The distance--some 1,500 miles--over which a working line of electric telegraph has thus been constructed and put in operation in the course of a single season is one of the minor obstacles surmounted. The want of timber is far more serious. From the sink of Carson River, less than one hundred miles this side of the Sierra, to the point at which the construction of the line was commenced on the Platte as aforesaid, there is no place at which a tree can fall across the fragile wires; there is probably less timber in sight on that whole sixteen hundred miles than is to-day standing in some single county of New York, Pennsylvania, or Ohio. From the forks of the Platte to the valley of the Sacramento, there is not a stick of growing timber that would make a decent axe-helve, much less a substantial axletree. The Sierra Nevada are heavily though not densely wooded nearly to their summits, but mainly with stately evergreens, including a brittle and worthless live oak; but the tough, enduring hickory, the lithe and springy white ash, the ironwood, beech, and sugar maple, are nowhere to be seen. A low, scrubby cedar and a small, scraggy white pine thinly cover a portion of the hills and low mountains of Utah; the former is shorter than it should be for telegraph poles, but stanch and durable, and is made to do. The detestable cotton-wood, most worthless of trees, yet a great deal better than none, thinly skirts the banks of the Platte and its affluents, in patches that grow more and more scarce as you travel westward, until you only see them 'afar off' on the sides of some of the mountains that enclose the South Pass. The Colorado has a still scantier allowance of this miserable wood; but the cedars meet you as you ascend from its valley to the hills that surround Fort Bridger. Where cotton-wood is used for poles,--and there are hundreds of miles where no other tree is found,--it will have to be replaced very frequently; for it decays rapidly, and has a fancy for twisting itself into all manner of ungainly shapes when cut and exposed to the sun and parching winds of the plains.