left Cincinnati, the ‘Magnolia’ steamer blew up, and more than eighty lives were lost. About the same time some terrific railway accidents occurred; but, as far as I could judge, no one seemed to think that on these occasions blame could attach to anyone. [Sidenote: _Prairie Fires._] At a distance of about sixty miles from Omaha, on the second night of my journeying through the prairie, I saw it on fire. It was on the right-hand side to one going westward, and did not reach up to the rails within a mile or two. The front of the fire, as we passed along it, was a line of five or six miles. The flames had not an uniform appearance. In slight depressions, where moisture hung longer, and therefore the grass and prairie plants were thick and high, the flames rose about fifteen feet; but where the blazing had subsided, the smouldering remains of plants that had more substance than the rest, appeared like rows of stars. There was smoke visible only where there was much flame, and the lazy masses of smoke were illuminated by the glare of the flames beneath. As in one place there was something burning above the general level, we supposed that it was the dwelling-house of some prairie settler that was being destroyed. I also, during four days, saw the pine and poplar forest, on the mountain above the town of Boulder, on fire. I was not so near to this as I had been to the prairie fire; but it did not strike me, judging however from a distance, that its effects were grander. There seemed a great deal more smoke than flame, which streamed off down the wind like large bodies of cloud. I heard, however, that sometimes the appearance of the forest burning on the mountains was very grand. I observed, wherever I penetrated into the Rocky Mountains, that a great part of the wood had been destroyed in this way. The fire generally occurs through the carelessness of persons who are camping out. The waste of valuable timber is thus enormous. As one passes over the prairie, the conviction becomes irresistible that fire is the sole cause of the absence of trees. The prairie was once covered with trees, because when fire is kept off by cultivation, and the earth loosened by the plough, so as to admit light and air to a greater depth than before, young trees at once appear. Of course the parent trees must, at some time or other, have grown on the spot. All the seeds that were sufficiently near the undisturbed surface to germinate had germinated, and the young plants that issued from them had been destroyed by fire. Those seeds which chance had buried more deeply waited for the aid of man to give proof of their presence in the soil. [Sidenote: _Animal Life on the Plains._]