until September no rain fell.  The snows of the mountains furnished the streams with water and the bunch-grass with sufficient dampness to sustain it until July when it became cured and was the food that sustained all animal life on the plains, summer and winter.

I have seen herds of buffalo, hundreds of thousands in number, living off bunch-grass that they obtained by pawing through two feet of snow, on the level.  It was this feature that induced the stocking of immense ranches with cattle.  Buffalo never changed the character of the grass, but herds of cattle did, so that now, on the ranges, very little of the bunch or buffalo grass remains.

Since the building of these roads, it is calculated that the rain belt moves westward at the rate of eight miles a year.  It has now certainly reached the plains of Colorado, and for two years that high and dry state has raised crops without irrigation, right up to the foot of the mountains.

Salt Lake since 1852 has risen nineteen feet, submerging whole farms along its border and threatening the level desert west of it.  It has been a gradual but permanent rise, and comes from the additional moisture falling during the year—­rain and snow.  Professor Agassiz, in 1867, after a visit to Colorado, predicted that this increase of moisture would come by the disturbance of the electric currents, caused by the building of the Pacific railroads and settlement of the country.[75]

It must be admitted, however, that the growth of the once vast supposed relatively sterile region west of the Missouri River is not due in its entirety to the building of railroads, but that the idea of absolute sterility was a mistaken one; without a fertile soil and other possibilities for the advancement of civilization there, railroads would never have been constructed.  The railroads have developed what was inherently not a desert in its most rigid definition, but a misunderstood region, which only awaited the touch of the genius of agriculture, made possible alone by the building of transcontinental highways.

But for the railroads the great central region of the continent would
indeed be a howling wilderness.  As the late Sidney Dillon,
ex-president of the Union Pacific Railroad, wrote in a magazine
article on “The West and the Railroads” in the North American Review
for April, 1891,
        Like many other great truths, this is so well known to the
        older portions of our commonwealth that they have forgotten it;
        and the younger portions do not comprehend or appreciate it. 
        Men are so constituted that they use existing advantages
        as if they had always existed, and were matters of course. 
        The world went without friction matches during thousands of
        years, but people light their fires to-day without a thought
        as