Quotes and text excerpts about "prairie"

“ A prairie life is one of constant changes and excitement. Few are the moments that can be spared from watchfulness, amid its ever-present danger, to give to regret. The tear must be dashed from the eye to sight the deadly rifle, and the hand that is performing the last acts of affection for the departed must turn hastily away for self-protection. It is a school, the like of which there is not elsewhere on earth, for training men to be self-reliant, brave to recklessness, scornful of privation, uncaring for hardship, and steady and unquailing in the hour of strife. ”

“ It is a glorious, still night out on the prairie. The heat, the dust, and the wild excitement seem like unpleasant incidents of long ago. The heavens in that clear, dry atmosphere are fairly ablaze with stars; one cannot gaze into their quiet depths and realize that within the past few hours one hundred thousand men have indulged the, fiercest of human passions, and for higher stakes than they have ever before dreamed of. But relaxation comes after unnatural stress, and men begin to know how tired they are; so winners and losers alike roll up in their blankets to sleep. ”

“ There's one thing that's the matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class (there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democracy) . And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our subjects watch us every minute. We can't get wholesomely drunk and relax. We have to be so correct about sex morals, and inconspicuous clothes, and doing our commercial trickery only in the traditional ways, that none of us can live up to it, and we become horribly hypocritical. Unavoidably. The widow-robbing deacon of fiction can't help being hypocritical. The widows themselves demand it! ”

“ I really think the stillness of a large prairie is one of the most painful sensations of loneliness, a man ever encountered. The sombre and dreary monotony of a dungeon, is scarcely a comparison; in fact, language fails to describe the essentially double-distilled monotony of these great American grass-patches—you can't call them deserts, for at times they represent interminable flower-gardens, of the most elegant and voluptuous description. ”

“ Prairie dogs are a wild, frolicsome, madcap set of fellows when undisturbed, uneasy, and ever on the move, and appear to take especial delight in chattering away the time, and visiting from hole to hole to gossip and talk over each other’s affairs; at least, so their actions would indicate. When they find a good location for a village, and there is no water in the immediate vicinity, old hunters say they dig a well to supply the wants of the community. On several occasions I crept close to their villages without being observed, to watch their movements. ”

“ The Prairie is ever their own;
And far though they wander, unwary,
Far, far from the breath of the plain,
A thought of the wind on the Prairie
Will set their blood rushing again.
Then you to the City who want it,
Go, grovel its gain-glutted streets,
Be one of the ciphers that haunt it,
Or sit in its opulent seats;
But for me, where the Prairies are reaching
As far as the vision can scan—
Ah, that is the prayer and the preaching
That goes to the heart of a man! ”

“ All nature is aglow; the sun rises from his eastern bed and spreads his warm, benign rays over this prairie land, and its happy occupants, as this terrific sound rings out on the morning air, are aroused and the cry: “Come over and help us” from the affrighted families, as they forsake their homes and flee for their lives, speeds on its way to ears that listen and heed their earnest, heart-piercing not, of despair, for the “Boys in Blue” respond. ”

“ No one can have any real notion of the sea before seeing it; and it is the same with the prairie. I have often imagined it, but now that we are actually on it, driving over it, I find that all my mind-pictures are lifeless compared with the reality. It gives one a feeling of freedom, as if one had been living always in rooms and suddenly got out. It is not flat like a table, but full of gentle curves and sweeps, as if it were always just going to reveal something unknown, and yet it reaches on for ever on all sides. ”

“ People may talk of the solitude of forests as much as they please, but there is a company in trees which one misses upon the prairie. It is in the prairie, with its ocean-like waving of grass, like a vast sea without landmarks, that the traveller feels a sickly sensation of loneliness. There he feels as if not in the world, although not out of it; there he finds no sign or trace to tell him that there are, beyond or behind him, countries where millions of his own kindred are living and moving. It is in the prairie that man really feels that he is--alone. ”

“ But a prairie is not a wood. There a man may journey long, caring for nothing but the prints his moccasin leaves, whereas in these open plains a runner, placed on yonder hill, for instance, could see far on every side of him, like a hovering hawk looking down on his prey. ”

“ I was in the midst of a prairie! A world of grass and flowers stretched around me, rising and falling in gentle undulations, as if an enchanter had struck the ocean swell, and it was at rest forever. Acres of wild flowers of every hue glowed around me, and the sun arising from the earth where it touched the horizon, was ‘kissing with golden face the meadows green.’ What a new and wonderous world of beauty! ”

