ONE of the most remarkable features of the western country consists in its extensive prairies or savannahs, which prevail in all the vast region between the Alleghany and the Rocky Mountains, and also to the west of the Rocky Mountains. When seen from the summits of the Mexican and the Rocky Mountains, they seem absolutely boundless to the view. They are not to be considered merely as dead flat, but undulating into gentle swelling lawns, and expanding into spacious valleys, in the centre of which is always found a little timber, growing on the banks of the brooks and rivulets of the finest water. Pike, who viewed them from the summit of the Blue Mountain, under the source of the Arkansaw, says, ‘the unbounded prairie was overhung with clouds, which seemed like the ocean in a storm, wave piled on wave, and foaming; while the sky over our heads was perfectly clear, and the prospect was truly sublime.’ In these vast prairies the soil is dry, sandy, with gravel; but the moment we approach a stream, the land becomes more humid, with small timber. It is probable that these steppes or prairies were never well wooded, as, from the earliest ages, the aridity of the soil, having so few water-courses running through it, and these being principally dry in summer, no sufficient nourishment has been afforded to the growth of timber. In all timbered land, the annual discharge of the leaves, with the continual decay of old trees and branches, creates a manure and moisture, which are preserved from the heat――the sun not being permitted to direct his rays perpendicularly, but to shed them only obliquely through the foliage. But in Upper Louisiana, a barren soil, dried up for eight months in the year, presents neither moisture nor nutriment for the growth of wood.