"Platte" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... burning! We'll all be killed!" some kept crying, and this added to the fears of the others. Many persons were killed and many injured. Waterloo, a village of about equal size to the northeast across the Platte River, suffered like damage. Wires were snapped off in all directions, and it took many hours to gather and circulate news ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... actor, and is meeting with success. He owns a large and valuable farm adjoining the town of North Platte, Nebraska, and there his family live in ease and comfort. He has also an extensive cattle ranch on the Dismal river, sixty-five miles north of North Platte, his partner being Major Frank North, the old commander of the celebrated Pawnee scouts. While many events of his ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... the native rock has been laid bare here and there, and this rock is as distinctly furrowed by the action of the glacier and by its engraving process, as the Handeck, or the slopes of the Jura. I have seen magnificent slabs in Nebraska in the basin of the river Platte. Do not the physicists begin to think of explaining to us the probable cause of changes so remarkable and so well established? We can no longer evade the question by supposing these phenomena to be due to the action of great currents. We have to do first with sheets ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... should be proud to have a borned orator like this in the agricultural pop'lation of the district. A reg'lar William Jennin's Bryan. I don't understand what he was trying to tell us, but sometimes I've had the same difficulty with the spaches of the Boy Orator of the Platte. Makin' a good spache is one thing, and teaching a good school is another, but in order to bring this matter before the board, I nominate Mr. James E. Irwin, the Boy Orator of the Woodruff District, and the new white hope, f'r the job of teacher of ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... Rio de la Plata represents geographically our Mississippi, and the Paraguay recalls the Missouri. The Parana may be compared to the Ohio; the Pilcomayo, Vermejo, and Salado rivers, to the River Platte, the Arkansas, and the Red River in the United States; while the rivers farther south, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico, represent the rivers of Patagonia and the southern parts of the Argentine Republic. Not only is there this general correspondence between the mountain elevations and the river ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... between the Northern and Southern Cheyennes. When the tribe was a compact whole they were constantly pressed farther into the plains by the hostile Sioux and established themselves on the upper branches of the Platte River. In consequence of the building of Bent's Ford upon the upper Arkansas in Colorado, a large part of the tribe decided to move south, the other section moving north to the Yellow-stone. The two sections of the one tribe have since ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... formidable combination, and the friendly Indians were daily leaving the reservations to join their hostile brethren. Two thousand Indians had destroyed over one hundred miles of telegraph, and were in possession of the country between the Arkansas and the North Platte Rivers. ...
— The Battle of Atlanta - and Other Campaigns, Addresses, Etc. • Grenville M. Dodge
... Platte, and Guillaumesse, and the gleaming Autelets, and La Grune, and on the other side the great black Gouliot rocks, and Moie Batarde, and the long dark side of Brecqhou all seemed straining with wide anxious eyes to learn what was coming. ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... of the then newly-discovered Columbia. The route thus explored was more difficult than that which was later travelled by the first emigrants across the continent to California. That route lies up the Platte River, through what is known as the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains, by Great Salt Lake and down the valley of the Humboldt into California, crossing the Sierra Nevada at any one of several points leading into the valley of the Sacramento. ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... manner of these desert conveyances, that creak and groan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering inconsequence, the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch left at sunrise to pursue a seemingly erratic career along the North Platte, while Miss Carmichael and the fat lady were to continue their journey with one Lemuel Chugg, who drove a stage northward towards the Red Desert, when he was sober enough to ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... third decade of the nineteenth century was fairly begun the trappers were crossing in considerable numbers from the headwaters of the Missouri and the Platte into the valley of the Colorado and the Columbia, and as early as 1824 one of the most brilliant figures of this epoch, General Ashley,* having previously organised a fur-trading company in St. Louis, then the centre of all Western commerce, had established himself in Green River Valley ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... sent out his trappers through the Green River valley, possibly even to