“ Are there many more like you, sweet Prairie Flower?"
"Our tribe numbers between sixty and seventy souls."
"Is this your fixed abiding place?"
"Only for a time. Our home is every where between the rising and the setting sun. We go wherever we think ourselves the most beneficial in effecting good." ”

“ PRAIRIE BORN
We have heard the night wind howling as we lay alone in bed;
We have heard the grey goose honking as he journeyed overhead;
We have smelt the smoke-wraith flying in the hot October wind,
And have fought the fiery demon that came roaring down behind;
We have seen the spent snow sifting through the key-hole of the door,
And the frost-line crawling, crawling, like a snake, along the floor;
We have felt the storm-fiend wrestle with the rafters in his might,
And the baffled blizzard shrieking through the turmoil of the night. ”

“ The Prairie. The Prairie has less swiftness than The Last of the Mohicans but more poetry. In it Natty appears again, twenty years older than in The Pioneers, far away on the plains beyond the Mississippi. He owns his defeat and he still grieves over the murdered forest, but he has given up anger for the peace of old age. To him it seems that all his virtues are gone. Once valiant he must now be crafty; his arms are feeble; his eyes have so far failed him that, no longer the perfect marksman, he has sunk to the calling of a trapper. ”

“ The Prairie is broad, unmolested,
It points to the high and sublime;
[Pg 2] Where only the sky is above you
And only the distance in view,
With no one to jostle or shove you—
It's there a man learns to be true!
Where the breeze whispers over the willows
Or sighs in the dew laden grass,
And the rain clouds, like big, stormy billows,
Besprinkle the land as they pass;
With the smudge-fire alight in the distance,
The wild duck alert on the stream,
Where life is a psalm of existence
And opulence only a dream. ”

“ I have known you for a good many years, child; years which have helped to put a few grey hairs on my head, it is true, but still years which have taught 216 me something which I never dreamed of learning out here on the prairie. They have taught me that such a thing as love exists for every man on this earth, and that somewhere in this world there is a woman who can inspire him with feelings which make the pettinesses of his own solitary existence seem very small indeed. ”

“ The great prairie is as flat as a table, and is the exact counterpart of Portage Plains, in Manitoba, or a number of them, with the addition of belts and beautiful islands of timber, the soil being a loamy clay, unmistakably fertile. Nothing could excel the beauty of this region, not even the fairest portions of Manitoba or Saskatchewan. ”

“ Let the reader, in order to conceive an American "prairie," imagine a level and boundless plain, reaching in every direction to the horizon, fertile and covered with luxuriant herbage, and unbroken except by swelling undulations and here and there occasional clumps of trees sprinkled like islets on the ocean, or oases on the desert. ”

“ The prairie-wolf is not so formidable an animal as the name of wolf would seem to denote; he is quite as great a coward as robber, but he is exceedingly mischievous. He never takes full-grown sheep unless he goes with a strong troop of his friends, but seizes young lambs, carries off sucking-pigs, robs the henroost, devours sweet corn in the gardens, and plunders the water-melon patch. A herd of prairie-wolves will enter a field of melons and quarrel about the division of the spoils as fiercely and noisily as so many politicians. ”

“ To find one of the “young folks” who took them seriously, heartened the Perrys, and she easily drew from them the principles by which Gopher Prairie should be born again—should again become amusing to live in.
This was their philosophy complete . . . in the era of aeroplanes and syndicalism:
The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordained standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. ”

“ No mosquitoes, no prairie horse-flies, no beetles, except the ceconilla or large phosphoric fly of California, and but very few worms and caterpillars; the consequence is, that there are but two or three classes of the smaller species of carnivorous birds; the large ones, such as the common and red-headed vulture and crow, are very convenient, fulfilling the office of general scavengers in the prairies, where every year thousands of wild cattle die, either from fighting, or, when in the central deserts, from the want of water. ”

“ The general term “prairie” comprises many varieties of open landscape. There are the level, alluvial prairies of Illinois, long since settled and colonized; there are the low, fertile prairies of the Red River, where the rich black mould, fallow under five months of snow, puts forth the rank luxuriance of a hot-bed during the half tropic heat of summer ”

“ We have made treaties in former years with all the Indians of the prairie, and from there to Lake Superior. As white people are coming into your country, we have thought it well to tell you what is required of you. The Queen wants all the whites, half-breeds and Indians to be at peace with one another, and to shake hands when they meet. The Queen's laws must be obeyed all over the country, both by the whites and the Indians. It is not alone that we wish to prevent Indians from molesting the whites, it is also to prevent the whites from molesting or doing harm to the Indians. ”

