NAMELESS ALPS.
At the post-office, in Main Street, I gave Mr. Dixon a few last messages
for home--he one to me for some Egyptian friends; and, with a shake and
a wave, we parted, to meet in London after between us completing the
circuit of the globe.
This time again I was not alone: an Irish miner from Montana, with a
bottle of whisky, a revolver and pick, shared the back-seat with the
mail-bags. Before we had forded the Jordan, he had sung “The Wearing of
the Green,” and told me the day and the hour at which the republic was
to be proclaimed at his native village in Galway. Like a true Irishman
of the South or West, he was happy only when he could be generous; and
so much joy did he show when I discovered that the cork had slipped from
my flask, and left me dependent on him for my escape from the alkaline
poison, that I half believed he had drawn it himself when we stopped to
change horses for mules. Certain it is that he pressed his whisky so
fast upon me and the various drivers, that the day we most needed its
aid there was none, and the bottle itself had ended its career by
serving as a target for a trial of breech-loading pistols.
At the sixth ranch from the city, which stands on the shores of the
lake, and close to the foot of the mountains, we found Porter Rockwell,
accredited chief of the Danites, the “Avenging Angels” of Utah, and
leader, it is said, of the “White Indians” at the Mountain Meadows
massacre.
Since 1840 there has been no name of greater terror in the West than
Rockwell‘s; but in 1860 his death was reported in England, and the
career of the great Brother of Gideon was ended, as we thought. I was
told in Salt Lake City that he was still alive and well, and his
portrait was among those that I got from Mr. Ottinger; but I am not
convinced that the man I saw, and whose picture I possess, was in fact
_the_ Porter Rockwell who murdered Stephenson in 1842. It may be
convenient to have two or three men to pass by the one name; and I
suspect that this is so in the Rockwell case.
Under the name of Porter Rockwell some man (or men) has been the terror
of the Mississippi Valley, of plains and plateau, for thirty years. In
1841, Joe Smith prophesied the death of Governor Boggs, of Missouri,
within six months: within that time he was shot--rumor said by Rockwell.
When the Danite was publicly charged with having done the deed for fifty
dollars and a wagon-team, he swore he‘d shoot any man who said he‘d shot
Boggs _for gain;_ “but if I am charged with shooting him, they‘ll have
to prove it”--words that looked like guilt. In 1842 Stephenson died by
the same hand, it is believed. Rockwell was known to be the working
chief of the band organized in 1838 to defend the First Presidency by
any means whatever, fair or foul, known at various times as the “Big
Fan” that should winnow the chaff from the wheat; the “Daughter of
Zion,” the “Destructives,” the “Flying Angels,” the “Brother of Gideon,”
the “Destroying Angels.” “Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion, for I
will make thy horn iron, and will make thy hoofs brass; and thou shalt
beat in pieces many people; and I will consecrate their gain unto the
Lord, and their substance unto the lords of the whole earth”--this was
the motto of the band.
Little was heard of the Danites from the time that the Mormons were
driven from Illinois and Missouri until 1852, when murder after murder,
massacre after massacre, occurred in the Grand Plateau. Bands of
immigrants, of settlers on their road to California, parties of United
States officers, and escaping Mormons, were attacked by “Indians,” and
found scalped by the next whites who came upon their trail. It was
rumored in the Eastern States that the red men were Mormons in disguise,
following the tactics of the Anti-Renters of New York. In the case of
Almon Babbitt, the “Indians” were proved to have been white.
[Illustration: PORTER ROCKWELL.--P. 154.]
The atrocities culminated in the Mountain Meadows massacre in 1857, when
hundreds of men, women, and children were murdered by men armed and
clothed as Indians, but sworn to by some who escaped as being whites.
