RAMBLES OF A BOTANIST IN WYOMING 
TERRITORY. 
BY REV. E. L. GREENE. 
I. 
Srruatep in the midst of a wide waste of treeless and even 
shrubless plains, which are at an elevation of a mile and more 
above the level of the sea, the city of Cheyenne would scarcely be 
thought a central point from which one might make many interest- 
ing little botanical excursions. The strong northwest winds, 
which prevail here almost incessantly, by day and by night during 
all the winter months, seem to sweep all the snows into the valley 
of the La Poudre, in northern Colorado, and leave the plains of 
Wyoming quite bare ;. so that one sees here only the short dry 
curly turf of buffalo and grama grasses, here and there inter- 
spersed with the spiny balls of Echinocactus Simpsonii. More 
than once during the winter of 1871-2, on the calmer, better days 
that are incident to even a Wyoming winter, did the writer of 
these notes stroll forth upon those plains, to ask of the sere 
grasses and withered cacti, what else could possibly grow among 
them in the summer. 
Our first spring visit to this region was made on the twentieth 
of May. The grasses were beginning to show green, the little 
spherical Echinocacti were crowned each with its chaplet of rose- 
purple flowers, and the low matted Phlox Douglasii was blooming 
almost everywhere. A few rods from the depot of the U. P. Rail- / 
way we stood upon the ridge of bluffs that overlook the turbid 
stream called Crow Creek, and its now beautiful little valley. 
The pebble beds that lie along the shore of this almost alpine 
river are quite gorgeous with purple and yellow. The yellow we 
recognize as the handsome bloom of Thermopsis fabacea, a common 
plant of this region, bearing heavy racemes of lupine-like flowers, 
but the purple is apparently something more interesting. It is a 
low growing plant, so small that although we are but a few rods 
from where it is, and we are looking almost straight down upon a 
large, dense patch of it, we cannot determine it. The color is 
much like that of several of our beautiful Coloradian Astragali, 
(81) ` 
