Let me now give a sample of retrenchment in the public service in this
quarter:
The mail from Missouri to Salt Lake has hitherto been carried weekly in
good six-mule wagons; the contract time being twenty-two days. The
importance of frequent and regular communication with head-quarters, at
least so long as a large army is retained here at a heavy extra cost,
and because of some presumed public necessity is evident. Yet the new
Postmaster-General has cut down the mail-service on this important
central route from weekly to semi-monthly. But the contractors, who are
obliged to run their stages weekly because of their passenger business,
and because they have to keep their stock and pay their men, whether
they work or play, find that they cannot carry the mail every other week
so cheaply as they can every week. For instance, a mail from the states
now often consists of twelve to sixteen heavy sacks (most of them filled
with franked documents), weighing as many hundred pounds. Double this,
and no six-mule team would draw it at the requisite pace, and no
mail-wagon stand the jerks and jolts of an unmade road. So they say,
“please let us carry the mail weekly, though you only pay us for
carrying it semi-monthly.” But no! this is strictly forbidden! The
post-master at Salt Lake has express written orders to refuse it, and of
course he at St. Joseph also. And thus all this central region,
embracing, at least a dozen important military posts, and countless
Indian agencies, is reduced to a semi-monthly mail-service, though the
contractor would gladly make it weekly at the same price!
XXV.
FROM SALT LAKE TO CARSON VALLEY.
PLACERVILLE, Cal., _July 31, 1859_.
There are two emigrant trails from Salt Lake City to Carson Valley and
the pass thence into California—the older and more favored, starts
north-west from the Mormon Zion, passes north and west of Salt Lake,
crossing Weber and Bear Rivers near their mouths, with several small
creeks, and gradually veering west and south-west so as to strike the
head springs of the Humboldt, which stream it follows more than three
hundred miles to its “sink,” within a hundred miles of the eastern Base
of the Sierra Nevada. The other route leaves the Mormon capital in a
south-westerly direction, touches Lake Utah on the north, passes west of
that Lake through Provo, and thence southerly through Fillmore, the
nominal capital of the territory, and so down by Soyier River and Lake
nearly to the southern boundary of Utah, whence it stretches west,
nearly upon the southern rim of the Great Basin, on which are the
“Mountain-Meadows,” where a large emigrant party from Arkansas was so
atrociously massacred in 1857. Thence this trail turns north-west to hit
the sink of Carson River. (I can get no tolerable map of Utah, and the
above may not be entirely correct, but is nearly so.) It will be seen
that each of these routes must necessarily be very circuitous, and that
almost, if not quite half the territory lies between them. So, last
year, Major Chorpening, the contractor for carrying the Salt Lake and
California Mail, resolved to seek a shorter route midway between them,
which he partially succeeded in establishing. This route passes Camp
Floyd, forty-three miles south of Salt Lake City, and thence strikes
west south-west through “the Desert,” so called, which it penetrates for
one hundred and fifty miles or more; thence turning north-west to reach
and follow the original emigrant and mail-route down the Humboldt. Even
thus, it is somewhat shorter than any other traveled route from Salt
Lake to Carson Valley, but still very tortuous, and at least one hundred
and fifty miles longer than it should be. Capt. Simpson, of the U. S.
Topographical Corps, has recently made his way quite through the desert,
on a route which makes the distance only five hundred and sixty-one
miles from Camp Floyd to Carson Valley; whereas it is six hundred and
seventy by the present mail-route, and further by any other. Capt.
Simpson is now engaged in further surveys, whereby he hopes[10] to
shorten the distance from Salt Lake City to Genoa, near the head of
Carson Valley, to about five hundred and fifty miles; and two of Major
Chorpening’s superintendents are now examining the new portion of this
route, intending to recommend a transfer of the mail to it should they
deem it practicable for wagons, and not hopelessly destitute of grass
and water. I trust they will find it passable; meantime, let me give
some account of so much of it as I have traveled, as I am not aware that
any is yet extant.
Footnote 10:
These hopes have since been fully realized. The new direct central
route is not only one hundred miles shorter, but is said to be better
supplied with grass and water, than that I traveled.
