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A Tour On The Prairies by Washington Irving Book Review
I’ll meet you at Fort Gibson in Oklahoma on October 28, 1832. We’ll hire a couple of indians and a creole. Their orders are to help provision our larder during a 30 day march into the Autumnal Pawnee hunting grounds.
We meet the captain two days march west, he’s traveling with approximately one hundred rangers. Each trooper is matched with a backup horse and pack horse. The single file line of horses and men like a termite mound on the move. Over the prairies and through the woods to hunt game and spread the news about the Great Father in Washington.
Excellent old time journal of adventure, horseback riding, bivouacking, camping, wild horse hunting, buffalo hunting, deer hunting, elk hunting, bear hunting, and turkey hunting.
A few things to note:
This journal contains no mention of whiskey or any liquors among the rangers during their march.
How on God’s good earth do you axe down a green tree and burn it in your fires that very same evening? Would it not just smolder and smoke like fresh chopped wood always does?
It really is a very romantic book, without one mention of a female in the entire text. Excluding the Negress that feeds the officers on their famished return to civilization.
It’s a bunch of young men with rifles, salted pork, coffee, and gun powder. They ride ten to fifteen miles on horseback a day. They camp in the alluvial bottoms of streams and creeks.
They parley with Indians and meet with buffalo herds through the Cross Timbers.
The campsites are described in fascinating detail, the men lounging round countless fires, roasting spits, and coffee pots.
If any of this is real, it must be some kind of alternate universe.
Galloping after wild stallions on wide open plains, bee hunting for liquid gold, buffalo hunting with a brace of brass locked pistols.
These people live without Google/Apple watching their every BLE signal.
They live without sticker policy on horseshoe registration.
Proof of financial responsibility equals zero.
There’s nobody on the prairie, except you, your horse, your backup horse, your saddle, your rifle, your powder, and hunting knife. And ninety-nine other men who would gladly rush into any skirmish to save your ass.
Truly an adventure.
I grew up not far from their march, I know the alluvial beds, I’ve seen the Cross Timbers. All residential/commercial zoning without benefit of mineral rights.
A Tour On The Prairies by Washington Irving Book Review
My highlights and annotations:
Chapter 217: CHAPTER I
Annotation
Chapter progress: 33.04%
Highlight: It is the purport of the following pages to narrate a month’s excursion to these noted hunting grounds, through a tract of country which had not as yet been explored by
Notes: whites – 1832
Chapter 217: CHAPTER I
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Chapter progress: 33.08%
Highlight: galliard
Notes: Lively
Chapter 218: CHAPTER II
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Chapter progress: 33.11%
Highlight: company of mounted rangers, or riflemen, had departed but three days previous to make a wide exploring tour from the Arkansas to the Red River, including a part of the Pawnee hunting grounds where no party of white men had as yet penetrated.
Notes: 1832
Chapter 218: CHAPTER II
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Chapter progress: 33.13%
Highlight: We took care to provide ourselves with flour, coffee, and sugar, together with a small supply of salt pork for emergencies; for our main subsistence we were to depend upon the chase.
Chapter 220: CHAPTER IV
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Chapter progress: 33.28%
Highlight: He came prepared at all points for war or hunting: his rifle on his shoulder, his powder-horn and bullet-pouch at his side, his hunting-knife stuck in his belt, and coils of cordage at his saddle bow, which we were told were lariats, or noosed cords, used in catching the wild horse.
Chapter 221: CHAPTER V
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Chapter progress: 33.31%
Highlight: They are a well-made race, muscular and closely knit, with well-turned thighs and legs. They have a gypsy fondness for brilliant colors and gay decorations, and are bright and fanciful objects when seen at a distance on the prairies.
Chapter 221: CHAPTER V
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Chapter progress: 33.31%
Highlight: For some miles the country was sprinkled with Creek villages and farmhouses; the inhabitants of which appeared to have adopted, with considerable facility, the rudiments of civilization, and to have thriven in consequence. Their farms were well stocked, and their houses had a look of comfort and abundance.
Notes: Indian farms and homes.
Chapter 221: CHAPTER V
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Chapter progress: 33.31%
Highlight: We met with numbers of them returning from one of their grand games of ball, for which their nation is celebrated.
Notes: Aztec ball game.
Chapter 221: CHAPTER V
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Chapter progress: 33.37%
Highlight: Such is the glorious independence of man in a savage state. This youth, with his rifle, his blanket, and his horse, was ready at a moment’s warning to rove the world; he carried all his worldly effects with him, and in the absence of artificial wants, possessed the great secret of personal freedom. We of society are slaves, not so much to others as to ourselves; our superfluities are the chains that bind us, impeding every movement of our bodies and thwarting every impulse of our souls.
Chapter 223: CHAPTER VII
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Chapter progress: 33.46%
Highlight: We were overshadowed by lofty trees, with straight, smooth trunks, like stately columns; and as the glancing rays of the sun shone through the transparent leaves, tinted with the many-colored hues of autumn, I was reminded of the effect of sunshine among the stained windows and clustering columns of a Gothic cathedral.
