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these lodgers we were to share one of the three apartments into which the house was divided.

After dinner, (which in admiration of the stationman's great qualities, we cooked for ourselves), we set out to explore the porpoise-back mountains which rolled away to the northward of the road. We had under-estimated their height at starting, and found that the climb to their highest cone took us a full hour. Our way led along the upper course of the brook, which waters the meadow before the ranch, to a series of deep rifts or cañons channeled in the side of the mountains by freshets at the season of snowmelting, but now dry as ashes, and paved with enormous boulders. Up the steep incline of one of these cañon bottoms, and under the shade of occasional maples or aspens which still throve along the slopes on memories of last spring's moisture, we clambered to the bald gray top of the mountain. We were rewarded by a fine bird's-eye view of the country traversed since sunrise, and immediately below us stretched delicious green bottom lands watered by a third mountain brook. Everywhere our horizon is bounded by snow-peaks. We stand at the summit of mountain piled on mountain, but yonder are colossal ridges which look down measurelessly far to laugh at us. Still further on rise peaks as much higher than they as they than we, or we than Denver. for matters right under foot, we find, in the first place, that these round mountains are a formation of flesh-colored granite, largely feldspathic, and existing, wherever it outcrops to the weather, in a state as friable and incoherent as the softest pudding-stone. This was the locality in which, as I have heretofore mentioned, I kicked several large boulders entirely

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to pieces in a few minutes, leaving a mere gravel-bed of crystals. Wherever a granite mass outcropped above the thin sand and gramma, I observed that its form followed the same haystack or mushroom contour presented by the mountains themselves. Several of the outcrops were very narrow in proportion to their heights, standing in round-topped pillars five or six feet high, with nearly the proportions of a Bologna sausage. The merest tap shook them down. From the similarity of their forms, I inferred that the mountains, as well as the minor outcrops, were masses of rotten granite which had been weathered into a spheroidal surface, though I had never before imagined the rock occurring in such quantity so completely decomposed. Several Rocky Mountain hares, a distant herd of antelope, a young elk, and a villainous looking gray wolf, who slunk on seeing us into the indistinctness of the similarly hued sage-brush, were the quadrupeds who came into our field; we saw several mourning-doves and plovers; and, coming down into the valley again, made unavailing search along the brook for a wonderful "fish with hands," which the stable-boys had seen there, and which, from their poetical description, we hoped might be a new species of siren, or some other equally interesting amphibian.

The next day, our friends came along in the stage, and we rejoined them. Our road for the next fifteen miles traversed an undulating tract like that between the stony plateau and Virginia Dale, tolerably green and well watered from the snow-peaks. As we proceeded, the undulations became lower, and presently merged into the magnificent level of the Laramie Plains. This is one of the world's largest and loftiest

intra-montane plateaus. It occupies a surface of about fifty miles square; is as smooth as an Illinois prairie; and the sensation of finding such a lowland tract at the height of eight thousand feet in the air, is a bewilderment to all one's previous notions of physical geography. The plateau is an alluvial deposit, belonging, so far as I could learn from a perpendicular section on the west bank of Big Laramie River, to the late tertiary. This appeared to consist of alternating white and yellow striæ, representing two varieties of silt, the former almost purely cretaceous, the latter partly so, but mostly composed of alumina with a tinge of red oxide of iron or chromium. I nowhere noticed an outcrop of rocks belonging to the mountain system. The grass was nearly as luxuriant and green as a New England June meadow. Its level in the general view seemed uniform as the sea; and such special deviations as occurred here and there, were not of the ordinary rolling contour proper to the Plains, but rather seemed terrace formations. To understand the strangeness of such a landscape in such a position, it must be remembered that this vast plain not only stands at an elevation of eight thousand feet, but is walled on all sides by mountains nearly as much higher than itself. Just as we enter the Plain by its eastern boundary coming from Cheyenne Pass, we catch a glorious glimpse of the Laramie Butte, its snow shining like a white-hot mass in the dazzling sunlight; its form almost a perfect cone, its height rated among the loftiest snow-peaks of the range. It stands as a sort of northeastern bastion to the enor

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mous square, and from it, westward, lead the giant ramparts of the Wind River range, with an occa

sional snow-crowned turret, towards Fremont's and Lander's Peaks. On the southern side of the plateau, in a direction nearly parallel to the Wind River chain, runs a long black range of rolling mountains, three or four thousand feet high above the Plains level, bare as the bumps on a phrenologist's cast, and possessing the rounded contour which I had found associated with rotten granite. Behind us the square is almost closed by the time we reach the lowest bottom, through the intervention of those crags and cones we have left around Virginia Dale. To the due westward rises a succession of rugged granite stairs climbing up to the mighty Medicine Bow Mountains, under whose snows we shall shiver to-morrow; and from the middle of the Plains, through a gap at the southwestern corner of our bounding walls, we get the most ravishing view of distant snow-ranges that was ever vouchsafed Nature's lover in this world. I have seen many isolated peaks which surpassed those of this particular view, but I never in my life imagined equal beauty in a range itself. These mountains belonged to the Uintah system, another transverse range like the Wind River, running from Green River, near the 109th parallel of longitude, to inosculate with the Wahsateh range near Utah Lake. This was our first view of Mormondom; and I could not wonder that when that strange company of enthusiasts, led by Brigham Young, caught such a glimpse as this of the land beyond them, they were filled with an ecstasy which spent itself in prayers, dreams, and prophesyings. I can think of no resemblance for it, save my childish impressions of an old steel engraving, called "The Mount of God." Mature taste may condemn such prints with the nightmares of Fuseli and the resurrec

tions of Martin; but my propensity for the marvelous was too much gratified to let me be critical. So was it here. The view was not explicable by the ordinary ideals of terrestrial scenery; it was a fairy phantasm, a floating cloud, a beatific dream of paradisaical ranges, let down out of heaven, not builded out of earth. The sunlight fell on it out of a spotless sky; every square inch of the range received its maximum of illumination, so that its shadows were only less relieved against greater lights, and seemed spots of vague turquoise, sapphire, or pale amethyst on a floating mist of diamond or opal vapor. These gross comparisons come as near the impression as words of mine can; but my reader must take a step in idealism for himself, and imagine all these gems glorified by distance into the spirits of themselves. The nearest peaks of the Uintah were at least a hundred miles from us, and rose from a lower level than ourselves; yet none of us needed to be told that they were among the grandest of the whole Cordillera. They vindicated themselves to the kingly title by the ermine of snow and the diamonds of ice, together making them one continuous splendor half way from foot to crest.

Our way lay across the southern third of the level. On each side of us the grass was luxuriant, and everywhere a nearer approach to Eastern meadows in its greenness than any of the herbage on the Plains proper. There were no settlements visible except at the stations; and these consisted merely of the buildings demanded by the road. We passed several large trains of cattle-wagons, all of them belonging to Gentile emigrants (the Mormon trains preferring the northern or Laramie route); and in one place, where

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