Porter Rockwell has had the infamy of this tremendous slaughter piled on
to the huge mass of his earlier deeds of blood--whether rightly or
wrongly, who shall say? The man that I saw was the man that Captain
Burton saw in 1860. His death was solemnly recorded in the autumn of
that year, yet of the identity of the person I saw with the person
described by Captain Burton there can be no question. The bald, frowning
forehead, the sinister smile, the long grizzly curls falling upon the
back, the red cheek, the coal beard, the gray eye, are not to be
mistaken. Rockwell or not, he is a man capable of any deed. I had his
photograph in my pocket, and wanted to get him to sign it; but when, in
awe of his glittering bowie and of his fame, I asked, by way of caution,
the ranchman--a new-come Paddy--whether Rockwell could write, the fellow
told me with many an oath that “the boss” was as innocent of letters as
a babe. “As for writin’,” he said, “cuss me if he‘s on it. You bet he‘s
not--you bet.”
Not far beyond Rockwell‘s, we drove close to the bench-land; and I was
able to stop for a moment and examine the rocks. From the veranda of the
Mormon poet Naisbitt‘s house in Salt Lake City, I had remarked a double
line of terrace running on one even level round the whole of the great
valley to the south, cut by nature along the base alike of the Oquirrh
and the Wasatch.
I had thought it possible that the terrace was the result of the
varying hardness of the strata; but, near Black Rock, on the overland
track, I discovered that where the terrace lines have crossed the
mountain precipices, they are continued merely by deep stains upon the
rocks. The inference is that within extremely recent, if not historic
times, the water has stood at these levels from two to three hundred
feet above the present Great Salt Lake City, itself 4500 feet above the
sea. Three days’ journey farther west, on the Reese‘s River Range, I
detected similar stains. Was the whole basin of the Rocky
Mountains--here more than a thousand miles across--once filled with a
huge sea, of which the two Sierras were the shores, and the Wasatch,
Goshoot, Waroja, Toi, Abbé, Humboldt, Washoe, and a hundred other
ranges, the rocks and isles? The Great Salt Lake is but the largest of
many such. I saw one on Mirage Plains that is salter than its greater
fellow. Carson Sink is evidently the bed of a smaller bitter lake; and
there are salt pools in dozens scattered through Ruby and Smoky Valleys.
The Great Salt Lake itself is sinking year by year, and the sage-brush
is gaining upon the alkali desert throughout the Grand Plateau. All
these signs point to the rapid drying-up of a great sea, owing to an
alteration of climatic conditions.
In the Odd Fellows’ Library at San Francisco I found a map of North
America, signed “John Harris, A.M.,” and dated “1605,” which shows a
great lake in the country now comprised in the Territories of Utah and
Dakota. It has a width of fifteen degrees, and is named “Thongo, or
Thoya.” It is not likely that this inland sea is a mere exaggeration of
the present Great Salt Lake, because the views of that sheet of water
are everywhere limited by islands in such a way as to give to the eye
the effect of exceeding narrowness. It is possible that the Jesuit
Fathers, and other Spanish travelers from California, may have looked
from the Utah mountains on the dwindling remnant of a great inland sea.
On we jogged and jolted, till we lost sight of the American dead sea and
of its lovely valley, and got into a canyon floored with huge boulders
and slabs of roughened rock, where I expected each minute to undergo the
fate of that Indian traveler who received such a jolt that he bit off
the tip of his own tongue, or of Horace Greeley, whose head was bumped,
it is said, through the roof of his conveyance. Here, as upon the
eastern side of the Wasatch, the track was marked by never-ending lines
of skeletons of mules and oxen.
On the first evening from Salt Lake, we escaped once more from man at
Stockton, a Gentile mining settlement in Rush Valley, too small to be
called a village, though possessed of a municipality, and claiming the
title of “city.” By night we crossed by Reynolds’ Pass the Parolom or
Cedar Range, in a two-horse “jerky,” to which we had been shifted for
speed and safety. Upon the heights the frost was bitter; and when we
stopped at 3 A.M. for “supper,” in which breakfast was combined, we
crawled into the stable like flies in autumn, half killed by the sudden
chill. My miner spoke but once all night. “It‘s right cold,” he said;
but fifty times at least he sang “The Wearing of the Green.” It was his
only tune.
