While I was waiting for the Denver coach, and watching the changing scene, a German, with whom I had had some conversation in the railway car for the two previous days, arrived at the coach-office. We were both to start at the same time by stage—he for 1,200 miles over the mountains; I to coast along the mountains to Denver, the point at which I proposed entering them. On meeting him he held out his hand, saying, ‘Well, I see we have both got safe through the night. But,’ he added, ‘I was prepared for them if anyone had meddled with me, I had sixteen bullets ready.’ As he said this, he drew aside his coat to show me his eight-shooting revolver hanging at his back; and then putting his hands into his breeches pockets, took from each a small four-shooter. This gentleman told me that he was doing very well as a stock-keeper in Oregon and Idaho; that he had had Durham cattle driven and carried by rail from New York to these Pacific States, more than 3,000 miles, in which journey, of course, they had crossed the prairies and the Rocky Mountains. He knew all the Pacific coast well, having been in the States of California, Washington, or Oregon; in British Columbia, and in Sitka. Of British Columbia he thought nothing ever could be made, as there was no agricultural land in the colony. At Cariboo everything, even to flour, cost a dollar per pound. The Indians about Sitka were the largest men he had ever seen; few were less than six feet in height or 200 pounds in weight. I never met with one of this description of settlers who belonged to any branch of the Latin race; they are all Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, or Germans. [Sidenote: _In a Coach on the Plains._]