After all, there is no desert. Within the memory of comparatively young men a third of the territory of the United States beyond the Mississippi bore the name of the "Great American Desert." It was a region vast beyond accurate human conception, in extent as great as half of Europe, midribbed with the stupendous, shaggy bulk of the Rocky Mountains, from which it descended in both directions in illimitable rolling plains and rugged mesas, rising here to the height of snow-crowned mountains, and falling there to the ancient salty beds of lost seas, lower than the level of the ocean. It was rutted by chasms and washes, the channels of rivers that thundered with a passion of water for a single month in the year, and were ash-dry for the other eleven. Some stretched eastward toward the Mississippi, some southward toward the Gulf, and some westward toward the Pacific. It was an empire of wild grandeur, of majestic heights and appalling depths, of silent waste places, of barbaric beauty of coloring, of volcanoes and the titanic work of volcanoes, of fierce wild beasts and wilder men; but it was a desert. Here, for months at a time, no rain came to moisten the parched earth, and there were few clouds to obscure the heat of a blazing sun. The earth became dust and ashes, all but uninhabited and impassable, here grown up to cactus and greasewood and sage, here to gray grass, here to nothing--a place where animals dropped in their tracks from heat and thirst, and shriveled there, undecaying, until their ragged hides crumpled like parchment over their gaunt skeletons. Many a pioneer bound for the El Dorado of California felt the tooth of the desert, and left his bones to whiten on the trail as a dreadful evidence of the rigor of these waste places. This was the Great American Desert, the irreclaimable waste of fifty years ago, the dread-spot of the continent. To-day you may seek it in vain.