Another week had elapsed, but still we were on our journey. With the exception of the band of Sac and Fox Indians, we had met with no other savages. We were the only human beings who lived and moved upon the wide waste. Nothing else was visible—not a deer, not a tree—all was prairie—a wide unbroken sea of green—where hollow succeeded hollow, and the long grass waved on the hills, with a heavy surge-like motion, until at last it was blended with the hazy atmosphere, which met the horizon. The power of sight was shut out by nothing; it had its full scope, and we gazed around until our eyes ached with the very vastness of the view that lay before them. There was a degree of pain, of loneliness, in the scene. A tree would have been a companion, a friend. It would have thrown an air of sociability over the face of nature, but there was none. The annual fires which sweep over the whole face of the country, during the autumn of every year, effectually destroy any thing of the kind. There will be no forest as long as the Indians possess these regions; for every year, when the season of hunting arrives, they set fire to the long dry grass. Once fairly on its errand, the destructive messenger speeds onward, licking up every blade and every bush, until some strip of timber, whose tall trees protect the shrubbery by the dampness which they diffuse beneath, or some stream, stops it in its desolating path. The object of burning the grass is to drive the deer and elk, that are roving over the broad extent of prairie, into the small groves of timber scattered over the surface. Once enclosed within these thickets, they fall an easy prey to the hunters. We at last reached the Platte[F] river, about forty miles distant from the Otoe village; then striking off to the west, we followed the course of this powerful tributary of the Missouri. [F] The Indian name for La Platte is _Nie-borahka_, signifying the shallow river; as also the word _Nie-agaruh_ signifies the broken river. This last word might lead to a pretty correct conclusion as to the meaning of the name Niagara, given to the celebrated river and falls connecting Lake Erie with Ontario; for the word is the same among several of the different tribes, who, though they now dwell in the “far west,” may nevertheless have once roamed in the neighbourhood of our eastern waters.