opposite St. Louis. Till we strike the prairie, our
course is among bold, well-timbered hills, which now and then we are
obliged to tunnel, and by the side of charming pastoral streams whose
green bottom-land is shaded by noble plane-trees and cotton-woods.
Certain passages in the scenery between Cincinnati and Vincennes are
beautiful as a dream of fairy-land. Every few miles we continue to meet
freight-trains laden with all the well-known products of the Western
field and dairy. Twice, before we reach St. Louis, a splendid cortege of
passenger-carriages shall whiz by us on the southern track,--and each
time we shall have seen the daily through-express from San Francisco.

The St. Louis through-passengers will be ready, on our arrival, in cars
of their own. We shall switch them on behind us with little over
half-an-hour's detention, and strike for Leavenworth, taking Jefferson
City by the way. The country we now traverse is rolling, well watered,
and well timbered along the streams. Our road has so stimulated
production in the mines of Missouri that we frequently pass on the
switch a freight-train taking out bar and pig iron to San Francisco, or
on the other track a train laden with copper ore going to the East for
reduction. We have hitherto said nothing of the innumerable trains which
pass us or switch out of our way, carrying through-freight between New
York and San Francisco. We are still surrounded by excellent
farming-land, a fine grain, fruit, and general-produce country. Not till
we leave Leavenworth can we be said fairly to have entered the central
wilds of the continent. We are now west of the Missouri River, and for a
distance of two hundred miles farther shall traverse a country
possessing certain individual characteristics which entitle it to a name
of its own among the divisions of our physical geography. This is the
proper place for an indication of those divisions, generalized to the
broadest terms.

In passing from sea to sea, the American traveller crosses ten
well-defined regions:--

1. The Atlantic slope of the Alleghany Range.

2. The eastern incline of the Mississippi basin.

3. The high divides of the short Missouri tributaries.

4. The Great Plains proper.

5. The Rocky-Mountain system of ridges and intramontane plateaus.

6. The Great Desert, broken by frequent uplifts, and divided by the
Humboldt Range.

7. The Sierra-Nevada mountain-system.

8. The basin of the Sacramento River.