Before modern houses and landscaping changed this place, the prairie around the bluffs was a treeless expanse where floods, lightning, and grass fires killed seedlings, leaving perfect grazing for bison and elk, while trees grew only on top of the bluffs. For the first people of the area, the land was not barren but full of life, with game to hunt, fish in the river, and useful plants such as yucca, prickly pear, chokecherry, sunflower, wild onion, and wild licorice. Bear, antelope, prairie wolves, coyotes, and especially bison roamed here, and the bluff tops offered a good place to scout herds. The first recorded sighting of the bluffs came in 1812, when men from John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company were headed east from Oregon, and on Christmas Day Robert Stewart wrote that the hills on the south had approached the river, were remarkably rugged and bluffy, and possessed a few cedars. The first white men left little mark on the prairie because there were few fur traders and they crossed the plains quickly. In 1837 Alfred Jacob Miller stopped on his way to the fur trade rendezvous in Wyoming to sketch Scotts Bluff, later turning the sketch into a watercolor, and a modern view from the same angle shows that although the plains around the bluff have changed, the bluff itself remains remarkably similar to what the first white men saw.