The valley was strewed for hundreds of miles with the bones of the buffalo, and marked with the still unobliterated basins which showed the spot in which he had rolled himself in the dry sandy soil on coming up out of the water of the Platte. Experience corrects the common error that animal life in any district will be found in proportion to the vigour of its vegetable life. Nowhere is vegetation more vigorous than in the mighty forests of South America and Western Africa, but they are very far from abounding in animal life. On the contrary, vegetable life is poor and scanty in Southern Africa, and nowhere in the world is there so great a number of species and of individuals of the larger quadrupeds. Something similar is observable in the dry valley of the Platte, the obvious requirement being not abundance of vegetation, but enough of that kind of vegetation the animals require, and either that kind of covert, or such an absence of covert, as shall most conduce to their security. [Sidenote: _‘Hardest Place, Sir, on this Continent.’_] Frequently, when I had mentioned my intention of going to the Rocky Mountains by way of Omaha and Denver, I had been cautioned against Shyenne city—‘Sir, it is the hardest place on this continent;’ by which was meant that it contained a choicer collection of hardened villains, and a larger proportion of them to its population, than any other place, and that, in consequence, it was harder there than anywhere else to keep out of a scrape. It is called Shyenne, because nine months before I was there, at which time it had three thousand inhabitants, the Chien or Dog Indians had scalped a white man on what was then the open prairie, but is now the site of the city. Nine months had sufficed for building and peopling the city. City on the Plains may mean a single house. At a place called ‘La Park,’ where there was but one wooden shanty, I heard a gentleman ask its proprietor ‘if anyone was then talking about building a second house in that city?’ Shyenne city is built entirely of wood. There is no company that will insure any goods or houses in the place. What so suddenly called it into existence was the opening of the Pacific Railway to this point. Here, then, everyone coming from the Pacific and Ultramontane States takes the rail for the East, and everyone leaving the rail for one of those States takes his place in one of Wells and Fargo’s coaches. There are therefore people always arriving from both directions, with plenty of money. It is also the natural rendezvous (as there is nothing behind it for five hundred miles back to Omaha) for all those who are employed beyond it in the construction of the railway through the mountains, to spend their money at, and for many too of the gold-washers and gold-miners from the mountains. All these are the birds of passage of the place; but they it is who attract the two classes of permanent inhabitants, if such a word is suitable to any residents in a town only