Some of the stream branches took their rise in a series of deep valleys called "parks," lying close within the main range and known to-day as North, Middle, and South parks, with still another below South Park, called San Luis Park, in which heads the Rio Grande. Thus the wide area intervening between the two chief mountain systems, the Rocky and the Sierra, was one of extraordinary topographical diversity, presenting innumerable minor mountain ranges (most of them, like the mother chains, trending northerly and southerly), lines of high cliffs of great length, extensive plateaus, and wonderful gorges like mountain ranges hollowed out and turned upside down below the surface of the earth, gorges so long and so deep as to absolutely and completely separate the areas lying on their opposite sides. East of the Rocky Mountains was the vast prairie land mentioned, while west of the Sierra lay the sunland now known as California, with the moister region of Oregon immediately above it cut in twain by the Columbia rushing triumphantly to the sea. Here too was still another lesser mountain chain, the Coast Range. On the headwaters of the Yellowstone branch of the Missouri was a district of hot springs and geysers, famous now the world round. Here also were the great falls of the Yellowstone and its celebrated canyon, so wonderful in the variety and brilliancy of its colouring, now held, by the wisdom of Congress, for a National Park. Farther south, like a beacon for the Christian pilgrim, there shone aloft, formed in ice and snow, on the topmost slopes of a high peak, the semblance of a perfect cross. The Arkansas, in freeing itself from the mountains, carved through them a long gorge, deep and narrow, of splendid picturesqueness, which later made a highway for the locomotive. Besides the Great Salt Lake there were broad salt lagoons farther south in what is now New Mexico, and in California likewise salt spread itself by tons and tons over the surface of the ground. In Southern Utah were the superb Temples of the Rio Virgen. In the Sierra Nevada was the now celebrated Yosemite, one of the grandest valleys on the globe; and there too stood the largest known trees, patriarchs from a former age, three hundred feet in height, with trunks of enormous circumference—the _Sequoia_. Here also were the redwood forests, scarcely less noble than the _Sequoia_. The vegetation was as varied as the topography. On the prairies of what is now Kansas flourished the sensitive plant, covering the ground with its lovely rose-coloured, rose-scented blossoms, round as a puff-ball, the delicate stems withering at the touch of a human hand, to lift themselves again when the intruder had withdrawn. Farther west the antithesis of this exquisitely sensitive growth, the cactus, spread its defiant lances everywhere, and there it was the human hand and not the plant which withered at the touch. And the cactus was no less beautiful