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| Prairie Scene: Mirage Alfred Jacob Miller, c. 1858-60 |
June 21. ...Now that's what the genuine Captain Cooke sounds like. Real prairie writing, transcribed from the manuscript of Cooke's 1843 Santa Fe journal. Manuscript reports of 1843 survive in the National Archives and are now accessible at fold3. For the summer expedition, see Letters to the Adjutant General 1822-1860: 1843/C/ Cooke, P St G (C252). For the fall 1843 march, see Cooke's report dated October 26, 1843 in Letters to the Adjutant General 1822-1860: 1843/C/Cooke, P St G (C307).
... I have never seen an attempt to explain the “mirage,” which here, as on on [sic] the sandy plains of Asia, deceive the eye with the semblance of white sheets of water: on a hot day we see an appearance of steam or vapour rising from a hill,—no matter how near, if relieved by the sky, just as from a hot stove. I conceive it to be exhalations of moisture & the usual vapours of the atmosphere put in visible motion by the radiated caloric; when there is an expanse of nearly plain surface, a vast amount of this moving vapour is seen at once, and, no longer translucent, assumes the appearance of a white plain,— of steam,—or water. Thus too, by the refraction of light passing through an aqueous medium, is easily explained the “looming” of objects on the plains & hill tops: a crow, or a weed, is frequently mistaken for a buffalo, or a horseman.
Parts I-IV, the first four installments, of Scenes Beyond the Western Border are rewritten from these 1843 reports.
Both the summer and fall reports of 1843 were edited by William E. Connelley and published as "A Journal of the Santa Fe Trail" in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review 12 (June 1925): 72-98; and 12 (September 1925): 227-255.
Cooke's 1843 journal of the summer expedition only was also published in J. M. Lowe, The National Old Trails Road (Kansas City, 1925) as
"An Interesting Military Excursion"
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