To the South Pass. August 20th.

We rose with the daybreak; we did not start till nearly 8 A.M., the interim having been consumed by the tenants of our late consort in a vain palaver. We bade adieu to them and mounted at last, loudly pitying their miseries as they disappeared from our ken. But the driver bade us reserve our sympathy and humane expressions for a more fitting occasion, and declared—it was probably a little effort of his own imagination—that those faithless friends had spent all their spare time in persuading him to take them on and to leave us behind. I, for one, will never believe that any thing of the kind had been attempted; a man must be created with a total absence of the bowels of compassion who would leave a woman and a young child for days together at the foot of Ridge Station.

The road at once struck away from Fort Laramie the land is all a sandy and hilly desert where one can easily starve, but here it shows its worst features. During a steep descent a mule fell, and was not made to regain its footing without difficulty. Signs of wolves, coyotes, and badgers were abundant, and the coqs de prairie (sage-chickens), still young and toothsome at this season, were at no pains to get out of shot. After about five miles we passed by “Three Lakes,” dirty little ponds north of the road, two near it and one distant, all about a quarter of a mile apart, and said by those fond of tasting strange things to have somewhat the flavor, as they certainly have the semblance, of soapsuds. Beyond this point we crossed a number of influents of the pretty Sweetwater, some dry, others full: the most interesting was Strawberry Creek: it supplies plenty of the fragrant wild fruit, and white and red willows fringe the bed as long as it retains its individuality. To the north a mass of purple nimbus obscured the mountains—on Frémont’s Peak it is said always to rain or snow—and left no visible line between earth and sky. Quaking-Asp Creek was bone dry. At MacAchran’s Branch of the Sweetwater we found, pitched upon a sward near a willow copse, a Provengal Frenchman—by what “hasard que les sceptiques appellent l’homme d’affaires du bon Dieu” did he come here ?—who begged us to stop and give him the news, especially about the Indians: we could say little that was reassuring. Another spell of rough, steep ground placed us at Willow Creek, a pretty little prairillon, with verdure, water, and an abundance of the larger vegetation, upon which our eyes, long accustomed to artemisia and rabbitbush, dwelt with a compound sense of surprise and pleasure. In a well-built ranch at this place of plenty were two Canadian traders, apparently settled for life; they supplied us, as we found it necessary to “liquor up,” with a whisky which did not poison us, and that is about all that I can say for it. At Ford No. 9, we bade adieu to the Sweetwater with that natural regret which one feels when losing sight of the only pretty face and pleasant person in the neighborhood; and we heard with a melancholy satisfaction the driver’s tribute to departing worth, viz., that its upper course is the “healthiest water in the world.” Near this spot, since my departure, has been founded “South-Pass City,” one of the many mushroom growths which the presence of gold in the Rocky Mountains has caused to spring up.

Ten miles beyond Ford No. 9, hilly miles, ending in a long champaign having some of the characteristics of a rolling prairie, with scatters of white, rose, and smoky quartz, granite, hornblende, porphyry, marble-like lime, sandstone, and mica slate—the two latter cropping out of the ground and forming rocky ridges—led us to the South Pass, the great Wasserscheide between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and the frontier points between the territory of Nebraska and the State of Oregon. From the mouth of the Sweetwater, about 120 miles, we have been rising so gradually, almost imperceptibly, that now we unexpectedly find ourselves upon the summit. The distance from Fort Laramie is 820 miles, from St. Louis 1580, and from the mouth of the Oregon about 1400: it is therefore nearly midway between the Mississippi and the Pacific. The dimensions of this memorial spot are 7490 feet above sealevel, and 20 miles in breadth. The last part of the ascent is so gentle that it is difficult to distinguish the exact point where the versant lies: a stony band crossing the road on the ridge of the table-land is pointed out as the place, and the position has been fixed at N. lat. 48° 19’, and W. long. 108° 40’.[1] The northern limit is the noble chain of Les Montagnes Rocheuses, which goes by the name of the Wind River; the southern is called Table Mountain, an insignificant mass of low hills.

A pass it is not: it has some of the features of Thermopylee or the Gorge of Killiecrankie; of the European St. Bernard or Simplon; of the Alleghany Passes or of the Mexican Barrancas. It is not, as it sounds, a ghaut between lofty mountains, or, as the traveler may expect, a giant gateway, opening through Cyclopean walls of beetling rocks that rise in forbidding grandeur as he passes onward to the Western continent. And yet the word “Pass” has its significancy. In that New World where Nature has worked upon the largest scale, where every feature of scenery, river and lake, swamp and forest, prairie and mountain, dwarf their congeners in the old hemisphere, this majestic level-topped bluff, the highest steppe of the continent, upon whose iron surface there is space enough for the armies of the globe to march over, is the grandest and the most appropriate of avenues.

