The Sun.
London, England, 1866-04-07 00:00:00

" ACROSS TEE CONTINENT."

From a notice of Across the Continent : A Sum-
mer's Journey to the Rocky Mountains, the Mor-
mons, and the Pacific States, with Speaker Colfax.
By SAMUEL BOWLES, in the new number of the

Anglo-American, we take the subjoined:—

Dr. Livingstone has written of equatorial Africa;
Captain Speke of the Nile ; Mr. Cameron of the
Eastern Archipelago ; and Madame Pfceffer of a
voyage round the world ; but no author, either
English or foreign, has ever produced a book of
travel of more absorbing interest than that now be-
fore us. Mr. Bowles is the editor of a well-known
Massachusetts newspaper. He accompanied Mr.
Colfax,
andto the Speaker of the United States Congress,
a small party of public men in America, on a
tour across from the Atlantic to the
acifi'e, and in this work of 450 pages he gives his
experiences of the trip. The book is certainly a re-
markable
boundless reciosn lisof
rempar.
insight it give— kable not only' for the clear
that immense and almost
charming
easetraversed by the writer, but for the
Republic, bugt of
tells his story. ' grace, and fluency with which he
We knew somethin the greatness of the
acknowledge that -we
American
never expaienced so Profoundwe
thatth wealth, and the
we have done
grlimanitdeddersesotinuryceosf, e undleas
since reading this work.
who desire to know more of their own country, all Americans
as all Englishmen who wish clear country, as well
information re-
garding America, to peruse it. But as it may
come within the reach of all our readers, not
h°cownetray4 avasi Sense
°I the nn-
grand
we propose
to give a few extracts from its pages.
A ride by rail from London to At derdeen, in pept-

land, is considered by Englishmen a rather " good-
ish stretch ;" but Mr. Bowles booked at Boston,
and travelled by rail due west as far as from London
to Aberdeen, and from Aberdeen back to London,
and from London to Aberdeen a second time, and
then when he got out of the railway carriage at
Atchison, Kansas, to stretch his legs and see if he
hadn't got pretty near to the region where the sun
sleeps o' nights, he found his westward journey had
scarcely commenced, and that he had before him a
nice little coach ride of some five times the distance
from London to Aberdeen, and then another long
railway journey—going all the time due west, and
never once passing
beyond the limits of that Repub-
lic over which the " banner of the stars" extends its
broad shield of protection, and its promise of uni-
versal liberty.
Well, now, we ask our English friends in all sin-
cerity, and with no desire to " draw the long bow,"
to think for a moment of America as described by
Mr. Bowles. Leaving Boston, he travelled west
two hundred miles, and there found a city of a mil-
lion inhabitants, and a commerce superior to any on
this earth, except London and Liverpool. He tra-
velled west five hundred miles further, passing large
and populous cities every twenty or thirty miles, till
he came to the great lakes and the city of Buffalo,
which boasts a single street longer and more elegant
than the whole line from the Marble Arch to St.
Paul's. Then he went west nearly a thousand
miles further, and found a spot which, thirty-five
years ago, contained one solitary cabin, but now,
changing as if by enchantment, boasts a population
of two hundred thousand,' streets miles in length,
lined on either side with marble and brown-stone
palaces, an immense and diversified industry, and a
grain trade greater than that of London itself !
He saw mountains which were kings to the Alps,
rivers with their branches navigable inland for seven
thousand miles, prairie meadows a hundred miles
broad, farms as big as all England, auriferous hills
that turn out gold and silver by millions every
year ! Just think of it ! New York, Penn-
sylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colo-
rado, Utah, Nevada, California—ten empires,
each greater in territorial extent than Great
Britain, each lying on his line of route due west,
and each and all only a portion—and comparatively
a small portion--of that splendid heritage which
the Good Father has given to the common work-
ing-men of the New World ! Truly, indeed, says
our author :

" How this Republic, saved, reunited, bound
together as never before, expands under such per-
sonal passage and footstep tread ; how magnificent
its domain ; how far-reaching and uprising its
material, moral, and political possibilities and
promises !"

