A Tour On the Prairies

Summary

“I found myself thus afloat, on the skin of a buffalo, in the midst of a wild river, surrounded by wilderness and towed along by a half savage whooping and yelling like the devil incarnate.”A wild adventure on horseback beyond the Mississippi River into America’s far west of 1832. Washington Irving, author of the “Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” joined a group of inexperienced rangers, hunters and an assortment of colorful characters into the unexplored prairies with the goal of meeting Native Americans, hunting buffalo and getting in trouble.Until 1803, when Irving was 20 years old, the western limit of the United States was the Mississippi river. With the Louisiana Purchase, the US gained 828,000 square miles of land, extending west from the Mississippi river to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. It doubled the size of the United States. A great deal of this new territory was prairie land, meadows with high grasses, as well as rivers and settlements. By 1832, this area was still rough country and was considered the Far West. It was Washington Irving’s intention to explore this new addition, which came into existence while he was a young man.This idea was forming in his mind while he crossed the Atlantic after living 17 years in Europe. On board ship, he made the acquaintance of the Swiss Count Albert de Pourtales, and an Englishman, Charles J. Latrobe. After landing in the United States, the three became traveling companions and, eventually, met Judge Henry L Ellsworth of Connecticut. Ellsworth had just been appointed by President Andrew Jackson as a Commissioner, tasked with the removal of Native Americans from their homes to new lands set aside for them. The Judge invited the three companions to accompany him west and they accepted resulting in this extraordinary adventure.