tle held. Adaptive Indian, Catholic Mexican,
acceptive dragoon, one and all respected and believed in it. But then
came the miner and the cowboy, and with them the new vocabulary. Monte
San Mateo slinks in unmerited shame to hide its heralded deformity as
Baldhead Butte. What devilish inspiration impelled the Forty-Niners to
damn Monte San Pablo to go down to eternity as Bill Williams' Mountain?
Who but an iconoclast would rend the sensitive ear with such barbarities
as the _Loss Angglees_ of to-day for the deep-vowelled Los Angeles of
the last century? Who but a Yankee would swap the murky "Purgatoire" for
Picketwire, and make Zumbro River of the Riviere des Ombres of brave old
Pere Marquette? And so, too, it goes through all the broad Northwest.
Indian names, beautiful in themselves even though at times
untranslatable, are tossed contemptuously aside to be replaced by the
homeliest of every-day appellations, until the modern geography of
Wyoming, Dakota, Montana, and Idaho bristles with innumerable Sage,
Boxelder, Horse, and Pine Creeks.

Mini Pusa--Dry Water--have the Dakotas called for ages the sandy stream
that twists and turns and glares in the hot sunshine down here in the
vale behind us. "Muggins's Fork," some stockman said he heard it called
a month ago. Far over there to the east--almost under the black shadow
of the hills--we see another slender thread of questionable green;
cottonwoods again, no doubt, for nothing but cottonwoods or sage-brush
or grease-wood--worse yet--will grow down in the alkaline wastes of this
Wyoming valley; and that thread or fringe betokens the existence of a
stream in the spring-time,--one that the Sioux have ever called the
Beaver, after the amphibious rodent who dammed its waters, and thereby
rescued them from a like fate at the hands of modern residents. Far to
the southeast, miles and miles away, dim and hazy through the heatwaves
of the atmosphere one can almost see another twisting string of shade,
the cottonwoods on the banks of the winding War Bonnet; at least so the
Sioux named it, after their gorgeous crown of eagle feathers, but 'twas
too polysyllabic, too poetic for the blunt-spoken frontiersman, who long
since compromised on Hat Creek. We are in the heart of the Indian
country, but the wild romance has fled. We are on dangerous ground, for
there, straight away before our eyes, broad, beaten as a race-course,
prominent as any public highway, descending the slope until los