For forty added miles the river chasm, throughout its length a narrow,
tortuous crevice, with sheer and towering cliffs for its walls, affords
a precarious footing for the railway embankment, leading the double line
of steel with almost sentient reluctance, as it seems, through the
mighty mountain barrier. At its western extremity the canyon forms the
gate-way to a shut-in valley of upheaved hills and inferior mountains
isolated by wide stretches of rolling grassland. To the eastward and
westward of the great valley rise the sentinel peaks of the two
enclosing mountain ranges; and across the shut-in area the river
plunges from pool to pool, twisting and turning as the craggy and
densely forested lesser heights constrain it.
Red Butte, the centre of the evanescent mining excitement which was
originally responsible for the building of the railroad, lies
high-pitched among the shouldering spurs of the western boundary range.
Seeking the route promising the fewest cuts and fills and the easiest
grades, Chandler, the construction chief of the building company, had
followed the south bank of the river to a point a short distance beyond
the stream-fronting cliffs of the landmark hill known as Little Butte;
and at the station of the same name he had built his bridge across the
Timanyoni and swung his line in a great curve for the northward climb
among the hogbacks to the gold-mining district in which Red Butte was
the principal camp.
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