ROCKY MOUNTAINS.
“What will I do for you if you stop here among us? Why, I‘ll name that
peak after you in the next survey,” said Governor Gilpin, pointing to a
snowy mountain towering to its 15,000 feet in the direction of Mount
Lincoln. I was not to be tempted, however; and as for Dixon, there is
already a county named after him in Nebraska: so off we went along the
foot of the hills on our road to the Great Salt Lake, following the
“Cherokee Trail.”
Striking north from Denver by Vasquez Fork and Cache la Poudre--called
“Cash le Powder,” just as Mont Royal has become Montreal, and Sault de
Ste Marie, Soo--we entered the Black Mountains, or Eastern foot-hills,
at Beaver Creek. On the second day, at two in the afternoon, we reached
Virginia Dale for breakfast, without adventure, unless it were the
shooting of a monster rattlesnake that lay “coiled in our path upon the
mountain side.” Had we been but a few minutes later, we should have made
it a halt for “supper” instead of breakfast, as the drivers had but
these two names for our daily meals, at whatever hour they took place.
Our “breakfasts” varied from 3.30 A.M. to 2 P.M.; our suppers from 3
P.M. to 2 A.M.
Here we found the weird red rocks that give to the river and the
territory their name of Colorado, and came upon the mountain plateau at
the spot where last year the Utes scalped seven men only three hours
after Speaker Colfax and a Congressional party had passed with their
escort.
While trundling over the sandy wastes of Laramie Plains, we sighted the
Wind River chain drawn by Bierstadt in his great picture of the “Rocky
Mountains.” The painter has caught the forms, but missed the atmosphere
of the range: the clouds and mists are those of Maine and Massachusetts;
there is color more vivid, darkness more lurid, in the storms of
Colorado.
This was our first sight of the main range since we entered the Black
Hills, although we passed through the gorges at the very foot of Long‘s
Peak. It was not till we had reached the rolling hills of “Medicine
Bow”--a hundred miles beyond the peak--that we once more caught sight of
it shining in the rear.
In the night between the second and third days the frost was so bitter
at the great altitude to which we had attained, that we resorted to
every expedient to keep out the cold. While I was trying to peg down one
of the leathern flaps of our ambulance with the pencil from my
note-book, my eye caught the moonlight on the ground, and I drew back
saying, “We are on the snow.” The next time we halted, I found that what
I had seen was an impalpable white dust, the much dreaded alkali.
In the morning of the third day we found ourselves in a country of
dazzling white, dotted with here and there a tuft of sage-brush--an
Artemisia akin to that of the Algerian highlands. At last we were in the
“American desert”--the “_Mauvaises terres_.”
Once only did we escape for a time from alkali and sage to sweet waters
and sweet grass. Near Bridger‘s Pass and the “divide” between Atlantic
and Pacific floods, we came on a long valley swept by chilly breezes,
and almost unfit for human habitation from the rarefaction of the air,
but blessed with pasture ground on which domesticated herds of Himalayan
yâk should one day feed. Settlers in Utah will find out that this
animal, which would flourish here at altitudes of from 4000 to 14,000
feet, and which bears the most useful of all furs, requires less herbage
in proportion to its weight and size than almost any animal we know.
This Bridger‘s Pass route is that by which the telegraph line runs, and
I was told by the drivers strange stories of the Indians and their views
on this great Medicine. They never destroy out of mere wantonness, but
have been known to cut the wire and then lie in ambush in the
neighborhood, knowing that repairing parties would arrive and fall an
easy prey. Having come one morning upon three armed overlanders lying
fast asleep, while a fourth kept guard by a fire which coincided with a
gap in the posts, but which was far from any timber or even scrub, I
have my doubts as to whether “white Indians” have not much to do with
the destruction of the line.
From one of the uplands of the Artemisia barrens we sighted at once
Fremont‘s Peak on the north, and another great snow-dome upon the south.
The unknown mountain was both the more distant and the loftier of the
two, yet the maps mark no chain within eyeshot to the southward. The
country on either side of this well-worn track is still as little known
as when Captain Stansbury explored it in 1850; and when we crossed the
Green River, as the Upper Colorado is called, it was strange to remember
that the stream is here lost in a thousand miles of undiscovered wilds,
to be found again flowing toward Mexico. Near the ferry is the place
where Albert S. Johnson‘s mule-trains were captured by the Mormons
under General Lot Smith.
In the middle of the night we would come upon mule-trains starting on
their march in order to avoid the mid-day sun, and thus save water,
which they are sometimes forced to carry with them for as much as fifty
miles. When we found them halted, they were always camped on bluffs and
in bends, far from rocks and tufts, behind which the Indians might creep
and stampede the cattle: this they do by suddenly swooping down with
fearful noises, and riding in among the mules or oxen at full speed. The
beasts break away in their fright, and are driven off before the
sentries have time to turn out the camp.
On the fourth day from Denver, the scenery was tame enough, but strange
in the extreme. Its characteristic feature was its breadth. No longer
the rocky defiles of Virginia Dale, no longer the glimpses of the main
range as from Laramie Plains and the foot-hills of Medicine Bow, but
great rolling downs like those of the plains much magnified. We crossed
one of the highest passes in the world without seeing snow, but looked
back directly we were through it on snow-fields behind us and all
around.
