Among the early explorers it was known as the range of Chippewyan
Mountains, and this Indian name is the one it is likely to retain
in poetic usage. Rising from the midst of vast plains and prairies,
traversing several degrees of latitude, dividing the waters of the
Atlantic and the Pacific, and seeming to bind with diverging ridges
the level regions on its flanks, it has been figuratively termed the
backbone of the northern continent.
The Rocky Mountains do not present a range of uniform elevation, but
rather groups and occasionally detached peaks. Though some of these rise
to the region of perpetual snows, and are upwards of eleven thousand
feet in real altitude, yet their height from their immediate basis
is not so great as might be imagined, as they swell up from elevated
plains, several thousand feet above the level of the ocean. These plains
are often of a desolate sterility; mere sandy wastes, formed of the
detritus of the granite heights, destitute of trees and herbage,
scorched by the ardent and reflected rays of the summer's sun, and in
winter swept by chilling blasts from the snow-clad mountains. Such is
a great part of that vast region extending north and south along the
mountains, several hundred miles in width, which has not improperly been
termed the Great American Desert.
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