The Prairie Flower: A Tale of the Indian Border

America is the land of prodigies! Everything there assumes gigantic proportions, which startle the imagination and confound the reason. Mountains, rivers, lakes and streams, all are carved on a sublime pattern. There is a river of North America—not like the Danube, Rhine, or Rhone, whose banks are covered with towns, plantations, and time-worn castles: whose sources and tributaries are magnificent streams, the waters of which, confined in a narrow bed, rush onwards as if impatient to lose themselves in the ocean—but deep and silent, wide as an arm of the sea, calm and severe in its grandeur, it pours majestically onwards, its waters augmented by innumerable streams, and lazily bathes the banks of a thousand isles, which it has formed of its own sediment. These isles, covered with tall thickets, exhale a sharp or delicious perfume which the breeze bears far away. Nothing disturbs their solitude, save the gentle and plaintive appeal of the dove, or the hoarse and strident voice of the tiger, as it sports beneath the shade. At certain spots, trees that have fallen through old age, or have been uprooted by the hurricane, collect on its waters; then, attached by creepers and concealed by mud, these fragments of forests become floating islands. Young shrubs take root upon them: the petunia and nenuphar expand here and there their yellow roses; serpents, birds, and caimans come to sport and rest on these verdurous rafts, and are with them swallowed up in the ocean. This river has no name! Others in the same zone are called Nebraska, Platte, Missouri; but this is simply the Mecha-Chebe the old father of waters, the river before all! the Mississippi in a word! Vast and incomprehensible as is infinity, full of secret terrors, like the Ganges and Irrawaddy, it is the type of fecundity, immensity, and eternity to the numerous Indian nations that inhabit its banks.