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City to Denver, the first two hundred may be briefly described as prairie, where thriving towns are rapidly springing up along the line of the railroad, and well cultivated farms will soon form a continuous line to the border of the plains, which stretch westward another two hundred miles, over which the buffalo still range, but are growing scarcer every year; then two hundred miles of desert, parched and arid, where the great drawback to settlement and culture will always be the lack of water. Here the stations on the road are few and far between, being rarely dignified by names, and distinguished only by numbers. But exactly where the plains end and the desert begins is difficult to tell. This is the famous “Smoky Hill route,” the scene of nearly all the Indian outrages upon overland travelers before the railroad was completed. As it passes through the great buffalo range, the sweetest pastures and best hunting-grounds of the Indians, they resisted the encroachment of the “iron horse” for a considerable time after they had yielded the valley of the Platte. And now if is an attractive feature to the traveler by this route, that speeding along twenty five miles an hour in a Pullman car he can see occasional herds of buffalo, and be regaled on buffalo and antelope meat at every eating station. A few weeks ago a large herd of buffalo crossing the track compelled the engineer to stop his train. Antelopes are almost constantly in sight from the cars, and fall an easy prey to the hunter. He fastens a red flag to a stick, and, lying quietly on the ground within rifle distance, the graceful, gazelle-like animal, with ears erect, gradually approaches, and falls an easy victim to his curiosity.
As we approach Denver, the second morning from St. Louis, we catch our first view of the magnificent scenery enjoyed by the traveler “across the continent.” We have been gradually and almost imperceptibly climbing until we reach the plain upon which Denver is built, over five thousand feet above the level of the sea, and stretching westward twenty mules further to the “Black Hills,” behind which rise the lofty, snow-covered peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Silvered with the first rays of the morning sun, we see Pike’s Peak, fourteen thousand feet high, on the extreme south of the range, and Long’s peak, still higher, as far north as the eye can reach. Between
