Buffalo, the Pawnee and an Old Story on a Trip Across the Plains Leah Nash for The New York Times The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas. One of the most adrenaline-fueled vacations in American history took place in August 1872, when a young New Yorker named George Bird Grinnell boarded a train at Grand Central Depot for the era's hot new travel destination - Nebraska. While most Gilded Age travelers preferred to immerse themselves in the Old World pleasures of Paris and Venice, the 22-year-old Grinnell was one of a new breed of nature-lovers who chose to take rugged, and often dangerous, excursions into the Western wilderness, usually for the purpose of hunting and fishing. Now Grinnell was taking America's first "adventure travel" trend to a new cultural level: In order to experience firsthand the most romantic image of the Western frontier, he intended to join the Pawnee Nation of Plains Indians on their summer buffalo hunt through the prairies. Thanks to the new Union Pacific rail line, Grinnell and a fellow Yale graduate, Jim Russell, were able to nip away from the cultured parlors in Manhattan to the raucous saloons of Plum Creek (now Lexington, Neb.) in a matter of days. From there, guided by a man named Luther North who had led teams of Pawnee scouts for the Union Army during the Civil War, they rode south to join a small army of Pawnee as they traveled into Kansas. While the Pawnee have been portrayed as Mad Max-style villains in Hollywood movies like "Dances With Wolves" and "Little Big Man," they were consistently allied with the United States, and when North arrived with his group, he was greeted as an old friend. For the next week, the travelers took part in rituals unchanged since the Plains Indians had first acquired horses, around 1700, joining Pawnee warriors as they attacked enormous buffalo herds in the traditional style, dining afterward on roasted buffalo tongue and liver. They observed ancient religious ceremonies. And for a dramatic finale on their way back to Plum Creek, they were chased by the Pawnees" enemies, the Cheyenne. I first stumbled across this alluring story at the New York Public Library while leafing through a yellowed 1873 volume of "Forest and Stream," a pioneer outdoor magazine in which Grinnell published a vivid account of his adventures. Further research unearthed other reports from Eastern travelers enjoying similar trips with friendly American Indians in Nebraska and Kansas - enough to show that the practice was not uncommon in the early 1870s. Grinnell's trip, however, was more than a youthful jaunt. His name is largely forgotten today, but during his lifetime he became one of the first campaigners for Western wildlife and national parks, and a pioneer ethnographer. On his death at age 88, in 1938, The New York Times described him as "the father of American conservation." With all the changes in the West over the last 140 years, I wondered if following Grinnell's route would offer any glimpses of the 1872 frontier. I had one thing in common with Birdie, as he was called by fellow Yalies: I too was a New Yorker longing for empty horizons and open skies. And most of my city friends still belong to the Europhile camp, the prospect of a trip to Nebraska or Kansas being on a par with an exile to Pago Pago. In the past I'd always been drawn to the marquee national parks. But while the impact of the prairies is more subtle than mega-spectacles like the Grand Canyon or Yosemite, as Walt Whitman himself wrote, they "fill the esthetic sense fuller" and haunt the memory longer. What's more, I've often found, it's in America's neglected corners that the past most endures. Even the modern metropolis of Omaha took me back in time more quickly than I could have hoped. After waking to the lonely whistle of a freight train at dawn, I strolled through the 19th-century warehouses of the Old Market district a stone's throw from the muddy Missouri River to an appointment in, of all places, the public library. TONY PERROTTET, a contributing writer for Smithsonian Magazine, is the author, most recently, of " The Sinner's Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe."