his expenditure of energies beyond
the needs of self-support. The Plains are the natural pasture of the
continent; but they have no natural fascination for the white man which
can induce him to take up his residence there for cattle-breeding _en
amateur_. The greatest enthusiast in butter and cheese would scarcely
care to accumulate mountains of rancid firkins and boxes for the mere
gratification of fancy. Access to a market is his only justification for
spending a nomadic lifetime among herds, or a fortune on churns and
presses. The settlement of the country must precede the birth of its
industries, and the Pacific Road is the absolutely essential stimulus to
such settlement.

As we converse, we are beginning our climb toward the snow. A series of
steep grades, mainly following the bed of that wildly picturesque and
roaring torrent, the Cache-la-Poudre, take us up through the Cheyenne
Pass to the Laramie Plains. In reaching the head of the Cache-la-Poudre
we have familiarized ourselves with the ridges of the system; we are now
to learn what is meant by the intramontane plateaus. The Laramie Plains
form the most remarkable plateau of the Rocky Range,--one of the most
remarkable anywhere in the known world. Through a series of savage
_canons_ we enter what appears to us a reproduction of the prairies east
of the Mississippi,--a level and luxuriantly grassy plain, bright with
unknown flowers, alive with startled antelope, threaded by the clear
currents of both the Laramie Rivers, and rejoicing in an atmosphere
which exhilarates like the fresh-brewed nectar of Olympus. Bounded on
the east by the great ridge we have just passed, northerly by a
continuation of the Wind-River Range and Laramie Peak, southerly by a
magnificent transverse bar of naked mountains running parallel with the
Wind-River Range, and westward by a staircase of sterile divides which
we must climb to reach the base of Elk Mountain and find its giant mass
towering into the eternal snows three thousand feet farther above our
heads,--this plateau is a prairie fifty miles square, lifted bodily
eight thousand feet into the air. It is difficult for us to roll over
this Elysian mead walled in by these tremendous ranges, and think of the
commercial uses to which the level might be put; but from its elevation
and its natural crop we may pronounce it a grazing tract of splendid
capabilities, unsuited to artificial culture.

Another series of grades takes us past