superstitious, the natives ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... but I 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 extending ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... village, perhaps an out-going war party, which, unluckily for himself, had tarried at the village to share the hospitalities, and take part in the revels, of its inhabitants. Thus, there was near the fire a huge heap of dried corn-husks and prairie-grass, designed for a couch,—a kind of, luxury which Nathan supposed the villagers would have scarce taken the trouble to provide, unless for guests whose warlike pride and sense of honour would not permit them to sleep under cover until they had struck the enemy in his own ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... river that flows into the great Mississippi a small band of these Indians had built their wigwams. All along the stream were tall oaks and spreading walnut trees, with here and there a grove of wild plums or a thicket of hazel bushes. But only half a mile away began the great prairie, where there was neither tree nor bush, but only tall grass; and it stretched like a green sea as far as ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... existed potentially in so vast a realm. His was not the order of speculative financial enthusiasm which, in the type known as the "promoter," sees endless possibilities for gain in every unexplored rivulet and prairie reach; but the very vastness of the country suggested possibilities which he hoped might remain undisturbed. A territory covering the length of a whole zone and between two seas, seemed to him to possess potentialities which ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... word camp lends itself to a variety of concepts. I once slept in a four-poster bed over a polished floor in an elaborate servant-haunted structure which, mainly because it was built of logs and overlooked a lake, the owner always spoke of as his camp. Again, I once slept on a bed of prairie grass, before a fire of dried buffalo chips and mesquite, wrapped in a single light blanket, while a good vigorous rain-storm made new cold places on me and under me all night. In the morning the cowboy with whom I was travelling remarked ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... for Portland, where conventional city life palls on him. A little branch of sage brush, pungent with the atmosphere of the prairie, and the recollection of a pair of large brown eyes soon compel his ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... neighboring states, the later starters from the Japanese squadron had continued to arrive in the oil regions. Like migrating birds, they settled down over the rich fields and grazing lands of that wonderful strip of flat, black-soiled prairie that stretches westward from the south center of Louisiana until it emerges into the great semi-arid ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... authority, and a few days subsequent to his deposition retired to his home near Huntsville, without friends, full of years, weak in body, suffering from wounds received in his country's service, but strong in soul, and wholly undismayed, though mourning his State's folly. In front of his house on the prairie he mounted a four-pound cannon, saying: "Texas may go to the devil and ruin if she pleases, but she shall not drag me along with her." History does not record another such incident. To the credit of the Secessionists, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... physical condition of the humbler emigrant, however, became better than that of his countrymen in the Old World; the fertile soil repaid his labor with competence; independence fostered self-reliance, and the unchecked range of forest and prairie inspired him with thoughts of freedom. But all these elevating tendencies were fatally counteracted by the blighting influence of feudal organization. Restrictions, humiliating as well as injurious, pressed upon the person and property of the Canadian. Every avenue to wealth and influence was closed ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... advance and lives on fertile farming soil it is possible to allot the members lands in severalty much as is the case with white settlers. There are other tribes where such a course is not desirable. On the arid prairie lands the effort should be to induce the Indians to lead pastoral rather than agricultural lives, and to permit them to settle in villages rather than ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the prairie-dog, huh?" Racey demanded, jabbing his comrade in the ribs with stiffened thumb. "Just watch him ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... the top afire!" 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 and ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... option in all things; but there is no reason why New York, or any other great city, should live as Kansas and Idaho live. I prefer New York because a big city gives me a spiritual uplift that a prairie town does not. It is my privilege to live where I desire. I like to hear fine music, to come in contact with intellectuals; to go to plays that are worth while; to read books that satisfy my soul. I find such a life in New York. I have no quarrel with the ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... The prairie horse he rode, the mustang of the Pampas, wild as he was, had been trained to take part in at least one exercise. This was the accomplishment in which Mr. Richard now proposed to try himself. For this purpose he sought the implement of which, as it may be remembered, he had once made ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... appointed by United States Senator Lafayette Fairclothe, in a letter written on Senate stationery, as district manager for that great organization, The Prairie Highlands Association, Senator Fairclothe, President, Washington, D. C.