THE LITTLE MISSOURI BAD LANDS. 



6 35 



light as from a desert absolute. Far as you can look or listen there 

 conies not the faintest sign or whisper of living thing. No bird visits 

 those forgotten hills, no insect stirs about your feet or beats with 

 humming wings the air ; the very wind is silent, and from the glowing 

 buttes, as from a furnace, the heated atmosphere rises in shimmering 

 columns. It seems as if it had never rained, or, if it has rained, it 

 seems as though it would never rain again. Here is the trail by which, 

 in 1863, passed General Sully and his train when all these hill-tops 

 were alive with hostile Sioux. The Indians are long since gone, but 

 the trail remains unchanged, and can be easily followed after a lapse 

 of twenty years. Yonder, along that other trail still so clearly visible 

 over the distant buttes, went Custer and his band when they marched 

 away to the west and disappeared from human sight forever. The 

 climate is an arid one, and the process of erosion slow. Looking out 

 over the landscape as we now see it, none would imagine that all this 

 territory was at one time favored with a climate perhaps nearly semi- 

 tropical, that over all this wide area were waving forests of perpetual 

 green, stretching away to the north, south, east, and west, almost to 

 the limits of the so-called " Plains." Yet such is the case, and this 

 complete transition from the wealth of primeval woods to the poverty 

 of semi-desert has been brought about not by the devastation of short- 

 sighted man, but by the orderly procedure of all those indefinite forces 

 which for convenient description men sum up as Nature. The evidence 

 of this transition is not far to seek. Scattered over the grassy low- 

 lands, crowning many an isolated pillar of sandstone or clay, lying 

 here and there on all the high hills, are remnants of gigantic trees, 

 remnants more or less perfectly silicified, stumps, boles, and branches. 

 In some localities these " petrified stumps " cover the whole face of 



Fig. 1. Longitudinal Section op Selicified 

 Wood, x 150. 



Fig. 2. Microscopic Section of tiie Wood op 

 the Common Larch, cut in the Long Direc- 

 tion op the Fibers. 



the country, and scores have been carried away on flat-cars to decorate 

 the lawns of those able to pay freight on such unwieldy " curiosities." 

 Scientists are frequently disposed to doubt petrifactions, and are often 

 compelled to disajDpoint popular expectation in regard to forms most 



