32 WESTERN INCIDENTS. FROM LAPORTE OVER THE BLACK HILL RANGE. On Tuesday morning, September 25, our party, con- sisting of Mr. Wiliams, General Dodge, Mr. Evans and myself, started from Laporte, fully mounted and equipped as cavalry, and armed to the teeth with breech-loading carbines dangling from our saddles, and revolvers buckled around our waists, accompanied by a supply wagon, in charge of Mr. McLain, one of Mr. Evans’ assistants, in which were our bedding, and such supplies as we would be likely to want on our trip. Our course lay up the valley of the Cache la Poudre a few miles, and then we turned more northerly and fol- lowed up the valley of one of its tributaries, which again led us into the valleys of the Pitchfork, Stonewall, Poisen and Dale Creeks. To the right of us, toward the Plains, were what time had suffered to remain of the rough, jagged crests of the secondary formations as they had rested from the great upheaval of this portion of the earth’s surface, when, dur- ing some former age, Old Vulcan had undoubtedly fallen asleep, and allowed the subterranean fires, which he used in forging those immense iron wedges and other machinery with which he keeps the universe in equili- brium, to attain too great a degree of heat. To the left of us were the higher and more imperish- able debris of these same formations, flanked in the dis- tance by the snow-clad summits of the primeval rocks, which have for so many centuries withstood the combined attacks of time and the elements. The objects of more immediate interest, however, were the “ Stonewall Ca- fon,” with its perpendicular walls of rock several hundred feet in height; and the “Steamboat Butte,” which from a distance presents to view all the characteristics of a