"All hail ye snow-capped mountains! Golden sunbeams smile." We made there, in the South Pass, if I count correctly, our two hundredth camp-fire. There, indeed, with our view, were the mountains; there, among those gray and storm-worn boulders of granite, welled forth the waters--those that flowed not to be lost in the Atlantic, but in the Pacific. That dividing line, that mighty ridge was the "Backbone of the Continent." Indeed, with our first descent, and we were with the West. Pacific Creek would be our next camping spot, and westward its waters would run. From either of these great peaks, the Snowy or Fremont's, how near we might see to the place of our destination. From these summits might we not discern other summits; mountains farther to the west; the ranges whose bases were near to the Inland Sea? Afar away it was over the heights and vales, and yet it brought a message--"You are near the place of rest." "A Buffalo Herd." This sketch could well have preceded several, instead of following, the one that it does. By the Sweetwater and along the reaches of the Platte, there we sighted buffalo. And in Ash Hollow, too, and by La Foche, or the East Boise River, we had seen the shaggy creatures. Here, across a wind-swept level, between two mountain slopes, the buffalo were changing pasture, moving leisurely toward the south. They knew when would come the storms; they knew where better they should be met. Each eye-witness has told, verbally or in print, how a distant herd of buffalo appears. They resemble a grove of low, thick-set trees or bushes. On a distant plain or along a hillside, their rounded forms might be easily mistaken, were it not for the moving, for clustered, sun-browned shrub-oak. Ash Hollow was once a familiar resort for the now rare animal. A traveller once saw there a herd which could scarcely have numbered less than fifty to sixty thousand. So vast were once the herds in the Valley of the Upper Platte, that it would sometimes take several days for one of them to pass a given point. Woe to the small party of emigrants that happened to be in their track--I mean a herd of frightened buffaloes. Annihilation was their fate. The herd that we now looked upon was not so great, yet it was large enough to resemble a moving wood. Slow at first, then with a headlong rush, and then, thank heaven! the herd dashed in another direction than ours.