A water-shed is always exciting to the traveler. What shall I say of this, where, on the topmost point of American travel, you drink within a hundred yards of the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans—that divides: the “doorways of the west wind” from the “portals of the sunrise?” On the other side of yon throne of storms, within sight, did not the Sierra interpose, lie separated by a trivial space the fountain-heads that give birth to the noblest rivers of the continent, the Columbia, the Colorado, and the Yellow Stone, which is to the Missouri what the Missouri is to the Mississippi, whence the waters trend to four opposite directions: the Wind River to the northeast; to the southeast the Sweetwater and the Platte; the various branches of the Snake River to the northeast; and to the southwest the Green River, that finds its way into the Californian Gulf.[2] It is a suggestive spot, this “divortia aquarum:” it compels Memory to revive past scenes before plunging into the mysterious “Lands of the Hereafter,” which lie before and beneath the feet. The Great Ferry, which steam has now bridged, the palisaded banks of the Hudson, the soft and sunny scenery of the Ohio, and the kingly course of the Upper Mississippi, the terrible beauty of Niagara, and the marvels of that chain of inland seas which winds its watery way from Ontario to Superior; the rich pasture-lands of the North, the plantations of the semi-tropical South, and the broad cornfields of the West; finally, the vast meadow-land and the gloomy desert-waste of sage and saleratus, of clay and mauvaise terre, of red butte and tawny rock, all pass before the mind in rapid array ere they are thrust into oblivion by the excitement of a new departure.

But we have not yet reached our destination, which is two miles below the South Pass. Pacific Springs is our station; it lies a little down the hill, and we can sight it from the road. The springs are a pond of pure, hard, and very cold water, surrounded by a strip of shaking bog, which must be boarded over before it will bear a man. The hut would be a right melancholy abode were it not for the wooded ground on one hand, and the glorious snow-peaks on the other side of the “Pass.” We reached Pacific Springs at 3 P.M., and dined without delay, the material being bouilli and potatoes—unusual luxuries. About an hour afterward the west wind, here almost invariable, brought up a shower of rain, and swept a vast veil over the forms of the Wind-River Mountains. Toward sunset it cleared away, and the departing luminary poured a flood of gold upon the majestic pile—I have seldom seen a view more beautiful.

From the south, the barren rolling table-land that forms the Pass trends northward till it sinks apparently below a ridge of offsets from the main body, black with timber—cedar, cypress, fir, and balsam pine. The hand of Nature has marked, as though by line and level, the place where vegetation shall go and no farther. Below the waist the mountains are robed in evergreens; above it, to the shoulders, they would be entirely bare but for the atmosphere, which has thrown a thin veil of light blue over their tawny gray, while their majestic heads are covered with ice and snow, or are hidden from sight by thunder-cloud or the morning mist. From the south, on clear days, the cold and glittering radiance may be seen at a distance of a hundred miles. ‘The monarch of these mountains is “Frémont’s Peak;” its height is laid down at 13,570 feet above sea level; and second to it 1s a hoary cone called by the station-people Snowy Peak.

That evening the Wind-River Mountains appeared in marvelous majesty. The huge purple hangings of rain-cloud in the northern sky set off their huge proportions, and gave prominence, as in a stereoscope, to their gigantic forms, and their upper heights, hoar with the frosts of ages. The mellow radiance of the setting sun diffused a charming softness over their more rugged features, defining the folds and ravines with a distinctness which deceived every idea of distance. And as the light sank behind the far western horizon, it traveled slowly up the mountain side, till, reaching the summit, it mingled its splendors with the snow—flashing and flickering for a few brief moments, then wasting them in the dark depths of the upper air. Nor was the scene less lovely in the morning hour, as the first effulgence of day fell upon the masses of dew-cloud—at this time mist always settles upon their brows—lit up the peaks, which gleamed like silver, and poured its streams of light and warmth over the broad skirts reposing upon the plain.

This unknown region was explored in August, 1842, by Colonel, then Brevet Captain, J. C. Frémont, of the United States Topographical Engineers; and his eloquent descriptions of the magnificent scenery that rewarded his energy and enterprise prove how easily men write well when they have a great subject to write upon. The concourse of small green tarns, rushing waters, and lofty cascades, with the gigantic disorder of enormous masses, the savage sublimity of the naked rock, broken, jagged cones, slender minarets, needles, and columns, and serrated walls, 2000 to 3000 feet high, all naked and destitute of vegetable earth; the vertical precipices, chasms, and fissures, insecure icy passages, long moraines, and sloping. glaciers—which had nearly proved fatal to some of the party; the stern recesses, shutting out from the world dells and ravines of exquisite beauty, smoothly carpeted with soft grass, kept green and fresh by the moisture of the atmosphere, and sown with gay groups of brilliant flowers, of which yellow was the predominant color: all this glory and grandeur seems to be placed like a picture before our eyes. The reader enjoys, like the explorer, the fragrant odor of the pines, and the pleasure of breathing, in the bright, clear morning, that “mountain air which makes a constant theme of the hunter’s praise,” and which causes man to feel as if he had been inhaling some exhilarating gas. We sympathize with his joy in having hit upon “such a beautiful entrance to the mountains,” in his sorrow, caused by accidents to barometer and thermometer, and in the honest pride with which, fixing a ramrod in the crevice of “an unstable and precarious slab, which it seemed a breath would hurl into the abyss below,” he unfurled the Stars and the Stripes, to wave in the breeze where flag never waved before—over the top-most crest of the Rocky Mountains. And every driver upon the road now can tell how, in the profound silence and terrible stillness and solitude that affect the mind as the great features of the scene, while sitting on a rock at the very summit, where the silence was absolute, unbroken by any sound, and the stillness and solitude were completest, a solitary “humble-bee”[3] winging through the black-blue air his flight from the eastern valley, alit upon the knee of one of the men, and, helas! “found a grave in the leaves of the large book, among the flowers collected on the way.”

