Though all our
meals had to be very much alike, they were always excellent and did
credit to the commissariat. As Carlyle remarks, "Honor be to the man
who cans! He is Canning, Koenig, or King!" How people lived here before
the days of canned vegetables it is hard to imagine. Before six we
were packed and off again. The morning ride in the cool invigorating
air, before the heat of the day came on, was the most delightful of
our experiences.

Winding first through a pass between hills of sandstone and rubble,
where moss-agates are found (an excellent place for an ambush), we
followed the same sort of country as before over a succession of small
creeks and divides. These table-lands were always barren, and covered
with the same thin gray vegetation, but sometimes adorned with a few
flowers--the beautiful agemone or prickly poppy, with its blue-green
leaves, large white petals and crown of golden stamens; the pretty
fragrant abronia, and the white oenothera. A deep pink convolvulus was
common, which grew upon a bush, not on a vine, and was a large and
thrifty plant. Sage and wormwood were seen everywhere, and on the
streams we found larkspur, aconite, little white daisies and lungwort,
lupines and the ever-present sunflower. But usually all was
barren--barren hills, barren valleys, barren plains. Sometimes we came
upon tracts of buffalo-grass, a thin, low, wiry grass that grows in
small tufts, and does not look as if there were any nourishment in it,
but is said to be more fattening than corn. Our animals ate it with
avidity. Was not all this dreary waste wearily monotonous and tame?
Monotonous, yes; but no more tame than the sea is tame. We sailed
along day after day over the land-waves as on a voyage. To ride over
those lonely divides in the fresh morning air made us feel as if we
had breakfasted on flying-fish. We felt what Shelley sings of the
power of "all waste and solitary places;" we felt their boundlessness,
their freedom, their wild flavor; we were penetrated with their solemn
beauty. Here the eyesight is clearer, the mind is brighter, the
observation is quickened: every animal, insect and bird makes its
distinct impression, every object its mark. There is something on the
Plains that cannot be found elsewhere--something which can be felt
better than described--something you must go there to find.

Under the superb blue sky we went on and on, over a country all tops
and bottoms, some of the bottoms with wet cre