I left Camp Floyd in the mail-wagon from Salt Lake City, on the morning
of Thursday, July 21st, pursuing a south-west course over a low
mountain-pass. Twenty miles on, we found a small brook making from the
mountains south of us across a thirsty plain, which, I presume, soon
drank it up. The vegetation was the same eternal sage-bush and
grease-wood, which I am tired of mentioning, but which, together or
separately, cover two-thirds of all the vast region between the Rocky
Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. In places, the sage-bush, for miles in
extent, is dead and withering, seemingly parched up by the all-pervading
drouth; the grease-wood is either hardier, or chooses its ground more
judiciously; for it is rarely found dead by acres. There is some
bunch-grass on the sides of two or three mountains, but very little of
aught that can be relied on to sustain human or animal life. The
mountains and plains seem to divide the ground very fairly between
them—the soil of both being mainly a white clay; while the former have
that creased, gullied, washed-away appearance, which I have repeatedly
noticed. Sometimes they are nearly perpendicular on one or more sides,
like the Buttes further east; but usually they can be ascended on any
side, and seem to rise but one to three thousand feet above the plains
at their bases. These plains appear from a distance to be level as so
many tables; but, on attempting to cross them in a wagon, you find them
creased and scored by innumerable water-courses, now dry, but showing
that, in the wet season, water is most abundant here. In most instances,
a gradual slope of a mile or two intervenes between the foot of a
mountain and the adjacent plain or valley; this slope is apt to be
intensely dry, sterile, and covered with dead or dying sage-bush. I
judge these slopes to be composed of the rocky, gravelly material of the
mountains, from which the lighter clay has been washed out and carried
off. They often seem to be composed almost wholly of small bits of rock.
The valleys or plains are from five to fifteen miles across, though they
seem, in the clear, dry atmosphere of Utah, not half so much. These
plains have an imperceptible slope to some point near their respective
centers, where a wider water-course runs toward some adjacent valley; in
some cases, a marsh or naked space near the center indicates that the
surplus water from the surrounding mountains forms here in winter and
spring a petty, shallow lake, which the hot suns soon evaporate or the
thirsty soil absorbs. The mountains are thinly belted or dotted with
low, scrubby cedar, seldom ten feet high, and often nearly as far across
the green top formed by three or four stalks or stems starting from a
common root. The mountains seem to have no particular, or rather no
general direction; some of the valleys being nearly or quite surrounded
by them. Even in the wettest seasons, I cannot perceive that this region
sends off any surplus water to Salt Lake or any other general reservoir.
Such is the face of the country for some two hundred miles directly
south-west of Camp Floyd.
We found a station, a change of horses, and something that was called
dinner, on the little stream I have already mentioned, and halted here,
twenty miles or more from Camp Floyd. In the afternoon, we came on, over
a higher, rockier mountain-pass and a far rougher road, to the next
station—Simpson’s Spring, nearly fifty miles from Camp Floyd—where we
halted for the night. I fear the hot suns of August will dry up this
spring; while there is no other fit to drink for a weary distance south
and west of this point.
The station-keeper here gave me an incident which illustrates the
character of the country. Some few days previously to our arrival, he
ascertained that his oxen, eight in number, had gone off, two or three
nights before, taking a southerly course; so he mounted a horse and
followed their trail. He rode upon it one hundred miles without reaching
water or overtaking the cattle, which had lain down but once since they
started, and were still a day’s journey ahead of him. If he continued
the pursuit his horse must die of thirst, and then he too must perish;
so he turned about and left his oxen to die in the desert or be found
and eaten by savages. There was not a shadow of hope that he would ever
see them again.
We had to drive the same team (mules of course) all next day, making
fifty miles; but we stopped to rest and feed them at a sub-station, only
twenty miles from our starting-point. It was about the forlornest spot I
ever saw. Though at the foot of a low mountain, there was no water near
it; that which was given our mules had been carted in a barrel from
Simpson’s Spring, aforesaid, and so must be for most of each year. An
attempt to sink a well at this point had thus far proved a failure. The
station-keeper here lives entirely alone—that is, when the Indians will
let him—seeing a friendly face but twice a week, when the mail-stage
passes one way or the other. He deeply regretted his lack of books and
newspapers; we could only give him one of the latter. Why do not men who
contract to run mails through such desolate regions comprehend that
their own interest, if no nobler consideration, should impel them to
supply their stations with good reading matter! I am quite sure that one
hundred dollars spent by Major Chorpening in supplying two or three good
journals to each station on his route, and in providing for their
interchange from station to station, would save him more than one
thousand dollars in keeping good men in his service, and in imbuing them
with contentment and gratitude. So with other mail-routes through
regions like this.
We drove on that day thirty miles further, to Fish Springs station, just
before reaching which we passed one of the salt wells which are
characteristic of this country, though not absolutely peculiar to it.
This one is about six or eight feet in diameter, and perhaps an equal
distance from the surface of the surrounding earth to that of the water,
which has a whitish green aspect, is intensely salt, and said to be
unfathomable, with a downward suction which a man could hardly or not at
all resist. I had no desire to try, badly as I needed ablution.
