The
breaking-up of our little company when the steamboat landed at
Saint Louis was like the ending of a pleasant dream. We had to
wake up to the fact that by striking due east thirty or forty
miles across that monotonous Greenness, we should reach our
destination, and must accept whatever we should find there, with
such grace as we could.
What we did find, and did not find, there is not room fully to
relate here. Ours was at first the roughest kind of pioneering
experience; such as persons brought up in our well-to-do New
England could not be in the least prepared for, though they might
imagine they were, as we did. We were dropped down finally upon a
vast green expense, extending hundreds of miles north and south
through the State of Illinois, then known as Looking-Glass
Prairie. The nearest cabin to our own was about a mile away, and
so small that at that distance it looked like a shingle set up
endwise in the grass. Nothing else was in sight, not even a tree,
although we could see miles and miles in every direction.
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