—which, under the encouragement of the Government, was bestowing a boon on a land-hungry nation of developing the fabulously rich prairie lands of the Western Everglades, Florida. Long before the afternoon when Roger ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... women—beautiful woman; to the wondrous educational influence as the mother which she exercised over the minds of men. It is ever, at all times, felt and operative—upon the dreary waste of ocean, on the lonely prairie, in the troublous contests at the national halls. And when the arm is moved in the deadly conflicts of the battle-field, and the foe is vanquished, then the gentle influences instilled by women do their work, and the ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... redeemed By penal statutes and the prisoner's cell. We leave the mind unfortified by Truth, And wonder it should fill with wayward Error. There's no blank ignorance, as many dream; Each soul will have its growth and garnering. As the uncultured prairie bears a harvest Heavy and rank, yet worthless to the world, So mind and heart uncultured run to waste; The noblest natures serving but to show A denser growth of passion's deadly fruit. Another error of our social state— We charter sin when chartering temptation. ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... prairie chickens, pertaters, hed made hot bread 'n coffee, 'n fried bernanners, and opened can fruit, and brot out ther honey 'nd two kinds o' pickles, ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... halted to rest for some time at Denver, after six days' journey across the plains, Charles Dilke, with a brain excited by the keen atmosphere of the prairie, "sketched out many projects ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... Government reserve on this part of the Lake Ontario; there are lands to be obtained nearer to Montreal, but all the land of good quality has been purchased. This land, you will observe, Mr Campbell, is peculiarly good, having some few acres of what we call prairie, or natural meadow. It has, also, the advantage of running with a large frontage on the beach, and there is a small river on one side of it; besides, it is not a great distance, perhaps four or five miles, from Fort Frontignac, and ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... "Then, again, there were prairie-like stretches of a sort of pampas waving in cloudy lines, the glistening pappus of the wild Nitoti, a peculiar, low composite, that grows in abundance and furnishes food to the strange gazelle of this latitude ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... of the Arnold family travelled between the rear-guard and the government wagons. They consisted of two large "prairie schooners," drawn by three pairs of oxen each, a lighter wagon, drawn by four horses, beside which four cows, two ponies, and four dogs were usually grouped. The father and eldest daughter drove the ox-teams, the mother the horse-team, and two daughters rode the ponies. Brenda's pony, Gypsy, was ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... day has departed. The buffalo and elk have gone. Even the prairie chickens are seen but seldom. Almost no game is found upon our plains, and not much back in the hills. Many of our young men till the soil. Some have been to the Carlisle School and have taken up professions or are teachers. The Osage people are no longer warlike. But some of our young men ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... of the massacre to the breaking of a stray nest of hen's eggs on the prairie, and what came of the transaction; but the date lies farther back than that, so far as the resolution to seize the first favorable opportunity for slaughtering the whites is concerned—and belongs to the era ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the never-failing relics of an Acadian settlement, yet remain on the roadside; these, with the dykes and Great Prairie itself, are the only memorials of a once happy people. The sun was just sinking behind the Gasperau mountain as we entered the ancient village. There was a smithy beside the stage-house, and we could see the dusky glow of the forge within, ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... are not the only streams of the region, for many others, some of considerable dimensions and volume, and others mere tiny brooklets, wander in every direction through the country. The Black Hills are divided from the adjacent prairie by a series of valleys some two to three miles across; while, away back from the more elevated points, the land rolls off into a series of undulating plains, covered with grasses of every hue, and ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... the Chief of the Fort was galloping over the prairie at the back of his establishment, followed by six of his best men, with Reuben Dale, and led ...