Soon after light, we passed the spot where Captain Gunnison of the
Federal Engineers, who had been in 1853 the first explorer of the Smoky
Hill route, was killed “by the Ute Indians.” Gunnison was an old enemy
of the Mormons, and the spot is ominously near to Rockwell‘s home. Here
we came out once more into the alkali, and our troubles from dust began.
For hours we were in a desert white as snow; but for reward we gained a
glorious view of the Goshoot Range, which we crossed by night, climbing
silently on foot for hours in the moonlight. The walking saved us from
the cold.
The third day--a Sunday morning--we were at the foot of the Waroja
Mountains, with Egan Canyon for our pass, hewn by nature through the
living rock. You dare swear you see the chisel-marks upon the stone. A
gold-mill had years ago been erected here, and failed. The heavy
machinery was lost upon the road; but the four stone walls contained
between them the wreck of the lighter “plant.”
[Illustration]
As we jolted and journeyed on across the succeeding plain, we spied in
the far distance a group of black dots upon the alkali. Man seems very
small in the infinite expanse of the Grand Plateau--the roof, as it
were, of the world. At the end of an hour we were upon them--a company
of “overlanders” “tracking” across the continent with mules. First came
two mounted men, well armed with Deringers in the belt, and Ballard
breech-loaders on the thigh, prepared for ambush--ready for action
against elk or red-skin. About fifty yards behind these scowling fellows
came the main band of bearded, red-shirted diggers, in huge boots and
felt hats, each man riding one mule, and driving another laden with
packs and buckets. As we came up, the main body halted, and an
interchange of compliments began. “Say, mister, thet‘s a slim horse of
yourn.” “Guess not--guess he‘s all sorts of a horse, he air. And how far
might it be to the State of Varmount?” “Wall, guess the boys down to hum
will be kinder joyed to see us, howsomever that may be.” Just at this
moment a rattlesnake was spied, and every revolver discharged with a
shout, all hailing the successful shot with a “Bully for you; thet
hit him whar he lives.” And on, without more ado, they went.
Even the roughest of these overlanders has in him something more than
roughness. As far as appearance goes, every woman of the far West is a
duchess, each man a Coriolanus. The royal gait, the imperial glance and
frown, belong to every ranchman in Nevada. Every fellow that you meet
upon the track near Stockton or Austin City, walks as though he were
defying lightning, yet this without silly strut or braggadocio. Nothing
can be more complete than the ranchman‘s self-command, save in the one
point of oaths; the strongest, freshest, however, of their moral
features is a grand enthusiasm, amounting sometimes to insanity. As for
their oaths, they tell you it is nothing unless the air is “blue with
cusses.” At one of the ranches where there was a woman, she said quietly
to me, in the middle of an awful burst of swearing, “Guess Bill swears
steep;” to which I replied, “Guess so”--the only allusion I ever heard
or hazarded to Western swearing.
Leaving to our north a snowy range--nameless here, but marked on
European maps as the East Humboldt--we reached the foot of the Ruby
Valley Mountains on the Sunday afternoon in glowing sunshine, and
crossed them in a snow-storm. In the night we journeyed up and down the
Diamond or Quartz Range, and morning found us at the foot of the Pond
Chain. At the ranch--where, in the absence of elk, we ate “bacon,” and
dreamt we breakfasted--I chatted with an agent of the Mail Company on
the position of the ranchmen, divisible, as he told me, into “cooks and
hostlers.” The cooks, my experience had taught me, were the aptest
scholars, the greatest politicians; the hostlers, men of war and
completest masters of the art of Western swearing. The cooks had a New
England cut; the hostlers, like Southerners, wore their hair all down
their backs. I begged an explanation of the reason for the marked
distinction. “They are picked,” he said, “from different classes. When a
boy comes to me and asks for something to do, I give him a look, and see
what kind of stuff he‘s made of. If he‘s a gay duck out for a six-weeks’
spree, I send him down here, or to Bitter Wells; but if he‘s a clerk or
a poet, or any such sorter fool as that, why then I set him cooking; and
plaguy good cooks they make, as you must find.”
