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In the clear air the snow-covered peaks of the Panamint Range began to be visible, although one hundred miles away. The weary emigrants believed that these peaks belonged to the Sierra Nevadas, and that beyond them lay the green valleys of California. How great was their mistake!
And when at last they reached the Humboldt River itself, they found it almost impossible to ford. The best feed lay on the other side. In the distance the high and forbidding ramparts of the Sierra Nevadas reared themselves.
"In addition to this Pride-of-the-World-Park, the people shall also demand, that all of the most available portions of the mountains of the Pacific Coast Range, the Sierra Nevadas, the Alleghenies, the Adirondacks and the White Mountains, shall be reserved by the government, and set apart for the same uses and purposes.
We dismounted and drove the horses down a bridle-path which I think was fully as crooked as a corkscrew, which I know to be as steep as the downward sweep of a rainbow, and which I believe to be the worst piece of road in the geography, except one in the Sandwich Islands, which I remember painfully, and possibly one or two mountain trails in the Sierra Nevadas.
The next mode of interment to be considered is that of cairn or rock burial, which has prevailed and is still common to a considerable extent among the tribes living in the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas. In the summer of 1872 the writer visited one of these rock cemeteries in middle Utah, which had been used for a period not exceeding fifteen or twenty years.
In South America they are the Andes, in Central America and Mexico the Cordilleras, and in our States they go under different names in California the Coast and Cascade ranges thence more eastwardly the Sierra Nevadas but mainly and more centrally here the Rocky Mountains proper, with many an elevation such as Lincoln's, Grey's, Harvard's, Yale's, Long's and Pike's peaks, all over 14,000 feet high.
Tilted blocks on a larger scale and much more deeply carved by erosion are found in the lofty St. Elias Mountain of Alaska, where much of the erosion has been done by some of the world's greatest glaciers. The western slope of the Wasatch Mountains facing the desert of Utah is the wall of a huge fracture, as is the eastern face of the Sierra Nevadas facing the deserts of Nevada.
In another portion of this work will be found descriptions of the cities of Cuba, and brief mention here of some of the beauties of the country may not be amiss. One of the grandest bits of scenery in the known world is to be found in the valley of the Yumuri, rivaling in sublimity the far- famed Lookout Mountain view and the Yosemite of the Sierra Nevadas.
Tamal-Pyweack Wall-of-Shining-Rocks is an Indian name for the Rocky Mountains. Backbone-of-the-World is another. The Country of the Dry Washes is between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas, toward the south. A dry wash is the bed of a river that runs only in the rainy season. As such rivers usually run very swiftly, they make great ragged gashes across a country.
The Elburz Mountains are a portion of the great water-shed of Central Asia, extending from the Himalayas up through Afghanistan and Persia into the Caucasus, and they perform very much the same office for the Caspian slope of Persia, as the Sierra Nevadas do for the Pacific slope of California, inasmuch as they cause the moisture-laden clouds rolling in from the sea to empty their burthens on the seaward, slopes instead of penetrating farther into the interior.
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