"Passing along the Flathead River for a short distance, we entered the valley of the Jocko River. The same general remarks concerning Clark's River Valley are applicable to the Flathead and Bitter Root Valleys. The climate, the valleys, the timber, the soil, the water-powers, all are here, awaiting only the presence of the industrious white man to render to mankind the benefits implanted in them by a beneficent Creator." The entire distance from Lake Superior by the Yellowstone Valley to the tide-waters of the Pacific below the cascades of the Columbia will be about eighteen hundred miles. It is nearly the same distance to Seattle, on Puget Sound, by the Snoqualmie Pass of the Cascade Range. The Union Pacific line has had no serious obstruction from snow since its completion. It has suffered no more than other roads of the country, and its trains have arrived as regularly at Omaha and Sacramento as the trains of the New York Central at Buffalo or Albany. That the Northern Pacific road will be quite as free from snow-blockades will be manifest by a perusal of the following paragraphs from the report of Mr. Roberts:-- "There is evidence enough to show that the line of road on the general route herein described will, in ordinary winters, be much less encumbered with snow where it crosses the mountains than are the passes at more southerly points, which are much more elevated above the sea. The difference of five or six degrees of latitude is more than compensated by the reduced elevation above the sea-level, and the climatic effect of the warm ocean-currents from the equator, already referred to, ameliorating the seasons from the Pacific to the Rocky Mountains. An examination of the profile of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines between Omaha, on the Missouri River, and Sacramento, California, a distance of 1,775 miles, shows that there are four main summits,--Sherman Summit, on the Black Hills, about 550 miles from Omaha, 8,235 feet above the sea; one on the Rocky Mountains, at Aspen Summit, about 935 miles from Omaha, 7,463 feet; one at Humboldt Mountain, about 1,245 miles from Omaha, 6,076 feet; and another on the Sierra Nevada, only 105 miles from the western terminus at Sacramento, 7,062 feet; whilst from a point west of Cheyenne, 520 miles from Omaha, to Wasatch, 970 miles from Omaha, a continuous length of 450 miles, every portion of the graded road is more than 6,000 feet above the sea, being about 1,000 feet on this long distance higher than the highest summit grade on the Northern Pacific Railroad route; whilst for the corresponding distance on the Northern Pacific line the average elevation is under 3,000 feet, or _three thousand feet_ lower than the Sherman Summit on the Pacific line.