The drivers on this portion of the route are as odd fellows as are the
ranchmen. Wearing huge jack-boots, flannel shirts tucked into their
trowsers, but no coat or vest, and hats with enormous brims, they have
their hair long, and their beards untrimmed. Their oaths, I need hardly
say, are fearful. At night they wrap themselves in an enormous cloak,
drink as much whisky as their passengers can spare them, crack their
whips, and yell strange yells. They are quarrelsome and overbearing,
honest probably, but eccentric in their ways of showing it. They belong
chiefly to the mixed Irish and German race, and have all been in
Australia during the gold rush, and in California before deep sinking
replaced the surface diggings. They will tell you how they often washed
out and gambled away a thousand ounces in a month, living like Roman
emperors, then started in digging-life again upon the charity of their
wealthier friends. They hate men dressed in “biled shirts,” or in “store
clothes,” and show their aversion in strange ways. I had no objection
myself to build fires and fetch wood; but I drew the line at going into
the sage-brush to catch the mules, that not being a business which I
felt competent to undertake. The season was advanced, the snows had not
yet reached the valleys, which were parched by the drought of all the
summer, feed for the mules was scarce, and they wandered a long way.
Time after time we would drive into a station, the driver saying, with
strange oaths, “Guess them mules is clared out from this here ranch;
guess they is into this sage-brush;” and it would be an hour before the
mules would be discovered feeding in some forgotten valley. Meanwhile
the miner and myself would have revolver practice at the skeletons and
telegraph-posts when sage fowl failed us, and rattlesnakes grew scarce.
After all, it is easy to speak of the eccentricities of dress and manner
displayed by Western men, but Eastern men and Europeans upon the plateau
are not the prim creatures of Fifth Avenue or Pall Mall. From San
Francisco I sent home an excellent photograph of myself in the clothes
in which I had crossed the plateau, those being the only ones I had to
wear till my baggage came round from Panama. The result was, that my
oldest friends failed to recognize the portrait. At the foot I had
written “A Border Ruffian:” they believed not the likeness, but the
legend.
The difficulties of dress upon these mountain ranges are great indeed.
To sit one night exposed to keen frost and biting wind, and the next day
to toil for hours up a mountain-side, beneath a blazing sun, are very
opposite conditions. I found my dress no bad one. At night I wore a
Canadian fox-fur cap, Mormon ’coon-skin gloves, two coats, and the whole
of my light silk shirts. By day I took off the coats, the gloves, and
cap, and walked in my shirts, adding but a Panama hat to my “fit-out.”
As we began the ascent of the Pond River Range, we caught up a
bullock-train, which there was not room to pass. The miner and myself
turned out from the jerky, and for hours climbed alongside the wagons. I
was struck by the freemasonry of this mountain travel: Bryant, the
miner, had come to the end of his “solace,” as the most famed chewing
tobacco in these parts is called. Going up to the nearest teamster, he
asked for some, and was at once presented with a huge cake--enough, I
should have thought, to have lasted a Channel pilot for ten years.
The climb was long enough to give me deep insight into the inner
mysteries of bullock-driving. Each of the great two-storied Californian
wagons was drawn by twelve stout oxen; still, the pace was not a mile an
hour, accomplished, as it seemed to me, not so much by the aid as in
spite of tremendous flogging. Each teamster carried a short-handled whip
with a twelve-foot leathern lash, which was wielded with two hands, and,
after many a whirl, brought down along the whole length of the back of
each bullock of the team in turn, the stroke being accompanied by a
shout of the bullock‘s name, and followed, as it was preceded, by a
string of the most explosive oaths. The favorite names for bullocks were
those of noted public characters and of Mormon elders, and cries were
frequent of “Ho, Brígham!” “Ho, Jóseph!” “Ho, Gránt!”--the blow falling
with the accented syllable. The London Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals would find at Pond River ranch an excellent opening
for a mission. The appointed officer should be supplied with two
Deringers and a well-filled whisky-barrel.
Through a gap in the mountain crest we sighted the West Humboldt Range,
across an open country dotted here and there with stunted cedar, and,
crossing Smoky Valley, we plunged into a deep pass in the Toi Abbé
Range, and reached Austin--a mining town of importance, rising two years
old--in the afternoon of the fourth day from Salt Lake City.
