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Show CHAPTER XXV. THE WAY TO OREGON. BROWN October found me again rolling through Iowa, in the palace cars of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad, on my way to Oregon, after a brief visit to the States. The four years and a half since I crossed the State on foot had added three hundred thou-sand to its population, and a thousand miles to its working railroads. And still there is room. The State still has vacant land enough for two million farmers. Westward from Omaha there had also been great changes. In 1868 we ran out into open prairie soon after leaving Fremont ; now there is a nearly continuous line of farms on both sides of the railroad as far as Loup Fork. Beyond, cattle ranches multiply, and but a few years will elapse till all this section of the high plains will be utilized by stock-growers. It is claimed that as ranches increase and farms are opened the climate changes, grows more moist, and thus carries the border of fertile land farther west; but, on this point, I will suspend judgment. My fourteenth trip over the Union Pacific Railroad was more pleasant than any previous one. The brown plains east of the mountains were just as brown, the red hills and alkali deserts of Wyoming quite as monotonous ; but the sublime scenery of Echo and Weber Cafions was glorified by the rich hues of autumn, and over all the gray- brown landscape of the plains, hung the soft haze of what would be Indian summer at the East. In Utah I found Saint and Gentile in their normal condition of attack and defense. First one side got a blow ahead, and then the other, like a pair of badly- matched oxen ; or, as we used to say in Indiana : " Like a half- sled on ice." It had grown monotonous, and, after a few days' rest in Salt Lake and Corinne, I took passage in one of the new silver palace cars of the Central Pacific. In them travel is a luxury ; one eats, drinks, smokes, sleeps, reads, or writes at the rate of twenty miles an hour; free to look at the scenery where it deserves it, and with abundant enjoyment indoors where it does not. Novem-ber 1st we found the Nevada Desert very bleak, and the Sierras fast being covered with snow. Between Truckee and Cape Horn the road ( 390) |