— The Thorogood Family • R.M. Ballantyne
... morning of the 16th, the parties separated; and, bearing a little out from the river, with a view of heading some of the numerous affluents, after a few hours' travel over somewhat broken ground, we entered upon an extensive and high level prairie, on which we encamped towards evening at a little stream, where a single dry cottonwood afforded the necessary fuel for preparing supper. Among a variety of grasses which to-day made their first appearance, I noticed bunch-grass, (festuca,) and buffalo-grass, (sesleria ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... perhaps a foot above the ground. They lay two eggs of a brownish buff color, irregularly blotched with brown, and with fainter marking of gray. Size 3.75 x 2.50. Data.—Torkton, northern Assiniboia, northwest Canada. Nest a mass of marsh hay, three feet in diameter, on the prairie. The birds seen, but very wary. Collector, ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... lake. But she didn't want to drownd it, after makin' such a fuss over it; it wouldn't have seemed very horsepitable. And she didn't really want to put it out onto a prairie. And she couldn't put it right round under her feet, where it would git trampled on, and git bruised, and knocked round; that wouldn't be a-usin' Christopher Columbus as he ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... from the old country? Thought not. Left there myself about four years ago—I joined the Force in Regina. It's altogether different 'outside,' patrol work, a free life on the open prairie. Here they keep one choring round barracks most of the time. I've been for six months now on the town station. I'm not sorry, though. It's all devilish interesting. Wouldn't have missed it for a farm. When I write ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Prairie freighting and Missouri river navigation, were of importance before the construction of the Union Pacific railway, and the activity of the city in securing the freighting interest gave her an initial start over the ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... myself sitting there so miserable, and the little boys playing about, so hushed and quiet. I can see the little green patch of vegetables, and the cornfield, and the roof of Healy's house beyond, and the blue smoke rising up so straight and still, and on the other side the prairie, and the gleam of the lake-water far away. I never hear the crickets on a summer afternoon but I think of that day, so bright and warm and still. Oh, how ...
— Stephen Grattan's Faith - A Canadian Story • Margaret M. Robertson
... origin. Some of the current names represent translations of the aboriginal terms either into English ("Blackfeet," "Two Kettles," "Crow,") or into French ("Sans Arcs," "Brule"," "Gros Ventres"); yet most of the names, at least of the prairie tribes, are simply corruptions of the aboriginal terms, though frequently the modification is so complete as to render identification and interpretation difficult—it is not easy to find Waca'ce in "Osage" (so spelled by the French, whose orthography was adopted and mispronounced ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... attempt to describe truly the social and economic state of things in the Prairie Provinces of the Dominion in the years 1913-14, at the end of the great rush. The writer, who is neither a summer visitor nor a professional advertiser, nor a disappointed immigrant, had unusual opportunities for the study of life in a small prairie city and among the real prairie people ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... while an Eaglet. The nest was found on a pine tree in the Chippewa country, about three miles from the mouth of the Flambeau, near some rapids in the river. He and another Indian cut the tree down, and, amid the menaces of the parent birds, secured two young Eagles about the size of Prairie Hens. One of them died. The other, which lived to become historical, was sold to Daniel McCann for a bushel of corn. McCann carried it to Eau Claire, and presented it to a company then being organized as a part of the ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... On the walls, two engravings only: one, of his own portrait; one, of Lincoln's. . . . In the outer room was sitting a certain sunburnt General Blair, with many evidences of the war upon him. He got up to shake hands with me, and then I found that he had been out on the Prairie with me five-and-twenty years ago. . . . The papers having referred to my birthday's falling to-day, my room is filled with most exquisite flowers.[276] They came pouring in from all sorts of people at breakfast time. The audiences here are really very fine. So ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... information on the hardiness of the black walnut and butternut has just come to hand from Col. B. D. Wallace of Portage, La Prairie, Manitoba. Col. Wallace reports the occurrence of a seedling black walnut in his nursery that is quite hardy and which bore fully matured nuts at an early age. He also has a fine grove of butternuts that are entirely hardy and which bear good crops of nuts. These butternut trees grew from ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... straightway went to their homes. Some went to the river, some to the forest, and some to the prairie, to wait for the day when they must meet at the lodge of ...
