Chapter XII: To Ruby Valley (1)

Mounted upon a fine mule, here worth $240, and “bound” to fetch in California $400, and accompanying a Gentile youth who answered to the name of Joe, I proceeded to take my first lesson in stock-driving. We were convoying ten horses, which, not being wild, declined to herd together, and, by their straggling, made the task not a little difficult to a tyro. The road was that leading to Camp Floyd before described. At the Brewery near Mountain Point we found some attempts at a station, and were charged $1 50 for frijoles, potatoes, and bread: among other decorations on the wall was a sheet of prize-fighters, in which appeared the portraiture of an old man, once the champion of the light weights in the English ring, now a Saint in Great Salt Lake City. The day was fine and wondrous clear, affording us a splendid back view of the Happy Valley before it was finally shut out from sight, and the Utah Lake looked a very gem of beauty, a diamond in its setting of steely blue mountains. After fording the Jordan we were overtaken by Mr. Kennedy, who had been delayed by more last words, and at the dug-out we drank beer with Shropshire Joe the Mormon, who had been vainly attempting to dig water by a divining rod of peach-tree. When moonlight began to appear, Joe the Gentile was ordered by the “boss” to camp out with the horses, where fodder could be found gratis, a commandment which he obeyed with no end of grumbling. It was deep in the night before we entered Frogtown, where a creaking little Osteria supplied us with supper, and I found a bed at the quarters of my friend Captain Heth, who obligingly insisted upon my becoming his guest.

The five days between the 20th and the 26th of September sped merrily at my new home, Camp Floyd; not pressed for time, I embraced with pleasure the opportunity of seeing the most of my American brothers in arms. My host was a son of that Old Dominion of Queen Elizabeth, where still linger traces of the glorious Cavalier and the noble feudal spirit, which (alas!) have almost disappeared from the mother country; where the genealogical tree still hangs against the wall; where the principal families, the Nelsons, Harrisons, Pages, Seldens, and Allens, intermarry and bravely attempt to entail; and where the houses, built of brick brought out from England, still retain traces of the seventeenth century. A winter indeed might be passed most pleasantly on the banks of James River and in the west of Virginia--a refreshing winter to those who love, as I do, the traditions of our ancestors.

[SPREES.]

From Captain Heth I gathered that in former times, in Western America as in British India, a fair aborigine was not unfrequently the copartner of an officer’s hut or tent. The improved communication, however, and the frequency of marriage, have abolished the custom by rendering it unfashionable. The Indian squaw, like the Beebee, seldom looked upon her “mari” in any other light but her banker. An inveterate beggar, she would beg for all her relations, for all her friends, and all her tribe, rather than not beg at all, and the lavatory process required always to be prefaced with the bribe. Officers who were long thrown among the Prairie Indians joined, as did the Anglo-Indian, in their nautches and other amusements, where, if whisky was present, a cut or stab might momentarily be expected. The skin was painted white, black, and red, the hair was dressed and decorated, and the shirt was tied round the waist, while broadcloth and blanket, leggins and moccasins completed the costume. The “crack thing to do” when drinking with Indians, and listening to their monotonous songs and tales, was to imitate Indian customs; to become, under the influence of the jolly god, a Hatim Tai; exceedingly generous; to throw shirt to one man, blanket to another, leggins to a third--in fact, to return home in breech-cloth. Such sprees would have been severely treated by a highly respectable government; they have now, however, like many a pleasant hour in British India, had their day, and are sunk, many a fathom deep, in the genuine Anglo-Scandinavian gloom.

[ARMY GRIEVANCES.]