After dining at an Italian digger‘s restaurant with an amount of luxury
that recalled our feasts at Salt Lake City, I started on a stroll, in
which I was stopped at once by a shout from an open bar-room of “Say,
mister!” Pulling up sharply, I was surrounded by an eager crowd, asking
from all sides the one question: “Might you be Professor Muller?”
Although flattered to find that I looked less disreputable and ruffianly
than I felt, I nevertheless explained as best I could that I was no
professor--only to be assured that if I was any professor at all, Muller
or other, I should do just as well: a mule was ready for me to ride to
the mine, and “Jess kinder fix us up about this new lode.” If my
new-found friends had not carried an overwhelming force of pistols, I
might have gone to the mine as Professor Muller, and given my opinion
for what it was worth: as it was, I escaped only by “liquoring up” over
the error. Cases of mistaken identity are not always so pleasant in
Austin. They told me that, a few weeks before, a man riding down the
street heard a shot, saw his hat fall into the mud, and, picking it up,
found a small round hole on each side. Looking up, he saw a tall miner,
revolver smoking in hand, who smiled grimly, and said: “Guess thet‘s my
muel.” Having politely explained when and where the mule was bought, the
miner professed himself satisfied with a “Guess I was wrong--let‘s
liquor.”
In the course of my walk through Austin I came upon a row of neat huts,
each with a board on which was painted, “Sam Sing, washing and ironing,”
or “Mangling by Ah Low.” A few paces farther on was a shop painted red,
but adorned with cabalistic scrawls in black ink; and farther still was
a tiny joss house. Yellow men, in spotless clothes of dark-green and
blue, were busy at buying and selling, at cooking, at washing. Some, at
a short trot, were carrying burdens at the end of a long bamboo pole.
All were quiet, quick, orderly, and clean. I had at last come thoroughly
among the Chinese people, not to lose sight of them again until I left
Geelong, or even Suez.
Returning to the room where I had dined, I parted with Pat Bryant,
quitting him, in Western fashion, after a good “trade” or “swop.” He had
taken a fancy to the bigger of my two revolvers. He was going to breed
cattle in Oregon, he told me, and thought it might be useful for
shooting his wildest beasts by riding in the Indian manner, side by side
with them, and shooting at the heart. I answered by guessing that I “was
on the sell;” and traded the weapon against one of his that matched my
smaller tool. When I reached Virginia City, I inquired prices, and was
almost disappointed to find that I had not been cheated in the “trade.”
A few minutes after leaving the “hotel” at Austin, and calling at the
post-office for the mails, I again found myself in the desert--indeed,
Austin itself can hardly be styled an oasis: it may have gold, but it
has no green thing within its limits. It is in canyons and on plains
like these, with the skeletons of oxen every few yards along the track,
that one comes to comprehend the full significance of the terrible entry
in the army route-books--“No grass; no water.”
Descending a succession of tremendous “grades,” as inclines upon roads
and railroads are called out West, we came on to the lava-covered plain
of Reese‘s River Valley, a wall of snowy mountain rising grandly in our
front. Close to the stream were a ranch or two, and a double camp, of
miners and of a company of Federal troops. The diggers were playing with
their glistening knives as diggers only can; the soldiers--their huge
sombreros worn loosely on one side--were lounging idly in the sun.
Within an hour, we were again in snow and ice upon the summit of another
nameless range.
This evening, after five sleepless nights, I felt most terribly the
peculiar form of fatigue that we had experienced after six days and
nights upon the plains. Again the brain seemed divided into two parts,
thinking independently, and one side putting questions while the other
answered them; but this time there was also a sort of half insanity, a
not altogether disagreeable wandering of the mind, a replacing of the
actual by an imagined ideal scene.
On and on we journeyed, avoiding the Shoshoné and West Humboldt
Mountains, but picking our way along the most fearful ledges that it has
been my fate to cross, and traversing from end to end the dreadful
Mirage Plains. At nightfall we sighted Mount Davidson and the Washoe
Range, and at 3 A.M. I was in bed once more--in Virginia City.