We swung around the circle of Indiana county friends, the Butterbaughs and Fairbanks, until Monday. Must say I enjoyed the _swing_ very much. Took a long ramble over the bluffs that range east and west, a half mile south of Mr. J. B.'s home. Climbed bluff after bluff, only to come to a jumping off place of from 50 to 100 feet straight down. To peer over these places required a good deal of nerve, but I held tight to the grass or a soap weed stalk, and looked. We climbed to the top of one of the highest, from which we could see across the valley to the Platte river three miles away--the river a mile in width, and the wide valley beyond, to the bluffs that range along its northern bounds. The U.P.R.R. runs on the north side of the river, and Mr. B. says the trains can be seen for forty miles. Plum Creek, twenty miles to the east, is in plain view, the buildings quite distinguishable. Then comes Cozad, Willow Island--almost opposite, and Gothenburg, where the first house was built last February, and now has about twenty. I would add the following from a letter received Dec. 21, '83: Gothenburg has now 40 good buildings, and in the county where but five families lived in the spring of '82, now are 300, and that number is to be more than doubled by spring. But to the bluffs again. To the south, east, and west, it is wave after wave of bluffs covered with buffalo grass; not a tree or bush in sight until we get down into the canyons, which wind around among the hills and bluffs like a grassy stream, without a drop of water, stone or pebble; now it is only a brook in width, now a creek, and almost a river. The pockets that line the canyons are like great chambers, and are of every size, shape and height. A clay like soil they call calcine, in strata from white to reddish brown, forms their walls. They seemed like excellent homes for wild cats, and as we were only armed with a sunflower stalk which we used for a staff (how æsthetic we have grown since coming west!) we did not care to prospect--would much rather look at the deer tracks. The timber in the canyons are ash, elm, hackberry, box elder, and cottonwood, but Mr. B. has to go fifteen miles for wood as it is all taken near him. Wild plums, choke cherries, currants, mountain cranberries, and snow berries grow in wild profusion, and are overrun with grape-vines.