In the tense, absorbing excitement of our life-and-death-struggle for national existence, events which in calmer times would quicken every pulse, and arrest universal attention, pass all but unnoticed; as historians record that during the battle between Hannibal and the Romans by the Lake Thrasymene, the earth was shaken and upheaved by a great natural convulsion, without attracting the observation of the fierce, eager combatants; or, as Byron tersely phrases it,

'An earthquake rolled unheededly away,'

being regarded, if regarded at all, as one of the incidents of the tremendous collision of Europe with Africa.

When, early in March, 1844, John C. Fremont, with thirty or forty followers, astonished Captain Sutter by dropping down from the Sierra Nevada upon his ranche on the Sacramento, the old Switzer could not have been more completely dumbfounded had he been told that his visitors had just descended from the clouds, than he was by the truthful assurance that they were an exploring party, who had left the United States only ten months before, and had since made their way across the continent. To pass the Sierra in winter had hitherto been deemed an impossibility, and, indeed, the condition of Fremont's surviving beasts of burden—thirty-three out of the sixty-seven with which he started—proved the presumption not far out of the way. To traverse the continent at all, even in summer, on a line stretching due west from the Hudson, the Delaware, or the Potomac, to the Pacific Ocean, was an unattempted feat, whereof the hardships, the dangers, were certain, and the success exceedingly doubtful. A very few parties of daring adventurers had, during several of the six or eight preceding summers, pushed up the Platte from the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains, followed the Sweetwater from the point where the North Platte emerges from the heart of those mountains, running to the northward, and having thus passed through the great central chain of North America (for the Sweetwater heads on the west side of the mountain range, and the South Pass, through which it seeks the Platte, is a broad elevated gap, wherein the face of the country is but moderately rolling, and the trail better than almost any where else), turned abruptly to the north-west, crossed the Green River source of the Colorado, which leads a hundred miles farther north, and soon struck across a mountainous water-shed to the Lewis or Snake branch of the Columbia, which they followed down to the great river of the west, and thus reached the coveted shore of the Pacific,—that Oregon which they had chosen as their future home, mainly because it was, of all possible Eldorados, the farthest and the least accessible. Trappers, hunters, and Indian traders, few in numbers, and generally men of desperate fortunes, who realized that

'The world was not their friend, nor the world's law,'

had, for several decades, penetrated every glen of the Rocky Mountains, and traced every affluent of the great river in quest of their respective prey; but the wild, desolate region watered by the Colorado, the Humboldt, or the streams that are lost in the Great Salt Lake, or some smaller absorbent of the scanty waters of the Great Basin, had never proved attractive to our borderers, and for excellent reasons. It is, as a whole, so arid, so sterile (though its valleys do not lack fertility wherever their latent capacities can be developed by irrigation), and its game is so scanty and worthless, that old Bridger (pioneer of settlers at the military post in northern Utah, now known as Fort Bridger) was probably the only American who had made his home in the Great Basin when Fremont's exploring party first pitched their tents by the border of Great Salt Lake, in September, 1843.

The discovery of gold in California, in the summer of 1847, closely following the military occupation and conquest of that country by the United States, wrought a great and sudden revolution. Of the few Americans in that region prior to 1846, probably nine tenths had rounded Cape Horn to reach it, while the residue had made their way across Mexico or the Isthmus of Darien. It was 'a far coy' at best, and very tedious as well as difficult of attainment. We have in mind an American of decided energy, who, starting from Illinois in May or June, 1840, with a party of adventurers, mainly mounted, reached the mouth of the Columbia, overland, in December, and California, by water, in the course of the winter; and who, starting again for California, via Panama, in the summer of 1847, was nine months in reaching his destination. But the tidings that the shining dross was being and to be picked up by the handful on the tributaries of the Sacramento wrought like magic. Early in 1849, steam-ships were dispatched from New York for Chagres, at the mouth of the river of like name on the Isthmus of Darien, whence crowds of eager gold-seekers made their way across, as they best might, to Panama, being taken in small, worthless boats up the river, so far as its navigation was practicable,—say sixty miles,—and thence, mounted on donkeys or mules, for the residue of the distance, which was perhaps half as far. Short as this portage was, it soon came to be regarded with a terror by no means unjustified. The ascent of the rapid, shallow, tortuous stream was at once difficult and dangerous; the boats were of the rudest construction; the boatmen little better than savages; rains fell incessantly for a good part of each year; the warm, moist, relaxing climate bred fevers in the blood of a considerable percentage of those so suddenly and so utterly exposed to its malarious influences; while the road from Cruces, at the head of navigation, being but a rugged bridle-path at best, was soon worn by incessant travel into the most detestable compound of rock and mire that ever aggravated the miseries of human life. Arrived at quaint, dull old Panama, the early adventurers long awaited with fierce impatience the steamers which were to have anticipated their coming, and been ready to speed them on their way; and many were goaded into taking passage on sailing vessels, which were months in beating up to the Golden Gate against the gentle but persistent breezes from the west and north-west which mainly prevail on that coast. Rarely has human endurance been put to severer tests than in the earlier years of gold-seeking travel by the Isthmus route to California.

