llegible is said to have concluded with this touching tribute to
the worth of the departed: "He was a good egg." Another was: "He done his
damnedest") In other particulars the "Great American Desert" of our
fathers was very like what it was when General Bidwell's party traversed
it with that hereditary instinct, that delicacy of spiritual nose which
served the Western man of that day in place of a map and guide-book.
Westward the course of empire had taken its way, but excepting these poor
vestiges it had for some fifteen hundred miles left no trace of its march.
The Indian of the plains had as yet seen little to unsettle his assurance
of everlasting dominion. Of the slender lines of metal creeping slowly
toward him from East and West he knew little; and had he known more, how
could he have foreseen their momentous effect upon his "ancient solitary
reign"?

I remember very well, as so many must, some of the marked features of the
route that General Bidwell mentions. One of the most imposing of these is
Court House Rock, near the North Platte. Surely no object of such dignity
ever had a more belittling name--given it in good faith no doubt by some
untraveled wight whose county court-house was the most "reverend pile" of
which he had any conception. It should have been called the Titan's
Castle. What a gracious memory I have of the pomp and splendor of its
aspect, with the crimson glories of the setting sun fringing its outlines,
illuminating its western walls like the glow of Mammon's fires for the
witches' revel in the Hartz, and flung like banners from its crest!

I suppose Court House Rock is familiar enough and commonplace enough to
the dwellers in that land (riparian tribes once infesting the low lands of
Ohio and Indiana and the flats of Iowa), but to me, tipsy with youth,
full-fed on Mayne Reid's romances, and now first entering the enchanted
region that he so charmingly lied about, it was a revelation and a dream.
I wish that anything in the heavens, on the earth, or in the waters under
the earth would give me now such an emotion as I experienced in the shadow
of that "great rock in a weary land."

I was not a pilgrim, but an engineer _attache_ to an expedition through
Dakota and Montana, to inspect some new military posts. The expedition
consisted, where the Indians preserved the peace, of the late General W.B.
Hazen, myself, a cook and a teamster; elsewhere we had an escort of
cavalry. My duty, as I was given