Gateway, Garden of the Gods, Colorado

Following up the Arkansas River from Pueblo, a route goes northward behind and west of Pike's Peak into the Cripple Creek district, situated at an elevation of nearly ten thousand feet among the mountains, where in 1890 was a remote cattle ranch. The next year gold was found there, a new population rushed in, and it has since become a leading gold producer, its output of fourteen to twenty millions of gold annually almost turning Colorado from a silver to a gold State. There is now a population of twenty thousand, and the town has many substantial buildings. Westward the route crosses the Continental Divide and descends into the extensive South Park, covering two thousand square miles, reaching Leadville beyond, renowned as a mining camp that has developed into one of the highest cities of the world. In the early Colorado days this was the great gold placer mining camp of California Gulch. Afterwards it produced enormous quantities of silver from the extensive carbonate beds discovered in 1876, and the population expanded to thirty thousand, its name being changed to Leadville. Of late, its gold mining has again become profitable, and its population now is about fifteen thousand, the yield of silver, which once reached $13,000,000 annually, being much reduced owing to the decline in value. To the westward, the Colorado Midland Railway crosses the Continental Divide by the Hagerman Pass, at eleven thousand five hundred and thirty feet elevation, the highest elevation of any railway route across the Rockies. It descends rapidly to Aspen, where $8,000,000 of silver and gold are mined in a year. North of Leadville is the noted Mountain of the Holy Cross, fourteen thousand two hundred feet high, named from the impressive cruciform appearance of two ravines crossing at right angles and always filled with snow.

The Grand Canyon of the Arkansas is one of the most magnificent gorges in the Rocky Mountains. This river above Pueblo forces its passage through a deep pass known in the narrowest part as the Royal Gorge, where the railway is laid alongside the boiling and rushing stream, with rocky cliffs towering twenty-six hundred feet above the line. It ascends westward, beyond the sources of the Arkansas, crossing the Continental Divide by the Marshall Pass, at ten thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight feet elevation, the route up there showing, in its abrupt and bold curves, great engineering skill. The Pass is always covered with snow, and the descent beyond it is to the mining town of Gunnison. The Gunnison River is followed down through its magnificent gorge, the Black Canyon giving a splendid display for sixteen miles of some of the finest scenery of the Rockies. The river is an alternation of foaming rapids and pleasant reaches, and within the canyon is the lofty rock pinnacle of the Currecanti Needle. The adjacent gorge of the Cimarron, a tributary stream, gives also a splendid display of Rocky Mountain wildness, and below it the river passes through the Lower Gunnison Canyon, bounded by smooth-faced sandstone cliffs, and finally it falls into Grand River, one of the head-streams of the Colorado. The combined magnificence of these canyons and mountains makes the environment of the Colorado mining region one of the most attractive scenic districts in America. The railways have arranged a route of a thousand miles through the mountains, starting from Denver, under the title of "Around the Circle," which crosses and recrosses the Continental Divide, threads the wonderful canyons, surmounts all the famous passes over the tops of the Rocky ranges, and includes the most attractive scenery of the district.

WYOMING FOSSILS.

The Union Pacific Railway, westward from Cheyenne in Wyoming, gradually ascends the slope and crosses the Continental Divide at Sherman, the pass being elevated eighty-two hundred and forty-five feet. Here, alongside the track, is the monument erected in memory of Oakes and Oliver Ames of Massachusetts, to whose efforts the construction of this pioneer railway across the Continent was largely due. Upon the western slope of the mountains the descent is to the Laramie Plains, an elevated plateau in Wyoming which is one of the best grazing districts of the country. In the midst of the region on the Big Laramie River is Laramie City, with ten thousand people, a prominent wool and cattle mart. To the north and west high mountains rise, out of which the river flows, and in this district is the great fossil region of Wyoming. This state is the most prolific producer of the skeletons of the enormous beasts that roamed the earth in prehistoric times. About ninety miles northwest of Laramie City are the greatest fossil quarries in existence, and the scientific hunters from all the great museums have been finding rich treasures there. We are told that in an early geological period Wyoming had numerous lakes and swamps and a semi-tropical climate. These huge animals then inhabited the lakes and swamps in large numbers. In dying, they sank into the mud, and their bones were covered by other deposits and became petrified. The extensive deposits of these bones are found where are supposed to have been the mouths of great water-courses, the huge animals, after death, having floated to where they are deposited in such large numbers. The belief is that through the geological eras these animals became covered with possibly twenty thousand feet of rock. Afterwards, the process by which the Rocky Mountains were formed tilted these rock beds, and the subsequent erosion of the strata brought to light these bone-deposits, made millions of years ago. For many years the scientists have been exhuming these skeletons, and have recovered the bones of over three hundred different species. They are of all sizes and characters, and here has been found the most colossal animal ever discovered on the earth, a dinosaur, nearly one hundred and thirty feet long, and thirty-five feet high at the hips and twenty-five feet at the shoulders. The skeleton of this immense creature, who is called a diplodocus, weighs twenty tons, and it is believed that when living he weighed sixty tons, having a neck thirty feet long and a tail twice that length. Yet his head was very small, and the weight of the brain was not over five pounds. In comparison with the mammoth, heretofore regarded as so large, this huge beast, whose foot covered a square yard of earth, was in size as a horse is compared to a dog. Such are the contributions Wyoming is making to our great museums of science.

