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Show 48 WESTERN WILDS. 5,600; and through all that long incline of 525 miles, the road- bed maintains a nearly uniform up- grade of ten feet to the mile. At a few places it sinks to a level, and for two short stages there is a down grade westivard : from the Omaha level to the Platte Valley, and from the " divide " down to Crow Creek, on which Cheyenne is situated. Nature evidently designed this valley for a railroad route. The Indian had used it from time immemorial; the voyageur and trapper trailed it for a hundred years before California was known in the East ; then the gold- hunters, Oregon settlers and Mormons turned the trail into a broad wagon road, and lastly came the railroad, obedient to the same necessities for water and a smooth route. West of Loup Fork we found the soil a little more sandy, and the grass shorter, with a dry and withered look ; and this change went on till at last we saw the heavy verdure of the Missouri Valley no more, and were introduced to the bunched and seeded grasses of the high plains and Rocky Mountains. North Platte, where we took breakfast, was once a roaring terminus " city ;" now a way station, with hotel and saloon attachment. Jules-burg, 377 miles out, had been a busy city of 5,000 inhabitants; now it was a wilderness of blackened chimneys and falling adobe walls, the debris of a dead metropolis. In the old days of the overland stage, one Julia, a Cherokee exile, kept the station hotel there ; and in the cheer-ful frankness of Western life the place was known as " Dirty Jule's Ranche." Thence " Jule's," and finally Julesburg. Similarly " Rob-ber's Roost'' has been softened to Roosaville, and " Black Bills" to Blackville. For three hundred miles we follow the course of the Platte, a broad but dirty and uninviting stream, differing only from a slough in having a swift current. Often a mile wide, but with no more water than would fill an average canal, three inches of fluid run-ning on top of several feet of moving quicksand; too thin to walk on, too thick to drink, too shallow for navigation, too deep for safe fording, too yellow to wash in, and too pale to paint with, it is the most disappointing and useless river in America. Nevertheless, many attempts have been made to navigate it, all ending in disaster. Nota-ble among these was the venture of a party of hunters from New England, who started from Laramie in the spring of 1843 to run two flats loaded with furs to St. Louis. After two months arduous toil, often unloading and dragging their boats over sand- bars, they at last abandoned them, cached the property, N and walked to Council Bluffs, where they arrived in July, nearly dead from fatigue and starvation. Three hundred miles out, and the plains in all their vastness are around us. The land rises into long ridges, stretching away swell on |
