The scenery of the upper Platte is constantly changing, the river presenting more the appearance of a genuine mountain stream.  Its banks are here and there heavily fringed with timber, rich grass grows luxuriantly in the flat bottoms, and the dark bluffs which bound them form a beautiful background, interspersed occasionally by snow-capped peaks.

In little more than the third of a century the vast area of desert-waste comprising the valley of the Platte, and beyond, has been transmuted by that most effective of civilizers the railroad, into great states.  On the terra incognita there have appeared large cities and towns, whose genesis is a marvel in the history of nations.  Peace has spread her white wings over the bloody sands of the trail, whose sublime silence but a short time since was so often broken by the diabolical whoop of the savage, as he wretched the reeking scalp from the head of his enemy.  Where it required many weeks of dangerous, tedious travel to cross the weary pathway to the mountains, now, in all the luxuriance of modern American railway service, the traveller is whirled along at the rate of fifty miles all hour, and where it required many days for the transmission of news, the events of the whole civilized world, as they hourly occur, are flashed from ocean to ocean in a few seconds.

The islands, bluffs, and isolated peaks of the trail have clustering around them many thrilling legends, stories, and events; some of them reaching far backward into the dim light of tradition; others having happened within the memory of men now living.  All are strangely characteristic of the region, and are as full of poetry and pathos as the epics of ancient Greece, whose stories are the basis of the literature of the world to-day.

Some traveller, who has visited every picturesque spot on both continents, has truthfully said:  “No!  Never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery.”  Nowhere else on the continent is the landscape for such a distance so varied, so distinctly picturesque, beautiful, and sublime, as that which may be viewed from the car windows of the magnificent trains of the Union Pacific Railway.  They swiftly course over almost the identical pathway once followed by the overland stage-coach, the pony express, and the slowly plodding ox caravans in the days when the possibility of a transcontinental trail of steel was regarded as a chimera.

Less than a hundred miles from the Missouri River is the famous Loup Fork of the Platte, once celebrated for the great Pawnee Indian village on its south bank, where, long before the white man encroached upon the beautiful region, that once powerful tribe lived in a sort of barbaric splendour.  This affluent was so named by the early French-Canadian trappers because of the numerous packs of wolves that haunted the region.  Game, consisting of deer, buffalo, antelope, turkeys, and prairie chickens, abounded,