I heard more of army grievances during my second stay at Camp Floyd. The term of a soldier’s enlistment, five years, is too short, especially for the cavalry branch, and the facilities for desertion are enormous. Between the two, one third of the army disappears every year. The company which should number 84 has often only 50 men. The soldier has no time to learn his work; he must drive wagons, clear bush, make roads, and build huts and stables. When thoroughly drilled he can take his discharge, and having filled a purse out of his very liberal pay ($11 per mensem), he generally buys ground and becomes a landed proprietor. The officers are equally well salaried; but marching, countermarching, and contingent expenses are heavy enough to make the profession little better than it is in France. The Secretary of War being a civilian, with naturally the highest theoretical idea of discipline and command combined with economy, is always a martinet; no one can exceed the minutest order, and leave is always obtained under difficulties. As the larger proportion of the officers are Southern men, especially Virginians, and as the soldiers are almost entirely Germans and Irish--the Egyptians of modern times--the federal army will take little part in the ensuing contest. It is more than probable that the force will disband, break in two like the nationalities from which it is drawn. As far as I could judge of American officers, they are about as republican in mind and tone of thought as those of the British army. They are aware of the fact that the bundle of sticks requires a tie, but they prefer, as we all do, King Stork to King Log, and King Log to King Mob.

I took sundry opportunities of attending company inspections, and found the men well dressed and tolerably set up, while the bands, being German, were of course excellent. Mr. Chandless and others talk of the United States army discipline as something Draconian; severity is doubtless necessary in a force so constituted, but--a proof of their clemency--desertion is the only crime punishable by flogging. The uniform is a study. The States have attempted in the dress of their army, as in the forms of their government, a moral impossibility. It is expected to be at once cheap and soldier-like, useful and ornamental, light and heavy, pleasantly hot in the arctic regions, and agreeably cool under the tropics. The “military tailors” of the English army similarly forget the number of changes required in civilian raiment, and, looking to the lightness of the soldier’s kit, wholly neglect its efficiency, its capability of preserving the soldier’s life. The federal uniform consists of a brigand-like and bizarre sombrero, with Mephistophelian cock-plume, and of a blue broadcloth tunic, imitated from the old Kentuckian hunter’s surtout or wrapper, with terminations sometimes made to match, at other times too dark and dingy to please the eye. Its principal merit is a severe republican plainness, very consistent with the prepossessions of the people, highly inconsistent with the customs of military nations. Soldiers love to dress up Mars, not to clothe him like a butcher’s boy.

The position of Camp Floyd is a mere brick-yard, a basin surrounded by low hills, which an Indian pony would have little difficulty in traversing; sometimes, however, after the fashion of the land, though apparently easy from afar, the summits assume a mural shape, which would stop any thing but a mountain sheep. The rim shows anticlinal strata, evidencing upheavals, disruption, and, lastly, drainage through the kanyons which break the wall. The principal vegetation is the dwarf cedar above, the sage greenwood and rabbit-bush below. The only animals seen upon the plain are jackass-rabbits, which in places afford excellent sport. There are but few Mormons in the valley; they supply the camp with hay and vegetables, and are said to act as spies. The officers can not but remark the coarse features and the animal expression of their countenances. On the outskirts of camp are a few women that have taken sanctuary among the Gentiles, who here muster too strong for the Saints. The principal amusement seemed to be that of walking into and out of the sutlers’ stores, the hospitable Messrs. Gilbert’s and Livingston’s--a _passe temps_ which I have seen at “Sukkur Bukkur Rohri”--and in an evening ride, dull, monotonous, and melancholy, as if we were in the vicinity of Hyderabad, Sindh.

I had often heard of a local lion, the Timpanogos Kanyon, and my friends Captains Heth and Gove had obligingly offered to show me its curiosities. After breakfast on the 23d of September--a bright warm day--we set out in a good ambulance, well provided with the materials of a two days’ picnic, behind a fine team of four mules, on the road leading to the Utah Lake. After passing Simple Joe’s dug-out we sighted the water once more; it was of a whitish-blue, like the milky waves of Jordan, embosomed in the embrace of tall and bald-headed hills and mountains, whose monarch was Nebo of the jagged cone. Where the wind current sets there are patches of white sand strewn with broken shells and dried water-weed. Near Pelican Point, a long, projecting rocky spit, there is a fine feeding-ground for geese and ducks, and swimmers and divers may always be seen dotting the surface. On the south rises a conspicuous buttress of black rock, and thirty miles off we could see enormous dust columns careering over the plain. The western part of the valley, cut with suncracks and nullahs, and dotted with boulders, shelves gradually upward from the selvage of the lake to small divides and dwarf-hill ranges, black with cedar-bush, and traversed only by wood roads. On the east is the best wheat country in this part of the Territory; it is said to produce 106 bushels per acre.