— The Book of Nature Myths • Florence Holbrook
... first time the holes of the bizcachas, or prairie-dogs, outside which the little prairie-owls keep guard. There appeared to be always one, and generally two, of these birds, standing, like sentinels, at the entrance to each hole, with their wise-looking heads on one side, pictures of prudence and watchfulness. The bird and the beast are ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... lay purple and dark, with the same sad, sweet loneliness that a prairie has in the dusk; but between us and the sun it resembled a molten mass, heaving with sinister power. Our bowsprit pointed straight at the fiery ball hanging on the sky rim, above which a pyramidal heaping ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... and went to the door and looked out. A chinook had blown up in the night, and although the wind was chill, the snow had disappeared, save where drifts clung to the hollows, shrinking and turning black beneath the sweeping gusts; sodden masses which gave to the prairie a dreary aspect of bleak discomfort. But Ford was well pleased at the sight of the brown, beaten grasses. Impulse was hardening to decision while he stared across the empty land toward the violet rim of hills; a decision to ride over to the Double Cross, and tell Ches Mason ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... great centres of population as fields of work. He passes through two less important places to establish himself in the great city. It is wise to fly at the head. Conquer the cities, and the villages will fall of themselves. That was the policy which carried Christianity through the empire like a prairie fire. Would that later missions ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... vessels at sea and points on land, but it is also applicable to electric communication between distant points on land, it being necessary, however, on land (with the exception of communication over open prairie) to increase the elevation in order to reduce to the minimum the induction-absorbing effect of houses, trees, and elevations in the land itself. At sea from an elevation of one hundred feet I can communicate ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... though she needed rest. She seemed very frail, and the color had entirely left her face. But her curling hair was as golden as ever, and her figure as girlish and graceful. She kissed me tenderly, and kept my hand in hers as she wandered over the house and took long looks across the prairie. ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... real pleasure in driving swiftly over the prairie land, through the sweet, spring sunshine, and Miss Whitmore tingled with enthusiasm till they drove headlong into a deep coulee which ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... the eastern coast, rather than to the slopes or plains of the west. Had the latter been first occupied, it is doubtful whether the rocks and lagoons of the seaboard would ever have been settled. No man would have turned from the prairie sward of the Pacific to the seamed elopes of the Atlantic edge. As it is, we have the energy and patience which the difficult soil of the east generates, with that magnificent sweep of western territory, which, had it been opened to us first, might, from ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... shown, {83a} in Algonquin and Bornoese tradition. The Red Indian story told by Schoolcraft in his 'Algic Researches' is most like the Aryan version, but has some native peculiarities. Wampee was a great hunter, who, on the lonely prairie, once heard strains of music. Looking up he saw a speck in the sky: the speck drew nearer and nearer, and proved to be a basket containing twelve heavenly maidens. They reached the earth and began to dance, inflaming the heart of Wampee with love. But Wampee could ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... morning; but do not let this depress you. The journey is a perilous one, but—pshaw! I have always come back safely heretofore, and why should I fear? Besides, I know that every night, as I lay down on the broad starlit prairie, your bright faces will come to me in my dreams, and make my slumbers sweet and gentle. You, Emily, with your mild blue eyes; and you, Henrietta, with your splendid black hair; and you, Nelly, with your hair so brightly, beautifully golden; and you, Mollie, with your cheeks so downy; ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne
