The Nebraska Sand Hills, for instance, were described by an explorer in 1796 as a " great desert of drifting sand, without trees, soil, rock, water or animals of any kind, excepting some little varicolored turtles, of which there were vast numbers ."
22.
For food they had abundant white-tail deer, wild turkeys, prairie chickens, wapati ( elk ), buffalo, skunk, fish, lotus, pawpaws, grapes, persimmons, hickory nuts, walnuts, hackberries, pecans, and acorns, beside their cultivated crops of varicolored maize, squashes, beans, pumpkins and the wild potato.
23.
Though each uniformly occupies a twenty-five-foot lot just like the pre-Old Law tenement, the Old Law facade with its fanciful sandstone human and animal gargoyles ( sometimes in full figure ), its terracotta filigree of no apparent historical precedent, its occasional design aberrations ( e . g ., dwarf columns ), and its often varicolored brick departs radically from the plain, dignified simplicity of the unassuming and largely unornamented older structures.
