6 JOHN BURROUGHS 



have been carved and sliced but yesterday, showing enor- 

 mous transverse sections. Indeed, never before have I 

 seen the earth so vivisected, anatomized, gashed — the cuts 

 all looking fresh, the hills looking as new and red as 

 butcher's meat, the strata almost bleeding. The red and 

 angry torrent of Price River, a mountain brook of liquid 

 mud near which we lay, was quite in keeping with the 

 scene. How staid and settled and old nature looks in the 

 Atlantic States, with her clear streams, her rounded hills, 

 her forests, her lichen-covered rocks, her neutral tints, in 

 contrast with large sections of the Rocky Mountain re- 

 gion. In the East the great god Erosion has almost done 

 his work — the grading and shaping of the landscape has 

 long since been finished, the seeding and planting are 

 things of the remote past — but in this part of the West it is 

 still the heat of the day with him; we surprise his forces 

 with shovels and picks yet in hand, as it were, and the 

 spectacle is strange indeed and in many ways repellent. 

 In places the country looks as if all the railroad forces of 

 the world might have been turned loose to delve and 

 rend and pile in some mad, insane folly and debauch. 



In crossing the Rockies I had my first ride upon the 

 cowcatcher, or rather upon the bench of the engine im- 

 mediately above it. In this position one gets a much 

 more vivid sense of the perils that encompass the flying 

 train than he does from the car window. The book of fate 

 is rapidly laid bare before him and he can scan every 

 line, while from his comfortable seat in the car he sees 

 little more than the margin of the page. From the en- 

 gine he reads the future and the immediate. From the 

 car window he is more occupied with the distant and the 

 past. How rapidly those two slender steel rails do spin 

 beneath us, and how inadequate they do seem to sustain 

 and guide this enormous throbbing and roaring monster 

 which we feel laboring and panting at our backs. The 