The Panama Railroad—commenced in 1850, and finished in 1855, at a total cost of $7,500,000, for a length of forty-seven and a half miles—very considerably reduced the expense, whether in time or money, of the Isthmus transit, diminishing its miseries and perils in still greater proportion. It is one of the noblest achievements, whereof our countrymen are fairly entitled to the full credit. A ship-canal or railroad across the Isthmus had been proposed, and commended, and surveyed for and estimated upon, by French, South American, and other officials and engineers; but the execution of the work was left to our countrymen, and not in vain. Contractor after contractor abandoned the undertaking in despair; hundreds, if not thousands, of laborers—Irish, Chinese, and others—were sacrificed to the deadly miasma of the swamps and tropical jungle which thickly stud the route. But the work was at last completed, and the railroad has now been some six years in constant operation, reducing the average length of the actual transit from a week to two hours, and its expense and peril to an inappreciable quantity. It is a cheering fact that the capitalists who invested their faith and their means in this beneficent enterprise have already had returned to them in dividends the full amount of their outlay, and are now receiving twenty per cent. per annum. Their road has shortened the average Isthmus passage to and from California by at least a full week, and immensely diminished the danger of loss by robbery, accident, or exposure, beside building up a large trade which but for it would have had no existence.

Yet the Isthmus route to California is only by comparison acceptable, even for passengers and goods, while for mails it was at best but endurable. It is nearly twice the length of the direct route from the Atlantic seaboard, while for the residents of the Evart Valley it is intolerably circuitous. A letter mailed at St. Paul for Astoria or Oregon City, or at Omaha for Sacramento, must, under the regimen of the last ten years, be conveyed overland to New York, or by steamboat to New Orleans, where it might have to wait ten or twelve days for an Isthmus steam-ship, making a circuit of twice to thrice the distance by a direct route to its destination. There has been, indeed, for some four years past, a tri-weekly overland mail from St. Louis via New Mexico and Arizona to San Diego, in the extreme south of California,—a route nearly a thousand miles longer than it need or should have been, and evincing a perverse ingenuity in the avoidance not only of Salt Lake and Carson Valley, but even of Santa Fe. This long and mischievous detour—one of the latest of our wholesale sacrifices to Southern jealousy and greed—has at length been definitely abandoned, and, instead of a tri-weekly mail via Elposo and the Gila, together with a weekly by Salt Lake, and a fortnightly or tri-monthly by the Isthmus, we have now one daily mail on the direct overland route from the Missouri, at St. Joseph or Omaha, via the Platte, North Platte, Sweetwater, South Pass, Fort Bridger, Salt Lake, Simpson's route, Carson Valley, and thence across the Sierra Nevada to Placerville and San Francisco, in shorter time than was usually made by way of the Isthmus, at less cost than that of the three mails which it replaces, while the immense advantage of a daily mail each way, over a tri-monthly or even weekly, needs no elucidation. The territories of Colorado, Utah, Nevada, are thus brought into intimate and constant communication with the loyal States, and made to feel the mighty pulsations of the National heart, in this heroic and eventful crisis of the Republic's history.

But this not all, nor the best. The old Congress, among its many wise and beneficent measures, enacted that the government should aid whatever company would for the lowest annual stipend establish and maintain a line of Electric Telegraph from Missouri or Iowa to California. A contract was accordingly made with the Western Union Telegraph Company, under which active operations were commenced last spring, under surveys previously made. The grand train of four hundred men, one hundred great prairie wagons, and six or eight hundred mules or oxen,—a portion of the cattle for the subsistence of the party,—started westward from Omaha, Nebraska, in June last, and on the 4th of July commenced pushing on the construction at the point which it had already reached, some two or three hundred miles further west in the valley of the Platte. It may give to some an idea of the destitution of timber on the great American Desert, to know that the greatest distance over which poles had to be drawn for the elevation of the wires of this telegraph was only 240 miles! Fresh teams were from time to time dispatched on the track of the working carts with additional supplies, and the line was pushed through to Salt Lake City by the 18th of October. Six days afterward, that point was reached by a like party, working eastward from Carson Valley, on behalf of the United Telegraph Companies of California, and the young Hercules by the Pacific vied with the infantile but vigorous territories this side of her in flashing to Washington and New York assurances of their invincible devotion to the indivisible American Union. So great and difficult an enterprise was probably never before so expeditiously and happily achieved in the experience of mankind.

