wearying sand--that now separates
the sink of the Humboldt from that of the Carson, was evidently long
under water, and might, to all human perception, have better remained
so.

I can not comprehend those who talk of the Plains and the more intensely
arid wilds which mainly compose Utah and Nevada becoming a great
stock-growing region. Even California, though its climate favors the
rapid multiplication and generous growth of cattle and sheep, can never
sustain so many animals to the square mile as the colder and more rugged
hills of New York and New England, because of the intense protracted
drouth of its summers, which suffer no blade of grass to grow throughout
the six later months of every year. Animals live and thrive on the
dead-ripe herbage of the earlier months; but a large area is soon
exhausted by a herd, which must be pastured elsewhere till the winter
rains ensure a renewal of vegetation.

But the grasses of the Great Valley and of a large portion of the Plains
are exceedingly scanty where they exist at all, so that the teams and
herds annually driven across them by emigrants and traders suffer
fearfully, and are often decimated by hunger, though they carefully seek
out and adhere to the trails whereon feed is least scanty. Many a weary
day's journey, even along the valleys of the North Platte and
Sweetwater, brings to view too little grass to sustain the life of a
moderate herd; those who have traversed the South Pass in June will
generally have just escaped starvation, leaving to those that come
straggling or tottering after them a very poor feed. The carcasses of
dead animals, in every stage of decomposition, thickly stud the great
trail from the banks of the Platte westward to the passes of the Sierra
Nevada, and, I presume, to the banks of the Columbia, bearing mute but
impressive testimony to the chronic inhospitality of the Great American
Desert, which is almost everywhere thinly overgrown by worthless shrubs,
known to travelers as grease-wood and sage brush;--the former prickly
and repellant, but having a waxy or resinous property which renders it
useful to emigrants as fuel; the latter affording shelter and
subsistence to rabbits and a poor species of grouse known as the 'sage
hen,' but utterly worthless to man and to the beasts obedient to his
sway.

Yet the daily Overland Mail is an immense, a cheering fact, and the
Pacific Telegraph another. A message dispatched from any village blessed
with