The Rocky Mountains are unlike the other great ranges of the world, in having broad, smooth, grassy valleys scattered everywhere among them. Some of these valleys are of very great size, even among the highest mountains, and they are so different from other mountain valleys that they have received a different name; they are generally called parks. This lower group of mountains also, like the great main range, has these lovely natural parks of smaller size. The largest and most beautiful of them all, a mile in width and many miles in length, lies along the eastern side of the great peak; and just where the evening shadow of the mountain falls across the park, shutting off an hour or two of late sunshine, there stands a little lonely log cabin, which is my hermitage. There I am spending a month or two, far away from men, like Robinson Crusoe. I have, to be sure, the company of a horse and a dog, but there is no man—not even a Man Friday; and therefore, as it is not possible for me to talk to any one, I must do a little talking with my pen, and tell what a queer sort of a life I lead. For even in this wilderness I have one great comfort which was denied to poor old Robinson—sometimes, by taking long rides, I can get letters; though, as the post-office is fifty miles away, mail days are very scarce. Still, slowly passed along from ranch to ranch, letters come and go; and so, in time, what I write will reach the railroad and then the outer world. [Illustration] Life in this part of the globe is not always so lonely. On nearly all the rivers and creeks of Wyoming there are ranches scattered at distances of ten or twenty miles apart. On the eastern edge of these mountains, there is a ranch only eight miles away from my hermitage, and there is another in the foot-hills on the western side, not twenty miles away. But now all the ranches are deserted, for the only business in all this region is the raising of cattle, and through the early summer all hands are hard at work on the “round-ups,” which run over the whole breadth of the territory, searching for cattle scattered by the storms of the last winter. Through the cold and the darkness and the deep snows of winter Crusoe-life would, indeed, be rather too hard to bear. Then, there were three of us together in the little cabin, and there were sometimes friendly visits between the men on the distant ranches. But now, alone in the wilderness, twenty miles from any human being, I feel the loneliness less than did we three together in the still, dead winter; for the whole world is alive and beautiful. No one knows, moreover, how much pleasure there is in the friendship of an affectionate dog and an intelligent horse, until he is shut off from all other company, and is obliged to make them his intimate friends. Gip and Monkey, my dog and my horse, spend so many hours of every day exploring the mountains with me, that we have grown to be very faithful friends. [Illustration]