Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Our Barren Lands: The Interior of the United States, West of the One Hundredth Meridian and East of the Sierra Nevadas
The region of country, about which this paper is writ ten, lies between the 100th meridian on the east, the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the west, with British America for its northern border, and Mexico on the south. It is a vast section of country, thousands of miles in extent. These wide plains, mountains, and valleys, for many years, have been the subject, sometimes of romantic interest, always of more or less of mystery, and later of various specula ti'on's.
The early maps condemned it, for the most part, as an arid desert, and the adventurous traveler who wandered beyond the line of civilization, was warned, that even should he not encounter the savage Indians, hunger and thirst and death accompanied his every step.
Until the discovery of gold on the Pacific coast, very few civilized men were so hardy as to venture across this land, known only as desolate. And when expeditions were undertaken - like those of Lewis and Clarke, in the beginning of the century, and, later, of Fremont and oth ers - the explorers who escaped those dangers, and told of their discoveries, gained world-wide celebrity. When that illusive struggle for wealth, in the search for gold, began, thousands of men attempted that perilous passage across the plains. In the following years, a ghastly spectacle of bleaching bones of men and animals marked a roadway from the settlements to the mountains. The burning sun cracked and parched the earth; the merciless snow-storms, the arctic cold, did a work of death whose story has never yet been told.
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