INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 



6 



increased facilities to be increased a liundred fold. For these 

 lands that now, for the first time, have bared their lustrous 

 bosoms to the day, invite the settler with a health-giving climate, 

 a fertile soil, wood and water, and resources of pastoral agricul- 

 ture unrivalled on the globe. The Rocky Mountains, no longer 

 regarded as a barrier to separate the east from the west, are 

 recognized as the strong backbone, permeated with veins of 

 material power to hold the country together. A recent writer, 

 whom I infer to be ex-Governor Gilpin of Colorado, whose elo- 

 quent description of the parks of that territory we had the 

 pleasure of listening to in these halls last season, says : " The 

 amount of transportation between the Missouri River and Col- 

 orado, as the first point of entrance to the great mountain sys- 

 tem, is prodigious. The great plains represent the ocean 

 between the city of I^ew York and Liverpool. It is no uncom- 

 mon thing to see as many as five thousand wagon-teams in one 

 camp, and it is not setting the figure too high to say that at 

 least half a million of people are more or less interested or en- 

 gaged in this vast system of intra-continental transportation." 



A daily line of stages is running, with tolerable regularity, 

 from Atchison to Placerville, California. The Mormons have 

 their trains ; and thousands of adventurers, apart from the above- 

 described travel to Colorado, with their own private convey- 

 ances, are pressing annually to the farthest west. Yet this 

 method of communication with our territories is slow^ and 

 difiicult, and runs but over a narrow ribbon or two of soil. 

 The large portion of our western domain is yet untrodden by 

 the foot of civilization, inviting the explorer with its promise of 

 fresh fields and pastures new. 



The Secretary of the Interior, in his last annual report to 

 Congress, says : " During the past year additional discoveries of 

 precious metals, particularly of silver, have been made in the 

 region flanking on the eastward the extended mountain ranges 

 of the Sierra ISTevada. A vast belt of some one or two hundred 

 miles in width, and eight or nine hundred miles in length, em- 

 bracing portions of Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona, is rich in 

 silver ore. Owing to the remote locality of these mines, and 

 the difficulty of transportation thereto, but little machinery 

 w^ell adapted to the rapid and economical reduction of the 

 various ores has been introduced. In that portion of Nevada 