... that strange journey upon which he had launched so suddenly dragged on and on, that the grassy slope above the orchard and the cool dark foliage of the oak tree must be the very greenest and fairest things on earth. There was no green now before his aching eyes, only the wide stretch of yellow-brown prairie, a rough trail, deep in dust, winding across it, a line of white-topped wagons crawling like ants over the vast plain, and a blue arch of sky above, ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... it said that the snakes and owls and prairie dogs are great friends," suggested Grant. "They all live together in ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... it, or pit its strength against the strength of others. No longer does he care to defend or to feed it. Yet when he is thus indifferent to its welfare, the individual self grows more stalwart and robust, like the prairie grasses and the trees of untrodden forests. It is a matter of indifference to him whether this is so or not. Only, if it is so, he has a fine instrument ready to his hand; and in due proportion ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... proudly sweeping to the sea, Dark and deep and grand, forever wrapt in myth and mystery. Lo he laughs along the highlands, leaping o'er the granite walls: Lo he sleeps among the islands, where the loon her lover calls. Still like some huge monster winding downward through the prairie plains, Seeking rest but never finding, till the tropic gulf he gains. In his mighty arms he claspeth now an empire broad and grand; In his left hand lo he graspeth leagues of fen and forest land; In his right the mighty mountains, ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... was low. It exposed to view all its shingles, with a prairie of sea-wrack as far as the edge of the waves. Grassy slopes cut the cliff, which was composed of soft brown earth that had hardened and become in its lower strata a rampart of greyish stone. Tiny streams of water kept flowing down incessantly, while in the distance the sea rumbled. It seemed ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... POTTER lived in a little red house in the outskirts of the town of Barnstable. There were two crabbed little windows in front, for it could boast of but one story, and a narrow green door, over which a prairie rose bush clustered, as if to hide its infirmity. A small window, reminding one of a half closed jacknife, and in which were two earthen flower pots containing mignonnette, set jauntily upon the roof, which was so covered with black moss, that it was impossible to tell whether it was shingled or ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... 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 so important now that the war was over. There was ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... of the committee men, who stood with shot guns near an old soap box in which a slit was cut to receive the money, "is the entrance gate. Niggers twenty-five cents, whites fifty cents. Now get right in or get off this prairie." ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... the piled-up baggage, with Sandy driving and Molly beside him, flushed a little with growing excitement. But the buckskins were sinewed with whalebone and used to desert work. They surged forward at the word, tightening the tugs in an eager leap and settled down to a fast trot, out across the prairie. The riders, with the exception of Buck, and Jim, who was already close to the butte, which was midway between the ranch and Hereford, loped off, two and two, to their work, not to return ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... sense of the dramatic it chose a little railroad station in a wretched village near Portchester. The station platform lay all day bare as a prairie, exposed to the dusty yellow sun and to the glance of that most obnoxious type of countryman who lives near a metropolis and has attained its cheap smartness without its urbanity. A dozen of these yokels, red-eyed, cheerless as scarecrows, saw the incident. Dimly it passed across their confused ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... its winding course after the manner of prairie-rivers, has long since shifted its bed some distance to the south, leaving only a portion of the old bridge to span what in high water becomes an arm of the river, but which ordinarily serves to convey the water from a neighboring ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... little bit, like that. A pill no bigger than a couple of aspirins or an Alka-Seltzer. It's only in the morning you take it when it's old and strong like this, for a pick-me-up, a cure for a hangover, you know, like a prairie oyster well soused ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... irritably. "You said we was when you brung me up here. And pardners stick, don't they? I reckon if it was my shack that was gittin' rushed, you 'd stick, and not go bellyin' under the bunk and hidin' like a dog-gone prairie-dog." ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... very swiftly, but he pretended to the chief that he was a bad runner. So they took him out on the prairie about four hundred yards away from the Indians. There he was turned loose, and ...
