from the western settlements of Kansas and
Nebraska--to the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains. Part of it is
included under the vague designation of 'the Great American Desert;' but
that title is applicable to a far larger area westward than eastward of
the Rocky Mountains. The Great Basin, whereof Salt Lake is the lowest
point, and the Valley of the Colorado, which skirts it on the east, are
mainly sterile from drouth or other causes--not one acre in each hundred
of their surface being arable without irrigation, and not one in ten
capable of being made productive by irrigation. Arid, naked, or thinly
shrub-covered mountains traverse and chequer those deep yet elevated
valleys, wherein few savages or even wild animals of any size or value
were ever able to find subsistence. Probably that of the Colorado is, as
a whole, the most sterile and forbidding of any valley of equal size on
earth, unless it be that of one of the usually frozen rivers in or near
the Arctic circle. Even Mormon energy, industry, frugality and
subservience to sacerdotal despotism, barely suffice to wrench a rude,
coarse living from those narrow belts and patches of less niggard soil
which skirt those infrequent lakes and scanty streams of the Great Basin
which are susceptible of irrigation; mines alone (and they must be rich
ones) can ever render populous the extensive country which is interposed
between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada.

The Plains differ radically from their western counterpoise. They have
no mountains, and very few considerable hills; they are not rocky: in
fact, they are rendered all but worthless by their destitution of rock.
In Kansas, a few ridges, mainly (I believe) of lime, rise to the
surface; beyond these, and near the west line of the new State,
stretches a thin-soiled, rolling sandstone district, perhaps forty miles
wide; then comes the Buffalo range, formerly covering the entire valley
of the Mississippi, and even stretching fitfully beyond the Rocky
Mountains, but now shrunk to a strip hardly more than one hundred and
fifty miles in width, but extending north and south from Texas into the
British territory which embosoms the Red River of the North. Better soil
than that of the Buffalo region west of Kansas is rarely found, though
the scarcity of wood, and the unfitness of the little that skirts the
longer and more abiding streams for any use but that of fuel, must be a
great drawback to settlement and cultiv