THE MOUNTAIN SNOWS.

line to Denver. The distance from Pond Creek to Denver is 187 miles :
to Santa Fé, by the stage road, it is 402 miles. Both lines pass over
good ground for railroad purposes, and through regions well adapted
to the rearing of stock. I am told that the plains of Colorado are not
adapted to agriculture, except where irrigation is feasible; but as it is
not very long since we were told that this whole region, through a
considerable portion of which our party travelled with great delight,
was an uninhabitable desert, this story about the indispensableness
of irrigation may be of the same kind. For more than four hundred
miles west of the Missouri river, as we can testify, no irrigation is
needed. On the route to Denver, the line of the road will pass through
extensive tracts of excellent pine timber, and over inexhaustible mines
of coal,
THE MOUNTAIN SNOWS.

Hiverything on this side of Denver is very good. There is neither
desert nor difficulty of any kind, but what lies beyond Denver causes
prudent men to pause and consider. Jt seems now to be a settled point
that the Union Pacific Railway, Eastern Division, will be carried through
New Mexico and Arizona to its ultimate and original destination, and not
through the stupendous system or labyrinth of mountains, which
begins at Denver, and ends only on the banks of the Sacramento.
Into the natural gorges of these mountains, and into the deep artificial
cuts required for a railroad, the light, dry snows of that region will
drift in such quantities as to defy all human skill and power to keep
them clear. Hven as late as the first of the present month, as I have
been informed, some of the passes through the mountains, between the
heads of the Platte and the valley of Utah, were still covered with
from ten to twenty feet of snow —not snow which had fallen upon
them, but which had been driven in by the winds, and over which men
and teams were passing as upon solid ground. But locomotives and
trains cannot run upon the top of snow-drifts, and where they are so
enormous, it is certain that they cannot run through them. It is
equally certain that those long, deep, narrow natural gorges or arti-
ficial cuts cannot be kept clear by any muscular or mechanical force
that can be employed for that purpose, for if cleared to-day, they may
be filled again to-morrow. To travel through such a region in the
winter season —and the winter in those mountains is nearly half the
year— would be attended with such frightful peril thet few would
have the hardihood to brave it; for imagine a passenger train caught
in a snow-drift, far from any human habitation, and buried, perchance,
in a few hours, under a snow-bank in which even the train itself would
soon cease to be a distinguishable object.