[Illustration: AN ORIGINAL AMERICAN. CHIEF OF A DISAPPEARING RACE Copyright by F A Rinehart, Omaha.]
Laramie is the center of a wonderful mineral section; near by are soda lakes large enough to raise all the world’s biscuits for centuries to come.
West of Laramie and fifteen miles away rises Elk Mountain, 11,511 feet high, which by its isolation was a noted landmark in the days of the trail. Northward twenty miles, dark and rugged, is Laramie Peak, another landmark of the Rockies, rising blue and solitary from the plain. Both peaks are visible from the car windows.
Passing beautiful Rock River, we reach Hanna, on the eastern border of the great coal measure of Wyoming. Six thousand people live here, but only half are on the surface at any one time. Between Medicine Bow and Fort Steele, now abandoned but once a celebrated fort, the best views of the Medicine Bow range are to be had. At Fort Steele are hot springs, and we cross again the North Platte River, but at an altitude some four thousand feet higher than the Nebraska crossing.
Rawlins, named after Grant’s Secretary of War, is an important distributing point of three thousand people, whence hunters, miners, and stockmen outfit for the Wind River Valley and other sections north and south. From Rawlins the ascent is made to the Divide, seven thousand one hundred and four feet above sea level, the highest point between Sherman and Ogden. The grades are gentle now, for along here some of the heaviest and most skillful work in the reconstruction of the Overland Route was done.
[Illustration: PASSENGER STATION AND GROUNDS AT CHEYENNE]
The next stop is at Rock Springs, the greatest coal mining town in the West. The town itself has the typical appearance of an active country town, and there is little on the surface to indicate the labyrinthine workings of the great underground measures, part of the vast mineral treasure house of the state. Wyoming is a state of both underground and over-ground industries, with its coal mines, gold mines, copper mines, its great flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, and lastly a newly developed agricultural field of great possibilities.
Green River is a lively railway center with division headquarters. The beautiful river of that name is of clear water, but gains its color from the copper-green shale over which it runs. The wonderfully colored shales give to the rocks that rise above it an added interest to their striking forms. This is the paradise of the geologist. The Green River Shales varying in thickness from a knife’s blade to several feet, are full of fossils, fish, insects, and whatnot of ancient life. In them have been uncovered the skeletons of huge ancient monsters. Agates and other gems are found hereabouts in great variety and quantity.