488 BUFFALO LAND. 



districts immediately adjoining will well repay the reader for a 

 brief consideration. 



THK NORTH PLATTE DISTRICT. 



A late writer, who has studied the country of which h? 

 speaks very closely,* thus describes the North Platte District: 



" The distance from the mouth of the North Platte, where 

 it joins the South Platte on the Union Pacific Railroad, to its 

 sources in the great Sierra Mad re, whose lofty sides form the 

 North Park, in which this stream takes its rise, is more than 

 eight hundred miles. Its extreme southern tributaries head in 

 the gorges of the mountains one hundred miles south of the 

 railroad, and receive their water from the melting snows of 

 these snow-capped ranges. Its extreme western tributaries rise 

 in the Wahsatch and Wind River ranges, sharing the honor of 

 conveying the crystal snow waters from the continental divide 

 with the Columbia and Colorado of the Pacific. Its northern 

 tributaries start oceanward from the Big Horn Mountains, 

 three hundred miles north of the starting-point of its southern 

 sources. 



" It drains a country larger than all New England and New 

 York together. East of the Alleghany Mountains there is no 

 river comparable to this clear, swift mountain stream in its 

 length or in the extent of country it drains. 



" The main valley of the North Platte, two hundred miles 

 from its mouth to where it debouches through the Black Hills 

 out on to the great plains, is an average of ten miles wide. 

 Nearly all this area — two thousand square miles— is covered 



*Dr. II. Latham, under date June 5th, 1870, in the Omaha Daily 

 Herald. 



