EARLY DAY STORIES. 37 



traveler." Page on page could be quoted from authors, 

 many of them prominent, similar to the quotation given 

 above. Even Horace Greeley, as observant and practical a 

 man as he was, speaking of his trip to Colorado by stage 

 after gold had been discovered at Pikes Peak, in articles 

 prepared by himself and published in the New York Tribune, 

 said substantially as follows : "This country will not or 

 cannot be used for farming until nature by its slow process 

 has pulverized the soil, and dissolved it into finer particles, 

 so that it can sustain and support plant growth." This is 

 not his language exactly, for that has been forgotten, but 

 it is exactly the thought as I read it myself in the Tribune ; 

 and yet Horace Greeley as he passed over the route could 

 see with his own eyes the rich buffalo, gramma and other 

 grasses, the dried excrement dropped, and the trails made 

 by the millions of these wild cattle of the plains. How 

 could a country be thought to be a desert, when at that very 

 time it was pasturing wild cattle that greatly exceeded in 

 number all the tame cattle of the United States? I want 

 to make all these things plain to our young people of Ante- 

 lope county today I want them to see and know just how 

 things were, and just how they were regarded, and that is 

 the excuse, if excuse is needed, for dwelling upon these 

 things. But besides the buffalo, there were millions of elk, 

 deer and antelope all feeding upon the grasses of our prair- 

 ies ; but this will be taken up in a subsequent article. 



There was in our company a guide book, which de- 

 scribed the route, telling of the best camping places where 

 wood and water could be found, and giving the distances 

 from one noted point to another. This guide book claimed 

 that the route had been measured by an odometer, an in- 

 strument attached to a wagon wheel and so constructed as 

 to record the revolutions of the wheel. Hence by multiply- 

 ing the number of revolutions by the measurement around 

 the circumference of the wheel ,the distance traveled could 



