Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1888-04-21
no! FOR CALEDONIA.
A ltird's-Eye Glance of an Overland rriI
from East to West.

Bird's-Eye Glance of an Overland Trip
from East to West.
In an article published in the New
York School Journai, from the pen of Col.
+. W. Palmer, in which he urges teachers
to come to the National Teachers Conven-
ton at San Francisco, he says:
In the summer of 1885 it was our my
wife and myself good fortune to cross the
Rockies with the Grand Army of the Re-
public on their trip to San Francisco, and
because the journey was so interesting and
instructive, | can emphatically advise all
my fellow teachers, who can possibly rake
and scrape together enough Of the "root of
all evil" to make the trip. There is no
summer school in the land, Saratoga, Mar
tha's Vineyard, or Normal Park, with the
mud pie" attachment not excepted, which
can begin to give teachers so much of pos
itively useful aud actual knowledge for
their sehool-rooms as the grand and won
derful things they can see by wandering
over the primary land mass" of America.
The most learned lectures, the finest ex-
positions of pedagogical truth. sink into
insIgniticance before the lessons, geograph-
ical, geological, botanical, geological and
chronological, that two thousand miles of
prairies, mountains and broad plateaus
have for teachers. Then it is such very
easy thing to do-a comfortable Pullman
or an airy Tourists car, good company,
and, from Chicago, five days of magnificent
panoramas. There is not a tedious nor
uninteresting moment anywhere it is one
continued pleasure that even the heat and
biting alkali of the desert cannot abate.
For seven hundred miles is the rolling
prairie-the erstwhile homes of vast herds
of buffaloes, now opened to the world by
virtue of the iron horse. Then breathe
the pure, bracing air seven thousand feet
above the sea, and behold the prairies run
ming clear to the base of the foothills, be-
yond which glisten the snowy tops of the
glorious Rockies. The prairie close to the
mountains is desert no longer; the skill
of the Western Yankee has changed it
into paradise covered with bountiful
crops, and beautiful thriving cities and
villages. Denver itself, nestled in the
rugged tanks of the buttresses of the great
plateau, is a sight worth the journey to
see. Then over the mountains, by snow
clad peaks, through deep canyons, wind
ing up preeipices, we behold moving
panorama of mountains and tumbling wa
ter, unrolling itself before our never-satis-
fed vision, u succession of beauty and
grandeur, too soon fading.
once thought, at least my old Smiths
geography said, that plateau is high
plain" 1t is plain that the geography
was wrong, for there is very little land in
our Great Basin that can be called plain;
rugged, crumbling mountains, turn where
you will; grand opportunity everywhere
for studying world-building.
Stop day at Salt Lake City, and to the
other ologies" add the study Of sociology.
As for zoology, the prairie dogs, with their
bosom friends the owls, iackrabbits, and
rattlesnakes, gaze at you from their count
less villages as you whirl through the
desert; at least the dogs and owls gaze;
vision. Two days in the Great Basin and
the snow-crowned Sierras delight your
soul. You can stop day in the beautiful
cities of Carson and Reno, or in another
day go to Virginia City and drop down
into the earth 5000 feet One days ride
in a coach from Carson City will take you
up the steep sides of the Sierras to Lake
Tahoe, the most beautiful lake in the wide
world. Joining the Central Pacific again
at Truckee, you slide down the slopes of
mountains, through thirty miles of snow
sheds, past magnificent scenery, into the
lovely valley Of California; lunch at Sac
ramento, and speed away down the valley
to the hospitable city Of Oakland; asteamer
ride Of thirty minutes and you are at the
city of the Golden Gate-San Francisco.