The herds numbered thousands upon thousands, diminishing in the
distance to black dots on the fawn-colored face of the prairie. Twice
a day they went to the river to drink. Solemnly, in Indian file, they
passed down the trails among the sand hills, worn into gutters by their
continuous hoofs. From the wall of the bluffs they emerged into the
bottom, line after line, moving slowly to the water. Then to the river
edge the valley was black with them, a mass of huge, primordial forms,
from which came bellowings and a faint, sharp smell of musk.
The valley was the highway to the West--the far West, the West of the
great fur companies. It led from the Missouri, whose turbid current
was the boundary between the frontier and the wild, to the second great
barrier, the mountains which blocked the entrance to the unknown
distance, where the lakes were salt and there were deserts rimed with
alkali. It stretched a straight, plain path, from the river behind it
to the peaked white summits in front.
Along it had come a march of men, first a scattered few, then a broken
line, then a phalanx--the winners of the West.
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