Great Salt Lake. A detachment of this party found the gateway of the Rocky Mountains, through the famous South Pass by way of the Sweetwater branch of the north fork of the Platte. This pass commanded the routes to the great interior basin and to the Pacific Ocean. What Cumberland Gap was in the advance of settlement across the Alleghenies, South Pass was in the movement across the Rocky ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... interesting information in reference to the important branches of the public service connected with his Department. The menacing attitude of some of the warlike bands of Indians inhabiting the district of country between the Arkansas and Platte rivers and portions of Dakota Territory required the presence of a large military force in that region. Instigated by real or imaginary grievances, the Indians occasionally committed acts of barbarous violence ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... (yet thine, all thine, O soul, the same,) I see over my own continent the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier, I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte carrying freight and passengers, I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle, I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world, I cross the Laramie plains, I note the rocks in grotesque shapes, the buttes, I see the plentiful ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... the Pawnee scouts had been sent up to Ogallalla, Nebraska, to guard the graders who were working on the Union Pacific railroad. While they were there, some Sioux came down from the hills and ran off a few mules, taking them across the North Platte. Major North took twenty men and started after them. Crossing the river, and following it up on the north bank, he headed them off, and before long ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... above the Rockies, apparently using an updraft with very little wing-motion. There was no means of calculating her weight, or mass, or buoyancy. Dead or injured, drift might have carried her anywhere within one or two hundred miles. Then she seemed to be following the line of the Platte and the Missouri. By the end of the day she was circling interminably over the huge complex of ...
— The Good Neighbors • Edgar Pangborn
... time, then," said Ralph, with glistening eyes. "Doesn't it seem odd, after I've been galloping all over this country from here to the Chug for the last three years, that now father won't let me go it alone. I never yet set eyes on a war party of Indians, or heard of one south of the Platte." ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... them from the territory of a foreign and an alien government, down somewhere, the Lord knows where, upon the lower banks of the Mississippi? What would become of Missouri? Will she join the arrondissement of the slave States? Shall the man from the Yellowstone and the Platte be connected, in the new republic, with the man who lives on the southern extremity of the Cape of Florida? Sir, I am ashamed to pursue this line of remark. I dislike it, I have an utter disgust for it. I would rather hear of natural blasts ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Missouri line we came upon a comfortable farm-house, at which father made inquiry concerning a lodging for the night. A widow lived there, and the information that father was brother to Elijah Cody, of Platte County, Missouri, won us a cordial welcome and the hospitality ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... came at last, dancing over the hills. The ground-birds began building, and at four each morning awoke Annie with their sylvan opera. The creek that ran just at the north of the house worked itself into a fury and blustered along with much noise toward the great Platte which, miles away, wallowed in its vast sandy bed. The hills flushed from brown to yellow, and from mottled green to intensest emerald, and in the superb air all the winds of heaven seemed to meet and ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... the North Platte on the 18th. The fare at the stations is daily improving, and we often have antelope steaks now. They tell us of eggs not far off, and we encourage (by a process not wholly unconnected with bottles) the drivers to keep their ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... the "Albatross" had left Omaha and crossed the Platte River, whose valley is followed by the Pacific Railway in its route across the prairie. Things looked serious for Uncle ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... beholder's breast, and, on reflection, stirs him with envy. Many nests were found in the Georgetown valley, in woodsy and bushy places on the route to Gray's Peak as far as the timber-line, in the neighborhood of Boulder, in the Platte River Canyon, in South Park, and in the Blue River region beyond the Divide. Some of the nests contained eggs, others young in various stages of plumage, and still others were already deserted. For general ubiquity as a species, commend ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... splendor, the warmth slightly increasing as the orb climbed the heavens. To the northward the undulating plain was unbroken by hill or stream, so far as the eye could note, while to the eastward the prospect was similar, though they knew that the