------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: KEPLER’S CASCADE, FIRE-HOLE RIVER.] After making an examination of the petrified and fossil forests, we retraced our way and returned to Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel by the road that leads to Clark’s Fork Mines, a route which I cannot recommend to dyspeptics, for it is worse than a jolting stool. A few hours’ stop at the hotel to arrange our baggage, and we resumed our journey eastward over the Northern Pacific, which thereafter runs through the apparently boundless plains of North Dakota. The road follows the Yellowstone from Livingstone to Glendine, a distance of 175 miles, but there is little diversity in the landscape on the immediate line. Big Horn River intersects the road at Custer City, below which town, twenty miles, on the river, is Fort Custer; and the tragic field upon which Custer and his entire command were slaughtered by the Sioux Indians is only twenty- five miles southeast of the fort. Everything hereabout appears to be a rueful reminder of that terrible 15th of July, 1876, for the name of Custer greets us everywhere we turn until we get beyond Miles City. Between this latter point and the Missouri River are the Bad Lands, extending over a large tract of country that includes both Montana and Dakota, but the formations, while curious, are not nearly so wonderful as those in Wyoming, described in an earlier chapter. Although the mounds, monuments and pillars of earth are less lofty, the district acquires a particular interest from the fact that interspersed among the earthen columns are the erect bodies of petrified trees, scarcely distinguishable, at a little distance, however, from the fantastically eroded monoliths that are disposed like skirmishers over the otherwise level plain. These so-called Bad Lands, which reappear also in South Dakota, are not what the term would seem to signify for the land is not lacking in fertility, being frequently rich with loam, though more often extremely sandy or covered with soft sandstones that have been worn until they are round as cannon-balls. Indeed, Cannon-Ball River, which flows into the Missouri sixty miles south of Bismark, takes its name from the numerous round sandstones that are scattered along its banks. Five miles below is Standing Rock Agency of the Sioux, so called from a sandstone which stands some three feet tall, and by the Sioux is believed to be a petrified squaw. Thus for a considerable distance north and south, as well as east and west, peculiar formations characteristic of the Bad Lands are met with, furnishing proof that this area was once a forest, later a great salt sea, and then a plain, each representing a long period of time. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: