In proportion as we proceeded toward the source of this wonderful river, the shades of vegetation became more gloomy, and the brows of the mountain more craggy. Everything seemed to wear the aspect not of decay, but of age, or rather of venerable antiquity.
The broad old Salt Lake Trail to the Rocky Mountains coincided with the Platte River about twenty miles below the head of Grand Island. The island used to be densely wooded, and extended for sixty or seventy miles. The valley at that point is about seven miles wide, and the stream itself, between one and two from bank to bank.
The South Platte was a muddy stream, and with its low banks, scattered flat sand-bars, and pigmy islands, a melancholy river, straggling through the centre of vast prairies, and only saved from being impossible to find with the naked eye by its sentinel trees standing at long distances from each other, on either side.
The Platte of the mountain region scarcely retains one characteristic of the stream far below. Here, it is confined to a bed of rock and sand, not more than two hundred yards wide, and its water is of unwonted clearness and transparency. Its banks are steep and the attrition caused at the time of spring freshets shows a deep vegetable mould reaching far back, making the soil highly fertile. Here, too, the river forces its way through a barrier of tablelands, forming one of those striking peculiarities incident to mountain streams, called by the Spaniards a cañon; that is, a narrow passage between high and precipitous banks, formed by mountains; a common term in the language of the mountaineers describing one of these picturesque breaks through the range.
The scenery of the upper Platte is constantly changing, the river presenting more the appearance of a genuine mountain stream. Its banks are here and there heavily fringed with timber, rich grass grows luxuriantly in the flat bottoms, and the dark bluffs which bound them form a beautiful background, interspersed occasionally by snow-capped peaks.
In little more than the third of a century the vast area of desert-waste comprising the valley of the Platte, and beyond, has been transmuted by that most effective of civilizers the railroad, into great states. On the terra incognita there have appeared large cities and towns, whose genesis is a marvel in the history of nations. Peace has spread her white wings over the bloody sands of the trail, whose sublime silence but a short time since was so often broken by the diabolical whoop of the savage, as he wretched the reeking scalp from the head of his enemy. Where it required many weeks of dangerous, tedious travel to cross the weary pathway to the mountains, now, in all the luxuriance of modern American railway service, the traveller is whirled along at the rate of fifty miles all hour, and where it required many days for the transmission of news, the events of the whole civilized world, as they hourly occur, are flashed from ocean to ocean in a few seconds.
The islands, bluffs, and isolated peaks of the trail have clustering around them many thrilling legends, stories, and events; some of them reaching far backward into the dim light of tradition; others having happened within the memory of men now living. All are strangely characteristic of the region, and are as full of poetry and pathos as the epics of ancient Greece, whose stories are the basis of the literature of the world to-day.
Some traveller, who has visited every picturesque spot on both continents, has truthfully said: “No! Never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery.” Nowhere else on the continent is the landscape for such a distance so varied, so distinctly picturesque, beautiful, and sublime, as that which may be viewed from the car windows of the magnificent trains of the Union Pacific Railway. They swiftly course over almost the identical pathway once followed by the overland stage-coach, the pony express, and the slowly plodding ox caravans in the days when the possibility of a transcontinental trail of steel was regarded as a chimera.
Less than a hundred miles from the Missouri River is the famous Loup Fork of the Platte, once celebrated for the great Pawnee Indian village on its south bank, where, long before the white man encroached upon the beautiful region, that once powerful tribe lived in a sort of barbaric splendour. This affluent was so named by the early French-Canadian trappers because of the numerous packs of wolves that haunted the region. Game, consisting of deer, buffalo, antelope, turkeys, and prairie chickens, abounded, while the stream itself was covered with ducks and geese. During the days of travel by the old trail, at the crossing-place was a primitive ferry. The current was always very strong, and when the fork was much swollen, dangerous. The region watered by the Loup Fork is unsurpassed in fertility by any other portion of the valley of the Platte. After crossing the stream, the Union Pacific's track is a perfectly straight line, and when the fields are golden with the harvests, the view from the train is the most marvellous agricultural landscape to be found anywhere on the continent.
A few miles westward, beyond Grand Island, is Wood River, a noted landmark and camping-place for those who followed the tide of immigration to Utah, and to the gold fields of California, in 1849. It was always a pleasant spot, and is now a station on the Union Pacific Railway. As the tourist crosses the bridge over the stream in a palace car, he may look down from his window, and meditate on the brilliancy of the present, and the misty past, with all its adventures and suffering. The march of civilization has made wonderful changes in fifty years. It has forced the Indians, the buffaloes, and the antelopes away from the prairies, and in their places comfortable homes may now be seen on the sites of old camps. The pretty little stream still runs its race to the Platte, and lingering near the bank at the old ford, murmurs its story of the long ago, as the train rushes by.