Two miles west of Miles City is Fort Keogh, one of the largest and most beautiful military posts in the United States. It was established in 1877 by Gen. Nelson A. Miles, as a means of holding in check the warlike Sioux. There are but few Indians to be seen now along the line of the railroad, and those are engaged in agricultural and industrial pursuits. The extinction of the buffalo has rendered the Indian much more amenable to the civilizing influences brought to bear upon him than he formerly was, and very fair crops of grain are now being raised at the various agencies. At the Devil's Lake Agency, 60,000 bushels of wheat were raised in 1885, and purchased by the United States Government at $1 per hundred pounds. The Crows, along the northern border of whose reservation--nearly as large as the State of Massachusetts--the road runs for two hundred miles, are said to be the richest nation in the world, in proportion to their numbers, their wealth aggregating $3,500 per head. This, however, is due to the natural increase of their live stock, chiefly ponies, rather than to their own industry and thrift. Out amid the solitudes of the far Northwest--for it must not be supposed that the entire country is a succession of settlements--it is wonderful with what interest the traveler regards that trivial event of daily occurrence, the meeting of the east-bound train. But, as he peers through the car window, or stands out on the platform, in critical survey of its passengers, it probably does not occur to him that he is as much an object of curiosity to them as they are, each of them, to him. He represents the far East of this great continent, they the far West. He, perchance, is making his first trip to the Pacific slope, they theirs to the Great Lakes or the Atlantic coast. Among them, however, may be distinguished merry groups of returning tourists, while, reclining in a luxurious Pullman car, or tempting dyspepsia with the rich and varied dainties of the dining car, may be seen one of the early settlers of California, a weather-beaten pioneer, who reached the Pacific slope by way of the Horn, twenty years ahead of the first transcontinental railway, and now goes east, by the Wonderland route, to revisit the scenes of his childhood. [Illustration: VIEWS OF "OLD FAITHFUL" GEYSER, YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK.] Twenty-nine miles east of Billings, the next divisional terminus and important trading point on the line of the road, the traveler will observe, rising from the right bank of the river, a huge mass of sandstone, interesting as bearing upon its face the name of William Clarke, cut in the rock by the veteran explorer himself, when he visited the locality in 1806. He will, about the same time, be able dimly to descry the peaks of the Big Snow Mountains, which, at first scarcely distinguishable from the fleecy clouds that hang around them, subsequently loom up grandly, constituting one of the most beautiful pieces of scenery in the Northwest.