[JORDAN BRIDGE.]

After seventeen miles we crossed Jordan Bridge, another rickety affair, for which, being Mormon property, we paid 50 cents; had we been Saints the expense would have been one half. Two more miles led us to Lehi, a rough miniature of Great Salt Lake City, in which the only decent house was the bishop’s; in British India it would have been the collector and magistrate’s. My companions pointed out to me a hut in which an apostate Mormon’s throat had been cut by blackened faces. It is gratifying to observe that throughout the United States, as in the Old Country, all historical interest pales before a barbarous murder. As we advanced a wall of rock lay before us; the strata were in confusion as if a convulsion had lately shuddered through their frame, and tumbled fragments cumbered the base, running up by precipitous ascents to the middle heights. The colors were as grotesque: the foreground was a mass of emerald cane, high and bushy; beyond it, the near distance was pink with the beautiful bloom most unpoetically termed “hogweed,” and azure with a growth like the celebrated blue-grass of Kentucky; while the wall itself was a bloodstone dark green with cedar--which, 100 feet tall, was dwarfed to an inch--and red stained with autumnal maple, and below and around the brightest yellow of the faded willow formed the bezel, a golden rim.

[AMERICAN FORK.]

Two miles and a half from Lehi led us to American Fork, a soft sweet spring of snow-water, with dark shells adhering to white stones, and a quantity of trout swimming the limpid wave. The bridge was rickety and loose planked--in fact, the worst I ever saw in the United States, where, as a rule, the country bridges can never be crossed without fear and trembling; the moderate toll was $1 both ways. Three miles and a half more placed us at Battle Creek, where in 1853 the Yuta Indians fled precipitately from a Mormon charge. Six miles over a dusty beach conducted us to the mouth of the kanyon, a brown tract crossed by a dusty road and many a spring, and showing the base of the opposite wall encumbered with degraded masses, superimposed upon which were miniature castles. The mouth of the ravine was a romantic spot: the staples were sister giants of brown rock--here sheer, their sloping--where pines and firs found a precarious root-hold, and ranged in long perspective lines, while between them, through its channel, verdant with willow, and over a clear pebbly bed, under the screes and scaurs, coursed a mountain torrent more splendid than Ruknabad.

We forded the torrent and pursued the road, now hugging the right, then the left side of the chasm. The latter was exceedingly beautiful, misty with the blue of heaven, and rising till its solidity was blent with the tenuity of ether. The rest of the scenery was that of the great Cotton-wood Kanyon; painting might express the difference, language can not. After six miles of a narrow winding road, we reached the place of Cataracts, the principal lion of the place, and found that the season had reduced them to two thin milky lines coursing down bitumen-colored slopes of bare rock, bordered by shaggy forests of firs and cedars. The shrinking of the water’s volume lay bare the formation of the cascades, two steps and a slope, which at a happier time would have been veiled by a continuous sheet of foam.

After finding a suitable spot we outspanned, and, while recruiting exhausted nature, allowed our mules to roll and rest. After dining and collecting a few shells, we remounted and drove back through a magnificent sunset to American Fork, where the bishop, Mr. Lysander Dayton, of Ohio, had offered us bed and board. The good episkopos was of course a Mormon, as we could see by his two pretty wives; he supplied us with an excellent supper as a host, not as an innkeeper. The little settlement was Great Salt Lake City on a small scale--full of the fair sex; every one, by-the-by, appeared to be, or about to be, a mother. Fair, but, alas! not fair to us; it was verily

“Water, water every where,
And not a drop to drink!”

[THE OLD “DANITE.”]