The distance—some 1,500 miles—over which a working line of electric telegraph has thus been constructed and put in operation in the course of a single season is one of the minor obstacles surmounted. The want of timber is far more serious. From the sink of Carson River, less than one hundred miles this side of the Sierra, to the point at which the construction of the line was commenced on the Platte as aforesaid, there is no place at which a tree can fall across the fragile wires; there is probably less timber in sight on that whole sixteen hundred miles than is to-day standing in some single county of New York, Pennsylvania, or Ohio. From the forks of the Platte to the valley of the Sacramento, there is not a stick of growing timber that would make a decent axe-helve, much less a substantial axletree. The Sierra Nevada are heavily though not densely wooded nearly to their summits, but mainly with stately evergreens, including a brittle and worthless live oak; but the tough, enduring hickory, the lithe and springy white ash, the ironwood, beech, and sugar maple, are nowhere to be seen. A low, scrubby cedar and a small, scraggy white pine thinly cover a portion of the hills and low mountains of Utah; the former is shorter than it should be for telegraph poles, but stanch and durable, and is made to do. The detestable cotton-wood, most worthless of trees, yet a great deal better than none, thinly skirts the banks of the Platte and its affluents, in patches that grow more and more scarce as you travel westward, until you only see them 'afar off' on the sides of some of the mountains that enclose the South Pass. The Colorado has a still scantier allowance of this miserable wood; but the cedars meet you as you ascend from its valley to the hills that surround Fort Bridger. Where cotton-wood is used for poles,—and there are hundreds of miles where no other tree is found,—it will have to be replaced very frequently; for it decays rapidly, and has a fancy for twisting itself into all manner of ungainly shapes when cut and exposed to the sun and parching winds of the plains.

Water, next to wood, is the great want of the plains and of the Great Basin. Travel along either base of the Rocky Mountains, and you are constantly meeting joyous, bounding streams, flowing rapidly forth from each ravine and coursing to the arid plain; but follow them a few miles and they begin to diminish in volume, and, unless intercepted by a copious river, often dwindle to nothing. The Republican fork of the Kansas or Kaw River, after a course of some thirty to fifty miles, sinks suddenly into its bed, which thence for twenty miles exhibits nothing but a waste of yellow sand. Of course there are seasons when this bed is covered with water throughout; but I describe what I saw early in June, when a teamster dug eight feet into that sand without finding a drop of the coveted liquid for his thirst-maddened oxen. Two months later, I observed the dry bed stretched several miles farther up and down what in winter is the river. Passing over to Big Sandy, the most northerly tributary of the Arkansas, I found dry sand (often incrusted with some white alkaline deposit) the rule; water the rare exception throughout the twenty or thirty miles of its course nearest its source. At Denver, on the 6th of June, Cherry Creek contributed to the South Platte a volume amply sufficient to run an ordinary grist-mill; ten days afterwards its bed was dry as a doctrinal sermon. My first encampment on the North Platte above Laramie was by a sparkling, dancing stream a yard wide, which could hardly have been forced through a nine-inch ring; but though its current was rapid and the Platte but three miles off, the thirsty earth and air drank up every drop by the way. Big Sandy, Little Sandy and Dry Sandy are the three tributaries to be crossed between South Pass and the Colorado, and the latter justifies its name through the better part of each year. Golden River runs through too deep a narrow valley and bears too strong a current from the snowy peaks in which it heads to be thus dried up; so with Bear, Welso, and the Timpanagos or Jordan, the principal affluents of Salt Lake, which tumble and roar between lofty peaks the greater part of their respective courses; but when you have crossed the Jordan, moving California-ward, you will not find another decent mill-stream for the five hundred miles that you traverse on your direct (Simpson's) route to the sink of the Carson. At intervals which seem very long, you find a spring, a scanty but welcome stream rushing down between two mountains, to be speedily drunk up by the thirsty plain and valley at their base; but you will oftener pass some 'sink' or depression below the general level of the valley you are traversing, where a shrewd guess has led to brackish or sulphurous water by digging two or three feet. A mail station-keeper lost his oxen, at a point a hundred miles south-west of Salt Lake; they had wandered southward on the desert, and he followed their trail for (as he estimated) a hundred miles, without finding a drop of water, when he gave them up, still a day's tramp ahead of him, and turned back to save his own life and that of his suffering horse. He might, I presume, have gone a hundred miles further without finding aught to drink but their blood.

