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| RAMBLES OF A BOTANIST IN WYOMING TERRITORY. 209 
leaves when eaten cause speedy death, and so this great beauty of 
the plains is known to the settlers by the name of “poison weed.” 
On the stony ridge, our point of observation, there was not 
much left at this season to interest us, save the fruits of the As- 
tragali and other remains of the flowers of spring. A little daisy- 
like composite, with white rays, quite stemless and altogether un- 
noticeable but for the comparatively large sizé of its flowers, was 
new to us then, and a good acquisition, proving .to be Nuttall’s 
Townsendia strigosa. Another tenant of this same series of hills 
now in flower is Eritrichium glomeratum DC., a coarse hairy bien- 
nial a foot high, belonging ‘to the’ natural order Borraginacez. 
Along the dry margin of what had been a pond at an earlier date, 
we found an abundance of a very small Gilia (G. minima Gray) 
which, as we have never seen it anywhere else, in all the region, 
must be accounted as rare in these parts, as it is minute and inter- 
esting. Gilia congesta Hook., a handsome species, is how to be 
found. in a good state for collecting, growing in the gravel beds 
along Crow Creek, at Cheyenne, and with it the splendid blue- 
flowered Pentstemon glaber Pursh. 
The railway station, Sherman, some thirty or thirty -five miles 
west from Cheyenne, has an altitude of about two thousand feet 
above that of Cheyenne, and the flora of that vicinity is still more 
interesting than that of the region we have just been noticing, 
eSpecially at this season of the year. It was on the 3d of July 
that we had a delightful ramble among the rocky “ Black Hills,” 
_in this part ef the Territory. Although this district does not suf- 
fer from drought as do the lower altitudes, yet timber appears 
always to have been scarce. One can see that whatever was 
available for the purposes of fuel and ties for the railway has 
long since been appropriated, and there now remain only a few 
Scattered pines (Pinus ponderosa Dougl.) on the hills, and some 
little groves of aspen (Populus tremuloides Mx.) in the moist 
Valleys. There are straggling bushes of *‘wild sage” (Artemisia _ - 
tridentata Nutt. -) growing on all the Milly portions of the land, and 
bal 
