To Green River. August 21st.
We rose early, despite the cold, to enjoy once more the lovely aspect of the Wind-River Mountains, upon whose walls of snow the rays of the unrisen sun broke with a splendid effect; breakfasted, and found ourselves en route at 8 A.M. The day did not begin well: Mrs. Dana was suffering severely from fatigue, and the rapid transitions from heat to cold; Miss May, poor child! was but little better, and the team was re-enforced by an extra mule returning to its proper station: this four-footed Xantippe caused us, without speaking of the dust from her hoofs, an immensity of trouble.
At the Pacific Creek, two miles below the springs, we began the descent of the Western water-shed, and the increase of temperature soon suggested a lower level. We were at once convinced that those who expect any change for the better on the counter-slope of the mountains labor under a vulgar error. The land was desolate, a red waste, dotted with sage and greasebush, and in places pitted with large rain-drops. But, looking backward, we could admire the Sweetwater’s Gap heading far away, and the glorious pile of mountains which, disposed in crescent shape, curtained the horizon; their southern and western bases wanted, however, one of the principal charms of the upper view: the snow had well-nigh been melted off. Yet, according to the explorer, they supply within the space of a few miles the Green River with a number of tributaries, which are all called the New Forks. We kept them in sight till they mingled with the upper air like immense masses of thunder-cloud gathering for a storm.
From Pacific Creek the road is not bad, but at this season the emigrant parties are sorely tried by drought, and when water is found it is often fetid or brackish. After seventeen miles we passed the junction of the Great Salt Lake and Fort Hall roads. Near Little Sandy Creek—a feeder of its larger namesake—which after rains is about 2°5 feet deep, we found nothing but sand, caked clay, sage, thistles, and the scattered fragments of camp-fires, with large ravens picking at the bleaching skeletons, and other indications of a halting-ground, an eddy in the great current of mankind, which, ceaseless as the Gulf Stream, ever courses from east to west. After a long stage of twenty-nine miles we made Big Sandy Creek, an important influent of the Green River; the stream, then shrunken, was in breadth not less than five rods, each = 16°5 feet, running with a clear, swift current through a pretty little prairillon, bright with the blue lupine, the delicate pink malvacea, the golden helianthus, purple aster acting daisy, the white mountain heath, and the green Asclepias tuberosa,[1] a weed common throughout Utah Territory. The Indians, in their picturesque way, term this stream Wagahongopa, or the Glistening Gravel Water.[2] We halted for an hour to rest and dine; the people of the station, man and wife, the latter very young, were both English, and of course Mormons; they had but lately become tenants of the ranch, but already they were thinking, as the Old Country people will, of making their surroundings “nice and tidy.”
Beyond the Glistening Gravel Water lies a mauvaise terre, sometimes called the First Desert, and upon the old road water is not found in the dry season within forty-nine miles—a terrible jornada [3] for laden wagons with tired cattle. We prepared for drought by replenishing all our canteens—one of them especially, a. tin flask, covered outside with thick cloth, kept the fluid deliciously cold—and we amused ourselves by the pleasant prospect of seeing wild mules taught to bear harness. The tricks of equine viciousness and asinine obstinacy played by the mongrels were so distinct, that we had no pains in determining what was inherited from the father and what from the other side of the house. Before they could be hitched up they were severally hustled into something like a parallel line with the pole, and were then forced into their places by a rope attached-to the fore wheel, and hauled at the other end by two or three men. Each of these pleasant animals had a bell: it is sure, unless corraled, to run away, and at night sound is necessary to guide. the pursuer. At last, being “all aboord,” we made a start, dashed over the Big Sandy, charged the high stiff bank with an impetus that might have carried us up an otter-slide or a Montagne Russe, and took the right side of the valley, leaving the stream at some distance.
