54 
GREELY. 
same scale as other States, except as charted in continental 
areas or with countries of the world. It w T ill assist, perhaps, 
m giving some faint relative idea of the extent of the State 
to remark that its extreme western portion, in El Paso county, 
is about 200 miles nearer the Gulf of California than the 
Gulf of Mexico, and that a portion of the Panhandle—a 
local name given to the portion of the State contiguous to 
and north of the 35th parallel of latitude—is nearer to the 
Great Salt Lake of Utah than to the nearest sea water, the 
Gulf of Mexico. It is as far from El Paso to the eastern 
boundary of the State as from New York to Chicago, and as 
far from the extreme northwest corner of the Panhandle to 
the southern border at Brownsville as from Chicago to 
Mobile, Alabama. While Texas has a longer stretch of 
sea-coast than any other State in the Union (California and 
Florida excepted), there are large areas of the State farther 
distant from the ocean than many inland political divisions, 
such as Idaho, Nevada, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio. 
The popular idea marks Texas as a country of plains and 
low elevation, yet about an eighth of the State is more than 
3,000 feet above the level of the sea, while considerable areas 
exceed 6,000 feet. In general, nevertheless, Texas may be 
said to be a prairie country, rising very gently, with occa¬ 
sional interruptions of low ranges of hills, from the ocean 
surface to the 3,000-foot contour line of elevation. West of 
the 101st meridian, however, the Llano Estacado or the Staked 
Plains rise quite sharply from the 3,000-foot line to a nearly 
level plateau having an elevation of about 4,500 feet, and in 
the Trans-Pecos region scattered mountain ranges rise very 
abruptly from an elevation of 4,000 feet to an elevation of 
more than 6,000 feet. So gentle is the rise that, in general, 
the rate does not exceed five or six feet to the mile, while 
even in exceptional cases the average rate from the sea does 
not exceed ten feet per mile. 
With its eleven degrees of latitude and marked contrasts 
of elevation, subjected to the widely dissimilar meteorologi¬ 
cal conditions arising on the one hand from a semi-tropical 
