We passed through the fertile plain of Bozzeman, where we obtained a fine view of the Rocky Mountains, south of us. Their lofty peaks, tipped with snow, are probably eighty miles distant. It could not have been very far from this neighbourhood that the sons of De la Verendrye first looked upon the mountain heights as they ascended a branch of the Missouri. At Bozzeman we prepared for another ascent and pass over a temporary track until the Bozzeman tunnel is completed. It will be 4,500 feet long and 5,572 feet above tide level. There is a marked contrast in the character of the heights at Bozzeman to those of Mullan. The latter are wooded, whereas the former are bare, with only a few small bushes. The Bozzeman tunnel, although only through a spur of the Rocky Mountain chain, is a few yards more elevated than the Mullan tunnel through the main divide. At Livingstone we are in the Yellowstone Valley, eight hundred and eighty miles from Portland. We followed the Yellowstone for three hundred and forty miles. Yellowstone park is sixty miles to the south, and a railway leads to it from this point. We can see the mountains of the National park in the distance, grand, lofty and striking, recalling some portion of the Selkirk range. I saw nothing on the Northern Pacific Railway except this distant view, to equal the mountains on our Canadian line. We cross the Yellowstone River, about one hundred and fifty feet wide, and which takes its rise in Yellowstone Lake, one hundred miles south of us. At Livingstone we enter a prairie country which we follow in our journey eastward for twenty degrees of longitude. As we pass over the two water sheds, between five and six thousand feet above the sea, we form the impression that there is abundance of moisture at this elevation. We are now, however in comparatively low ground, and the district generally is evidently dry, if not to some extent rainless. Possibly the mountains intercept the vapour-bearing clouds, or drive them into the higher regions. The maps show that there are spurs of the Rocky Mountains continuing to the north and south of the Yellowstone Valley for a long distance east of the main range, but all of them are too distant from our point of vision or too low to appear above the horizon. The railway follows the general direction of the river, sometimes along its banks, and at no place at any great distance from it. The soil on the bottom lands is loam or clay with a gravelly sub-soil. The grass is dry and thin, but preparations for irrigation on a considerable scale have been undertaken west of Billings’ station, one hundred and fifteen miles east of Livingstone. By this means the lowlands adjacent to the river will be brought under cultivation. Beyond the immediate valley itself, in which irrigation is practicable the ground must remain much as it now is. East of Billings we meet the same arid country, with scanty herbage and a few scattered trees of small size along the river’s edge.