Rain-clouds appeared from the direction of the hills: apparently they had many centres, as the distant sheet was rent into a succession of distinct streamers. A few drops fell upon us as we advanced. Then the fiery sun “ate up” the clouds, or raised them so high that they became playthings in the hands of the strong and steady western gale. The thermometer showed 95° in the carriage, and 111° exposed to the reflected heat upon the black leather cushions. It was observable, however, that the sensation was not what might have been expected from the height of the mercury, and perspiration was unknown except during severe exercise; this proves the purity and salubrity of the air. In St. Jo and New Orleans the effect would have been that of India or of a Turkish steam-bath. The heat, however, brought with it one evil—a green-headed horsefly, that stung like a wasp, and from which cattle must be protected with a coating of grease and tar. Whenever wind blew, tourbillons of dust coursed over the different parts of the plain, showing a highly electrical state of the atmosphere. When the air was unmoved the mirage was perfect as the sarab in Sindh or Southern Persia; earth and air were both so dry that the refraction of the sunbeams elevated the objects acted upon more than I had ever seen before. A sea lay constantly before our eyes, receding of course as we advanced, but in all other points a complete lusus naturæ. The color of the water was a dull cool sky-blue, not white, as the “looming” generally is; the broad expanse had none of that tremulous upward motion which is its general concomitant; it lay placid, still, and perfectly reflecting in its azure depths—here and there broken by projecting capes and bluff headlands—the forms of the higher grounds bordering the horizon.
After twelve miles’ driving we passed through a depression called Simpson’s Hollow, and somewhat celebrated in local story. Two semicircles of black still charred the ground; on a cursory view they might have been mistaken for burnt-out lignite. Here, in 1857, the Mormons fell upon a corraled train of twenty-three wagons, laden with provisions and other necessaries for the federal troops, then halted at Camp Scott awaiting orders to advance. The wagoners, suddenly attacked, and, as usual, unarmed—their weapons being fastened inside their awnings—could offer no resistance, and the whole convoy was set on fire except two conveyances, which were left to carry back supplies for the drivers till they could reach their homes. On this occasion the dux facti was Lot Smith, a man of reputation for hard riding and general gallantry. The old Saint is always spoken of as a good man who lives by “Mormon rule of wisdom.” As at Fort Sumter, no blood was spilled. So far the Mormons behaved with temper and prudence; but this their first open act of rebellion against, or secession from, the federal authority nearly proved fatal to them ; had the helm of government been held by a firmer hand than poor Mr. Buchanan’s, the scenes of Nauvoo would have been acted again at Great Salt Lake City. As it was, all turned out à merveille for the saints militant. They still boast loudly of the achievement, and on the marked spot where it was performed the juvenile emierants of the creed erect dwarf graves and nameless “wooden” tomb-“stones” in derision of their enemies.
As sunset drew near we approached the banks of the Big Sandy River. The bottom through which it flowed was several yards in breadth, bright green with grass, and thickly feathered with willows and cotton-wood. It showed no sign of cultivation; the absence of cereals may be accounted for by its extreme cold; it freezes there every night, and none but the hardiest grains, oats and rye, which here are little appreciated, could be made to grow. We are now approaching the valley of the Green River, which, like many of the rivers in the Eastern States, appears formerly to have filled a far larger channel. Flat tables and elevated terraces of horizontal strata—showing that the deposit was made in still waters—with layers varying from a few lines to a foot in thickness, composed of hard clay, green and other sandstones, and agelutinated conglomerates, rise like islands from barren plains, or form escarpments that buttress alternately either bank of the winding stream. Such, according to Captain Stansbury, is the general formation of the land between the South Pass and the “Rim” of the Utah Basin. |
Advancing over a soil alternately sandy and rocky—an iron flat that could not boast of a spear of grass—we sighted a number of coyotes, fittest inhabitants of such a waste, and a long, distant line of dust, like the smoke of a locomotive, raised by a herd. Of mules which were being driven to the corral. We were presently met by the Pony Express rider; he reined in to exchange news, which de part et d’autre were simply nil. As he pricked onward over the plain, the driver informed us, with a portentous rolling of the head, that Ichabod was an a’mighty fine “shyoot.” Within five or six miles of Green River we passed the boundary stone which bears Oregon on one side and Utah on the other. We had now traversed the southeastern corner of the country of Longeared men,[4] and were entering Deserét, the Land of the Honey-bee.