Before setting out homeward on the next day we met O. Porter Rockwell, and took him to the house with us. This old Mormon, in days gone by, suffered or did not suffer imprisonment for shooting or not shooting Governor Boggs, of Missouri: he now herds cattle for Messrs. Russell and Co. His tastes are apparently rural; his enemies declare that his life would not be safe in the City of the Saints. An attempt had lately been made to assassinate him in one of the kanyons, and the first report that reached my ears when _en route_ to California was the murder of the old Danite by a certain Mr. Marony. He is one of the triumvirate, the First Presidency of “executives,” the two others being Ephe Hanks and Bill Hickman--whose names were loud in the land; they are now, however, going down; middle age has rendered them comparatively inactive, and the rising generation, Lot Huntington, Ike Clawson, and other desperadoes, whose teeth and claws are full grown, are able and willing to stand in their stead. Peter Rockwell was a man about fifty, tall and strong, with ample leather leggins overhanging his huge spurs, and the saw-handles of two revolvers peeping from his blouse. His forehead was already a little bald, and he wore his long grizzly locks after the ancient fashion of the United States, plaited and gathered up at the nape of the neck; his brow, puckered with frowning wrinkles, contrasted curiously with his cool, determined gray eye, jolly red face, well touched up with “paint,” and his laughing, good-humored mouth. He had the manner of a jovial, reckless, devil-may-care English ruffian. The officers called him Porter, and preferred him to the “slimy villains” who will drink with a man and then murder him. After a little preliminary business about a stolen horse, all conducted on the amiable, he pulled out a dollar, and sent to the neighboring distillery for a bottle of Valley Tan. The _aguardiente_ was smuggled in under a cloth, as though we had been respectables in a Moslem country, and we were asked to join him in a “squar’ drink,” which means spirits without water. The mode of drinking was peculiar. Porter, after the preliminary sputation, raised the glass with cocked little finger to his lips, with a twinkle of the eye ejaculated “Wheat!” that is to say, “good,” and drained the tumbler to the bottom: we acknowledged his civility with a “here’s how,” and drank Kentucky-fashion, which in English is midshipman’s grog. Of these “squar’ drinks” we had at least four, which, however, did not shake Mr. Rockwell’s nerve, and then he sent out for more. Meanwhile he told us his last adventure--how, when ascending the kanyon, he suddenly found himself covered by two long rifles; how he had thrown himself from his horse, drawn his revolver, and crept behind a bush, and how he had dared the enemy to come out and fight like men. He spoke of one Obry, a Frenchman, lately killed in a street-quarrel, who rode on business from Santa Fé to Independence, about 600 miles, in 110 hours. Porter offered, for the fun of the thing, to excel him by getting over 900 in 144. When he heard that I was preparing for California, he gave me abundant good advice--to carry a double-barreled gun loaded with buck-shot; to “keep my eyes skinned,” especially in kanyons and ravines; to make at times a dark camp--that is to say, unhitching for supper, and then hitching up and turning a few miles off the road; ever to be ready for attack when the animals were being inspanned and outspanned, and never to trust to appearances in an Indian country, where the red varmint will follow a man for weeks, perhaps peering through a wisp of grass on a hill-top till the time arrives for striking the blow. I observed that, when thus speaking, Porter’s eyes assumed the expression of an old mountaineer’s, ever rolling as if set in quicksilver. For the purpose of avoiding “White Indians,” the worst of their kind, he advised me to shun the direct route, which he represented to be about as fit for traveling as is h--ll for a powder magazine, and to journey _viâ_ Fillmore and the wonder-bearing White Mountains;[225] finally, he comforted me with an assurance that either the Indians would not attempt to attack us and our stock--ever a sore temptation to them--or that they would assault us in force and “wipe us out.”

[225] An emigrant company lately followed this road, and when obliged
by the death of their cattle to abandon their kit, they found on the
tramp a lump of virgin silver, which was carried to California: an
exploring party afterward dispatched failed, however, to make the
lead. At the western extremity of the White Mountains there is a
mammoth cave, of which one mile has been explored: it is said to end
in a precipice, and the enterprising Major Egan is eager to trace its
course.

When the drinking was finished we exchanged a cordial _poignée de main_ with Porter and our hospitable host, who appeared to be the _crême de la crême_ of Utah County, and soon found ourselves again without the limits of Camp Floyd.

