Near the waterless creek was a newly built stage station, known also as Plum Creek. The station formerly on its site had been destroyed by the Indians, one in each of the two preceding years. Such was the history of nearly all the stations along the Platte. A few miles west of Plum Creek, we became satisfied that somewhere along there we should cross the one-hundredth meridian, which had figured prominently in the literature of the day as approximately defining the border of the American desert, beyond which undefined line there was no hope for the agriculturist. Fremont had described the country as "a vast, arid desert, impregnated with salts and alkali." Mr. Holton, in an address before the Scientific Club in Topeka, as late as the year 1880, is reported to have said that, "Commencing at the Rocky Mountains and extending eastward toward the Missouri, and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Northwestern part of the United States, lay the great American desert of thirty years ago," and, he added, "the geographies of that day were right." As I rode from day to day far back upon the uplands, I, too became convinced that they were right. "The stinging grass, the thorny plants, And other prickly tropic glories, The thieving, starved inhabitants Who look so picturesque in stories," about constitute the impression received by one observer. Somewhere along this belt we certainly passed by slow gradation into a still more arid country having an exceedingly scant vegetation, in which the stubby, spiny, prickly types were prominent. The buffalo grass, having a short, rounded blade resembling the needles of a pine tree, and which cured like hay in the dry air, was very nutritious for the stock, but even where it grew, its small brown bunches covered but little of the soil. I have observed, and it is generally conceded, that the eastern prairie grass has of late each year spread westward, because "rain follows the plow." Across that seemingly forbidding expanse, tens of thousands of Mormon emigrants had passed, to reach another desert equally inhospitable, where the "soil was impregnated with salts and alkali." Hundreds of trains had transported the families of gold hunters to California and the Pike's Peak region, and now we were watching the tide of migration still press westward along this trail, but as far as I could discern, not one person of all these voyagers had deigned to pause and leave his impress upon this land. Their pathway was marked only by the bleaching bones of horses and oxen that had perished in thousands by the wayside; and these bones were nearly all that those travelers left behind. This slumbering, inert expanse must slumber on, until some one shall find and develop its springs of life.