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are many associations for mining purposes, composed entirely of English or Scotch capitalists, employing almost exclusively British miners, and having their principal offices in London. In Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Texas, there are also British associations engaged in the stock business. In Utah, where almost three-fourths of the population are Mormons, and most of them believe in polygamy, while several thousands of them actually practice it, the Mormon immigration is almost wholly from Great Britain, though a small number come from the Scandinavian countries. As most of these immigrants are practical polygamists, our Government has recently sought to restrain the influx of such open violators of our laws. In New Mexico the greater part of the inhabitants, certainly nine-tenths, including both the original inhabitants and the immigrants, are nominally or really members of the Roman Catholic Church. The policy of our Government is, and has always been, opposed to the entire control of a State or Territory by one sect or denom ination alone, inasmuch as perfect freedom of conscience, except where it violates the rights of others, is the cardinal principle of our national Constitution. Where one sect is largely dominant in a State or Territory, the rights of the minority are almost invariably invaded. In Utah this predominance involves also the practice of polygamy, which is an added violation of our national laws; and in New Mexico the school moneys derived from the sale of school lands have been misdirected by the Jesuits and other religious orders, who have the entire control of education there, not only to the payment of teachers of theology in Roman Catholic seminaries, but to the payment of the board of students of theology.

So far as colonies of Roman Catholics are concerned, they are perfectly right and proper, and very considerable settlements have been organized under the auspices of bishops and archbishops, in Dakota, Nebraska, Texas and Oregon, and perhaps in some other States and Territories. No objection is made to the organization of Mormon colonies, provided they obey the laws; and, as a matter of fact, the Mormons have planted large colonies in Idaho, and smaller ones in Colorado and Arizona.

In a few instances colonies of American Protestant denominations have settled in a single township, and have done well. There are Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist and possibly Baptist colonies of this sort. Generally, however, our American colonists prefer a diversity of religious beliefs in their settlements.

Recently, two methods of settlement and improvement of lands have been adopted. They are both of doubtful expediency, so far as the future of the States and Territories is concerned, though of great present profit and success in the development of new regions. The first method has been largely practised in California, and is coming into vogue in the newer States and Territories. A capitalist, usually, though not always, a practical farmer, stock-raiser or mining operator, or sometimes an association of capitalists, acting by their superintendent or general manager, purchases a large tract of land, often many thousands of acres, adapted to his purpose, whether of raising grain, wine-making, stock or wool-growing, or mining, erects the necessary buildings, and procures the best and latest machinery for his purpose, and hires his laborers, who may be the poorer classes of foreigners, Mexicans, Indians, or Chinese, and works his estate exclusively, or almost exclusively, with such labor, his machinery or steamdriven agricultural implements supplying the place of very large numbers of laborers. If he is a farmer, and in the smooth prairie lands, he breaks up the soil with his gangs of steamplows, or an army of plowing machines each drawn by four horses or mules; sows his wheat or other grains with steam or four-horse drills; irrigates his lands, if irrigation is necessary, by water raised from an artesian well, by steam or wind-power; reaps, gathers and binds or more expeditiously still, clips off the heads of the grain and deposits them in an accompanying wagon by bushels, whence they are transferred by a chute to the threshingmachine, which threshes, winnows, separates and sacks the grain with little human intervention. When the market is at its highest point, he sends to it his hundred thousand or two hundred thousand bushels of wheat, his oats, barley, and corn in nearly equal amounts, and employing cheap labor, his net profits on a single year's crops may be reckoned by the hundred

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thousand dollars, though his cultivation may be less thorough, and the yield per acre smaller, than on smaller and more carefully tilled farms. All this is very well for the capitalist, and equally well for the exporter of grain; but it is not so well for the State or Territory, nor for its permanent and successful development. These large estates prevent the formation of villages and towns, and the establishment of primary and grammar schools; encourage absenteeism, and tend to the establishment of a privileged and oligarchical class; and in the not distant future, when the public lands and the railroad lands are all sold, will bring about a condition of things such as now exists in Great Britain, and sooner than there, because the cultivation is more superficial and the land, skinned for present crops, will soon lose its fertility. It is a significant fact in this connection, that on the great "Dalrymple farm" in Northern Dakota, with its more than 30,000 acres in grain, the yield per acre is much less than that of adjacent small farms, and that the yield per acre diminishes with each successive crop, though the land is the best in the Red River valley.