On the evening of the 25th of September, the judge, accompanied by his son and the Marshal of the Territory, entered the cantonment, and our departure was fixed for the next day. The morning of the start was spent in exchanging adieux and little gifts with men who had now become friends, and in stirrup-cups which succeeded one another at no longer intervals than quarter hours. Judge Crosby, who had arrived by the last mail, kindly provided me with fishing-tackle which could relieve a diet of eggs and bacon, and made me regret that I had not added to my outfit a Maynard. This, the best of breech-loading guns, can also be loaded at the muzzle; a mere carbine in size, it kills at 1300 yards, and in the United States costs only $40 = £8. The judge, a remarkable contrast to the usual Elijah Pogram style that still affects bird’s-eye or speckled white tie, black satin waistcoat, and swallow-tailed coat of rusty broadcloth, with terminations to match, had been employed for some time in Oregon and at St. Juan: he knew one of my expatriated friends--poor J. de C., whose exile we all lament--and he gave me introductions which I found most useful in Carson Valley. Like the best Americans, he spoke of the English as brothers, and freely owned the deficiencies of his government, especially in dealing with the frontier Indians.

We started from Lieutenant Dudley’s hospitable quarters, where a crowd had collected to bid us farewell. The ambulance, with four mules driven by Mr. Kennedy in person, stood at the door, and the parting stirrup-cup was exhibited with a will. I bade farewell with a true regret to my kind and gallant hosts, whose brotherly attentions had made even wretched Camp Floyd a pleasant _séjour_ to me. At the moment I write it is probably desolate, the “Secession” disturbances having necessitated the withdrawal of the unhappies from Utah Territory.

[JOHNSTON’S SETTLEMENT.]

About 4 P.M., as we mounted, a furious dust-storm broke over the plain; perhaps it may account for our night’s _méprise_, which a censorious reader might attribute to our copious libations of whisky. The road to the first mail station, “Meadow Creek,” lay over a sage barren; we lost no time in missing it by forging to the west. After hopelessly driving about the country till 10 P.M. in the fine cool night, we knocked at a hut, and induced the owner to appear. He was a Dane who spoke but little English, and his son, “skeert” by our fierceness, began at once to boo-hoo. At last, however, we were guided by our “foreloper” to “Johnston’s settlement,” in Rock Valley, and we entered by the unceremonious process of pulling down the zigzag fences. After some trouble we persuaded a Mormon to quit the bed in which his wife and children lay, to shake down for us sleeping-places among the cats and hens on the floor, and to provide our animals with oats and hay. Mr. Grice, the marshal, one of the handiest of men, who during his volunteer service in Mexico had learned most things from carrying a musket to cooking a steak, was kind enough to prepare our supper, after which, still sorely laden with whisky dying within us, we turned in.

[A MEAN PLACE.]

_To Meadow Creek. 27th September._

We rose with the dawn, the cats, and the hens, sleep being impossible after the first blush of light, and I proceeded to inspect the settlement. It is built upon the crest of an earth-wave rising from grassy hollows; the haystacks told of stock, and the bunch-grass on the borders of the ravines and nullahs rendered the place particularly fit for pasturage. The land is too cold for cereals: in its bleak bottoms frost reigns throughout the year; and there is little bench-ground. The settlement consisted of half a dozen huts, which swarmed, however, with women and children. Mr. Kennedy introduced us to a Scotch widow of mature years, who gave us any amount of butter and buttermilk in exchange for a little tea. She was but a lukewarm Mormon, declaring polygamy to be an abomination, complaining that she had been inveigled to a mean place, and that the poor in Mormondom were exceedingly poor. Yet the canny body was stout and fresh, her house was clean and neat, and she washed her children and her potatoes.

We had wandered twenty-five miles out of the right road, and were still distant fifteen to sixteen from the first mail station. For the use of the floor, flies, and permission to boil water, we paid our taciturn Mormon $2, and at noon, a little before the bursting of the dusty storm-gusts, which reproduced the horrors of Sindh, we found ourselves once more in the saddle and the ambulance. We passed by a cattle track on rolling ground dotted with sage and greasewood, which sheltered hosts of jackass-rabbits, and the sego with its beautiful lily-like flowers. After crossing sundry nullahs and pitch-holes with deep and rugged sides, we made the mail station at the west end of Rush Valley, which is about twenty miles distant from Camp Floyd. The little green bottom, with its rush-bordered sinking spring, is called by Captain Simpson “Meadow Creek.” We passed a pleasant day in revolver practice with Al. Huntington, the renowned brother of Lot, who had lately bolted to South California, in attempts at rabbit-shooting--the beasts became very wild in the evening--and in dining on an antelope which a youth had ridden down and pistoled. With the assistance of the station-master, Mr. Faust, a civil and communicative man, who added a knowledge of books and drugs to the local history, I compiled an account of the several lines of communication between Great Salt Lake City and California.

