imber in sight on that whole sixteen hundred miles than
is to-day standing in some single county of New York, Pennsylvania, or
Ohio. From the forks of the Platte to the valley of the Sacramento,
there is not a stick of growing timber that would make a decent
axe-helve, much less a substantial axletree. The Sierra Nevada are
heavily though not densely wooded nearly to their summits, but mainly
with stately evergreens, including a brittle and worthless live oak; but
the tough, enduring hickory, the lithe and springy white ash, the
ironwood, beech, and sugar maple, are nowhere to be seen. A low, scrubby
cedar and a small, scraggy white pine thinly cover a portion of the
hills and low mountains of Utah; the former is shorter than it should be
for telegraph poles, but stanch and durable, and is made to do. The
detestable cotton-wood, most worthless of trees, yet a great deal better
than none, thinly skirts the banks of the Platte and its affluents, in
patches that grow more and more scarce as you travel westward, until you
only see them 'afar off' on the sides of some of the mountains that
enclose the South Pass. The Colorado has a still scantier allowance of
this miserable wood; but the cedars meet you as you ascend from its
valley to the hills that surround Fort Bridger. Where cotton-wood is
used for poles,--and there are hundreds of miles where no other tree is
found,--it will have to be replaced very frequently; for it decays
rapidly, and has a fancy for twisting itself into all manner of ungainly
shapes when cut and exposed to the sun and parching winds of the plains.

Water, next to wood, is the great want of the plains and of the Great
Basin. Travel along either base of the Rocky Mountains, and you are
constantly meeting joyous, bounding streams, flowing rapidly forth from
each ravine and coursing to the arid plain; but follow them a few miles
and they begin to diminish in volume, and, unless intercepted by a
copious river, often dwindle to nothing. The Republican fork of the
Kansas or Kaw River, after a course of some thirty to fifty miles, sinks
suddenly into its bed, which thence for twenty miles exhibits nothing
but a waste of yellow sand. Of course there are seasons when this bed is
covered with water throughout; but I describe what I saw early in June,
when a teamster dug eight feet into that sand without finding a drop of
the coveted liquid for his thirst-maddened oxen. Two months later, I
observed the dry bed s