After your train passes Oacoma, you will se a very interesting kind of country. Let’s look out the window together and see what we can see.
There seem to be lots of hills… each on dropping into a bright green valley that looks as if once upon a time a big river had cut its way down to split the hills even farther apart. And do you notice how green everything is?
The answer is that you are almost ready to cross the broad Missouri River. If you have your imagination going lickety split, you can see where little creeks and rivers once ran, each on heading to help fill the great river just over the next hill.
Look far out ahead and to the south (the right-hand side of the train when you look toward the engine)… and you’ll see far off a long line of high hills, with their sides cut off into almost cliffs. They’re on the far bank of the Missour, and just south of Chamberlain.
Then the train starts to slow up, and it finally starts ahead at a snail’s pace. You hear a hollow rolling sound. And the first thing you know, there’s the dirty-grayish Missouri right under you. For your train has started out slowly on a long trestle and on to a long long bridge.
When you’re out in the middle, and look down on th grey-black waters, that sometimes look green and sometimes look blue, you will wonder, I think, just how in the world anyone would ever build a bridge that big, and so long. For the water is so deep, and the bottom is sand. And in spite of it all, they’ve taken some steel and some concrete, and here’s bridge that will take a whole big railrood train, engine, cars, Mary and all. Believe it or not.
It’s a funny feeling, rolling along slowly across a mghty river. Below you are swirling waters, and past your window slide the big steel girders of the bridge. Up near Pierre the White River joined the Missouri, and here it meets you in Chamberlain! And on the waters go to roll into the broad Mississippi and finally into the Gulf of Mexico.
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