Notes: Cathedral of trees
Chapter 223: CHAPTER VII
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Chapter progress: 33.52%
Highlight: As far as I can judge, the Indian of poetical fiction is like the shepherd of pastoral romance, a mere personification of imaginary attributes.
Chapter 225: CHAPTER IX
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Chapter progress: 33.61%
Highlight: and some of the ancient settlers of the West pretend to give the very year when the honey-bee first crossed the Mississippi.
Notes: Honey bees never seen by Indians till whie man arrive.
Chapter 226: CHAPTER X
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Chapter progress: 33.68%
Highlight: We send our youth abroad to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe; it appears to me, that a previous tour on the prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness, simplicity, and self-dependence, most in unison with our political institutions.
Chapter 226: CHAPTER X
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Chapter progress: 33.7%
Highlight: A large dish, or bowl, made from the root of a maple tree, and which we had purchased at the Indian village, was placed on the ground before us, and into it were emptied the contents of one of the camp kettles, consisting of a wild turkey hashed, together with slices of bacon and lumps of dough.
Chapter 226: CHAPTER X
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Chapter progress: 33.7%
Highlight: The cooking was conducted in hunter’s style: the meat was stuck upon tapering spits of dogwood, which were thrust perpendicularly into the ground, so as to sustain the joint before the fire, where it was roasted or broiled with all its juices retained in it in a manner that would have tickled the palate of the most experienced gourmand.
Chapter 229: CHAPTER XIII
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Chapter progress: 33.94%
Highlight: There is always some wild untamed tribe of Indians, who form, for a time, the terror of a frontier, and about whom all kinds of fearful stories are told. Such, at present, was the case with the Pawnees, who rove the regions between the Arkansas and the Red River, and the prairies of Texas.
Chapter 229: CHAPTER XIII
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Chapter progress: 33.98%
Highlight: Ah, Captain!” cried the ranger, “that will never do for me. Where I go, my rifle goes. I never like to leave it behind; it’s like a part of myself. There’s no one will take such care of it as I, and there’s nothing will take such care of me as my rifle.”
Chapter 229: CHAPTER XIII
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Chapter progress: 33.98%
Highlight: I’ve had my rifle pretty nigh as long as I have had my wife, and a faithful friend it has been to me.
Chapter 230: CHAPTER XIV
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Chapter progress: 34.09%
Highlight: Our march this day was animating and delightful. We were in a region of adventure; breaking our way through a country hitherto untrodden by white men, excepting perchance by some solitary trapper.
Notes: 1832 arkansas oklahoma
Chapter 230: CHAPTER XIV
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Chapter progress: 34.11%
Highlight: Indeed I can scarcely conceive a kind of life more calculated to put both mind and body in a healthful tone. A morning’s ride of several hours diversified by hunting incidents; an encampment in the afternoon under some noble grove on the borders of a stream; an evening banquet of venison, fresh killed, roasted, or broiled on the coals; turkeys just from the thickets and wild honey from the trees; and all relished with an appetite unknown to the gourmets of the cities.
Chapter 230: CHAPTER XIV
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Chapter progress: 34.16%
Highlight: The remnant took refuge on the summit of one of those isolated and conical hills which rise almost like artificial mounds, from the midst of the prairies.
Notes: Artificial mounds
Chapter 231: CHAPTER XV
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Chapter progress: 34.18%
Highlight: Man is naturally an animal of prey; and, however changed by civilization, will readily relapse into his instinct for destruction. I found my ravenous and sanguinary propensities daily growing stronger upon the prairies.
Chapter 232: CHAPTER XVI
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Chapter progress: 34.31%
Highlight: The regular journeyings of frontiersmen and Indians, when on a long march seldom exceed above fifteen miles a day, and are generally about ten or twelve, and they never indulge in capricious galloping.
Chapter 234: CHAPTER XVIII
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Chapter progress: 34.49%
Highlight: The prairies bordering on the rivers are always varied in this way with woodland, so beautifully interspersed as to appear to have been laid out by the hand of taste; and they only want here and there a village spire, the battlements of a castle, or the turrets of an old family mansion rising from among the trees, to rival the most ornamented scenery of Europe.
Notes: Walmart, walgreens, cvs.
Chapter 235: CHAPTER XIX
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Chapter progress: 34.59%
Highlight: It was the first time I had ever seen a horse scouring his native wilderness in all the pride and freedom of his nature. How different from the poor, mutilated, harnessed, checked, reined-up victim of luxury, caprice, and avarice, in our cities!
Chapter 239: CHAPTER XXIII
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Chapter progress: 34.92%
Highlight: The wind had been at northwest for several days; and the atmosphere had become so smoky, as in the height of Indian summer, that it was difficult to distinguish objects at any distance.
Notes: Iron oxide Saharan dust.
Chapter 239: CHAPTER XXIII
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Chapter progress: 34.92%
Highlight: He had scented the smoke of mingled sumac and tobacco, such as the Indians use.