Fish Springs form quite a large pool at the north end of a low mountain
range, and send off a copious stream to be drank up in the course of
three or four miles by the thirsty clay of the plain. The water is
brackish, and I think sulphurous, as that of a spring in the adjacent
marsh near the station clearly is. There are many fish in the pool and
stream, and they are said to be good. I should have liked to verify the
assertion; and if they bite a hundredth part so freely as the musketoes
do hereabout, it were an easy matter to afford the stage passengers here
a change from their usual rations of pork, bread and coffee; which, when
the flour, or the pork, or the coffee, happens to be out, as it
sometimes is, renders the diet unsatisfactory, even to those who would
seem to have been seasoned to the like by a passage across the plains
and the Rocky Mountains. Fish Springs are just fifty miles from living
water on either side, and the stages have to run at least ten miles out
of their course to strike them. There is some coarse grass here.
_July 23d._—We traveled this forenoon over a plain nearly surrounded by
mountains. Said plain is very level to the eye, but the rapid traveler’s
sense of feeling contradicts this, for he finds it full of
dry-water-courses, which give him most uncomfortable jolts. Before noon,
we came to the spot, where the stage-mules are turned out to feed and
rest, by the side of a sink or depression in the plain, which is covered
with coarse grass and reeds or bulrushes. By digging in the side of this
sink, water has been easily obtained, but so sulphurous, and generally
bad, as to be barely drinkable. Even the mules, I noticed, practice
great moderation in the use of it. At one, we harnessed up, and were
soon rising over a long mountain-pass, hardly less than ten miles from
the level plain to its summit, where a light thunder-shower—that is, a
light rain with heavy thunder—overtook us. We drove rapidly down its
western declivity, and, a little after 5, P. M., reached our next
station in “Pleasant Valley,” a broad ravine, which descends to the
south-west. Here we found water—bright, sweet, pure, sparkling, leaping
water—the first water fit to drink that we had reached in a hundred
miles; if Simpson’s Spring ever dries up, the distance will then be at
least a hundred and twenty. We were now across what is here technically
known as “the desert”—that is to say, we had crossed the north-east
corner of it. I believe it extends at least two hundred miles south from
this point, and is at least as far from east to west across its center.
If Uncle Sam should ever sell that tract for one cent per acre, he will
swindle the purchaser outrageously.
Let me endeavor, on quitting it, to give a clear idea of this desert,
and thus of about half the land inclosed between the Rocky Mountains and
the Sierra Nevada—the other half being mainly covered by mountains and
the narrow ravines or cañons which separate them.
The plains or valleys of Utah, then, have generally a soil of white
clay, sometimes rocky, at others streaked by sand or gravel; but usually
pure clay, save as it is impregnated with some alkaline
substance—usually salæratus; but in places niter, in others, salt or
sulphur. Sometimes, but rarely, considerable areas of this alkali in a
nearly pure state are exposed on the surface; in many places, it covers
the beds of shallow, dried-up lakes, and even streams, with a whitish
incrustation; but it is more generally diffused through the soil, and
thus impregnates the springs and streams. Irrigating a piece of ground,
strongly imbued with alkali, will often bring an incrustation of it to
the surface, after which no trouble from it is experienced in that
place. I think the greater proportion of these plains or valleys—which
could easily be cleared of their grease-wood and sage-bush and
plowed—would produce large crops of wheat, and of almost anything else,
if they could be irrigated. But that can never be, unless by Artesian
wells. But little rain falls in summer, and that little is speedily
evaporated from the hot earth, leaving the clay as thirsty as ever. I
fear it is mainly doomed to perpetual barrenness.
The mountains which divide these plains exude very little water.
Wherever a range is single—that is, with a broad valley each side of
it—it is apt to be not more than one to three thousand feet high, and so
to be early denuded of snow; its springs are few and generally feeble,
and their waters are often dried up before trickling half way down the
sides of the mountain which gave them birth. If a spring is so copious,
or so many are speedily combined, as to form a considerable stream, they
may reach the plain; but only to be speedily drank up by its scorched
surface. Cultivation, therefore, save in a very few narrow spots, seems
here impossible.
But wherever a chaos or jumble of mountains is presented—still more,
where mountains rise behind mountains, range behind range, rank above
rank, till the summits of the furthest that may be seen are flecked with
snow—there the case is altered. Springs are there more abundant and more
copious; the gradual melting of the snows swells the rivulets formed by
the speedy meeting of their waters; and thus considerable brooks are
formed and poured down upon the subjacent plains, as we observe in and
around Salt Lake City, and north and west of Lake Utah. Thus are formed
Bear and Weber Rivers; such, I believe, is the origin of the Humboldt.
