Stark and bare, it was landscape like this
that prompted Samuel Bowles, a newspaper
editor from Massachusetts who rode through
southern Wyoming in 1868 over the recently
completed transcontinental railroad, to write:
"West of Cheyenne the eye has no joy, the lips no
comfort through it; the sun burns by day, the cold chills
at night; the fine, impalpable, poisonous dust chokes,
and chafes, and chaps you everywhere."
