TEN DAYS IN MONTANA. . 135 



rupted and unimpeded, perhaps for many hundreds of years. 

 Great gulches, canyons and ravines are cut out between these 

 buttes. The sides of the buttes, mounds and turrets are 

 washed into fantastic shapes, and are still changing in shape 

 and appearance every year. The various strata of each butte 

 are plainly visible, owing to the absence of vegetation on 

 their sides, and we see here a tall butte with half-a-dozen beds 

 of clay of various colors and as many more of sand, while 

 within fifty feet of it we see another standing lower down in 

 the valley, whose head only reaches to the level of the base 

 of this one, and which contains the very same strata as in the 

 one just mentioned. The average level of these bad lands, as 

 above stated, is from two to five hundred feet below the 

 adjacent prairies ; and as one stands on a ridge of the prairie 

 overlooking a tract of these lands perhaps thirty to fifty miles 

 in circumference, a scene is presented to the eye that for 

 grandeur and sublimity cannot be excelled on this continent, 

 if on the globe. After all that can be said in the way of 

 describing these wonderful bad lands, no more correct idea 

 of them can be given than that conveyed in the few words of 

 General Sully, who, when asked what the bad lands were 

 like, replied, "They are simply hell with the fire out." 



I predict that when the Northern Pacific railroad is com- 

 pleted through to the Yellowstone, people will come here 

 from all parts of the civilized world simply to see the bad 

 lands, and consider themselves richly repaid for their time 

 and trouble when they have beheld them. 