The Wind-River Range has other qualities than mere formal beauty. to recommend it. At Horseshoe Creek I was shown a quill full of large gold-grains from a new digging. Probably all the primitive masses of the Rocky Mountains will be found to contain the precious metal. The wooded heights are said to be a very paradise of sport, full of elk and every kind of deer; pumas; bears, brown [4] as well as grizzly; the wolverine; [5] in parts the mountain buffalo—briefly, all the noble game of the Continent. The Indian tribes, Shoshonees and Blackfeet, are not deadly to whites. Washiki, the chief of the former, had, during the time of our visit, retired to hilly ground, about forty miles north of the Foot of Ridge Station. This chief—a fine, manly fellow, equal in point of physical strength to the higher race—had been a firm friend, from the beginning, to emigrant and settler; but he was complaining, according to the road officials, that the small amount of inducement prevented his affording good conduct any longer —that he must rob, like the rest of the tribe. Game, indeed, is not unfrequently found near the Pacific Springs; they are visited, later in the year, by swans, geese, and flights of ducks. At this season they seem principally to attract coyotes — five mules have lately been worried by the little villains—huge cranes, chicken-hawks, a large species of trochilus, and clouds of musquetoes, which neither the altitude, the cold, nor the eternal wind-storm that howls through the Pass can drive from their favorite breeding-bed. Near nightfall a flock of wild geese passed over us, audibly threatening an early winter. We were obliged, before resting, to insist upon a smudge,[6] without which fumigation sleep would have been impossible.

The shanty was perhaps a trifle more uncomfortable than the average; our only seat was a kind of trestled plank, which suggested a certain obsolete military punishment called riding on a rail. .The station-master was a bon enfant; but his help, a Mormon lad, still in his teens, had been trained to go in a “sorter” jibbing and somewhat uncomfortable “argufying,” “highfalutin’ ” way. He had the furor for fire-arms that characterizes the ingenuous youth of Great Salt Lake City, and his old rattletrap of a revolver, which always reposed by his side at night, was as dangerous to his friends as to himself. His vernacular was peculiar; like Mr. Boatswain Chucks (Mr. D s), he could begin a sentence with polished and elaborate diction, but it always ended, like the wicked, badly. He described himself, for instance, as having lately been “slightly inebriated ;” but the euphuistic periphrasis concluded with an asseveration that he would be “Gord domned” if he did it again.

The night was, like the day, loud and windy, the log hut being somewhat crannied and creviced, and the door had a porcelain handle, and a shocking bad fit—a characteristic combination. We had some trouble to keep ourselves warm. At sunrise the thermometer showed 85° Fahrenheit.

[1] Some guide-books place the water-shed between two small hills, the “‘ Twin Peaks,” about fifty or sixty feet high; the road, however, no longer passes between them.

[2] As early as A.D. 1772 (Description of the Province of Carolana, etc., etc., by Daniel Cox) it was suggested that there was a line of water communication by means of the “northern branch of the Great Yellow River, by the natives called the River of the Massorites” (Missouri River), and a branch of the Columbia River, which, however, was erroneously supposed to disembcgue through the Great Salt Lake into the Pacific. The idea has been revived in the present day. Some assert that the upper waters of the Yellow Stone, which approach within three hundred miles of Great Salt Lake City, are three feet deep, and therefore navigable for flat-bottomed boats during the annual inundation. Others believe that, as in the case of the Platte, shallowness would be an insuperable obstacle, except for one or two months, This point will doubtless be settled by Captain W. F. Raynolds, of the United States Topographical Engineers, who, accompanied by Colonel J. Bridger, was, at the time of my visit to Great Salt Lake City, exploring the Valley of the Yellow Stone.

[3] A species of bromus or bombus. In the United States, as in England, the word is often pronounced bumble-bee. Johnson says we call a bee an humble bee that wants a sting; so the States call black cattle without horns “humble cows.” It is the general belief of the mountaineers that the bee, the partridge, the plantain, and the “Jamestown weed” follow the footsteps of the white pioneers westward.

[4] Some authorities doubt that the European brown bear is found in America.

[5] The wolverine (Gulo luscus), carcajou, or glutton, extends throughout Utah Territory: its carnivorous propensities render it an object of peculiar hatred to fur-hunters. The first name is loosely used in the States: the people of Michigan are called Wolverines, from the large number of mischievous prairie wolves found there (Bartlett).

[6]This old North of England word is used in the West for a heap of green bush or other damp combustibles, placed inside or to windward of a house or tent, and partially lighted, so as to produce a thick, pungent steam.