Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 22.djvu/138



128 S. H. TAYLOR

here with us, but with what intention we know not. We are not afraid of our lives but we find them very annoying. Dur- ing the day we keep our cattle constantly in view, and at night chain them up and keep up a double guard. All do the same but it is impossible to keep their hands off property when they attempt to get it. They will almost steal a horse from under his rider.

We move very slowly, but are gaining upon those ahead of us. It is the wettest season "known to the earliest settlers," and those who have been through in dry seasons can form no conceptions of the difficulties we have had to encounter. Even the road along the Platte, except a few miles along the base of the highlands, is horrible. Last Wednesday we saw many wagons set on the Platte bottoms, and I am sorry to say mine was one of them. We saw a little of the best of the road just before a rain and when it was very dry, and it was the best I ever saw in some respects equal and in others superior to a plank road. There are places where 30,000 loaded wagons have, within five years, passed along a track of not over seven feet in breadth, and there is no rut no depression of one inch below its original level.

The description of this country is generally embodied in the pithy expression that "it can never be settled." The plain. truth is, it is the most splendid country in the world, but with- out timber. From 15 miles this side of the Missouri, to this point, except the river flats, the surface is in fine easy slopes, or levels, and the soil cannot be excelled. From here back to Elkhorn, 60 miles, there is no timber but the cottonwood groves of the Platte, and that away in the midst of a wet valley from 8 to 15 miles wide. We traversed the banks of the Elkhorn 10 miles, and saw its valley 20 miles more, and it is to that extent skirted with noble cottonwoods, and its hillsides on the east are covered with grand old burr oaks. East of that stream, as we rise to its highlands, the country lies, how far back we know not, in the finest slopes and valleys. No man ever saw a more beautiful region, or one better adapted to