"To one unaccustomed to it there is something inexpressibly lonely in the solitude of the prairie. The loneliness of a forest seems nothing to it. There the view is shut in by the trees and the imagination is left to picture some livelier scene beyond. But here we have the immense extent to landscape without a sign of human existence. We have the consciousness of being far, far beyond the bounds of human habitation" (Irving, 1959).