For several days longer our road ran through mountains, which were bordered by savage precipices and crossed by grassy valleys; then we rode for some days across open, boundless prairies, and again reached low ranges of hills, between which we crossed the southern arm of Red River, which divides Texas from Arkansas and falls into the Mississippi in Arkansas, after flowing a distance of nearly one thousand miles. There it is of a dirty red, and muddy, and moves sluggishly between lofty poplars and planes which overshadow its flat banks, while the long gray grass hangs down from thence to the surface of the water and literally covers the trees. This moss hangs from every branch in creepers twenty feet long, and conceals the swampy soil in which those fearful monsters, the alligators, lie by thousands and await in their pestiferous lair the unhappy victims whom accident leads to them. Here and there a half-decayed blockhouse peeps out from under these weeping banners, and as everything there offers the picture of rapid desolation, you see in this house, where so many families have died out one after the other, the pale, yellow wasted faces of the new-comers peering out, like candidates for death, till it becomes too late to escape from this pestilential abode. How perfectly different, however, the river appears here! Clear as crystal to the bottom, it dances from rock to rock; refreshes as it darts past the luxuriant ferns and the thousand-hued flowers with its waves, and displays to the visitor its living wealth, as well as the vegetable world on its bed, in the most brilliant hues. The purest, lightest breeze sports over its high banks and drives the diseases, which are the curse of South-Eastern America, out of the paradise which lies beneath the haughty cypresses, pecan nut-trees, planes, maples, and colossal oak-trees that border it. How is it possible that men can be terrified by the dangers of the West, and patiently expose themselves to a certain, slow, awful decay in those poisoned forests, where Death inexorably swings his scythe all the year round? The Rocky Mountains now rose in the west, and glistened with their snowy peaks, while around us the plants announced spring by their bursting buds. We drew nearer to them, although in this way our route became far more fatiguing than farther eastward, where the wide prairies extend to the north. But Tiger employed this precaution in order to get out of the way of the great Indian hordes pursuing the buffalo, who do not find in these mountains sufficient food for their troops of horses and mules, and cannot hunt the buffaloes there so well as on the prairie. Hence our journey was continued more slowly; but at this season we could reckon on water, and the small valleys offered our few cattle abundance of food. The mountains constantly afforded us more game than we needed for our support, and we could approach it with greater ease than on the prairies.