Chapter 239: CHAPTER XXIII
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Chapter progress: 34.94%
Highlight: when we came in sight of six wild horses, among which I especially noticed two very handsome ones, a gray and a roan. They pranced about, with heads erect, and long flaunting tails, offering a proud contrast to our poor, spiritless, travel-tired steeds. Having reconnoitered us for a moment, they set off at a gallop, passed through a woody dingle, and in a little while emerged once more to view, trotting up a slope
Notes: Wild horses.
Chapter 239: CHAPTER XXIII
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Chapter progress: 34.97%
Highlight: Here then we fixed the limits of our tour to the Far West, being within little more than a day’s march of the boundary line of Texas.
Chapter 240: CHAPTER XXIV
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Chapter progress: 34.99%
Highlight: It was a melancholy predicament to be reduced to; without horse or weapon in the midst of the Pawnee hunting
Chapter 240: CHAPTER XXIV
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Chapter progress: 34.99%
Highlight: The old hunters, who had often experienced this want, made light of it; and Beatte, accustomed when among the Indians to live for months without it, considered it a mere article of luxury. “Bread,” he would, say scornfully, “is only fit for
Notes: Low carb diet.
Chapter 240: CHAPTER XXIV
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Chapter progress: 35.01%
Highlight: I felt quite like another being, now that I had an animal under me, spirited yet gentle, docile to a remarkable degree, and easy, elastic, and rapid in all his movements. In a few days he became almost as much attached to me as a dog; would follow me when I dismounted, would come to me in the morning to be noticed and caressed; and would put his muzzle between me and my book, as I sat reading at the foot of a tree.
Notes: Horse care.
Chapter 241: CHAPTER XXV
Annotation
Chapter progress: 35.1%
Highlight: Away they all went over the green bank; in a moment or two the wild horses reappeared, and came thundering down the valley, with Frenchman, halfbreeds, and rangers galloping and yelling like devils behind them.
Notes: Wild horse hunt.
Chapter 243: CHAPTER XXVII
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Chapter progress: 35.21%
Highlight: Preparations were immediately made to weather it; our tent was pitched, and our saddles, saddlebags, packages of coffee, sugar, salt, and every thing else that could be damaged by the rain, were gathered under its shelter.
Chapter 243: CHAPTER XXVII
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Chapter progress: 35.23%
Highlight: The change of weather had taken sharp hold of our little Frenchman. His meager frame, composed of bones and whip-cord, was racked with rheumatic pains and twinges. He had the toothache — the earache — his face was tied up — he had shooting pains in every limb; yet all seemed but to increase his restless activity, and he was in an incessant fidget about the fire, roasting, and stewing, and groaning, and scolding, and swearing.
Notes: Creole rickets.
Chapter 243: CHAPTER XXVII
Annotation
Chapter progress: 35.27%
Highlight: repining.
Notes: Feel or express discontent.
Chapter 245: CHAPTER XXIX
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Chapter progress: 35.42%
Highlight: I was provided with a brace of veteran brass-barreled pistols, which I had borrowed at Fort Gibson, and which had evidently seen some service. Pistols are very effective in buffalo hunting, as the hunter can ride up close to the animal, and fire at it while at full speed; whereas the long heavy rifles used on the frontier, cannot be easily managed, nor discharged with accurate aim from horseback.
Notes: How to hunt buffalo.
Chapter 246: CHAPTER XXX
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Chapter progress: 35.53%
Highlight: We determined, therefore, to hasten to the camp as speedily as possible, and send out our halfbreeds, and some of the veteran hunters, skilled in cruising about the prairies, to search for our companion.
Notes: half indian half euro
Chapter 247: CHAPTER XXXI
Annotation
Chapter progress: 35.6%
Highlight: what made us the more anxious about him was, that he had no provisions with him, was totally unversed in “woodcraft,” and liable to fall into the hands of some lurking or straggling party of savages.
Notes: Woodcraft
Chapter 249: CHAPTER XXXIII
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Chapter progress: 35.75%
Highlight: On a tour of the kind, horses should as seldom as possible be put off of a quiet walk; and the average day’s journey should not
Notes: Horse science.
Chapter 249: CHAPTER XXXIII
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Chapter progress: 35.78%
Highlight: Indeed our coffee, which, as long as it held out, had been served up with every meal, according to the custom of the West, was by no means a beverage to boast of. It was roasted in a frying-pan. without much care, pounded in a leathern bag, with a round stone, and boiled in our prime and almost only kitchen utensil, the camp kettle, in “branch” or brook water; which, on the prairies, is deeply colored by the soil, of which it always holds abundant particles in a state of solution and suspension.
Notes: Cowboy coffee
Chapter 250: CHAPTER XXXIV
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Chapter progress: 35.88%
Highlight: On the edge of the prairie, and in a spacious grove of noble trees which overshadowed a small brook, were the traces of an old Creek hunting camp. On the bark of the trees were rude delineations of hunters and squaws, scrawled with charcoal; together with various signs and hieroglyphics, which our halfbreeds interpreted as indicating that from this encampment the hunters had returned home.
Chapter 251: CHAPTER XXXV
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Chapter progress: 35.99%
Highlight: bivouacked,
Chapter 332: BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE
Annotation
Chapter progress: 43.19%
Highlight: coxcomb,
Notes: Vain and conceited man, dandy.