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 we emptied our rubber clothes sacks, filled them with water, hauled hay, which we had cured, to feed our mules, and made the trip as pleasantly as if upon green sod. The lack of water on this wide desert had left many thousand bones of dead animals bleaching upon its wastes. Many wells had been dug in various places and we tested the water in them and found it intensely salt. The entire space is evidently the bed of a salt sea.

In the long reaches where no trees of any kind grow, the entire dependence of the early pioneer for fire was upon buffalo chips, the animal charcoal of the plains. It makes a good fire and is in no way offensive. And if no iron horse had invaded the plains, buffalo chips would be selling all along the route to-day at forty dollars per ton.

One of the pleasant historical events in which our company naturally takes a pride is, that one night we camped upon a little mountain stream near where the city of Denver now stands; the whole land as wild as nature made it. Many years afterward one of the little band, Frank Denver, was elected Lieutenant-Governor of Colorado, and Gen. J. W. Denver was among the most prominent politicians of the coast, and the city of Denver was named in honor of them. I 304 have thus, as concisely as I could, sketched life as it was in a wagon journey