DISTRICTS CONTIGUOUS TO THE PLAINS. 487 



miles along the Missouri River of the most fertile agricultural 

 land in the world." 



Of this coal area, Persifor Frazier, Jr., says : " Those beds 

 which occur on the east flank of the Rocky Mountains have 

 been followed for five hundred miles and more, north and 

 south ; and if it be true that these are ' fragments of one great 

 basin, interrupted here and there by the upheaval of mountain 

 chains, or concealed by the deposition of newer formations/ 

 then their extension east and west, or from the eastern range 

 of the Rocky Mountains or Black Hills to Weber Canyon, 

 where an excellent coal is mined, will fall but little short of 

 five hundred miles. Throughout this extent these beds of coal 

 are found between the upper cretaceous and lower tertiary (or 

 in the transition beds of Hayden), wherever these transition 

 beds occur, whether on the extreme flanks or in the valleys 

 and parks between the numerous mountain ranges. Assuming 

 that the eroding agencies together have cut off one-half of the 

 coal from this area, and taking one-half of the remainder as 

 their average longitudinal extent, we have over fifty thousand 

 square miles of coal lands, accounting the latitudinal extent as 

 only five hundred miles; whereas we have no reason to believe 

 that it terminates within these bounds, but, on the contrary, 

 good reason for supposing that it extends northward far into 

 Canada, and southward with the Cordilleras. All this terri- 

 tory has been omitted in the estimate of the extent of our coal 

 fields." 



DISTRICTS CONTIGUOUS TO THE PLAINS. 



The reader has now had the salient features of the great 

 plains placed before him in succession. The more interesting 



