Beyond the West: containing an account of two years' travel in the other half of our great continent far beyond the old West, on the plains, in the Rocky mountains, and picturesque parks of Colorado. Also, characteristic features of New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho ... Oregon, Utah, Nevada, and ... California, the end of the West ... the great continental railroad, together with the ... most wonderful natural scenery in the world .../ by George W. Pine.

BEYOND THE WEST
pression which this in,st terrible ileiiu in the history
of those times -,made upOn the mind.
Crossing the summit, we were atmonig bare, granite peaks of white, gray and brown. The minjestic
Sierras rear their snrow-capped summits, where king
winter holds his eternal court. Their long sides,
furrowed with dark, deep canyons, through which
bright-glowini)g rivulets leap down the abrupt mountain-sides, carrying to life and nature ill the plain below the tribute of that icy court above. They remind
one of the beautiful conceit of the Spanish poet, that
a brook is the laugh of the mountain.
We pass along amid granite walls on the vast
mountain sides, hundreds of feet above and below
us, some places so upright that from the summit a
stone could have been dropped hundreds of feet upon our heads; while we could look thousands of feet
down the nearly perpendicular side below us.
Among the many objects of grandeur and beauty
which feasted our eyes as we passed down the Pacifice
slope, through the most magnificent forest of pine,
red-wood and firs in the world, we beheld fifteen hundred feet below us a silvery section of the American
River, with delicious green grass sloping down to it
on all sides, with the most perfect symmetry.
As seen through the massive trees, it presented
the rarest picture in a tree-frame of unrivaled ver
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