At 6 30 P.M. we debouched upon the bank of the Green River. The station was the home of Mr. Macarthy, our driver. The son of a Scotchman who had settled in the United States, he retained many signs of his origin, especially freckles, and hair which one might almost venture to describe as sandy; perhaps also, at times, he was rather o’er fond of draining “a cup o’ kindness yet.” He had lately taken to himself an English wife, the daughter of a Birmingham mechanic, who, before the end of her pilgrimage to “Zion on the tops of the mountains,” had fallen considerably away from grace, and had incurred the risk of being buffeted by Satan for a thousand years—a common form of commination in the New Faith—by marrying a Gentile husband.[5] The station had the indescribable scent of a Hindoo village, which appears to result from the burning of bois de vache and the presence of cattle: there were sheep, horses, mules, and a few cows, the latter so lively that it was impossible to milk them. The ground about had the effect of an oasis in the sterile waste, with grass and shrubs, willows and flowers, wild geraniums, asters, and various cruciferæ. A few trees, chiefly quaking asp, lingered near the station, but dead stumps were far more numerous than live trunks. In any other country their rare and precious shade would have endeared them to the whole settlement; here they were never safe when a log was wanted. The Western man is bred and perhaps born—I believe devoutly in transmitted and hereditary qualities—with an instinctive dislike to timber in general. He fells a tree naturally as a bull-terrier worries a cat, and the admirable woodsman’s axe which he has invented only serves to whet his desire to try conclusions with every more venerable patriarch of the forest.[6] Civilized Americans, of course, lament the destructive mania, and the Latter-Day Saints have learned by hard experience the inveterate evils that may arise in such a country from disforesting the ground.” We supped comfortably at Green-River Station, the stream supplying excellent salmon trout. The kichimichi, or buffalo berry,[7] makes tolerable jelly, and alongside of the station is a store where Mr. Burton (of Maine) sells “ Valley Tan” whisky.[8]
The Green River is the Rio Verde of the Spaniards, who named it from its timbered shores and grassy islets: it is called by the Yuta Indians Piya Ogwe, or the Great Water; by the other tribes Sitskidìagí, or “Prairie-grouse River.” It was nearly at its lowest when we saw it; the breadth was not more than 330 feet. In the flood-time it widens to 800 feet, and the depth increases from three to six. During the inundation season a ferry is necessary, and when transit is certain the owner sometimes nets $500 a week, which is not unfrequently squandered in a day. The banks are in places thirty feet high, and the bottom may average three miles from side to side. It is a swift-flowing stream, running as if it had no time to lose, and truly it has along way to go. Its length, volume, and direction entitle it to the honor of being called the head water of the great Rio Colorado, or Colored River, a larger and more important stream than even the Columbia. There is some grand exploration still to be done upon the line of the Upper Colorado, especially the divides which lie between it and its various influents, the Grand River and the Yaquisilla, of which the wild trapper brings home many a marvelous tale of beauty and grandeur, Captain T. A, Gove, of the LOth Regiment of Infantry, then stationed at Camp Floyd, told me that an expedition had often been projected: a party of twenty-five to thirty men, well armed and provided with inflatable boats, might pass without unwarrantable risk through the sparsely populated Indian country: a true report concerning regions of which there are so many false reports, all wearing more or less the garb of fable—beautiful valleys inclosed in inaccessible rocks, Indian cities and golden treasures—would be equally interesting and important. I cannot recommend the undertaking to the European adventurer: the United States have long since organized and perfected what was proposed in England during the Crimean war, and which fell, as other projects then did, to the ground, namely, a corps of Topographical Engineers, a body of well-trained and scientific explorers, to whose hands the task may safely be committed.[9]
We passed a social evening at Green-River Station. It boasted of no less than three Englishwomen, two married, and one, the help, still single. Not having the Mormonite retenue, the dames were by no means sorry to talk about Birmingham and Yorkshire, their birthplaces. At 9 P.M. arrived one of the road-agents, Mr. Cloete, from whom I gathered that the mail-wagon which once ran from Great Salt Lake City had lately been taken off the road. The intelligence was by no means consolatory, but a course of meditation upon the saying of the sage, “in for a penny, in for a pound,” followed by another visit to my namesake’s grog-shop, induced a highly philosophical turn, which enabled me—with the aid of a buffalo—to pass a comfortable night in the store.
[1] Locally called milkweed. The whites use the silky cotton of the pods, as in Arabia, for bed-stuffings, and the Sioux Indians of the Upper Platte boil and eat the young pods with their buffalo flesh. Colonel Frémont asserts that he never saw this plant without remarking “on the flower a large butterfly, so nearly resembling it in color as to be distinguishable at a little distance only by the motion of its wings.”