“ We have heard that there are praying men among the pale-faces, but that their praying made their people different to us we did not know, for most of the things we do they do; they fight with each other and with us, they drive us from our lands, they cheat us when trading, they shoot us without pity whenever they catch us, and they bring disease and death among us, so that, though once we were numerous as the stones which strew the prairie lands of the Dakotahs, now we can count our people while the sun rests at its mid-day height in the sky. ”

“ The Americans are men who pass most easily from extreme prudence to the most foolish and rash confidence, and on this occasion were true to their character. When they saw that all was quiet around them, and no obstacle checked their progress, they began to laugh and deride the apprehensions of their friends; they gradually relaxed in their vigilance; neglected the precautions usual on the prairie; and at last almost wished to be attacked by Indians, to make them feel the weight of their arms. ”

“ The perils of drought and storm, however, always remain, though with increasing capital the risk is lessened. The life is one long wrestling-bout—man's brain and muscle pitted against the forces of nature; but when he is victorious the reward is great.
It is a virile country peopled with virile men (for only the strong can "make good" out there) . But these men have already realised that man cannot live by bread alone. Close to nature, man feels the presence of God. The wide sweep of the prairie, enamelled with a thousand flowers or gilded with the ripened corn ”

“ It was the last of October, just one day after my arrival at the Forks, when we turned our faces westward in quest of buffalo. They were said to be a long way off—200 miles nearer to the setting sun—out somewhere on that great motionless ocean, where no tree, no bush breaks the vast expanse of prairie; land to which the wild men of the West and those who lead wild lives there have turned for many an age in search of that food which nature once so generously scattered over the plains of Central North America. ”

“ Look here, Prue, I want to get away from here. I want to get out upon the world again, alone, to make my life what I choose. I can’t stand this place; the quiet surroundings; the people with whom I come in contact. It isn’t living; it’s existence, and a hellish one at that. Look around; prairie––nothing but prairie. In the winter, snow, endless snow; in the summer, the brown, scorched prairie. The round of unrelieved, monotonous labour. Farming; can mind of man conceive a life more deadly? ”

“ To get leg-weary in the open air, tramping about the sedgy slough-sides after mallard and canvas-back, to smell coffee and bacon and frying grouse in the cool of the evening, across a thin veil of camp-fire smoke, to see the tired world turn over on its shoulder and go to sleep—it's all a sort of monumental lullaby.
The prairie wind seems to seek you out, and make a bet with the Great Dipper that he'll have you off in forty winks, and the orchestra of the spheres whispers through its million strings and sings your soul to rest. ”

“ Although the wolves of America are the most daring of all the beasts of prey on that continent, they are by no means so courageous or ferocious as those of Europe, particularly in Spain or the south of France, in which countries they commit dreadful ravages both on man and beast; whereas a prairie wolf, except forced by desperation, will seldom or never attack a human being. ”

“ We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. ”

“ As a matter of fact, an ordinary desert supports a much greater variety of plants than does either a forest or a prairie. ”

“ Indeed, Northern Canada is the analogue of Eastern Canada in more likenesses than one.
That the country is great and possessed of almost unique resources is beyond doubt; but that it has serious drawbacks, particularly in its lack of railway connection with the outer world, is also true. And one thing must be borne in mind, namely, that, when the limited areas of prairie within its borders are taken up, the settler must face the forest with the axe. ”

“ I'm going to love my Dinky-Dunk. But, oh, isn't it wonderful to wake love in a man, in a strong man? To be able to sweep him off, that way, on a tidal wave that leaves him rather white and shaky in the voice and trembly in the fingers, and seems to light a little luminous fire at the back of his eyeballs so that you can see the pupils glow, the same as an animal's when your motor head-lights hit them! It's like taking a little match and starting a prairie-fire and watching the flames creep and spread until the heavens are roaring! ”

“ The sun beat down upon us with a sultry penetrating heat almost insupportable, and as our party crept slowly along over the interminable level, the horses hung their heads as they waded fetlock deep through the mud, and the men slouched into the easiest position upon the saddle. At last, towards evening, the old familiar black heads of thunder-clouds rose fast above the horizon, and the same deep muttering of distant thunder that had become the ordinary accompaniment of our afternoon's journey began to roll hoarsely over the prairie. ”