1C THE PLAINS. 



that the stump has been dug up and sent to some scientific 

 establishment in the east. 



Some portions of the plains seem to be entirely under- 

 laid by a mass of gypsum. The streams tributary to the 

 Cimarron on both sides, east of 100 longitude, cut their 

 way through immense deposits of this mineral. North of 

 the Great Salt Plain of the Cimarron the deposit seems to 

 attain its greatest thickness. Though the ' divide ' is high, 

 and the country very broken, the rains in many places do 

 not reach the principal channels by ravines, but through 

 caves and tortuous caverns cut underground by the dis- 

 solution of the gypsum. From these hills I have taken 

 out beautiful specimens of selenite transparent as glass. 

 Here are also fair samples of alabaster, though not to my 

 knowledge in masses sufficiently large to be of commercial 

 value. The water impregnated by the gypsum is sweet 

 and sickly to the taste ; it fails to satisfy thirst, and war- 

 rants a constant admixture of some corrective. 



The Great Salt Plain of the Cimarron is a curiosity 

 well worth travelling many miles to see. For thirty or 

 forty miles the bed of the stream is an expanse of sand 

 half a mile wide, in many places so loose as to form 

 quicksands. This is so impregnated with salt that the 

 buffalo lick it up greedily. Near the mouth of Buffalo 

 Creek a number of springs rise from the bed, the water 

 of which is a saturated solution of almost pure salt. A 

 great area of nearly a hundred acres is floored to unknown 

 depths with most beautifully crystallised rock salt, as clear 

 and apparently pure as that taken from the evaporating 

 pans at Syracuse, in the State of New York. It can be 

 quarried out in lumps and boulders of any size. These 

 splendid natural salt works are unfortunately situated in 

 the Indian Territory, and have not yet been in any way 

 developed. 



The hills- in this gypsum region along the Cimarron 

 are covered with splendid buffalo -grass, the streams bor- 

 dered by beautiful trees and shrubs in great variety, and, 



