His nature was not more imaginative than comprehensive.
To a very few men Edward Franklin has admitted that he once dreamed of a hill topped by a little fire, whose smoke dipped and waved and caught him in its fold.

In brief, he got into saddle, and journeyed to the Hill of Dreams.
The Hill of Dreams dominated the wide and level landscape over which it had looked out through hundreds of slow, unnoted years.

From it once rose the signal smokes of the red men, and here it was that many a sentinel had stood in times long before a white face was ever seen upon the Plains.

Here often was erected the praying lodge of the young aspirant for wisdom, who stood there and lifted up his hands, saying: "O sun! O air! O earth! O spirits, hear me pray! Give me aid, give me wisdom, so that I may know!" Here on the Hill of Dreams, whence the eye might sweep to the fringed sand hills on the south, east to the river many miles away, and north and west almost to the swell of the cold steppes that lead up to the Rocky Range, the red men had sometimes come to lay their leaders when their day of hunting and of war was over.

Thus the place came to have extraordinary and mysterious qualities ascribed to it, on which account, in times gone by, men who were restless, troubled, disturbed, dissatisfied, came thither to fast and pray.