Wood River, my next resting-place, is a township in Hall County with a population not exceeding one thousand. On the following day good headway was made, but I could find no better accommodation for the night than at a Pawnee camp. On the succeeding night, after a hard day's ride, I stopped at Plum Creek, two hundred and thirty miles west of Omaha, and was accommodated at the Plum Creek House. A bridge spans the Platte River at this point. The population was only three hundred, but a weekly paper had been started and was well supported. The next evening, the McPherson House, McPherson, received me and my mustang and treated us hospitably. Then followed North Platte, one hundred and thirty-seven miles from Grand Island, where I lodged for the night at a private house, the home of a pioneer. The repair shops of the Union Pacific Railroad were located here; also a bank and two enterprising newspapers. The population of the township was nearly three thousand. At Sidney, which is a military post, I stopped at the Railroad Hotel. Sheep-farming is a leading industry of Sidney and its vicinity. My last stopping-place in Nebraska was at Evans Ranche, Antelope, a small village on the Elk Horn River. Crossing the boundary into Wyoming Territory and reaching Cheyenne, I made my entrance into this most interesting region--a great plateau of nearly 100,000 square miles, its lowest level 3,543 feet, its highest altitude more than 13,000 feet above the sea. Some one has said that it seems "a highway, laid out by the 'Great Intelligence,' in the latitude most favorable, at all seasons, for great migrations to the shores of the Pacific." Shales bearing petroleum, iron, limestone, soda, sulphur, mica, copper, lead, silver and gold, are all there for the taking. There, volcanoes are still at work. There, great mountains, great canyons, and great cataracts make the face of Nature sublime. There, in past centuries, "at some period anterior to the history of existing aboriginal races," lived a mysterious, to us unknown people, traces of whom we still find in neatly finished stratite vessels, "knives, scrapers, and sinkers for fish lines made of volcanic sandstone or of green-veined marble. Such is the tract of territory called Wyoming." [Illustration: PLUM CREEK, NEBRASKA.] Beginning at the southeast corner of this tract, we encounter, not far from the boundary, a semi-circular range, about 2,000 feet above the general level, known as Laramie Hills. The north branch of the Platte, coming from the south, sweeps in a long curve about it; and just at the base of this Laramie range nestles the so-called "Magic City," Cheyenne, the capital of Wyoming. White men first explored this region in 1743, and in 1744, when Sieur de la Verendrye and his sons came down from Canada, lured by the then unexplored Rocky Mountains. But the region was fearfully wild. Not only was the face of Nature most strange, but the whole tract was overrun by belligerent savages.