Mr. Bowles writes earnestly and truthfully, but
also poetically. Here is a beautiful description of
the plains of Nebraska :

"It is too early yet for many of the prairie
flowers ; but the rich, fresh green of the grass satis-
fies the eye. Scattered through it we catch fre-
quent glimpses of the prairie hen, multiplying for
the hunter's harvest in November ; from its bare,
last year's stalks floats out the liquid music of
the larks ; the plover, paired as in Paradise,
never divorced even in this western coun-
try of easy virtue and cheap legislation, bob
up and down their long necks, or flutter their
wide wings in flight at every rod ; little blackbirds
accompany you in great shoals ; a lean, hungry-
looking wolf steals along at a distance with one
eye on you, and the other on the carcase of a horse
or oxs dropped in sickness or fatigue from some
passing train ; away off near the horizon scamper
most daintily and provokingly a half-dozen ante-
lopes—too near for restless palates, too far for wait-
ing rifles ; and over all and illuminating all floats
an atmosphere so pure, so rare, so ethereal, as pic-
tures every object with a pre-Raphaelite distinct-
ness, makes distant things appear near, and sends
the horizon far away in an unbounded stretch of
slightly rounding green earth."
" But I omit one great feature in the constant
landscape—the long trains of waggons and carts,
with their teams of mules and oxen, passing to and
fro on the road, going in empty, coming out laden
with corn for man and beast, with machinery for
the mining regions, with clothing, food, and luxu-
ries for the accumulating populations of Colorado,
Utah, and Montana—for all these territories and
the intermediate populations draw their supplies
from this quarter, and not from the California shore.
The waggons are covered with white cloth ; each is
drawn by four to six pairs of mules or oxen; and the
trains of them stretch frequently from one-quarter
to one-third of a mile each_ A. the:- mo,-., aic nr
in the distance they remind one of the caravans de-
scribed in the Bible and other Eastern books.
Turned out of the road on the green prairie, for
afternoon rest or a night's repose, the waggons
drawn around in a circle, as a sort of barricade
against Indians or protection against storm, and the
animals turned loose to feed, and wandering over
the rounding prairie for a mile-6 cattle upon a
thousand hills ; at night their camp fires burning ;
—in any position, or under any aspect, they pre-
sent a picture most unique and impressive indeed."
And here is something about the Rocky Moun-
tains :

"How the mind runs back to one's youthful,
vague, mythical knowledge of the Rocky Moun-
tains in their actual presence ! How difficult to
realise that, whereas, twenty years ago, they and
their location and character and the region about
them were almost unknown, now, two weeks from
home, I am sporting familiarly under their shadows,
following tediously up their sides, galloping in the
saddle around their summits, drinking from their
streams, playing snow-ball in June with their im-
perishable snow banks, descending into their very
bowels, and finding companionship and society as
various and as cultured and as organised as in New
England ; cities of thousands of inhabitants, not
only at their base, but away up in their narrow
valleys, eight and nine thousand feet above the sea
level ! All this seems dream-like, yet weary head,
and sore feet, and stern statistics testify to the
reality."

Some of the peaks near the city of Denver rise
to a height of upwards of 15,000 feet. And these
are not mere mountains of granite, but actually
mountains of gold and silver :
gg This whole vast range of mountains, that
divides our continent, seems indeed crowded with
veins of rich mineral ore. They run into and
through the hill-sides as the bars of a gridiron—
every hundred feet, every fifty feet, every twenty
feet. There is no end to them in number ; there
is no apparent limit to their depth ; one hundred
feet, three hundred feet, and four hundred feet
have the miners sunk shafts, and did we descend,
but the veins of ore hold their course and their rich-
ness undiminished, oftenest enlarged."