About seventy-five miles above this place, and immediately on the Arkansas River, there is a small settlement, chiefly composed of old trappers and hunters; the male part of it are mostly Americans (Missourians), French Canadians, and Mexicans. It numbers about one hundred and fifty, and of this number about sixty men have wives, and some have two. These wives are of various Indian tribes, as follows; viz. Blackfeet, Assiniboines, Sioux, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, Snakes, and Comanches. The American women are Mormons, a party of Mormons having wintered there, and then departed for California. The old trappers and hunters of the Pueblo fort lived entirely upon game, and a greater part of the year without bread. As soon as their supply of meat was exhausted, they started to the mountains with two or three pack-animals, and brought back in two or three days loads of venison and buffalo. The Arkansas at the Pueblo is a clear, rapid river about a hundred yards wide. The bottom, which is enclosed on each side by high bluffs, is about a quarter of a mile across. In the early days of which I write, the margin of the stream was heavily timbered with cottonwood, and the tourist to-day may see the remnant of the primitive great woods, in the huge isolated trees scattered around the bottom in the vicinity of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad station of the charming mountain city. On each side vast rolling prairies stretch away for hundreds of miles, gradually ascending on the side towards the mountains, where the highlands are sparsely covered with pinyon and cedar. The lofty banks through which the Arkansas occasionally passes are of shale and sandstone, rising precipitously from the water. Ascending the river the country is wild and broken, until it enters the mountain region, where the scenery is incomparably grand and imposing. The surrounding prairies are naturally arid and sterile, producing but little vegetation, and the primitive grass, though of good quality, is thin and scarce. Now, however, under a competent system of irrigation, the whole aspect of the landscape is changed from what it was thirty years ago, and it has all the luxuriance of a garden.