I jot these lines literally at Kenosha summit, where we return,
afternoon, and take a long rest, 10,000 feet above sea-level. At
this immense height the South Park stretches fifty miles before me.
Mountainous chains and peaks in every variety of perspective, every hue
of vista, fringe the view, in nearer, or middle, or far-dim distance,
or fade on the horizon. We have now reach'd, penetrated the Rockies,
(Hayden calls it the Front Range,) for a hundred miles or so; and though
these chains spread away in every direction, specially north and south,
thousands and thousands farther, I have seen specimens of the utmost
of them, and know henceforth at least what they are, and what they look
like. Not themselves alone, for they typify stretches and areas of half
the globe--are, in fact, the vertebrae or back-bone of our hemisphere.
As the anatomists say a man is only a spine, topp'd, footed, breasted
and radiated, so the whole Western world is, in a sense, but an
expansion of these mountains. In South America they are the Andes, in
Central America and Mexico the Cordilleras, and in our States they
go under different names--in California the Coast and Cascade
ranges--thence more eastwardly the Sierra Nevadas--but mainly and more
centrally here the Rocky Mountains proper, with many an elevation such
as Lincoln's, Grey's, Harvard's, Yale's, Long's and Pike's peaks, all
over 14,000 feet high. (East, the highest peaks of the Alleghanies, the
Adirondacks, the Catskills, and the White Mountains, range from 2000 to
5500 feet-only Mount Washington, in the latter, 6300 feet.)