238 Annals of the Carnegie Museum, 



smooth, gentle slopes, which are pleasing and restful to the eye. 

 There are some fields of grain, and, though the grass is short, large 

 areas are mown for hay. As we proceed westward the country has 

 much the same appearance for a long distance. The ditches and rail- 

 road cuts show no change in the strata. The houses'are small and far 

 apart, and there is an occasional " hay-corral," or a small house built 

 on a wagon, the summer residence of a sheep-herder. The grass, when 

 we passed through the country in August, was shorter than in the bad- 

 lands of the Little Missouri, and deader and browner. This is the 

 divide between the valleys of the Little Missouri River and Beaver 

 Creek. 



Near Wibaux on Beaver Creek there are gray bluffs and cottonwoods 

 along the stream. In the distance through the broad valley to the 

 southeastward a hilly country is seen. The rounded hills appear as if 

 standing on a level plain. A little farther west there are exposures of 

 rocks, which are stained with iron. Still farther are exposures of 

 ripple-marked sandstones. Soon we again enter a rougher country. 

 The rocks are still mostly gray and of a soft texture, nearly like those 

 of the Little Missouri Bad-lands, but there are darker slabs of sand- 

 stone. At Hodges there still are mounds, which are red from the 

 burning of coal, and some of the rocks on the tops of the hills have a 

 dark, rough, and rugged appearance. 



Soon we are in bad-lands again for the first time since leaving the 

 Little Missouri River ; but the rock is darker than in that region. 

 The hills are not so high, but on the whole they are more barren than 

 those of the bad-lands of the Little Missouri. They have a more 

 weird, somber, and desolate appearance ; though, when I saw them on 

 this occasion, the bright sun was shining on them from a clear western 

 sky. There are no high buttes, but some conical mounds project a 

 little higher than the rest. The railroad follows the flat of a perennial 

 stream, which winds its way among steep cut-banks of alluvial deposits. 

 Occasionally the low bluffs on either side of the stream part a little, 

 and the green of the flat winds and breaks among them, growing 

 smaller in the distance until its branches are lost among the maze of 

 bar en hills. The whole region has a strangely unfamiliar aspect and 

 seems foreign toman and his works. Everything suggests an age that 

 has long passed away. The strata, like nearly all those we have seen 

 in our western journey thus far, are almost perfectly horizontal. In 

 one or two places we cross the little stream, the bed of which is sev- 



