Before them stretched the barren snow-clad steppes, forlorn and shelterless, with scarcely a mark of guidance anywhere, a dismal wilderness, intersected by gloomy ravines and frozen creeks.

Here and there a river, the water icy cold and covered with floating ice, barred their passage; down in the valleys the drifted snow turned them aside.

Again and again the struggling ponies floundered to their ears, or slid head-long down some steep declivity.
Twice Hamlin was thrown, and once the Osage was crushed between floating cakes and submerged in the icy stream.

Across the open barrens swept the wind into their faces, a ceaseless buffeting, chilling to the marrow; their eyes burned in the snow-glare.

Yet they rode on and on, voiceless, suffering in the grim silence of despair, fit denizens of that scene of utter desolation.
At the Cimarron the half-frozen Indian collapsed, falling from his saddle into the snow utterly exhausted.