— Stories of American Life and Adventure • Edward Eggleston
... (1828-1861) fell an early sacrifice in the war. His descriptions of prairie life, his fresh and vigorous individualization of character and power of narrative indicate a vein of original genius which was foil of promise. William Dean Howells and Henry James are foremost as writers of the analytic and realistic school. Their studies of character are life-like ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 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, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... as he drew her hand closer to his side, she turned across the track of the moon and bounded into the wide south. A maze of marsh islands—huddling along that narrow, half- drowned mainland of cypress swamp and trembling prairie which follows the Mississippi out to sea—slept, leagues away, below the western waters. In the east lay but one slender boundary between the voyager and the shoreless deep, and this was so near that from its ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... he landed penniless, he turned his strong and capable hands to whatever labour he could find. He had intended to become a Unitarian minister. Instead of doing so he had to work as a farm-hand on the prairie, street-car conductor in Chicago, dairyman in Dakota; and he varied these pursuits by giving a series of lectures on French literature in Minneapolis. By that time he probably imagined that he was equipped for a more successful attack on the literary strongholds ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... up with her when from a hollow near the roadside Leff came into view. He had been after antelope and carried his rifle and a hunting knife in his belt. During the chase he had come upon a deserted Pawnee settlement in a depression of the prairie. Susan was instantly interested and wanted to see it and David stood by, listening in sulky silence while Leff pointed out the way. The sun was sinking and they faced it, the young man's indicating finger moving back and forth across the vagaries of ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... from her lonely cabin on the prairie, at the band of roving Indians, learned to note and understand the Indian smoke signals, puffing lightly into the clear blue of the prairie sky. These smoke signals are always sent in puffs or rings, so that there may be no chance of mistaking them for a camp fire. The puffs are ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... the main army resumed its advance, moving forward fifteen miles to Honing's Spruit. On the 23rd another march of twenty miles over a fine rolling prairie brought them to Rhenoster River. The enemy had made some preparations for a stand, but Hamilton was near Heilbron upon their left and French was upon their right flank. The river was crossed without opposition. On the 24th the army was at Vredefort ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a red-bronze color, hung just above the horizon and softened the unlovely stretches of prairie into something brooding and beautiful. Thirty miles away the Rockies had become a mass of gray-blue fleeced across the top with lines of late snow—for it ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... fearless, ready, and staunch, bearing their sons and daughters in fortitude; raising them to fear God, to love their country,—and to labour. From the edge of our Republic these valiant ones toiled into the dump of prairie and mountain to live the raw new days and weld them to our history; to win fertile acres from the wilderness and charm the desert to blossoming. And the time of these days and these people, with their tragedies and their comedies, was a time of epic ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... waves and billows and tumbles of green; oceans unswum, continents untracked, of thousandfold green. Then, on beyond, the gray, the gray-brown, the purple-gray of the higher plains; nearer than that, a broad slash of great golden yellow, a band of the sturdy prairie sunflowers; and nearer than that, swimming on the surface of the mysterious wave which constantly passes but is never past on the prairies, bright red roses, and strong larkspur, and at the bottom of this ever-shifting sea, jewels in God's best blue enamel. You can not find ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... wish I could show you our country. Wouldn't you love to go galloping across a great prairie,—tearing ahead for illimitable miles,—breathing the air that has come, fresh and clean, straight down from the ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... conditions of a hunter life which determine these probationary preparations for the hardships which accompany it in populations so remote as the Australian and the American of the prairie. I say of the prairie, because we shall find that in the proportion as the agricultural state replaces the erratic habits of the hunter, ceremonies of the sort in question decrease both in number and peculiarity ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... continued for several hours. At midday it held up sufficiently to enable me to plant some seeds of various trees, plants, vegetables, etc., given me specially by Baron von Mueller. Among these were blue gum (tree), cucumbers, melons, culinary vegetables, white maize, prairie grass, sorghum, rye, and wattle-tree seeds, which I soaked before planting. Although the rain lasted thirty-six hours in all, only about an inch fell. It was with great pleasure that at last, on the 5th, we left the glen behind us, and in a couple of miles debouched upon a plain, which ran up to ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... that some of the winter experiences of travelers in the prairie country were most severe. In the forest a fire can be made and some shelter can be found. But imagine a party on the prairie in the midst of a driving snowstorm, overtaken by night, the temperature at zero. Even in these circumstances ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... 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, ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... 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 waving grain; the maverick steer, ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... exception, they would all be now estimated as well qualified for State legislation." Away then with the idea that there are not in the manly form, the courageous and generous heart, the clear and self-reliant, though, perhaps, untutored mind of the pioneer of the forest and prairie, "native countryman," though he may be, equally with "the exile from foreign lands," or the residents of towns and cities, the inherent right of self-government, and the elements that lay broad and deep the foundations of free and sovereign States! As for me, I had rather trust the interests ...
