STRATIGRAPHICAL REPORT. 



A QUARTER of a ccntury ago, when the overland journey to California was 

 made in the mail-coach, one of the many stopping-places in Wyoming Territory 

 was a small station called Leclede. The completion of the Union Pacific Rail- 

 road ruined the business of the stage company ; Leclede was abandoned, and 

 nothing is now left to mark the spot where it stood but the roofless walls of the 

 stables and tavern and the broken piers of an old bridge that spanned a stream 

 hard by. 



Almost due West, and not more than eighteen or twenty miles away, is Black 

 Butte station, on the Union Pacific Railroad, and just back of it the high butte 

 from which it takes its name. To the southwest is Pine Bluffs, a long mountain 

 rising more than two thousand feet above the plain, and clearly visible from Le- 

 clede. Close about the station, which is still a camping-place for emigrants, are 

 low hills, and winding between them is a narrow stream. The water is very 

 strongly alkaline, and bordered at some places by steep and high banks, at 

 others by meadows covered with coarse grass, and not seldom by alkali bogs. 

 This creek flows southward from Leclede across a wide plain which stretches 

 away to the South and Southeast for several miles and ends abruptly at the Bad 

 Lands. The country from Leclede to the Bad Lands is not, strictly speaking, a 

 plain, but a series of broad benches lying one over the other and sloping south- 

 ward at an angle of about four degrees. This bench-formation is, indeed, the 

 most peculiar geological feature of the region, and is best seen from the summit 

 of Black Butte, or from the steep hills that border the railroad at Black Butte 

 station. Standing at either of these places and looking off to the East and 

 South, the variegated strata are visible for many hundred feet in thickness, and 

 as they crop out, one under the other, suggest to the mind the idea of a pack of 

 cards carelessly thrown upon a table. 



The beds exposed at Black Butte station belong to the Lignitic coal- 

 measures, and contain a seam of coal that has in times past been very extensively 

 mined. Over these, some two miles to the eastward, is a bed of sandstone, at 

 the foot of which were observed many slabs covered with deep ripple-marks 



