We had passed some snow in the night, which had been very cold, but there was very little at Larimore, a considerable town; there was a high, raw wind during the day, and a temperature of about 10° above, which heavily frosted the car windows. At Devil’s Lake (a body of brackish water twenty-eight miles long) is a settlement three years old, and from this and two insignificant stations beyond were shipped, in 1887, 1,500,000 bushels of wheat. The country beyond is slightly rolling, fine land, has much wheat, little houses scattered about, some stock, very promising altogether. Minot, where we crossed the Mouse River the second time, is a village of 700 people, with several brick houses and plenty of saloons. Thence we ran up to a plateau some three hundred feet higher than the Mouse River Valley, and found a land more broken, and interspersed with rocky land and bowlders—the only touch of “bad lands” I recall on the route. We crossed several small streams, White Earth, Sandy, Little Muddy, and Muddy, and before reaching Williston descended into the valley of the Missouri, reached Fort Buford, where the Yellowstone comes in, entered what is called Paradise Valley, and continued parallel with the Missouri as far as the mouth of Milk River. Before reaching this we crossed the Big Muddy and the Poplar rivers, both rising in Canada. At Poplar Station is a large Indian agency, and hundreds of Teton Sioux Indians (I was told 1800) camped there in their conical tepees. I climbed the plateau above the station where the Indians bury their dead, wrapping the bodies in blankets and buffalo-robes, and suspending them aloft on crossbars supported by stakes, to keep them from the wolves. Beyond Assiniboin I saw a platform in a cottonwood-tree on which reposed the remains of a chief and his family. This country is all good, so far as I could see and learn. It gave me a sense of geographical deficiency in my education to travel three hundred miles on a river I had never heard of before. But it happened on the Milk River, a considerable but not navigable stream, although some six hundred miles long. The broad Milk River Valley is in itself an empire of excellent land, ready for the plough and the wheat-sower. Judging by the grass (which cures into the most nutritious feed as it stands), there had been no lack of rain during the summer; but if there is lack of water, all the land can be irrigated by the Milk River, and it may also be said of the country beyond to Great Falls that frequent streams make irrigation easy, if there is scant rainfall. I should say that this would be the only question about water.