hat the current was
hastening away; still more by the formation of swamps and marshes, which
arrest the sweep of fires, and so protect the youth and growth of trees
and forests. An uninhabited, moderately-rolling or nearly flat country,
wherein no ridges of stubborn rock gave protection to fire-repelling
marshes, would gradually be swept of trees by fires, and converted into
prairie or desert.

Life on the Plains--the life of white men, by courtesy termed
civilized--is a rough and rugged matter. I can not concur with J.B.
Ficklin, long a mail-agent ranging from St. Joseph to Salt Lake (now, I
regret to say, a quarter-master in the rebel army), who holds that a man
going on the Plains should never wash his face till he comes off again;
but water is used there for purposes of ablution with a frugality not
fully justified by its scarcity. A 'biled shirt' lasts a good while. I
noted some in use which the dry, fine dust of that region must have been
weeks in bringing to the rigidity and clayey yellow or tobacco-stain hue
which they unchangeably wore during the days that I enjoyed the society
of the wearers. Pilot-bread, a year or so baked, and ever since
subjected to the indurating influences of an atmosphere intensely dry,
is not particularly succulent or savory food, and I did not find it
improved by some minutes' immersion in the frying-pan of hot lard from
which our rations of pork had just been turned out; but others of more
experience liked it much. The pork of the Plains is generally poor,
composed of the lightly-salted and half-smoked sides of shotes who had
evidently little personal knowledge of corn. The coffee I did not drink;
but, in the absence of milk, and often of sugar also, and in view of its
manufacture by the rudest and rawest of masculine cooks, I judge that
the temptation to excessive indulgence in this beverage was not
irresistible. Most of the water of the Plains, unlike that of the Great
Basin, is pretty good; but as you near the Rocky Mountains, 'alkali'
becomes a terror to man and beast.

The present Buffalo range will, doubtless, in time, be covered with
civilized herdsmen and their stock; but beyond that to the fairly
watered and timbered vicinity of the Rocky Mountains, settlers will be
few and far between for many generations. What the Plains universally
need is a plant that defies intense protracted drouth, and will
propagate itself rapidly and widely by the aid of winds and streams
alone. I