Capt. McCoy had calculated that he would soon find game in the country
through which his route lay, and therefore he had turned over to Carson,
and the division of the party under his command, nearly all the food
which was left, but this was insufficient to give them full meals for
more than three days. Their prospect was a dreary one indeed, for at the
earlier season of coming down the river, they had not half enough to
eat, even with the few beaver they had taken, to add to the supply, and
even this was now denied them. And now, that the reader may understand
Carson's position, we invite him to enjoy with us a few of the incidents
passed through, and views observed in our passage up this river, which
the untraveled eastern man would find so entirely new, and the man of
travel and of letters would find so full of interest, as did the man
whose name the river bears, for it was named by Fremont, after Carson,
whom he had learned to love and respect, long before he reached it. We
shall speak especially of the features of this country, common to so
much that lies between the civilizations of the Atlantic and the Pacific
slopes, though the latter was not a civilization; and when from the
desert Carson gazed with admiration at the snow mountains, he surmised,
as he afterwards realized through hunger, cold, danger, and suffering,
that this was the chain of mountains which separated him from
California.
At the station-house, upon the lake, called the Sink of the Humboldt, we
were told that the Humboldt did not connect with this lake, except in
the spring season, after the rains; and that for the last two years it
had not been connected even at that time; and that in the autumn one
could pass between the lake and the limit of the marsh in which the
river loses itself, upon dry ground; and that the sinks, or the margins
of the lakes or marshes in which the Carson, the Walker, and the Susan
Rivers, neither of them less than a hundred miles in length, and some of
them several hundred, in the wet season empty or lose themselves, were
all within the limit of a single day's ride, and in the direct vicinity
of the desert upon which the reader last saw Carson.
It was the evening of the second of July, during a rain storm, (an
unusual occurrence at this season of the year, no traveler having ever
reported a similar one so far as we had heard,) that, weary, and wet,
and cold, we found our way in the dark to this river in the wilderness.
The house of the traders at the sink was made of logs, with two
rooms--the logs having been drawn from the mountains, forty miles
distant. There was no timber in sight, and nothing that was green except
some grass about the lake, which we were told was poison, and on
examining, we found it encrusted with a crystalization of potash, left
on it by the subsiding water in which the grass had started.
During the wet season, the water of the lake overflows its banks, and
the banks of the river are also overflowed, while the water standing
upon the surface of the ground is strongly impregnated with potash, not
only near the sink, but far up the stream, nearly to its source, the
same cause existing, though only in occasional spots is it exhibited to
the same degree as about the lake. It is not improbable that some
immense coal formation might have been consumed here in some remote
past age, though that is a matter for more scientific examination than
becomes this work.
But, to leave speculation; the occupants of the station, whilom trappers
in the mountains, furnished barley for our animals, and we might have
purchased coffee, or a rusty gun, or bad whiskey, but little else, for
their regular supplies for the emigrants who were soon expected to
arrive, had not yet come in. The parties bound east had passed, and the
Mormons, with their herds of cattle for the California markets, had been
met beyond the desert. A party of Pah Utah or Piete Indians, a tribe of
Diggers, were hanging about the encampment, and possibly had caused the
stampede of the Mormon oxen, which one of their herdsmen had reported to
us as occurring here. The traders on the plains are charged with
conniving at such expeditions of the Indians, and of sharing with them
the plunder. These traders may not have been privy to any thing of the
kind, but certain it is they always stood ready to purchase the worn out
stock of the overland emigrants, much of which is worthless to cross the
desert, after the prior fifteen hundred miles of travel.
This is made a lucrative business, as will be readily imagined, when
the number of animals driven over is taken into consideration, which has
amounted to a hundred thousand annually, by this route, during several
of the years since the quest for gold.
The traders said they had twenty-five hundred horses and as many oxen,
in charge of herdsmen in a mountain valley. Shrewd men they were, one of
them with an eye we would not warrant to look out from a kindly soul.
Miserable wretches were these Humboldt Diggers, with scarcely a trace of
humanity in their composition, for they have not improved since Carson
first met them, many years ago. The old chief was delighted with a lump
of sugar, which one of our party gave him. He wore a long coat made of
rabbit skins, warm and durable, strips of the skin with the hair out
being wound around a deerskin thong, and these rolls woven into a
garment, but the rest of the party were nearly naked.
Passing Lassen's meadows where the party lunched at a spring, indicated,
as we approached, by a growth of willows, and striking upon the
artemisia plain that constitutes the larger portion of the river valley,
when about fifty miles from the station, we left the road by a blind
trail, and approached the river, descending to the bottom land by a
precipitous bluff thirty feet in height. The mountains approached close
on the opposite side of the river, probably a mile distant, and enclosed
us in a semi-circle, while the bluff was lined with a scattered growth
of alders.
It rained, was raining violently when we halted, and stretching a rope
from alder to alder, with a blanket thrown over it, we thus made a tent,
and established ourselves cosily to spend here the nation's Sabbath-day,
the 4th of July.
The rain turned into snow towards evening, and covered the mountains to
their base, but melting as it fell where we were encamped, and with the
cooing of the doves which filled the alders, the croaking of the frogs
in the marsh next the river, and the patter of the rain upon the bushes,
we had other music--nature's deep bass--in a constant roaring sound,
like that of old ocean at full tide on a sand beach of the open coast of
the Pacific; or like the sound of Niagara, heard half a mile away, but
there was no discoverable cause.
Going a mile up and down the river from the camp--if there is up and
down to a dead river--we still heard the sound, the same in tone and
power. Our Wyandotte--a member of the party who had crossed the plains
with Col. Fremont--suggested that it was "the Humboldt sinking."
All the day of the 4th of July we rested here, with our animals in
clover, amid the snow which reached even to the foot of the mountains
opposite, and the dirge played for us by the unseen hand. It was a
quiet, still sweetly sad day--pleasant in memory, and such an one as we
shall never spend again--so far from civilized humanity, and in a place
so remote from human footsteps, it seemed a natural wonder which had
never been properly examined and explained.
Sooner than the old trappers anticipated, will the Humboldt be lined
with farms, and the little mountain valleys filled with grazing herds,
and the church spire and the cross upon an unassuming building in the
centre of a six mile square prairie, indicate the advance of
civilization. Yet, except in the mud-lake localities, there is no tract
of country that can well be more unpromising than that about the
Humboldt; and not many years will elapse before science will make plain
and palpable that wonder of the world, "the sinking of the Humboldt."