At Elk Mountain we suffered greatly from the frost, but by mid day we
were taking off our coats, and the mules hanging their heads in the sun
once more, while those which should have taken their places were, as the
ranchman expressed it, “kicking their heels in pure cussedness” at a
stream some ten miles away.
While walking before the “hack” through the burning sand of Bitter
Creek, I put up a bird as big as a turkey, which must, I suppose, have
been a vulture. The sage-brush growing here as much as three feet high,
and as stout and gnarled as century-old heather, gave shelter to a few
coveys of sage-hens, at which we shot without much success, although
they seldom ran, and never rose. Their color is that of the brush
itself--a yellowish gray--and it is as hard to see them as to pick up a
partridge on a sun-dried fallow at home in England. Of wolves and
rattlesnakes there were plenty, but of big game we saw but little, only
a few black-tails in the day.
This track is more traveled by trains than is the Smoky Hill route,
which accounts for the absence of game on the line; but that there is
plenty close at hand is clear from the way we were fed. Smoky Hill
starvation was forgotten in piles of steaks of elk and antelope; but
still no fruit, no vegetable, no bread, no drink save “sage-brush tea,”
and that half poisoned with the water of the alkaline creeks.
Jerked buffalo had disappeared from our meals. The droves never visit
the Sierra Madre now, and scientific books have said that in the
mountains they were ever unknown. In Bridger‘s Pass we saw the skulls of
not less than twenty buffalo, which is proof enough that they once were
here, though perhaps long ago. The skin and bones will last about a year
after the beast has died, for the wolves tear them to pieces to get at
the marrow within, but the skull they never touch; and the oldest
ranchman failed to give me an answer as to how long skulls and horns
might last. We saw no buffalo roads like those across the plains.
From the absence of buffalo, absence of birds, absence of flowers,
absence even of Indians, the Rocky Mountain plateau is more of a
solitude than are the plains. It takes days to see this, for you
naturally notice it less. On the plains, the glorious climate, the
masses of rich blooming plants, the millions of beasts, and insects, and
birds, all seem prepared to the hand of man, and for man you are
continually searching. Each time you round a hill, you look for the
smoke of the farm. Here on the mountains you feel as you do on the sea:
it is nature‘s own lone solitude, but from no fault of ours--the higher
parts of the plateau were not made for man.
Early on the fifth night we dashed suddenly out of utter darkness into a
mountain glen blazing with fifty fires, and perfumed with the scent of
burning cedar. As many wagons as there were fires were corraled in an
ellipse about the road, and 600 cattle were pastured within the
fire-glow in rich grass that told of water. Men and women were seated
round the camp-fires praying and singing hymns. As we drove in, they
rose and cheered us “on your way to Zion.” Our Gentile driver yelled
back the warhoop “How! How! How! How--w! We‘ll give yer love to
Brigham;” and back went the poor travelers to their prayers again. It
was a bull train of the Mormon immigration.
Five minutes after we had passed the camp we were back in civilization,
and plunged into polygamous society all at once, with Bishop Myers, the
keeper of Bear River Ranch, drawing water from the well, while Mrs.
Myers No. 1 cooked the chops, and Mrs. Myers No. 2 laid the table
neatly.
The kind bishop made us sit before the fire till we were warm, and
filled our “hack” with hay, that we might continue so, and off we went,
inclined to look favorably on polygamy after such experience of
polygamists.
Leaving Bear River about midnight, at two o‘clock in the morning of the
sixth day we commenced the descent of Echo Canyon, the grandest of all
the gully passes of the Wasatch Range. The night was so clear that I
was able to make some outline sketches of the cliffs from the ranch
where we changed mules. Echo Canyon is the Thermopylæ of Utah, the pass
that the Mormons fortified against the United States forces under Albert
S. Johnson at the time of “Buchanan‘s raid.” Twenty-six miles long,
often not more than a few yards wide at the bottom, and a few hundred
feet at the top, with an overhanging cliff on the north side, and a
mountain wall on the south, Echo Canyon would be no easy pass to force.
Government will do well to prevent the Pacific Railroad from following
this defile.
After breakfast at Coalville, the Mormon Newcastle, situated in a
smiling valley not unlike that between Martigny and Saint Maurice, we
dashed on past Kimball‘s Ranch, where we once more hitched horses
instead of mules, and began our descent of seventeen miles down Big
Canyon, the best of all the passes of the Wasatch. Rounding a spur at
the end of our six-hundredth mile from Denver, we first sighted the
Mormon promised land.
The sun was setting over the great dead lake to our right, lighting up
the valley with a silvery gleam from Jordan River, and the hills with a
golden glow from off the snow-fields of the many mountain chains and
peaks around. In our front, the Oquirrh, or Western Range, stood out in
sharp purple outlines upon a sea-colored sky. To our left were the Utah
Mountains, blushing rose, all about our heads the Wasatch glowing in
orange and gold. From the flat valley in the sunny distance rose the
smoke of many houses, the dust of many droves; on the bench-land of
Ensign Peak, on the lake side, white houses peeped from among the
peach-trees, modestly, and hinted the presence of the city.
Here was Plato‘s table-land of the Atlantic isle--one great field of
corn and wheat, where only twenty years ago Fremont, the pathfinder,
reported wheat and corn impossible.