f all the
wild animals is the antelope. Every hour we passed flocks of these
little fellows. They are timid as school-girls, but as inquisitive as
village gossips; and while frightened and trembling at our presence,
they could not resist keeping long in our view, and stopping every few
moments to watch us, with most childish curiosity. Though fleet as the
wind, I have seen many of the meek-eyed little fellows watch too long,
and pay for their curiosity with their lives.

The most eastern settlement of Montana is at the mouth of a canon near
the Yellowstone, one hundred and thirty miles from Virginia. A party of
Iowa emigrants found fair prospects here, and made it their home,
calling their mines Emigrant Gulch, and their half-dozen log-huts
Yellowstone City. Their gulch is rich in gold, but the huge boulders,
many tons in weight, make it impossible to obtain the treasure by the
present rude methods. The few profitable claims are high up in the
mountains, and are free from ice only in the hottest days of summer.
Even the donkeys, so much in use in transporting supplies to the
mountain miners, cannot travel here, and every pound of flour is carried
on men's backs over giddy paths almost impassable for the chamois. Still
the emigrants went to work with a will, and full of confidence. They
built themselves log-cabins, not so convenient as those at
Virginia,--for they had not the miner's knack of reaping large results
from such limited resources,--but still substantial and comfortable.
They enacted written laws, as ample as the Code Napoleon. Almost every
day during our visit they met to revise this code and enact new
provisions. Its most prominent feature was the ample protection it
afforded to women in the distribution of lots in their prospective city,
and the terrible punishment with which it visited any man who dared
offer one of them an insult. They certainly founded their republic on
principles of adamant, but in spite of high hopes and wise laws the
boulders refused to move. Even Iowa enterprise at last gave way under
constant disaster, and the people of the little city are one by one
forsaking it for the older mines.

The swift Yellowstone and the Colorado rise in lakes in the enchanted
Wind River Mountains. Mr. Stuart mentions the weird tales, told by
trappers and hunters, of places--avoided, if possible, by man and
beast--in these mountains where trees and game and even Indians are
petrified, and yet look natura