Speaking of the train he was about to take passage on, and which was standing in the station awaiting the hour of departure, Mr. Wheeler says: “At its head is a huge, ten-wheeled Baldwin locomotive. On each side of this machine there are three driving wheels sixty-two inches in diameter. As it stands, its length from peak to pilot, or in common parlance, cow-catcher to end of tender, is about fifty-five feet. From the rails to top of smokestack it stands fourteen feet five inches. With its tender loaded with coal and water it weighs nearly ninety-four tons. Behind this noble combination of iron, brass and steel extends a long train. First comes the mail car, in which Uncle Sam’s messengers run a traveling postoffice. Then follows the express car, carefully guarded by ever vigilant expressmen. The third car is the principality of the baggage man. Then follow the various classes of passenger coaches—the free colonists’ sleeping car, where man or woman may find a fair bed at night and a comfortable seat by day. The smoking car, and the first-class coaches with their high-backed, easy, reclining seats, are succeeded by the Pullman tourist car. Behind the tourist car is the dining car, which is a feature of this train. Behind the dining car are the first-class Pullman sleeping cars—from two to four of them. These are of the most approved type, with heavy trucks and wheels of large diameter, insuring smoothness of motion. This entire train is vestibuled and the car wheels are of paper and steel tired.
“But the bell of that monster engine is ringing, the conductor is signaling to start. Jump aboard and we will continue our dissertation as we glide swiftly along.”
The Northern Pacific through trains from St. Paul to Portland, Oregon, a distance of 2,050 miles, are of the same description, only on a larger scale. The average time these trains make is twenty-seven miles an hour, schedule speed, including all regular stops.
After describing his journey through Dakota and up the great valley of the Yellowstone for 341 miles in Eastern Montana until arriving at Livingstone, where the National Park branch of the Northern Pacific began and on which the tourist train continued to the country of wonders, fifty-one miles away, Mr. Wheeler was still in his observation seat taking notes of the grand scenery that the swiftly moving train brought to view. Again he said:
“The entrance to the heart of Wonderland is through an enormous gateway. The gateway, or opening, was made by a river, through a mountain wall, and it is known as The Gate of the Mountains.
“Through this gateway pours the river, fresh from the eternal snows far back in the mountains; from the great lake, a vast reservoir into which the melting snow banks drizzle in a million streamlets; from the wondrous canyon between whose divinely sculptured and colored walls it throws itself in an ecstasy of fury. Beside the stream lies a railway, which, following it in its sinuosities, leads the pilgrim to the very border of Wonderland. As the river flows out of the mountain gate into the broad, unpent valley, it seems to sing, in the words of Colonel Norris, whose name is indissolubly connected with Wonderland, of the region it is leaving far behind:
‘I sing in songs of gliding lays
Of forests scenes in border days;
Of mountain peaks begirt with snow,
And flowery parks, pine girt below;
Of goblins grim and canyons grand,
And geysers spouting o’er the strand
Of Mystic Lake, of Wonderland.’
“After having passed through the gate of the mountains one is in Paradise valley, for such is the name of the beautiful valley which stretches up to the portals of Wonderland. The farther one invades these precincts, the more one comes to feel that the valley is rightly named. The great mountains, the very temples of the gods, loom high above. Mighty canyons, rocked ribbed, ragged, gloomy, forest-garbed, deep and fascinating, have been gouged from their very vitals. From out these latter the mountain streams rush, singing songs of deliverance as they dance down the long, sweeping slopes to the mightier river. In their courses the streams have been harnessed by man, and their fructifying influences are seen in the broad fields of waving grain and alfalfa that checker the slopes.
“Mountains, fields, streams, trees, slopes, form truly enough such a picture that the thought of paradise is borne in upon me.
“The scene changes! The mountains crowd together, the valley contracts, the rocky sides of the former rise high above, the river is throttled by craggy canyons and rushes madly along far below us—we are in a wild eyrie where the echoes of the iron horse’s brazen throat reverberate among the crags and cliffs. Sweeping through this scene of wildness we reach the threshold of the Wonderland of Wonderlands, nature’s greatest wonderland—