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Show TWO YEARS OF CHANGE. 125 variety blue ; the greasewood is a dirty white, and the earth and rocks white, yellow or red; the general result is a neutral gray, which seems to shroud all creation in sober tints. One may ride all day through good bunch- grass pasture and his horse be walking in sand all the time; or through a tolerably rich country and never see an acre of that lively emerald which is the charm of an Ohio landscape. A plat 1- of green sward is a rare sight in the Rocky Mountains; but eastward, on the high plains, other grasses appear, changing by slow degrees to the heavy verdure of the Missouri Valley. Last, and least in extent, are the arable tracts, which are all the more fertile from receiving the wash of the high lands; they are in fact the most fertile in the world. Utah alone contains some fifty valleys, of every width from one mile to fifteen ; in them the soil needs only water to produce thirty and sixty and a hundred- fold. But between one such valley and the next, intervene from five to fifty miles of rocky ridges, gravel plains or alkali beds, the first two per-haps yielding bunch grass, the last a waste. In Nevada the propor-tion of good land is much less- in Wyoming least of all, though that Territory has immense tracts of good grazing land. Up to 5,000 feet above the sea all the fruits and grains of the temperate zones are produced in abundance, above that the products lessen rapidly. In a few places wheat can be grown at or above . the 6,000 foot level ; rye and oats 2,000 feet higher, and near Central City, Colorado, I have seen heavy crops of potatoes produced at 9,000 feet above the sea. Even the highest parks, where the snow is six feet deep in winter, and does not melt away till the middle of May, often produce heavy crops of grass ; but neither fruit nor grain can be grown there. The want of water hinders settlement in many places where the land is fertile. If every drop in Utah were utilized, it would not irrigate one- tenth of the Territory. If the Ohio River were turned into the north- west corner of the Great Basin, not a drop of it would ever reach the Colorado above ground; the hot sun, dry air, gravel beds and alkali plains would absorb it all. Southward this difficulty steadily increases ; the water is scantier while more is needed. In the Rio Grande Valley a given area requires from two to three times as much water as in the Platte Valley. The Mormons in Arizona put five times as much water on an acre as the Mormons in Idaho. The trav-eler among the mountains of the Great Basin finds in the higher cafions hundreds of streams of which not one survives to reach the valley ; scores of " rivers " are marked upon the maps, which do not contain a drop of water after the first of June. South of latitude 37 |
