"I have been on the plains all the time since early in May till this date (22d of September). There has been much dry weather, but I have not seen one cloudless day--no day on which the sun would rise clear and roll along a canopy of brass to the west. There has always been humidity enough to form clouds at the proper height; and on many days they would be seen defining, by their flat bottoms, the exact line where condensation became sufficient to render the vapor visible. I conclude, from all this, that abundant moisture has floated over the plains to have given us a great deal more rain than would be desirable if it had been precipitated. "Sometimes a storm would be seen to gather near the horizon, and we could see the rain pending from the clouds like a fringe, hanging apparently in mid-air, unable to reach the expectant earth. The rain stage of condensation had been reached above, but the descending shower was re-vaporized apparently, and thus arrested. "These hot winds are not, so far as I have observed, apt to be constant in one place for any considerable length of time; they strike your face suddenly, and perhaps in a minute are gone. They seem to run along in streaks or _ovenfulls_ with the winds of ordinary (but rather high) temperature. They do not begin, I believe, till in July, as a general rule, and are over by September 1, or perhaps by August 15. Their origin I take to be, of course, in heated regions south or southwest of us; but their peculiar occurrence, so capricious and often so brief, I can not explain to myself satisfactorily. "I may remark that this season, since about the 15th of July, in these distant plains, has given us rain enough to make beautifully verdant the spots in the prairie burnt off during the 'heated' term in July. From Kit Carson eastward, the rains have been, I think, exceptionally abundant. All through the summer we have had _dew_ occasionally, and it has been remarked that buffalo meat has been more difficult of preservation than heretofore--facts indicative of humidity in the atmosphere, even where but little rain-fall was witnessed. Turnips sown in August would have made a crop in this vicinity--four hundred and twenty-two miles west of the state line of Missouri," CLIMATIC CHANGES ON THE PLAINS.