butte, the lava-bed, the gray desert, the far horizon are
familiar here. With the sunniest and bluest of skies, this is the
range of the deadliest storms, and its delightful summers contrast
with the dreadest cold.

Here the desert of death simulates a field of cooling snow, green
hills lie black in the dazzling light of day, limpid waters run green
over arsenic stone, and sunset betricks the fantastic rock with column
and capital and dome. Clouds burst here above arid wastes, and where
dew is precious the skies are most prodigal in their downpour. If the
torrent bed is dry, distrust it.

This vast mountain shed parts rivers whose waters find two oceans, and
their valleys are the natural highways up which railroads wind to the
crest of the continent. To the mountain engineer the waterway is the
sphinx that holds in its silence the riddle of his success; with him
lies the problem of providing a railway across ranges which often defy
the hoofs of a horse.

The construction engineer studies the course of the mountain water.
The water is both his ally and his enemy--ally because it alone has
made possible his undertakings; enemy because it fights to destroy his
puny work, just as it fights to level the barriers that oppose him.
Like acid spread on copperplate, water etches the canyons in the
mountain slopes and spreads wide the valleys through the plains. Among
these scarcely known ranges of the Rocky Mountain chain the Western
rivers have their beginnings. When white men crowded the Indian from
the plains he retreated to the mountains, and in their valleys made
his final stand against the aggressor. The scroll of this invasion of
the mountain West by the white man has been unrolled, read, and put
away within a hundred years, and of the agencies that made possible
the swiftness of the story transportation overshadows all others. The
first railroad put across those mountains cost twenty-five thousand
miles of reconnaissances and fifteen thousand miles of instrument
surveys. Since the day of that undertaking a generation of men has
passed, and in the interval the wilderness that those men penetrated
has been transformed. The Indian no longer extorts terms from his foe:
he is not.

Where the tepee stood the rodman drives his stakes, and the country of
the great Indian rivers, save one, has been opened for years to the
railroad. That one is the Crawling Stone. The valley of Crawling Stone
River marked for more than a deca