— The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery - Delivered at Fort Wayne, Ind., October 30th 1860 • Joseph Ketchum Edgerton
... with Montezuma, thinks that the pure dogs of Chihuahua are descendants of those which were left behind by that regent near Casas Grandes at the time when he started south, which afterward became wild and degenerated into the prairie-dogs ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... teachers train the little "beginners" in accordance with kindergarten principles. Even to places far away from any schools at all the kindergarten penetrates. Only yesterday I saw a book, written by a kindergartner, dedicated to "mothers on the rolling prairie, the far-off rancho, the rocky island, in the lonely light-house, the frontier settlement, the high-perched mining-camp," who, distant indeed from school kindergartens and their equipment, might wish help in making out of what materials ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... camped amid the foot-hills on the trail which led up to the Kicking Horse Pass. The sun had already passed from sight, beyond the white summits above us, and the shadow of the monstrous mountain range darkened the prairie to the east, to the horizon's rim. Our bivouac was made in a grove of lofty firs, six or eight in number; and a little rivulet, trickling from the upper slopes, fell, with soft, lapsing sound, within a few feet of our camp-fire. We did not even pitch a tent, for the sky was mild, and ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... And since she came to Lindsleyville it was harder than ever, for there was no neighbor nearer than Gager's, ten miles away, and there was not a woman within fifty miles. There is no place so lonesome as a prairie; the horizon is so wide, and the earth is ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... modern square dances and tabulated forms for the guidance of the leader or others in calling them. Full and complete directions for performing every known square dance, such as Plain Quadrilles, Polka Quadrilles, Prairie Queen, Varieties Quadrille, Francaise, Dixie Figure, Girl I Left Behind Me, Old Dan Tucker, Money Musk, Waltz Lanciers, Military Lanciers, Columbian Lanciers, Oakland Minuet, Waltz Quadrilles, ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... all four limbs for frost-bite, with recovery. The patient, aged twenty-six, while traveling to his home in Northern Minnesota, was overtaken by a severe snow storm, which continued for three days; on December 13th he was obliged to leave the stage in a snow-drift on the prairie, about 110 miles distant from his destination. He wandered over the prairie that day and night, and the following four days, through the storm, freezing his limbs, nose, ears, and cheeks, taking no food or water until, on December 16th, he was found in a dying ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... character of elephants. How those creatures manage to communicate with each other it is impossible to determine, but the fact remains that a very few days' shooting will clear out an extensive district, although the area may comprise a variation of open prairie with a large amount of forest. I have frequently observed, in the portion of Ceylon known as the Park country, the tracks of elephants in great numbers which have evidently been considerable herds that have joined together in a general retreat from ground which they considered ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... cause for these exclamations upon the part of the Yankee and Irishman, as they stood on the margin of Wolf Ravine, and gazed off over the prairie. Several miles to the north, something like a gigantic man could be seen approaching, apparently at a rapid gait for a few seconds, when it slackened its speed, until ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... procession of odd-looking homesteads down the road; their narrow fields running back indefinitely; the resting flocks and herds; here a group of thatched-roof barns, and there a wayside cross; passed along and mused on the peace of life in this prairie country, and the goodness of the Almighty to ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... at all. They had no chart nor compass; north and south and east and west stretched the wastes of the Pacific for hundreds of leagues. Only here and there in the ocean, and all unseen to them, like little groups of mushrooms on a limitless prairie, lay ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... freebooting expedition, too large to find resting-place on the boards. Nor was this all. Mingled with stolen garments, cans and boxes of provisions, purses and bags of gold, were the Indian disguises in which the highwaymen from No-Man's Land had descended on the prairie-schooners on their tedious journey from Abilene, Kansas, toward ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... time dey wuz a momsus mean man, en he live 'way out in de prairie all 'lone by hisself, 'cep'n he had a wife. En bimeby she died, en he tuck en toted her way out dah in de prairie en buried her. Well, she had a golden arm—all solid gold, fum de shoulder down. He wuz pow'ful mean—pow'ful; en dat night he couldn't sleep, caze he want dat golden ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... skins together. No, first thar was a lot o' prayin'; ye kin suit yerselves 'bout that—then they sewed the skins together an" pegged it down flat on the prairie (B D H I, Cut No. 1). Then put in a peg at the middle of one side (A). Then with a burnt stick an' a coord—yes, there must 'a' been