The Union Pacific Railway, westward from Cheyenne in Wyoming,
gradually ascends the slope and crosses the Continental Divide at
Sherman, the pass being elevated eighty-two hundred and forty-five
feet. Here, alongside the track, is the monument erected in memory of
Oakes and Oliver Ames of Massachusetts, to whose efforts the
construction of this pioneer railway across the Continent was largely
due. Upon the western slope of the mountains the descent is to the
Laramie Plains, an elevated plateau in Wyoming which is one of the
best grazing districts of the country. In the midst of the region on
the Big Laramie River is Laramie City, with ten thousand people, a
prominent wool and cattle mart. To the north and west high mountains
rise, out of which the river flows, and in this district is the great
fossil region of Wyoming. This state is the most prolific producer of
the skeletons of the enormous beasts that roamed the earth in
prehistoric times. About ninety miles northwest of Laramie City are
the greatest fossil quarries in existence, and the scientific hunters
from all the great museums have been finding rich treasures there. We
are told that in an early geological period Wyoming had numerous lakes
and swamps and a semi-tropical climate. These huge animals then
inhabited the lakes and swamps in large numbers. In dying, they sank
into the mud, and their bones were covered by other deposits and
became petrified. The extensive deposits of these bones are found
where are supposed to have been the mouths of great water-courses, the
huge animals, after death, having floated to where they are deposited
in such large numbers. The belief is that through the geological eras
these animals became covered with possibly twenty thousand feet of
rock. Afterwards, the process by which the Rocky Mountains were formed
tilted these rock beds, and the subsequent erosion of the strata
brought to light these bone-deposits, made millions of years ago. For
many years the scientists have been exhuming these skeletons, and have
recovered the bones of over three hundred different species. They are
of all sizes and characters, and here has been found the most colossal
animal ever discovered on the earth, a dinosaur, nearly one hundred
and thirty feet long, and thirty-five feet high at the hips and
twenty-five feet at the shoulders. The skeleton of this immense
creature, who is called a diplodocus, weighs twenty tons, and it is
believed that when living he weighed sixty tons, having a neck thirty
feet long and a tail twice that length. Yet his head was very small,
and the weight of the brain was not over five pounds. In comparison
with the mammoth, heretofore regarded as so large, this huge beast,
whose foot covered a square yard of earth, was in size as a horse is
compared to a dog. Such are the contributions Wyoming is making to our
great museums of science.
To the southward of the Laramie Plains is the Colorado North Park,
among the mountains of that State, having an area of over two thousand
square miles. Beyond, the railway route goes westward among hills and
over the plateaus. This route is not as picturesque as some of the
other Pacific railways, but in crossing the Continent it discloses
very curious scenery. At places there are great Buttes, water-worn and
rounded, rising in isolated grandeur; the plains and terraces are
carved into elongated and wide depressions, as if abandoned rivers had
run through them; there are long and regular embankments, strange
hills of fantastic form, huge mounds, broken-down pyramids, vast
stone-piles, and the most strange and extraordinary fashionings of
nature, showing both water and fire to have been at work. Then the
route passes the snow-clad Uintah Mountains to the southward, and
crossing the Wahsatch range, enters Utah, traversing its remarkable
enclosed basin, where the waters have no outlet to the sea, but flow
into salt lakes which lose their surplus supplies by evaporation in
the summer. Beyond, is the wild and picturesque Echo Canyon, with the
green valley of Weber River and the Weber Canyon. Here is the gigantic
Castle Rock, a rugged stone-pile fantastically carved by nature,
having a giant doorway and all the semblance of a mountain fortress.
Here is also the "One Thousand Mile Tree," on the northern side of the
road, being that distance west of Omaha. In the Echo Gorge is the
Hanging Rock, where Brigham Young, as the Mormon Pilgrims journeyed to
their Utah home, is said to have preached the first sermon to them in
the "Promised Land." The old-time emigrant trail passes through these
canyons alongside the railway and the river. A remarkable sight within
the Weber Canyon is the Devil's Slide, where on the face of an almost
perpendicular red mountain, eight hundred feet high, there is inlaid a
brilliantly white strip of limestone about fifteen feet wide, all the
way from top to bottom, having enclosing white walls, the whole work
being as regularly constructed as if built by a stonemason. Beyond, we
come to Ogden, a busy industrial town of twenty thousand people, the
western terminus of the Union Pacific Railway, and having another
railroad leading thirty-seven miles southward to Salt Lake City.