North Platte curved over in that direction, and, after winding around the upper end of the Laramie Mountains, joined the main stream far over ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... We skirted the South Platte River most of the time; it was only a bed of shingles, wide and shallow, with not a drop of water in it. These plains, extending for thousands of miles in all directions, are the great "ranching," or cattle-farming districts, formerly the favourite breeding-grounds ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... the mountaineers, had charge of the party. He was, at that time, well acquainted by experience with the Rocky Mountains, and has, since then, gained an enviable fame as an Indian Agent. The new party travelled North and commenced operations on the Platte River, which they followed down stream to one of its tributaries, the Sweet Water River. From here they worked on until they reached the Green River. Hence they journeyed to Jackson's Hole, which is a fork of the Great Columbia River. After making a short stay at ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... always found on the side of law and order; it was difficult to conceive that this quiet-spoken, mild-eyed, gently smiling man could indeed be the most famous gun fighter on the border, hated, feared, yet thoroughly respected, by every desperado between the Platte and the Canadian. Beyond the glare and glitter of the Metropolitan Dance Hall the noisy crowd thinned away somewhat, and the marshal ventured to drop back beside Fairbain, yet ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... the wild trails of the West converged: northward, from the trading-posts of Bent and St. Vrain on the Platte; south, over the Raton Pass from Taos and Santa Fe; westward, from the fur-bearing plateaus of the Rockies, where trappers and traders brought their precious piles of pelts down the Arkansas; and eastward, ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... Laramie we crossed the Platte river by fording. The stream, as I remember it, was near a mile wide, but not waist deep. Thirty and forty oxen were hitched to one wagon, to effect the crossing. But woe to the hapless team that stalled in the treacherous quicksands. They must be kept going, as it required but ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... greatest, when you leave out boat travel. The Platte Valley led out the men with plows on their wagons, the home makers who stayed West. You see, our young leaders were only ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... men danced to the strains of a voyageur's fiddle. Usually, among forty men is one traitor, and Liberte must desert on pretence of running back for a knife; but perhaps the fellow took fright from the wild yarns told by the lonely-eyed, shaggy-browed, ragged trappers who came floating down the Platte, down the Osage, down the Missouri, with canoe loads of furs for St. Louis. These men foregathered with the voyageurs and told only too true stories of the dangers ahead. Fires kindled on the banks of the river called neighboring Indians to council. Council Bluffs commemorates ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... vessel, also his fellow passengers; not humorously, but with an appreciation of their peculiarities Deena had not anticipated; he introduced her to flying fish, and then to the renowned albatross, and he conducted her up the river Platte to Montevideo, which he described with the ponderous minuteness of a guide book. At the end he made a confidence—namely, that even his summer flannels had proved oppressive in that climate—but the intimacy of his letter went no further, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... principle or broad policy. He was chairman of the Senate committee on Territories, and early in the session of 1853-4 he introduced a bill for the organization of a vast section hitherto known as "the Platte country," a part of the Louisiana purchase, lying next to the western tier of States, and stretching from Indian Territory to Canada; all of which was now to constitute the Territory of Nebraska, or, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... well, as so many must, some of the marked features of the route that General Bidwell mentions. One of the most imposing of these is Court House Rock, near the North Platte. Surely no object of such dignity ever had a more belittling name—given it in good faith no doubt by some untraveled wight whose county court-house was the most "reverend pile" of which he had any conception. It should ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... roving tribe, in the region of the Platte and Kansas Rivers. If they were just setting out on their journey when the children heard them ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got off next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern platform singing The Sweet By-and-By with very tuneful voices; the chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at an end. But it was not so; for the train stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged with ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... travelled south or southwesterly from the wintry regions where the British fur companies reigned supreme. The headwaters of the Missouri were absolutely unknown; nobody had penetrated the great plains, the