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Show 50 WESTERN WILDS. happy family in one burrow; for this is meant to be a veracious chron-icle, and though I have since spent many hours in " dog- towns," I do not know such association to be a fact. Passing the last and worst stage of the barren plains, we run down into the Jittle oasis on Crow Creek, and to the " Magic City" of Chey-enne. Its rapid rise and mad career had given it a national fame. On the 3d of July, 1867, the first house was erected; on the 1st of No-vember there was a population of 7,000, with a city government, a municipal debt, and three daily papers. When spring dissolved the snow banks and ice- packs from Sherman summit, the railroad pushed on ; Laramie became the metropolis, and Cheyenne sank to a quiet town of perhaps 1,200 people. Its further decay was arrested by the development of sheep- ranching, and its location as the junction of the Denver Pacific ; and now as the capital of Wyoming and most conven-ient outfitting point for the Black Hills, it looks forward to another era of prosperity. While I rested a few days at Cheyenne, the railroad was rapidly pushing westward, and soon another " metropolis" was laid off be-yond Laramie. From Cheyenne the road bed is nearly level to Hazard Station, officially pronounced the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains; and thence the grade rises eighty feet per mile to Sher-man, 8,342 feet above sea- level, and highest point on the Union Pacific. Beyond that we have the magnificent scenery of Granite Canon and Virginia Dale, the last now seeming peaceful as an Ar-cadian dell, but with as bloody a history as any spot in the Rocky Mountains. In the olden time it was the favorite abode of land pirates, and every ravine in the vicinity was the scene of a murder. Thence the road makes a sharp bend to the north, and we run rapidly downward for forty miles to the new city of Laramie, already past its greatness, and many of its inhabitants leaving for the next " me-tropolis." Laramie Plains, though 7,000 feet above sea- level, abound in rich pastures; but westward the grassy slopes yield rapidly to bar-renness, and at Medicine Bow we enter fairly on the three- hundred-mile desert. In the worst part of this waste we found Benton, the great terminus town, six hundred and ninety- eight miles from Omaha. Far as eye could see around the town, there was not a green tree, shrub, or spear of grass. The red hills, scorched and bare as if blasted by the lightnings of an angry God, bounded the white basin on the north and east, while to the south and west spread the gray desert till it was interrupted by another range of red and yellow hills. The whole basin looked as if it might originally have been filled with |