Three main roads connect the land of the Saints with the El Dorado of the West--the northern, the central, and the southern.

The northern road rounds the upper end of the Great Salt Lake, and falls into the valleys of the Humboldt and Carson Rivers. It was explored in 1845 by Colonel Frémont,[226] who, when passing over the seventy waterless miles of the western, a continuation of the eastern desert, lost ten mules and several horses. The “first overland trip” was followed in 1846 by a party of emigrants under a Mr. Hastings, who gave his name to the “cut-off” which has materially shortened the distance. The road has been carefully described in Kelly’s California, in Horn’s “Overland Guide,” and by M. Remy. It is still, despite its length, preferred by travelers, on account of the abundance of grass and water: moreover, there are now but two short stretches of desert.

[226] Explored is used in a modified sense. Every foot of ground
passed over by Colonel Frémont was perfectly well known to the old
trappers and traders, as the interior of Africa to the Arab and
Portuguese pombeiros. But this fact takes nothing away from the
honors of the man who first surveyed and scientifically observed
the country. Among those who preceded Colonel Frémont, the most
remarkable, perhaps, was Sylvester Pattie, a Virginian, who, having
lost his wife in his adopted home on the Missouri, resolved to trap
upon and to trace out the head-waters of the Yellow River. The little
company of five persons, among whom were Pattie and his son, set out
on the 20th of June, 1824, and on the 22d of August arrived at the
head-waters of the Platte, where they found General Pratt proceeding
toward Santa Fé. Pattie, in command of 116 men, crossed the dividing
ridge, descended into the valley of the Rio Grand del Norto, entered
Santa Fé, and trapped on the Gila River. The party broke up on the
27th of November, 1826, when Pattie, accompanied by his son and six
others, descended the Colorado, and, after incredible hardships,
reached the Hispano-American missions, where they were received
with the customary inhumanity. The father died in durance vile; the
son, after being released and vaccinated at San Diego, reached San
Francisco, whence he returned home _viâ_ Vera Cruz and New Orleans,
after an absence of six years. The whole tale is well told in
“Harper’s Magazine.”

[PIONEER EXPLORERS.]

The southern road, _viâ_ Fillmore and San Bernardino, to San Pedro, where the traveler can embark for San Francisco, is long and tedious; water is found at thirty-mile distances; there are three deserts; and bunch and other grasses are not plentiful. It has one great merit, namely, that of being rarely snowed up, except between the Rio Virgen and Great Salt Lake City: the best traveling is in Spring, when the melting snows from the eastern hills fill the rivulets. This route has been traveled over by Messrs. Chandless and Remy, who have well described it in their picturesque pages. I add a few notes, collected from men who have ridden over the ground for several years, concerning the stations: the information, however, it will be observed, is merely hearsay.[227]