To the southward of the Laramie Plains is the Colorado North Park, among the mountains of that State, having an area of over two thousand square miles. Beyond, the railway route goes westward among hills and over the plateaus. This route is not as picturesque as some of the other Pacific railways, but in crossing the Continent it discloses very curious scenery. At places there are great Buttes, water-worn and rounded, rising in isolated grandeur; the plains and terraces are carved into elongated and wide depressions, as if abandoned rivers had run through them; there are long and regular embankments, strange hills of fantastic form, huge mounds, broken-down pyramids, vast stone-piles, and the most strange and extraordinary fashionings of nature, showing both water and fire to have been at work. Then the route passes the snow-clad Uintah Mountains to the southward, and crossing the Wahsatch range, enters Utah, traversing its remarkable enclosed basin, where the waters have no outlet to the sea, but flow into salt lakes which lose their surplus supplies by evaporation in the summer. Beyond, is the wild and picturesque Echo Canyon, with the green valley of Weber River and the Weber Canyon. Here is the gigantic Castle Rock, a rugged stone-pile fantastically carved by nature, having a giant doorway and all the semblance of a mountain fortress. Here is also the "One Thousand Mile Tree," on the northern side of the road, being that distance west of Omaha. In the Echo Gorge is the Hanging Rock, where Brigham Young, as the Mormon Pilgrims journeyed to their Utah home, is said to have preached the first sermon to them in the "Promised Land." The old-time emigrant trail passes through these canyons alongside the railway and the river. A remarkable sight within the Weber Canyon is the Devil's Slide, where on the face of an almost perpendicular red mountain, eight hundred feet high, there is inlaid a brilliantly white strip of limestone about fifteen feet wide, all the way from top to bottom, having enclosing white walls, the whole work being as regularly constructed as if built by a stonemason. Beyond, we come to Ogden, a busy industrial town of twenty thousand people, the western terminus of the Union Pacific Railway, and having another railroad leading thirty-seven miles southward to Salt Lake City.

GREAT SALT LAKE.

In the centre of the Rockies, occupying a large portion of Utah and adjacent States, is the "Great Basin," which, as remarked, has no drainage outlet for its waters. The geologists tell us that in ancient times this region was covered by two extensive lakes, one of them in the Pleistocene era occupying the now desert interior basin of Utah. This extinct lake, whose ancient shores can be distinctly traced, has been named Lake Bonneville. When at its greatest expansion, it covered twenty thousand square miles, and the waters were nearly a thousand feet deep, overflowing to the northward into a branch of Shoshoné River through a deep pass, and going thence to the Pacific. The waters of this lake, by climatic changes, gradually dwindled, the loss by evaporation overcame the rainfall supply, the overflow ceased, and then the lake dried up, revealing the desert bottom. Of its waters there now remain the Great Salt Lake of Utah, about eighty miles long and from thirty to fifty miles wide, very shallow, averaging only twenty feet depth, and not over fifty feet in the deepest place, having monotonously flat shores on the desert plateau, elevated forty-two hundred feet above the sea. Its dimensions vary according to the rainfall, the surface rising and falling in various periods of years. Several streams flow in, among them the Jordan River, forty miles long, draining Utah Lake to the southward. The waters are densely salt, varying from fourteen to twenty-two per cent. as the lake is high or low (compared with three to four per cent. in the ocean), and it is estimated to contain four hundred million tons of salt. Not a fish can live there excepting a small brine shrimp. A bath in the lake is novel, as the density makes the body very buoyant, easily floating head and shoulders above the water.

To this desert region, after being driven from Nauvoo on the Mississippi, Brigham Young brought his first Mormon colony by a long journey across the plains and mountains, a band of one hundred and forty-three persons, arriving in July, 1847, Utah then being Mexican territory. They organized the State of Deseret, and it afterwards became a Territory of the United States. By prodigious labors, constructing irrigation canals to bring in the mountain streams, they made the soil productive, and now it is one of the most fertile valleys in the country. Almost the whole flow of the Jordan River is thus used for irrigation. Colonies and proselytes were brought in from various parts of the world, until two hundred thousand Mormons came to Utah, and after protracted conflicts with the Government, polygamy was declared illegal, and its discontinuance was ordered by proclamation of the Mormon President. Twelve miles from the Great Salt Lake is the Utah capital and Mormon Zion, Salt Lake City, where the Latter-Day Saints and Gentiles together exceed fifty thousand. Its prosperity is largely due to the extensive mining interests of the surrounding country. The lofty Wahsatch Mountains are close to the city on the northern and eastern sides, while to the south, seen over a hundred miles of almost level plain, is a magnificent range of snow-covered mountains, this being the perpetual and awe-inspiring view from all parts of the city. The streets are wide and lined with shade trees, the residences surrounded by gardens, and irrigation canals border all the thoroughfares, so that the whole place is embosomed in foliage, and the delicious green adds to its scenic attractiveness. The Temple Block of ten acres, the sacred square of the Mormons, is the centre from which the streets are laid towards the four cardinal points of the compass. A high adobé wall surrounds it, and here is the great Mormon Temple of granite, which was forty years building, and cost over $4,000,000, having three pointed towers at each end, the loftiest being surmounted by a gilded figure of the Mormon angel Moroni. Here is also the Mormon Tabernacle, a huge oval-shaped structure, surmounted by a roof rounded like a turtle-back, the interior accommodating twelve thousand people. This is their great meeting-place, and they also have a smaller Assembly Hall for religious services. These are the chief buildings of Salt Lake City. To the eastward in the suburbs is the military post of Fort Douglas, where the troops are barracked that guard the Mormon capital. In the earlier period, when there were fears of trouble, a large garrison was kept at this extensive fortification to maintain government control.

OGDEN TO SACRAMENTO.