Crossing the mountains into Bison Valley

Crossing the mountains into Bison Valley is the expedition’s passage from the familiar, increasingly depleted hunting grounds of Kansas into a remote mountain basin where a great herd of American bison still survives. The crossing is at once a difficult piece of travel and a revelation: Miller recognizes a trail hidden in the forest, the men labor up a dangerous slope, and Andrews encounters a landscape so vast and quiet that it seems to exceed ordinary human measure. The discovery opens the way to the hunt that will define their time in the valley.

Causes and Background

Miller’s search for a distant herd takes shape against the rapid depletion of the Kansas range. He recalls that when he and J. D. McDonald arrived, the spring plains had been black with American bison, and a two-week hunt could yield a thousand or fifteen hundred animals. Now the herds have dwindled to small groups; bringing back two or three hundred in a hunt counts as good fortune. Miller expects that in another year or two Kansas will offer no more animals to hunt. He considers trapping or mining as alternatives, but leaves open the possibility that skilled hunters can still find American bison elsewhere.

The evidence of that earlier slaughter is already written across the prairie. Miller points out a large skeleton and remembers a time when heaps of bones stretched as far as the eye could see, from Pawnee Fork to the end of the Smoky Hill. He regards the bones as a consequence of the Kansas hunts, and even their likely reuse as fertilizer strikes him as a diminished end for material that once served many purposes. This history makes the expedition’s journey more than a search for new hunting territory: the men are moving toward a refuge made valuable by the disappearance of animals elsewhere.

Approaching the Mountain Pass

The route carries the party through the night and into the foothills. They pass clear streams, but Miller presses onward for nearly three hours after sunset, as the ground grows rough and wooded and steep hills are difficult to distinguish in the dark. A distant light, apparently shining from an open doorway, recedes behind them as they continue. Early the next morning they reach the hills, where scattered pines partly conceal the mountains. Miller guides the wagon toward a line of trees descending from a slope, and the party follows it into a valley beside a small stream. The channel is broad, although its clear water runs through a much narrower course among rocks, shrubs, and scattered trees.

The forest across the river arrests Andrews. The pine trunks rise beneath dense crowns, and the woods seem to continue without a visible end. As he looks, the individual trees and then the mountain itself lose definition; what remains in his perception is an immense green tangle, like a sea held motionless. The image suggests both invitation and danger: he imagines that a person might move across its surface only briefly before sinking into its depth and becoming lost within it. His absorption gives the mountain crossing a psychological dimension before the party has even begun its ascent. The forest is not simply scenery to be traversed; it unsettles the boundaries by which Andrews ordinarily understands a place.

Finding the Herd’s Road

The next morning the men resume their journey. Miller moves restlessly along the river, sometimes on its bank and sometimes in the water, while Schneider watches him with hostility and Andrews finds himself increasingly alert to the forest. Midmorning, Miller stops near the center of the stream, points toward the opposite slope, and directs Charley Hoge to turn the wagon and cross. The place he indicates initially seems no different from the ground they have already passed.

The clue is under the horses’ feet: a line of long, flat stones runs from the mountain’s base into the trees. Beyond it, a natural clearing reveals a broad, regularly worn strip of bare earth. Miller examines the packed ground and recognizes it as a recently used route made by a large herd. The revelation turns apparently undifferentiated forest into a legible path. The men tie their horses behind the wagon and begin the ascent, following the uneven track as it rises, dips into a hollow, and climbs again. Andrews, invigorated by the cool mountain air, strides ahead and jokes that the others will be left behind; Miller and Schneider continue more slowly, offering no matching enthusiasm.

The Ascent and the Valley Revealed

The climb exacts a physical cost. The men walk beside the wagon and brace themselves against its wheels when the oxen slip on steep sections. By midafternoon Andrews’s legs are numb, his back burns, and the thin, dry air stings his throat and chest. Near the end of the day the trail bends sharply around a deep ravine. Hoge has to maneuver the wagon carefully: its right wheels scrape against the pines while the left approach the edge of a drop several hundred feet deep. Beyond the turn, the track climbs toward a pass between two dark, jagged peaks. Miller identifies the ground beyond them as the place they have been seeking, and the oxen lurch upward under the men’s shouts and pressure against the wheels.

At the top, the party stops. Andrews has fallen and scraped his hands; he cleans the blood on his shirt before moving to where Miller is standing. The descending trail opens onto a long, narrow valley, level and grass-covered, enclosed by mountains. Its apparent stillness is so complete that Andrews, exhausted as he is, carefully lets out the breath he has been holding, as though reluctant to disturb it. The view changes when Miller points southwest: a dark mass is moving below the pines. Andrews makes out a ripple along its edge and sees the mass pulse like disturbed water. Miller identifies the distant animals as American bison and estimates their number at two or three thousand, perhaps more, while warning that the winding valley hides much of the herd from view.

Significance and Aftermath

The crossing marks a reversal in scale. On the Kansas plains, the dwindling herds and immense fields of bones register the consequences of repeated commercial hunting; here, the first sight of thousands of animals gives the expedition access to a remnant on a startling scale. Yet the discovery is not a simple escape from that history. The trail makes the herd findable, and Miller’s ability to read it turns the valley’s apparent inaccessibility into an opportunity for further killing.

The later hunt confirms the consequence of the discovery. As Miller’s companions skin and butcher animals at an increasingly exhausting pace, Andrews understands that Miller will not leave while a single animal remains alive. The herd’s reduction, rather than the passage of days, becomes the measure by which Andrews imagines their return. Thus the mountain journey brings the expedition to a place that seems untouched and outside ordinary time, but also delivers that place into the logic of depletion already visible in Kansas. The quiet valley becomes both a revelation of abundance and the setting for its destruction.