At 9 A.M. on the 16th we arrived at Council Bluffs, and crossed the turbid and furious Missouri in a steam ferry-boat to Omaha in Nebraska.  For many years Council Bluffs was one of the remotest military posts:  to go there was to be banished from the world.  Now it is a town of ten thousand inhabitants, struggling to overtake its rival on the other bank, Omaha, which has sixteen thousand.

Here our baggage was rechecked for Denver, for at Omaha begins the Union Pacific Railroad.  A great road it is, and great are its charges.  On the North-western, as on most others, the charge is about four cents per mile, but the Union Pacific, to which corporation Congress gave the usual land-grant, and more than enough money to build the road, cannot afford to carry you for less than ten.  This may arise from the custom which has prevailed of giving free passes to all Congressmen, governors, editors and other privileged classes, so that, half the passengers paying nothing, the others have to pay double.  Not only are the fares high, but you are charged for extra baggage.  Like the elephant, who can drag a cannon or pick up a pin, this great corporation is able to give free passes to a whole legislature or to charge me twenty-five cents for five pounds of extra baggage.

From Nebraska into Wyoming, and we are nearly out of the United States, though the old flag still flies over us.  The people here talk about going to the “States.”  All the region hereabouts, from the middle of Nebraska, lies in what used to be called by the French Les Mauvaises Terres, or “Bad Lands,” and was eloquently described by Irving in Astoria as the Great American Desert.  “This region,” he writes, “resembles one of the immeasurable steppes of Asia, and spreads forth into undulating and treeless plains and desolate sandy wastes, which are supposed by geologists to have formed the ancient floor of the ocean countless ages ago, when its primeval waves beat against the granite bases of the Rocky Mountains.  It is a land where no man permanently abides, for in certain seasons of the year there is no food either for the hunter or his steed.  The herbage is parched and withered, the streams are dried up, the buffalo, the elk and the deer have wandered to distant parts, leaving behind them a vast, uninhabited solitude.”

But this “land where no man permanently abides” is rapidly being settled, and is found to be rendered very fertile by the simple process of irrigation, which costs less than the manuring of Eastern farms.  So the Great American Desert recedes before the immigrant, and, like the noble savage, is found to be a myth.