[2] Similarly the Snake River, an eastern influent of the Colorado, is called Yampa Pa, or Sweet Root (Anethum graveolens) Water.
[3] The Spanish-Mexican term for a day’s march. It is generally applied to a waterless march, e. g., “Jornada del Muerto” in New Mexico, which, like some in the Sahara, measures ninety miles across.
[4] Oregon is supposed by Mr. Edward to have been named by the Spaniards from
the immensely lengthened ears (orejones) of the Indians who inhabited it.
[5] Mr. Brigham Young, one of the most tolerant of a people whose motto is toleration, would not, I believe, offer any but an official objection to a Mormon member marrying a worthy Gentile; but even he—and it could hardly be expected that he should—can not overlook the sin of apostasy. The order of the faith runs thus: “ We believe that it is not right to prohibit members of the Church from marrying out of the Church, if it be their determination so to do, but such persons will be considered weak in the faith of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” The same view of the subject is taken, I need hardly say, by the more rigid kind of Roman Catholic.
[6] Many of the blades, being made by convicts at the state prisons, are sold cheap. The extent of the timber regions necessitated this excellent implement, and the saving of labor on the European article is enormous.
[7] A shrub 10-15 feet high, with a fruit about the size of a pea, red like a wild rose-hip, and with a pleasant sub-acid flavor: the Tudians eat it with avidity, and it is cultivated in the gardens at Great Salt Lake City.
[8] Tannery was the first technological process introduced into the Mormon Valley : hence all home industry has obtained the sobriquet of ‘‘ Valley Tan.”
[9] The principal explorers under the United States government of the regions lying west of the Mississippi, and who have published works upon the subject, are the following :
1. Messrs. Lewis and Clarke, in 1804-6, first explored the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River.
2. Major Z. M. Pike, in 1805-7, visited the upper waters of the Mississippi and
the western regions of Louisiana.
3. Major, afterward Colonel S. H. Long, of the United States Topographical Engineers, made two expeditions, one in 1819-20 to the Rocky Mountains, another in 1823 to the Sources of the St. Peter and the Lake of the Woods, whereby four volumes octavo were filled.
4. Governor Cass and Mr. Schoolcraft in 1820 explored the Sources of the Mississippi and the regions west and south of Lake Superior.
5. Colonel H. Dodge, U.S. Army, in 1835 traveled 1600 miles from Fort Leavenworth, and visited the regions between the Arkansas and the Platte Rivers,
6. Captain Canfield, United States Topographical Engineers, in 1838 explored the country between Forts Leavenworth and Snelling.
7. Mr. M‘Cox, of Missouri, surveyed the boundaries of the Indian reservations: his work was in part revised by the late Captain Hood, United States Topographical Engineers. :
8. Mr. Nicollet (French) in 1833-38 mapped the country west of the Upper Mississippi: he was employed in 1838-9 to make a similar scientific reconnoissance between the Mississippi and the Missouri, on which occasion he was accompanied by Mr. Frémont. He died in 1842.
The explorations of Colonel Frémont, Captain Howard Stansbury, Lieutenant Gunnison, and Lieutenant Warren have been frequently alluded to in these pages.
9. Lieutenant, afterward Captain Charles Wilkes, U.S. Navy, set out in 1838, and, after a long voyage of discovery in South America, Oceanica, and the Antarctic continent, made San Francisco on August 11, 1841. It is remarkable that this officer’s party were actually pitched upon the spot (New Helvetia, afterward called Sacramento City) where Californian gold was dug by the Mormons.
10. Captain R. B. Marcy, U.S. Army, ‘‘discovered and explored, located and marked out the wagon-road from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to Santa Fé, New Mexico.” The road explorers, however, are too numerous to specify.
11. Governor I. I. Stevens, of Washington Territory, surveyed in 1853 the northern land proposed for a Pacific railway near the 47°-49° parallels, from St. Paul to Puget Sound. No portion of that line had been visited since the days of Lewis and Clarke, except a small portion toward the Pacific Ocean.
12. Captain Raynolds, United States Topographical Engineers, accompaniad by Colonel Bridger as guide and interpreter, is still (1860) exploring the head-waters of the Yellow Stone River.