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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.