But such instances are far too rare in Utah. From the Jordan to the
Humboldt is about three hundred and fifty miles by the route I traveled,
and in all that distance the brooks and rills I crossed or saw, could
they be collected into one channel, would barely form a decent
mill-stream. I thence traveled down the south side of the Humboldt for
two hundred and twenty-five miles, and in all that distance not more
than two tributaries come in on that side, and their united currents
would barely suffice to turn a grindstone. This desolation seems
therefore irredeemable.
The mountains of central Utah are less hopeless than the Plains.
Contrary to my former impression, they are fairly wooded; by which I
mean that wood is procurable on them at almost any point. This wood is
for the most part cedar, six to ten feet high, and from a foot downward
in diameter near the ground. White pines of like size, and of equally
scrubby character, are quite common in the western part of the mountains
I traversed, and there is some balsam-fir in the deeper cañons, which
attains a diameter of fifteen to twenty inches, and a height of forty to
sixty feet. Of this fir, several of the mail-station cabins are
constructed; in Ruby Valley, they have one of red or Indian-pine; but
they are quite commonly built of stones and mud. One on the Humboldt is
built of dwarf-willow canes or wattles—not one any where of cedar nor of
the dwarfed white-pine of this region. Neither could be made to answer.
But I must hurry on. At Pleasant Valley, we turned north-west up a broad
ravine, and thenceforth held that general course to reach the Humboldt,
instead of still making west south-west directly toward Carson Valley,
as it is proposed hereafter to do if that be found practicable. For the
next one hundred and forty miles or thereabouts, our trail led us mainly
up one side of a mountain range and down the other, thence across a
valley of some ten miles in width to the foot of another chain, and so
on. As the train naturally runs up the deepest cañons and over the
lowest passes, the ascent and descent are rarely abrupt for any
considerable distance, and we seldom lacked water; but our route was the
most devious imaginable—veering from north-east on one hand to south on
the other. Sometimes, two or three hundred square miles were visible at
a glance—the mountain-sides half covered with cedar and pine, with some
dwarf willows and rose-bushes often fringing their slender rivulets; but
not a tree other than evergreen in sight. There is a large, pine-leaved
shrub or small tree which a driver termed a mountain-mahogany and a
passenger called a red haw, growing sparingly among the evergreens on
some mountain slopes, which seems about half way between a thorn-bush
and an untrimmed apple-tree, but nothing else deciduous above the size
of the dwarf-willow. Even the sage-bush and grease-wood appear to be
evergreens. Grass is here not abundant but unfailing, as it must be
where water is perennial and wood in fair supply. The plains or valleys
remain as further east, save that they are smaller, and, because of the
less scanty supply of water, more susceptible of improvement. At Shell
Creek, forty-five miles from Pleasant Valley, where we spent our next
night, there is a little garden—the first I had seen since Camp
Floyd—and at Ruby Valley, fifty miles or so further on, the government
has a farm in crop, intended for the benefit, and partly cultivated by
the labor of the neighboring Indians. The mail-station also has its
garden, and is cutting an abundance of hay. From this station, it is
expected that the new cut-off, saving one hundred miles or more in
distance to Carson Valley, will be made, so soon as those now
scrutinizing it shall have pronounced it practicable.
At Ruby, the stage usually stops for the night; but we had been six days
making rather less than three hundred miles, and began to grow
impatient. The driver had his own reasons for pushing on, and did so,
over a road partly mountainous, rough and sideling; but, starting at
eight P. M., we had reached the next (Pine Valley) station, forty miles
distant, before sunrise. Here we were detained three or four hours for
mules—those we should have taken being astray—but at nine we started
with a new driver, and were soon entangled in a pole-bridge over a deep,
miry stream—a drove of a thousand head of cattle (the first ever driven
over this road) having recently passed, and torn the frail bridge to
pieces. Our lead-mules went down in a pile, but were got up and out and
the wagon ran over, after a delay of an hour. We soon rose from Pine
Valley by a long, irregular, generally moderate ascent, to a mountain
divide, from which our trail took abruptly down the wildest and worst
cañon I ever saw traversed by a carriage. It is in places barely wide
enough at bottom for a wagon, and if two should meet here it is scarcely
possible that they should pass. The length of this cañon is a mile and a
half; the descent hardly less than two thousand feet; the side of the
road next to the water-course often far lower than the other; the
roadbed is often made of sharp-edged fragments of broken rock, hard
enough to stand on, harder still to hold back on. The heat in this cañon
on a summer afternoon is intense, the sun being able to enter it while
the wind is not. Two or three glorious springs afford partial
consolation to the weary, thirsty traveler. I am confident no passenger
ever rode down this rocky ladder; I trust that none will until a better
road is made here; though a good road in such a gulch is scarcely
possible. Fifteen miles further, across a plain and a lower range of
hills, brought our mail-wagon at last, about seven P. M. of its seventh
day from Salt Lake City, to