/lit/ - Literature

>>13803367
When the whites penetrated the western watercourses they found the life there as abundant as it had been along the eastern seaboard where sturgeon, giant lobsters, and shad were so plentiful that settlers grew nauseated on them. Out west, Pierre Radisson in the middle of the seventeenth century found otters so numerous in the streams that they hindered the progress of the little expedition's canoes. Gigantic catfish thumped ominously against the frail crafts of Jesuit fathers and voyageurs, while overhead flocks of passenger pigeons traveled the skies in such numbers that for hours at a time the sunlight would be obscured.

When Daniel Boone and the Long Hunters crept through the Cumberlands into Kentucky, they discovered newer variations on this theme of abundance in a land of canebrakes, clover, bluegrass, wild grains, and salt licks where a thousand animals might be glimpsed in a single lucky moment. They saw the buffalo whose enormous presence Vaca and Coronado had earlier reported and whose relatives, the woods buffalo, were to be found in considerable numbers as far east as Pennsylvania and upper New York. Here these few whites were on the very margin of the prairies that stretched they knew not how far toward sunset, prairies that in spring glinted like an ocean running under windsunflower, golden alexander, prairie lily, silphium, blazing star, golden rod, sky blue aster, purple gentian, big bluestem.

All of it seemed so lavish and exhaustless that it tempted the whites to tales of exaggeration, some imported from the Old World, some locally grown. There was, for example, the story about the Fortunate Hunter: charged simultaneously by a bear and a moose, he sent his only shot into a rock squarely between them, the bullet splitting and each half killing its beast. The fragments of the rock killed a squirrel in a nearby tree, while the recoil of the hunter's rifle knocked him into a stream from which he emerged with his pockets brimming with fish.