a coord—they drawed a half circle—so (B C D). Then they cut that off, an' out o' the ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... anticipate what we afterward found, viz., a great similarity in the forms of their vessels, and also in their manner of ornamentation. The principal differences consist in the more profuse use of the forms of birds and flowers, the first evidently representing prairie grouse and the last some form of sunflower. There is an absence of the geometrical forms, of lines and angles commonly observed on the works of ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... on the shelf and when he's through the row, he just takes 'em up, all over again. I like to read parts of them—the interesting parts. This is the way they stand on the shelf: The Children of the Abbey—that's Bill's favorite; The Scottish Chiefs, David Copperfield, The Talisman, The Prairie, The Last of ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... who crossed the plains in 1849, while he was yet in his teens, and settling in California, made it his permanent home. When he left Independence, Mo., with the train, his parents and one sister were his companions, but all of them were buried on the prairie, and their loss robbed him of the desire ever to return to the East. Hostile Indians, storm, cold, heat, privation, and suffering were the causes of their taking off, as they have been of hundreds who undertook the long journey to the Pacific ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... Mountains of the Prairie, On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry, Gitche Manito, the mighty, He the Master of Life, descending, On the red crags of the quarry 5 Stood erect, and called the nations, Called the tribes of men together. From his footprints flowed a river, Leaped into the light ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 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
... treacle by an economic housekeeper. And the proprietor was right, for had we not done so, the treacle would have run off through the whole house. But after this we fared royally. Squirrel soup and prairie chickens regaled us. One of our new friends had laden his pockets with champagne and brandy; the other with glasses and a corkscrew; and as the bottle went round, I began to feel something of the spirit of Mark Tapley ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... buy the woman. All he wanted was to hire her, anyway. Col. Johnson is a great inventor. It was he that invented the stomach pump, and the automatic candle enunciator, for awakening guests in the night to take early trains. The latter he sold to Mr. Williams, of Prairie du Chien, for a large amount and took his ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... incessantly at other places, Douglas oftener than once a day. First the fame of Douglas, and then Lincoln's unexpected survival of the early meetings, drew the eyes of the whole country upon these two foremost Americans of their generation, face to face there on the Western prairie, fighting out the great question of ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... covered with saw palmetto, dotted with pretty little lakes, what looks like a couple of acres of prairie ahead, and, oh yes, a lot of gopher holes all around us like the one you ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... at the camp. The man came up with that curiously silent, almost furtive gait, which no prairie Indian, however civilized, ever quite loses. It comes from long years of moccasin use, and an habitual bent knee walk. Peigan Charley considered himself unusually civilized. But it was for his native ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... perceive till they had parted, and he was thinking over their walk. She must have gone out to Canada immediately after leaving school. He gathered that her father had been a clergyman, and was dead; that she knew the prairie life, but had never been in British Columbia, and only a few days in Montreal and Toronto. That was all that, at the end of their walk, he knew; and all apparently she meant him to know. Whereas she on her side showed a beguiling power of listening to all he had to say about the mysterious ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a good deal warmer than his coffee and more sulphurous than his eggs. Afar off to the right the sun was rounding up from the Gulf and clearing the haze from his broad, red face, the better to look abroad over the glistening prairie and see if the silhouetted pines and cattle were where he had left them the day before. Glancing to the left, which was my side of the car, I became aware of a large bird suspended in the air, not motionless, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... of "culture," do we find the atmosphere for free and benevolent thought, but rather far away from such influences, in the forests, the mountain and prairie, where man comes more nearly into communion with nature, and forgets the inheritance of ancient error which every corporate institution preserves and perpetuates. It is to this widespread audience that the JOURNAL OF MAN appeals and offers a ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... from Dubuque, Ia., there stands in grim isolation, upon a blackened and desolate prairie, a monastery of the fifteenth century pattern. Every morning at 2 o'clock the monks who occupy this lugubrious dwelling-place arise from the hard planks which serve them in lieu of beds, and pray in wooden stalls, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various |