This dearth of wood and water can hardly be realized from any mere description. A life-long denizen of Europe, or of the cis-Alleghany portion of this continent, is so accustomed to the unfailing presence or nearness of trees and springs, or streams, that he naturally supposes them as universal as the air we breathe. In a New Englander's crude conception, trees spring up and grow to stately maturity wherever they are not repressed by constant vigilance and exertion, while brooks and rivers are implied by the existence of hills and valleys, nay, of any land whatever. But as you travel westward with the Missouri, springs, streams, woods, become palpably scarcer and scarcer, until, unless in the immediate valley of the Platte, Arkansas, or some more northerly river that rushes full-fed from a long course among the snow-crowned peaks of the Rocky Mountains, your eye ranges over a vast expanse whereon neither forest, grove, nor even a single tree, is visible. If the country is rolling, springs may at long intervals be found by those who know just where to seek them; but streams are few and scanty, save in winter, and in later summer they disappear almost entirely. Beyond Salt Lake, the destitution of wood in Utah and Nevada is far less than on the Plains, but that of water is even greater. Fifty miles from water to water is the lowest interval in my experience on Simpson's route; but I only traversed the eastern half of it, turning thence abruptly northward to strike the valley of the Humboldt (formerly known as the St. Mary's), which rising in the north-west corner of the new Territory of Nevada, hardly fifty miles from the southern or Lewis branch of the Columbia, flows southward from the Goose Creek Mountains that cradled and nourished it, and thence hardly maintains its volume (which is that of a decent mill stream) in its generally south-west course of three hundred and fifty miles, till it is two thirds lost in a lake and the residue in a reedy slough or sink, a hundred miles from the Sierra Nevada and forty from the similar sink of the Carson, a larger and less impulsive stream which drains a considerable section of the eastern declivity of the Sierra Nevada only to meet this inglorious end. Doubtless, the time has been when a large portion of western Nevada formed one great lake or inland sea, whereof Pyramid and Mud Lakes, and the sinks respectively of the Carson, Walker and Humboldt rivers, are all that the thirsty earth and air have left us. The forty miles of low, flat, naked desert—in part of heavy, wearying sand—that now separates the sink of the Humboldt from that of the Carson, was evidently long under water, and might, to all human perception, have better remained so.

I can not comprehend those who talk of the Plains and the more intensely arid wilds which mainly compose Utah and Nevada becoming a great stock-growing region. Even California, though its climate favors the rapid multiplication and generous growth of cattle and sheep, can never sustain so many animals to the square mile as the colder and more rugged hills of New York and New England, because of the intense protracted drouth of its summers, which suffer no blade of grass to grow throughout the six later months of every year. Animals live and thrive on the dead-ripe herbage of the earlier months; but a large area is soon exhausted by a herd, which must be pastured elsewhere till the winter rains ensure a renewal of vegetation.

But the grasses of the Great Valley and of a large portion of the Plains are exceedingly scanty where they exist at all, so that the teams and herds annually driven across them by emigrants and traders suffer fearfully, and are often decimated by hunger, though they carefully seek out and adhere to the trails whereon feed is least scanty. Many a weary day's journey, even along the valleys of the North Platte and Sweetwater, brings to view too little grass to sustain the life of a moderate herd; those who have traversed the South Pass in June will generally have just escaped starvation, leaving to those that come straggling or tottering after them a very poor feed. The carcasses of dead animals, in every stage of decomposition, thickly stud the great trail from the banks of the Platte westward to the passes of the Sierra Nevada, and, I presume, to the banks of the Columbia, bearing mute but impressive testimony to the chronic inhospitality of the Great American Desert, which is almost everywhere thinly overgrown by worthless shrubs, known to travelers as grease-wood and sage brush;—the former prickly and repellant, but having a waxy or resinous property which renders it useful to emigrants as fuel; the latter affording shelter and subsistence to rabbits and a poor species of grouse known as the 'sage hen,' but utterly worthless to man and to the beasts obedient to his sway.

Yet the daily Overland Mail is an immense, a cheering fact, and the Pacific Telegraph another. A message dispatched from any village blessed with electric wires on poles in the Atlantic States will probably reach its destination in any city or considerable settlement of California or Nevada within a few hours, while every transpiring incident of the war for the Union is directly flashed across the continent to the journals of Sacramento and San Francisco, and will often be devoured by their readers on the evening after its occurrence. The Republic may well be proud of having achieved two such strides in her onward, upward course, in the midst of a great and desolating war, and with confidence implore a God of beneficent justice to hasten the auspicious day when we shall be able to telegraph her children by the far Pacific that her enemies are baffled, vanquished, humbled, and that there opens again before her a long vista of unbroken and honorable peace.