"A horse," says Mr. Galton, "may be hoppled with a stirrup-leather by placing the middle around one leg, then twisting it several times and buckling it round the other leg. When you wish to picket horses in the middle of a sandy plain, dig a hole two or three feet deep, and, tying your rope to a fagot of sticks or brushwood, or even to a bag filled with sand, bury this in it." For prairie service, horses which have been raised exclusively upon grass, and never been fed on grain, or "_range horses_," as they are called in the West, are decidedly the best, and will perform more hard labor than those that have been stabled and groomed. The large, stout ponies found among some of our frontier settlements are well adapted to this service, and endure admirably. The same remarks hold good in the choice of mules; and it will be found that the square-built, big-bellied, and short-legged Mexican mule will endure far more hard service, on short allowance of forage, than the larger American mule which has been accustomed to grain. In our trip across the Rocky Mountains we had both the American and Mexican mules, and improved a good opportunity of giving their relative powers of endurance a thorough service-trial. For many days they were reduced to a meagre allowance of dry grass, and at length got nothing but pine leaves, while their work in the deep snow was exceedingly severe. This soon told upon the American mules, and all of them, with the exception of two, died, while most of the Mexican mules went through. The result was perfectly conclusive. We found that, where the snow was not more than two feet deep, the animals soon learned to paw it away and get at the grass. Of course they do not get sufficient in this way, but they do much better than one would suppose. In Utah and New Mexico the autumn is so dry that the grass does not lose its nutritious properties by being washed with rains. It gradually dries and cures like hay, so that animals eat it freely, and will fatten upon it even in mid-winter. It is seldom that any grain is fed to stock in either of these territories. Several of the varieties of grass growing upon the slopes of the Rocky Mountains are of excellent quality; among these may be mentioned the Gramma and bunch grasses. Horses and mules turned out to graze always prefer the grass upon the mountain sides to grass of the valleys. We left New Mexico about the first of March, six weeks before the new grass appeared, with 1500 animals, many of them low in flesh, yet they improved upon the journey, and on their arrival in Utah were all, with very few exceptions, in fine working condition. Had this march been made at the same season in the country bordering upon the Missouri River, where there are heavy autumnal rains, the animals would probably have become very poor.