vast seas of grass through which the Platte, the Little Missouri, and the Yellowstone ran. What lay beyond them, and between them and the Pacific, was not even guessed at. The Rocky Mountains were not known to exist, so far as the territory newly acquired by the United States was concerned, although under the name of "Stonies" ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... an example of those colony towns so successful in the West, and on which we must depend for rebuilding society in the South. Greeley is surrounded by fertile farms, and every city lot looks fresh and green: all this is effected by irrigation. Two canals have been dug from the head-waters of the Platte—one twenty-six miles long, which will water fifty thousand acres; the other ten miles long, to furnish water for the town and five thousand acres. The prairie where it is not irrigated now, in midsummer, looks burned up and covered with a parched herbage, which, however unpromising to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... threatened. Alarm-bells warned the frightened inhabitants of impending danger; many fled to the United States Mint for refuge, and to cellars, cisterns, and dark alleys. This was during the wild reign of Spotted Horse along the shores of the Platte, before he was captured by Major Downing at the battle of Sand Creek, and finally sent to Europe on exhibition as a genuine child of ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... rocks, dimly seen. He gave the signal to lay-to, and himself took the bearings. The tide was going out rapidly, disclosing reefs on either hand. He drew in carefully to the right of the rock known as L'Echiquelez, up through a passage scarce wide enough for canoes, and to Roque Platte, the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to the levee, where lay the steamer Platte Valley, almost ready to leave, and besought Hattie, who was ever my counselor, to pay our passage, and, in spite of repulse, enjoy the river scenery. In her judgment it seemed better not to do so, but to use our ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... I don't know about the gun-boat, but I saw some of them on board the "Platte Valley," after I had been carried on her. They came on board, and I think went into drink with some of our officers. I think one of the rebel ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... OLD TRAPPERS. Captain Ezekiel Williams' Expedition to the Platte Valley in 1807—Character of the Old Trapper—The Outfit of his Men—Crosses the River—Immense Herds of Buffalo—Death of their Favourite Hound—A Lost Trapper—A Prairie Burial—A Wolf-chase after a Buffalo—An Indian Lochinvar—The Crow Indians—Their ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... hear, also, from the hunters and trappers on La Platte. Though it is with the Frenchers, and not with the men who claim to own the Mexicos, that my ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... building a line from New York to the Mouth of the Oregon (Columbia River) by way of the south shore of Lake Erie and Lake Michigan, crossing the Mississippi River between 41 and 42 north latitude, the Missouri River about the mouth of the Platte, thence to the Rocky Mountains near the source of the last named river, crossing them and down the valley of the Oregon to the Pacific. It further suggested that it be made a national project, or this failing the grant of three ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... the original main line of the Union Pacific ran from Omaha up the Platte Trail through Cheyenne to Ogden, with a branch from Kansas City to Denver and Cheyenne. Between the main line and the branch the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy constructed a road that reached Denver in May, 1882. Here ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... rode as silently as the bison marched. For each one of us had seen that one-minded pilgrimage of the brown cattle take place in moons gone by. I recalled a time when a trail-herd lay on the Platte and the buffalo barred their passing for two days—even made fourteen riders and three thousand Texas steers give ground. Is it not history that the St. Louis-Benton river-boats backed water when the bison crossed the Missouri in ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and May and June was well-nigh half over. The old semaphore of Telegraph Hill would have worn itself out signaling sidewheel steamers had it still been in operation. The transcontinental railway was stretching out up the valley of the Platte toward the center of the continent, but Wells-Fargo, and the pony express charging a dollar a letter, were the only transcontinental rapid transit of the day. People still went to and from the distant East by way of Aspinwall and Panama, and the big boats of the Pacific mail were crowded, ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... from year to year, and finally it was split in two and divided into a northern and southern strip. The cause of this division was the California overland emigration, the route of which followed the Kansas and Platte Rivers, cutting through the center of the buffalo regions. These emigrants killed hundreds of thousands of animals, and the division became still greater after the completion of the Union Pacific line and the settlement ...
— My Native Land • James Cox |
