We passed various other encampments of Indians, and far from any encampment or habitation saw an Indian on the track carrying a small light bundle, and following him a long way behind was his squaw, labouring under a very heavy burden.

During this day we ran through ranges of uneven mountains, rising one above another in broken undulations and with ever-varying tops, such as table lands, sharp conical peaks, rounded heads, and broken indentations.

The distant mountains are enveloped in snow, upon which gleams a resplendent setting sun, presenting a prospect which only such a region could produce.  From the dazzling whiteness of one range we look upon the dense darkness of another, as being out of the sun’s influence.  The lights and shades, the gorges, the fissures, the striations in the range upon range, with their intervals of plains and valleys, here and there opening up peeps of great tracts of country, and then again shutting all in to the circumference of their gigantic heads, interspersed with the brilliance of rich gold, tingeing some tops and revealing dark recesses, some ruby tints and fantastic shadows,—­all combine to reflect a glory which lifts the mind beyond the great heights of hills to a height, greater still, whence originated all natural grandeur.

We had run through Utah and Nevada, and were now approaching the northern part of California.  In the very early morning of December 6th I awoke and found that the train was at a standstill.  Thinking that we were at a station I tried to sleep again, but, finding that we continued motionless, I went out on to the platform connecting our car with the next and found all around was deep snow, and that another train on the other metals had broken down, and that our men were apparently helping to get it off.  We were then two miles from Truckee, and at an elevation of nearly 6,000 feet.  After a long delay we got away and ran into Truckee.  The scenery on this day was also of a truly grand character:  precipices, declivities, chasms; and in one very romantic spot, of weird and wild mountain sides, graduating to narrow gullies, with pine and other trees, some perfect, others broken by the wind was one great wreck of a forest monster—­a tree rudely snapped asunder by wind or lightning, about 40 feet from the ground, and stripped of every branch, so that it looked like a broken column; on its top sat a great vulture in the well-known attitude of its kind, as motionless as rock, and apparently meditating on the incongruity of a noisy, vulgar bit of machinery, with its train of cars, invading such a nook of Nature’s solitudes.