After a fifty miles' ride from Omaha a halt was made at the Sherman House, Fremont, Dodge County, for supper and lodging. The journey had been pleasant and the landscape charming in its quiet beauty. The south wind was neither too warm nor too cold for perfect comfort, and my mustang looked as if he could carry me another fifty miles without any inconvenience to himself.
Fremont had a population of nearly 3,000, and has a large trade in grain, cotton and lumber. It has a court house, a high school, three banks and four newspapers.
Left early the following morning and at night slept in a wigwam with Pawnee Indians, in the absence of other shelter, and they gave me of their best. At Lone Tree, a post office in Nance County, I stopped at the Lone Tree House for the night, and next morning at dawn, the weather being very fine, hurried forward on my journey. Reached Grand Island, where I was accommodated at a private house with bed and board.
Grand Island is in the Great Platte Valley on Platte River, one hundred and fifty-four miles west of Omaha. It stands 1,800 feet above sea level. The Island, on which the town is built, is fifty miles long.
Wood River, my next resting-place, is a township in Hall County with a population not exceeding one thousand. On the following day good headway was made, but I could find no better accommodation for the night than at a Pawnee camp. On the succeeding night, after a hard day's ride, I stopped at Plum Creek, two hundred and thirty miles west of Omaha, and was accommodated at the Plum Creek House. A bridge spans the Platte River at this point. The population was only three hundred, but a weekly paper had been started and was well supported. The next evening, the McPherson House, McPherson, received me and my mustang and treated us hospitably. Then followed North Platte, one hundred and thirty-seven miles from Grand Island, where I lodged for the night at a private house, the home of a pioneer. The repair shops of the Union Pacific Railroad were located here; also a bank and two enterprising newspapers. The population of the township was nearly three thousand. At Sidney, which is a military post, I stopped at the Railroad Hotel. Sheep-farming is a leading industry of Sidney and its vicinity. My last stopping-place in Nebraska was at Evans Ranche, Antelope, a small village on the Elk Horn River.
Crossing the boundary into Wyoming Territory and reaching Cheyenne, I made my entrance into this most interesting region—a great plateau of nearly 100,000 square miles, its lowest level 3,543 feet, its highest altitude more than 13,000 feet above the sea. Some one has said that it seems "a highway, laid out by the 'Great Intelligence,' in the latitude most favorable, at all seasons, for great migrations to the shores of the Pacific."
Shales bearing petroleum, iron, limestone, soda, sulphur, mica, copper, lead, silver and gold, are all there for the taking.
There, volcanoes are still at work.
There, great mountains, great canyons, and great cataracts make the face of Nature sublime.
There, in past centuries, "at some period anterior to the history of existing aboriginal races," lived a mysterious, to us unknown people, traces of whom we still find in neatly finished stratite vessels, "knives, scrapers, and sinkers for fish lines made of volcanic sandstone or of green-veined marble. Such is the tract of territory called Wyoming."