ir turn to be. What is
their freight? Rather ask what it is not. For the present, Colorado
imports everything except the most perishable commodities,--and that
which pays for all. If you would see _that_, ask the express-messenger
on the train going East in five minutes to lift the lid of one of those
heavy iron trunks in his car. Your eyes are dazzled by the yellow gleam
of a king's ransom. It is a day's harvest of ingots from the stamps of
Central City, on its way to square accounts with New York for the
contents of one of those freight-trains.

At Denver we reach the edge of the Rocky-Mountain foot-hills; the grand
snow-peak of Mount Rosalie, rivalling Mont Blanc in height and majesty,
though forty miles away, seems to rise just behind the town; thence
southerly toward Pike's and northerly toward Long's Peak, the billowing
ridges stretch away brown and bare, save where the climbing lines of
sombre green mark their pine-fringed gorges, or the everlasting ice
pencils their crests with an edge of opal. Still we do not leave the
Plains region. We glide through the thronged streets of the growing
city, cross the South Platte by a short bridge, and strike nearly due
north along the edge of the mountain-range, over a broad plateau which
still bears the characteristic _grama_. Not until we enter the _canon_
of the Cache-la-Poudre, a hundred miles from Denver by the road, can we
consider ourselves fairly out of the Plains, and in the fifth great
region of the continent, the Rocky-Mountain system of ridges and
intramontane plateaus.

Before we begin this portion of our journey, let us examine, in the
light of that already accomplished, an assertion made early in this
article to the effect that the Pacific Railroad must precede and create
the business which shall support it. The consideration shall be brief as
a mathematical process.

The river-bottoms and divides along the Lower Republican are peculiarly
suited to the raising of farm-produce. But so long as they had no avenue
to a market, they might have been fertile as Paradise without alluring
settlers to cultivate them. The natural advantages of a country are
developed not as a matter of taste, but as a matter of profit. The crops
which can be raised to best advantage in this region are the crops which
without a railroad must rot on the ground. No man can be expected to
settle in a new country from pure Quixotism,--and nothing but the
railroad would make anything else of