Mr. Greeley said
he "could think of these plains (called in your maps the 'Great
American Desert') as fit for nothing but to fill up between commercial
cities!" But he was partly mistaken, as his friends are now planting a
colony (named Greeley) of intelligent settlers on the Cach-le-pow-dre
Creek, south of Cheyenne, fifty-five miles toward Denver, where ninety
thousand acres of land have been secured for tillage, and where
saw-mills and stores and dwellings are to be erected. The success of
this enterprise has led to another one. The railroad _has projected
civilization one hundred years ahead_, opening up a highway for
commerce from New York to the "Golden Gate," to Asia, Africa, and
China, which will astonish the world and divert the course of trade to
the Pacific coast.

But you are interested mainly, I see, in reading about the incidents
which attended the opening up of this great national highway.

The dangers attending the building of the road were sometimes very
great, as the Indians saw very plainly that it was the white man's
encroachment on his hunting-grounds. And when even the telegraph-poles
were being put up, long before, the Indians imagined that the
government was thus putting them up to fence off their hunting-grounds,
so they could not get any more buffalo! And once, after I came to Fort
Sedgwick, the wires were said to be "down," and no communication could
be had with other posts in the upper country. It was feared that the
Indians had been tampering with the wires, and torn them down. But the
operators went out under an escort of soldiers to see what the
difficulty was. They came back again in a couple of days, and reported
that the Indians had not meddled with the wires at all. But it seemed
that some buffaloes in a large drove had taken the privilege of
scratching their rumps against the poles, and thus tore them down; and
getting their horns entangled in the wires, the wild creatures had
carried off about four miles of telegraph-wire!

WHY DOES NOT THE INDIAN MEDDLE WITH THE TELEGRAPH?

It is said that the pioneer company over the plains got together
several chiefs and explained as well as they could the _modus operandi_
of obtaining electricity from the clouds, and making it useful in
conveying intelligence to great distances. This was hard for them to
believe, because they are superstitious, and attribute all phenomena
they do not fully understand to _conjuration_ or _charms_, such