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Show THE MISSOURI VALLEY. 133 the beautiful slopes bordering the Verdigris River : a region of inex-haustible richness, and dotted at irregular intervals by those cone-shaped mounds of rock and gravel, which are the delight of the trav-eler and the despair of science. Some are perfectly circular, rising abruptly from the plain with a rocky wall of from ten to thirty feet in height, upon which stands the cone of loam and clay, often crowned with a pretty clump of trees and bushes. Others rise in long swells, abrupt at one end and sloping gradually to the plain at the other; and still others are mole- shaped, of every length from fifty to ten thousand feet, and from fifty to a hundred feet in height. A few have large tracts of fertile land on top, and farms have been located on their summits. Cherryvale, then terminus of the L. L. & G. R. R., was our last stopping- place a lively town of great pretensions. As laid off, it is about the size of Cincinnati ; but only a half dozen squares are built up yet. Thence, late in July, we turned northward to hunt the cooler sections of the valley. The Southern Kansian we found to be a good fellow, but somewhat prone to the marvelous and romantic. " Snake stories " were abun-dant. Those reptiles are common, but seldom dangerous. The most formidable looking is the " bull- snake," so called, an immense thing of four or five feet in length, which gets its name from its blunt head and thick, clumsy body. Strangers often mistake its resonant hiss for the rattle of the real crotalus horridus, or rattlesnake. The only dangerous snakes are the little " prairie rattlers," seldom over two feet long; they are dull and sluggish, rarely bite, and their bite, I believe, never proves fatal. But they serve an admirable purpose for local romancers. A settler told us of one which bit his horse : the animal fell dead, and when he examined the wound, the marks of the upper and lower fangs were four inches apart! Discount sixty per cent, when a Kansian talks about snakes. Another told of stirring up an immense rattler while he was hoeing corn. He aggravated it till it struck its fangs into the hoe- handle, then killed it, and was proceeding with his work, when he observed the handle growing larger, perceptibly swelling with the poison. This continued for an hour, when " the eye of the hoe popped out." Of course the trichina-spiralis was peculiarly bad in such a country. We were told of one man in Doniphan County, who read all the accounts of that news-paper epidemic, and in turn felt all the symptoms described. He had the " spirals" bore through his skin; in fact got decidedly " wormy." So he took a powerful emetic, and threw up three or four handfuls of pork worms, three lizards, a section of the worm of the still, |