The great cattle and sheep ranches are in some respects still more objectionable, inasmuch as the herdsman's life has a strong tendency towards a condition of semi-civilization. The owner of these immense flocks and herds may be, indeed, like the Oriental patriarchs, a man of culture and refinement, a poet or historian, a king among men, and may surround his children with all the luxuries of civilization; but his herdsmen or shepherds, without opportunities of education, and far from civilizing influences, will, in the course of time, become mere boors and hinds. In the wasteful methods of stock-raising in these regions, it is estimated that it requires fifty acres of the mountain pasturage to feed a single steer, and where the herd amounts, as it not unfrequently does, to 4,000 or 5,000 head, it may require a whole county to furnish them with sufficient pasture. This isolated life inevitably leads to results, directly opposed to the whole genius of our institutions. In the sale of the public lands, the policy of the government has been, to have the holdings small, and the settlers within such neighborhood to each other, that schools, churches, and villages, could be maintained; this

has been, to some extent, also the policy of the land-grant railroads, though those holding large grants have too often departed from it; but the pressure to sell large quantities of grazing lands, and in some instances farming lands also, has been so great, that the government officers and the railroad officials have too often yielded to it. In Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and California, the old Spanish and Mexican land-laws have prevailed, under which a square league of land was about the smallest parcel put upon the market, and from six to thirty leagues not an uncommon purchase. California is already suffering from these immense estates.

Another plan now prevailing to some extent, especially among the English middle classes, people of fixed incomes which terminate with their lives, is perhaps less objectionable though tending in the same direction. These people, younger sons of the nobility or gentry, retired army or navy, officers, clergymen or their families, civil servants, etc., come to the western country and purchase one or two quarter sections or more, have then broken up, and perhaps a log-house or sod-house built, and let them, the first year for half the crop, and in the years that follow for $1.25 to $1.50 per acre. If their means are sufficient, they repeat this process, every year, till they have 2,500 or 3,000 acres leased in this way, and this gives them a comfortable. annual income. This is less objectionable than the purchase of large tracts, because these quarter sections need not be contiguous, and there will thus be an opportunity for sufficiently close settlement to permit the establishment of good schools and villages; and these land-holders may sell their improved farms, at prices which will permit them to make still larger investments; but there is a strong tendency, in the process, toward the formation of a landed aristocracy.

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CHAPTER VIII.

VARIETY OF Soils and Surface-GeograPHY AND GEOGnosy-Soils-GEOLOGY -CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS-VOLCANIC REMAINS OF THE YELLOWSTONE COUNTRY-THE GEYSERS-THE VICINITY OF SALT LAKEPROFESSOR GEIKIE'S SUMMARY OF THE GEOLOGY OF THE Central Region— MINERALOGY.

THE variety of soils in this vast region is almost infinite, and in this chapter we can only glance at the principal causes which lead to such diversity. There are nearly 2,000 miles of coast, washed by the ocean and gulf on the Pacific and in Texas, upon all of which has been cast by the waves, sand and alluvium to a greater or less breadth, for thousands of years. The very heavy rains on the west coast and the western slope of the Coast range, aided during the glacial epoch by the movements of the huge glaciers, the largest by far which ever existed on our earth, disintegrated the rocks, and washed down upon the foot-hills their constituents, varying according to the nature of the rocks, and varying also in the fineness of their comminution, in proportion as they were for a longer or shorter time ground by the slow but irresistible motion of the glaciers. The same causes produced similar effects, in the early periods, on both the eastern and western slopes of the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. The great but now elevated valley between those two mountain chains, as well as the greater part of the plains east of the Rocky Mountains, were for ages the bed of immense lakes or inland seas, while the southern portion of California and Nevada connecting with the Pacific, through the Tejon pass, which was then another strait of Gibraltar, formed an American Mediterranean, where there is now only a desert. The upheaval of the bottoms of all these salt or fresh lakes, led to their drainage, by the Colorado and its affluents, the Rio Grande, the Arkansas, the Yellowstone, the Missouri and the Snake rivers. Most of these rivers, and pre-eminently the Colorado and its tributaries, cut their way through the soft and disintegrating rocks which formed