e river, and
we were twenty miles away from any white settler. Wolves howled and
panthers screamed around our camp, we lived upon elk and deer meat,
and our only visitors in two weeks were some Sac and Fox Indians, who
disapproved of our intrusion upon their hunting-grounds.

At 9 A.M. on the 16th we arrived at Council Bluffs, and crossed
the turbid and furious Missouri in a steam ferry-boat to Omaha in
Nebraska. For many years Council Bluffs was one of the remotest
military posts: to go there was to be banished from the world. Now
it is a town of ten thousand inhabitants, struggling to overtake its
rival on the other bank, Omaha, which has sixteen thousand.

Here our baggage was rechecked for Denver, for at Omaha begins the
Union Pacific Railroad. A great road it is, and great are its charges.
On the North-western, as on most others, the charge is about four
cents per mile, but the Union Pacific, to which corporation Congress
gave the usual land-grant, and more than enough money to build the
road, cannot afford to carry you for less than ten. This may arise
from the custom which has prevailed of giving free passes to all
Congressmen, governors, editors and other privileged classes, so that,
half the passengers paying nothing, the others have to pay double. Not
only are the fares high, but you are charged for extra baggage. Like
the elephant, who can drag a cannon or pick up a pin, this great
corporation is able to give free passes to a whole legislature or to
charge me twenty-five cents for five pounds of extra baggage.

From Nebraska into Wyoming, and we are nearly out of the United
States, though the old flag still flies over us. The people here
talk about going to the "States." All the region hereabouts, from the
middle of Nebraska, lies in what used to be called by the French _Les
Mauvaises Terres_, or "Bad Lands," and was eloquently described by
Irving in _Astoria_ as the Great American Desert. "This region,"
he writes, "resembles one of the immeasurable steppes of Asia, and
spreads forth into undulating and treeless plains and desolate sandy
wastes, which are supposed by geologists to have formed the ancient
floor of the ocean countless ages ago, when its primeval waves beat
against the granite bases of the Rocky Mountains. It is a land where
no man permanently abides, for in certain seasons of the year there is
no food either for the hunter or his steed. The herbage is parched and
withered, the streams are dr