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In the early sixties a trail led from the broad Missouri, swirling
yellow and turgid between its green-groved borders, for miles and
miles out upon the grassy Nebraska plains, turning westward over the
undulating prairie, with its swales and billows and long, winding
lines of cottonwoods, to a slow, vast heave of rising ground--
Wyoming--where the herds of buffalo grazed and the wolf was lord and
the camp-fire of the trapper sent up its curling blue smoke from
beside some lonely stream; on and on over the barren lands of
eternal monotony, all so gray and wide and solemn and silent under
the endless sky; on, ever on, up to the bleak, black hills and into
the waterless gullies and through the rocky gorges where the deer
browsed and the savage lurked; then slowly rising to the pass
between the great bold peaks, and across the windy uplands into
Utah, with its verdant valleys, green as emeralds, and its haze-
filled canons and wonderful wind-worn cliffs and walls, and its pale
salt lakes, veiled in the shadows of stark and lofty rocks, dim,
lilac-colored, austere, and isolated; ever onward across Nevada, and
ever westward, up from desert to mountain, up into California, where
the white streams rushed and roared and the stately pines towered,
and seen from craggy heights, deep down, the little blue lakes
gleamed like gems; finally sloping to the great descent, where the
mountain world ceased and where, out beyond the golden land, asleep
and peaceful, stretched the illimitable Pacific, vague and grand
beneath the setting sun.