[227] The distance from Great Salt Lake City to San Bernardino is,
according to my informant, about 750 miles, and has been accomplished
in fourteen days. The road runs through Provo to Salt Cruz, formed by
a desert of 50-60 miles, and making Sevier River the half-way point
to the capital. At Corn Creek is an Indian farm, and Weaver is 64
miles from Fillmore. Cedar Spring is the entrance to Paravan Valley,
where as early as 1806 there was a fort and a settlement. Then comes
Fillmore, the territorial capital, and 96 miles afterward it passes
through Paravan City in Little Salt Lake Valley. At Cold Creek it
forks, the central road being that mostly preferred. The next station
is Mountain Meadows, the Southern Rim of the Basin, celebrated for
its massacre; ensues the Santa Clara River, and thence a total of 70
miles, divided into several stages, lead to the Rio Virgen. After
following the latter for 20-30 miles, the path crosses the divide
of Muddy River, and enters a desert 55-67 miles in breadth leading
to Las Vegas. Thirty miles beyond that point lies a pretty water
called “Mountain Springs,” a preliminary to “Dry Lake,” a second
desert 40-45 miles broad, and ending at an alkaline water called
Kingston Springs. The third desert, 40 miles broad, leads to a post
established for the protection of emigrants, and called Bitter or
Bidder’s Springs, 115 miles from Las Vegas. The next stage of 35 is
to the Indian River, a tributary of the Colorado, whence there is
another military establishment: the land is now Californian. Thence
following and crossing the course of the stream, the traveler sights
the Sierra Nevada. After 50 miles down the Mohave Kanyon is San
Bernardino, once a thriving Mormon settlement, 90 miles from San
Pedro and 120 from San Diego, where water conveyance is found to San
Francisco.

The central route is called Egan’s by the Mormons, Simpson’s by the Gentiles. Mr. or Major Howard Egan is a Saint and well-known guide, an indefatigable mountaineer, who for some time drove stock to California in the employ of Messrs. Livingston, and who afterward became mail-agent under Messrs. Chorpenning and Russell. On one occasion he made the distance in twelve days, and he claims to have explored the present post-office route between 1850 and the winter of 1857-1858. Captain J. H. Simpson, of the federal army, whose itinerary is given in Appendix I., followed between May and June, 1859. He traveled along Egan’s path, with a few unimportant deviations, for 300 miles, and left it ten miles west of Ruby Valley, trending southward to the suite of the Carson River. On his return he pursued a more southerly line, and fell into Egan’s route about thirty miles west of Camp Floyd. The _employés_ of the route prefer Egan’s line, declaring that on Simpson’s there is little grass, that the springs are mere fiumaras of melted snow, and that the wells are waterless. Bad, however, is the best, as the following pages will, I think, prove.

_To Tophet. 28th September._

On a cool and cloudy morning, which at 10 A.M. changed into a clear sunny day, we set out, after paying $3 for three feeds, to make the second station. Our road lay over the seven miles of plain that ended Rush Valley: we saw few rabbits, and the sole vegetation was stunted sage. Ensued a rough divide, stony and dusty, with cahues and pitch-holes: it is known by the name of General Johnston’s Pass. The hills above it are gray and bald-headed, a few bristles of black cedar protruding from their breasts, and the land wears an uninhabitable look. After two miles of toil we halted near the ruins of an old station. On the right side of the road was a spring half way up the hill: three holes lay full of slightly alkaline water, and the surplus flowed off in a black bed of vegetable mud, which is often dry in spring and summer. At “Point Look-out,” near the counterslope of the divide, we left on the south Simpson’s route, and learned by a sign-post that the distance to Carson is 533 miles. The pass led to Skull Valley, of ominous sound. According to some, the name is derived from the remains of Indians which are found scattered about a fine spring in the southern parts. Others declare that the mortal remains of bison here lie like pavement-stones or cannon balls in the Crimean Valley of Death. Skull Valley stretches nearly southwest of the Great Salt Lake plain, with which it communicates, and its drainage, as in these parts generally, feeds the lake. Passing out of Skull Valley, we crossed the cahues and pitch-holes of a broad bench which rose above the edge of the desert, and after seventeen miles beyond the Pass reached the station which Mormons call Egan’s Springs, anti-Mormons Simpson’s Springs, and Gentiles Lost Springs.

