“The great, cloudless sky. The rolling ocean of grass. Nothing else, no matter where he put his eyes. No road. No trace of ruts for the big wagon to follow. Just sheer, empty space. He was adrift. It made his heart jump in a strange and profound way.” 

Lieutenant Dunbar, riding on a horse-drawn wagon across the prairie, enters a vast world completely different from the one he has known. The old rules won’t apply here. The thought thrills him.

“Lieutenant Dunbar had fallen in love. He had fallen in love with this wild, beautiful country and everything it contained. It was the kind of love people dream of having with other people: selfless and free of doubt, reverent and everlasting. His spirit had received a promotion and his heart was jumping.” 

Not a religious man, Dunbar finds a kind of religious ecstasy in the great open prairie. Already, he has bonded with the majestic wilds; on first meeting, he becomes loyal to it and to whatever it might contain. 

“What he might have lacked was pale in light of what he had. His mind was free. There was no work and there was no play. Everything was one. It didn’t matter whether he was hauling water up from the stream or tying into a hearty dinner. Everything was the same, and he found it not at all boring. He thought of himself as a single current in a deep river. He was separate and he was whole, all at the same time. It was a wonderful feeling.”

Dunbar’s tenure at Fort Sedgewick teaches him to see the world differently from his old, civilized view. The human rules of what’s important and what’s not seem no longer to apply. His mind, untethered, shifts into a freer, looser attitude. The prairie replaces the tired complexities of his old life with a simpler, rolling flow of grassy hills and endless peace.