on to think that vine-culture might reach a development along the
southern slope of the Republican Bluffs not surpassed in the most
favorable positions east of California. We believe it no exaggeration to
say that this region needs only culture (and that of the easiest kind)
to become the garden of the continent. Its mineral wealth has received
scanty examination; yet we know that it contains numerous beds of
tertiary coal, and easily worked iron-deposits, in the form both of
hydrated oxide and black scale.

On our way through this region we strike the Republican bottom near Lat.
39 deg. 30' N., and Long. 97 deg. 20' W. We are now in the primest part of the
buffalo-pasture. As we wind along the base of the steep Republican
Bluffs, and the edges of those green amphitheatres made by their
alternate approach and retrocession, our whistle scares a picket-line of
giant bulls, guarding a divide across the stream, and with tails in air,
heads at the down charge, they scour away at a lumbering cow-gallop, to
tell the main herd of a progress more resistless than their own. Or,
perhaps, our experience of the buffaloes is a more inconvenient one. We
may find the main herd crossing our track in their migration from the
Republican to the Platte. In such case, there will be a detention of
several hours, as the current of a main herd is not fordable by any
known human mechanism. The halt will be taken advantage of by timid
spectators looking safely out of car-windows,--by _bona-fide_ hunters,
who want fresh meat, and take along the tidbits of their game to be
cooked for them at the next dinner-station,--and by excited
pseudo-hunters, who will bang away with their rifles at the defenceless
herd, until the ground flows with useless blood, and somebody suggests
to them that they might as well call it sportsmanship to fire into a
farmer's cow-yard, resting over the top-rail.

Now and then we shall whirl through a village of chattering
prairie-dogs, send a hen-turkey rattling off her nest in a thicket on
the river's edge, or perhaps surprise even an antelope sufficiently
close to point out to the ladies from our window the exquisite flight of
that swiftest and most beautiful creature in our American fauna. But our
road will not be in running order very long before this sight becomes
the rarest of the rare. The stolid buffalo will continue to wear his old
paths long after the human presence has driven every antelope into
invisible fastness