ied up, the buffalo, the elk and the
deer have wandered to distant parts, leaving behind them a vast,
uninhabited solitude."

But this "land where no man permanently abides" is rapidly being
settled, and is found to be rendered very fertile by the simple
process of irrigation, which costs less than the manuring of Eastern
farms. So the Great American Desert recedes before the immigrant, and,
like the noble savage, is found to be a myth.

On the railroad midway between Cheyenne and Denver lies the new town
of Greeley. Although not on the maps in 1870, it now contains fifteen
hundred inhabitants, forty or fifty stores, six hotels, churches,
schools, and all the apparatus of civilization. This aspiring town,
4779 feet above the sea-level, is an example of those colony towns
so successful in the West, and on which we must depend for rebuilding
society in the South. Greeley is surrounded by fertile farms,
and every city lot looks fresh and green: all this is effected by
irrigation. Two canals have been dug from the head-waters of the
Platte--one twenty-six miles long, which will water fifty thousand
acres; the other ten miles long, to furnish water for the town and
five thousand acres. The prairie where it is not irrigated now, in
midsummer, looks burned up and covered with a parched herbage, which,
however unpromising to the eye, is really good sweet hay, dried and
preserved by the hand of Nature for the buffalo and antelope, and now
cropped by the flocks and herds of the white man.

Denver, the capital of the Territory, contains about eight thousand
inhabitants. It is a true specimen of a Western town which fully
believes in itself, and blows a loud trumpet from its elevation of
five thousand feet. It was said of old "that the meek shall inherit
the earth," but it was not by _that_ quality that the Denverites
obtained their location. Here are plenty of hotels, three banks and
a mint: five railroads centre here, bringing in ten thousand tons of
freight per month. Denver has schools and churches in satisfactory
numbers, and her merchants sell ten millions of dollars' worth of
goods per annum. Considering that the place was only settled in 1858,
and has in these fifteen years been destroyed both by fire and water,
and almost starved by an Indian blockade, it must be admitted to be a
pretty smart specimen of a Western city.

We ride in a 'bus, city fashion, to the Broadwell House, a
fatigued-looking structure of the earli