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Show 450 WESTERN WILDS. course is up a steep grade and through the domain of the sublime and beautiful. The narrow train dashes from side to side of the rocky cafion, now rushing along at fifteen miles an hour when there is a short stretch of easy grade, and again toiling slowly up and over the rocks; one minute we are under an overhanging bluff a thousand feet in height, and the next out in an open valley where the widening canon gives us a broad view of green plats, timbered hills and the deep blue sky beyond. At every pause we hear the continuous roar, a soothing monotone, of Clear Creek dashing down its rocky channel, a limpid stream when unobstructed, but churned to milk- white foam where bowlders choke its bed; now to our right, now to our left, and again directly under us, as the train repeatedly crosses it to gain ele-vation At times the cliffs so crowd upon the stream that a way for the iron track has been blasted out of the stone wall ; and again the road-way is upon immense table rocks in the very bed of the stream. It was a triumph of engineering. The route was only practicable for a narrow- guage road, on which short curves and abrupt rises pre-sent no great obstacle to the little engine and narrow cars. All the slopes are covered with dark green forests, and even the over-hanging cliffs fringed with delicate pines, softening the outlines, adding fresh charms, and preventing that gloomy grandeur which so marks the mountain scenery of Arizona. Here and there the solid wall lining the cafion seemed split to its very base, and out of the narrow cleft flowed an affluent of Clear Creek, its waters clear as alcohol. The main line of this road runs up North Clear Creek to Black-hawk and Central City; the left branch is to run to Georgetown, but now terminates at Floyd Hill, leaving us eighteen miles of staging to reach the metropolis- of the richest silver district in the new State. Most of this stage is through a broader canon, the timbered hills ris-ing three thousand feet on both sides. Towards the last we enter a narrow gorge, then suddenly the cafion widens again, and Clear Creek is seen flowing placidly down the center of a tolerably level tract, some two miles long and from a quarter to half a mile wide. At the upper end of this plat, on the last considerable piece of level land this side of the mountains, stands Georgetown an attractive Al-pine hamlet, 8,410 feet above the level of the sea. Tourists by the Pacific Railway think themselves away up when at Sherman, but here is a prosperous community of three thousand people, and a handsome town, a hundred feet higher than Sherman. Here the creek and caflon run nearly north. Southward, the town ends abruptly against |