THROUGH WONDERLAND. 
15 
the enterprise of the people, and he is far more interested in the crossing of the 
Missouri river, than in either of the two cities that frown at each other across 
its turbid waters. 
The bridge, by which the railroad is carried across the great river, here 
2,800 feet in breadth, although 3,500 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, is a 
structure of immense strength, and not more substantial than it is graceful. It 
consists of three spans, each of 400 feet, and two approach spans, each of 113 
feet, with a long stretch of strongly built trestle work over the gently sloping 
west bank of the river. 
Here the train runs into Mandan, a pleasant little city, nestling under low 
ranges of hills which encompass it on three sides. This is the terminus of the 
Missouri and Dakota divisions of the road. The change from Central to Mount¬ 
ain time is made at this point, and the west-bound traveler sets his watch back 
one hour. 
The country west of the Missouri river presents an entirely different 
appearance from that through which the tourist has been traveling since he 
entered the Territory at Fargo. It is more diversified ; its numerous streams, 
with handsome groves of cottonwood upon their banks, meandering through 
pleasant valleys, clothed, where still uncultivated, with that nutritious bunch 
grass, which, but a few short years ago, made them the favorite feeding grounds 
of the buffalo. The vast beds of lignite coal that underlie this portion of the 
Territory crop out at various points, twelve car loads being mined daily at Sims, 
35 miles west of Mandan, for shipment by rail. The most important settle¬ 
ments on this division of the road are Gladstone and Dickinson. 
Twenty miles west of the latter town, the line enters the singular and pic¬ 
turesque region known as the Bad Lands of the Little Missouri. For a full 
hour the train pursues its way through scenery of which the whole world is not 
known to afford any counterpart. 
The product of natural forces, still working to the same end, the picture 
that meets the astonished gaze of the traveler, suggests, where it does not 
utterly bewilder, either supernatural agency or the operation of laws whose reign 
has ceased. Reasonable hypotheses all failing, one’s imagination connects the 
weird and mysterious scene with some early geologic epoch when, perchance 
under the brooding darkness of night, the yet plastic earth was tortured by 
some wild spirit of Caprice into the fantastic forms in which we see it to-day. 
But evidences of intelligent design are not altogether wanting, and we turn 
from mounds of wonderful regularity and symmetry of form, standing like 
Egyptian pyramids, to reproductions of the frowning battlements of Gibraltar 
or Ehrenbreitstein, or the dome and towers of some great cathedral. 
Marvelous as they are, however, these forms and outlines excite even less 
astonishment than the wealth of coloring in which they are arrayed. Composed 
largely of clay, solidified by pressure, and converted into terra-cotta by the 
slow combustion of underlying masses of lignite, each dome and pyramid and 
mimic castle is encircled with chromatic bands presenting vivid and startling 