Standing upon the edge of the bench, I could see the Tophet in prospect for us till Carson Valley: a road narrowing in perspective to a point spanned its grisly length, awfully long, and the next mail station had shrunk to a little black knob. All was desert: the bottom could no longer be called basin or valley: it was a thin fine silt, thirsty dust in the dry season, and putty-like mud in the spring and autumnal rains. The hair of this unlovely skin was sage and greasewood: it was warted with sand-heaps; in places mottled with bald and horrid patches of salt soil, while in others minute crystals of salt, glistening like diamond-dust in the sunlight, covered tracts of moist and oozy mud. Before us, but a little to the right or north, and nearly due west of Camp Floyd, rose Granite Mountain, a rough and jagged spine or hog’s-back, inhabited only by wolves and antelopes, hares and squirrels, grasshoppers, and occasionally an Indian family. Small sweet springs are found near its northern and southern points. The tradition of the country declares it to be rich in gold, which, however, no one dares to dig. Our road is about to round the southern extremity, wheeling successively S. and S.E., then W. and N.W., then S.W. and S.E., and S.W. and N.W.--in fact, round three quarters of the compass; and for three mortal days we shall sight its ugly frowning form. A direct passage leads between it and the corresponding point of the southern hill: we contemplate, through the gap, a blue ridge where lies Willow-Spring Station, the destination of our party after to-morrow; but the straight line which saves so much distance is closed by bogs for the greater part of the year, and the size of the wild sage would impede our wagon-wheels.

[THE GREAT DESERT.]

The great desert of Utah Territory extends in length about 300 miles along the western side of the Great Salt Lake. Its breadth varies: a little farther south it can not be crossed, the water, even where not poisonous, being insufficient. The formation is of bottoms like that described above, bench-lands, with the usual parallel and perfectly horizontal water-lines, leaving regular steps, as the sea settled down, by the gradual upheaval of the land. They mark its former elevation upon the sides of the many detached ridges trending mostly N. and S. Like the rim of the Basin, these hills are not a single continuous mountain range which might be flanked, but a series of disconnected protrusions above the general level of the land. A paying railway through this country is as likely as a profitable canal through the Isthmus of Suez: the obstacles must be struck at right angles, with such assistance as the rough kanyons and the ravines of various levels afford.

We are now in a country dangerous to stock. It is a kind of central point, where Pávant, Gosh Yuta (popularly called Gosh Ute), and Panak (Bannacks) meet. Watches, therefore, were told off for the night. Next morning, however, it was found that all had stood on guard with unloaded guns.

_To Fish Springs. 29th September._

[OUR PARTY.]

At Lost Springs the party was mustered. The following was found to be the material. The Ras Kafilah was one Kennedy, an Irishman, whose brogue, doubly Dublin, sounded startlingly in the Great American Desert. On a late trip he had been victimized by Indians. The savages had driven off two of his horses into a kanyon within sight of the Deep-Creek Station. In the hurry of pursuit he spurred up the ravine, followed by a friend, when, sighting jerked meat, his own property, upon the trees, he gave the word _sauve qui peut_. As they whirled their horses the Yutas rushed down the hill to intercept them at the mouth of the gorge, calling them in a loud voice dogs and squaws, and firing sundry shots, which killed Kennedy’s horse and pierced his right arm. Most men, though they jest at scars before feeling a wound, are temporarily cowed by an infliction of the kind, and of that order was the good Kennedy.

The next was an excellent traveler, by name Howard. On the road between Great Salt Lake City and Camp Floyd I saw two men, who addressed me as Mr. Kennedy the boss, and, finding out their mistake, followed us to the place of rendezvous. The party, with one eye gray and the other black, mounted upon a miserable pony, was an American. After a spell at the gold diggings of California he had revisited the States, and he now wished to return to his adopted country without loss of time. He was a hardy, fine-tempered fellow, exceedingly skilled in driving stock. His companion was a Frenchman and ex-Zouave, who, for reasons best known to himself, declared that he came from Cuba, and that he had forgotten every word of Spanish. Like foreigners among Anglo-Scandinavians generally, the poor devil fared badly. He could not hold his own. With the most labor, he had the worst of every thing. He felt himself _mal placé_, and before the end of the journey he slunk away.

At Lost Springs we were joined by two Mormon fugitives, “pilgrims of love,” who had, it was said, secretly left the city at night, fearing the consequences of having “loved not wisely, but too well.” The first of the Lotharios was a Mr. R----, an English farrier-blacksmith, mounted upon an excellent horse and leading another. He soon took offense at our slow rate of progress, and, afflicted by the thought that the avenger was behind him, left us at Deep Creek, and “made tracks” to Carson City in ten days, with two horses and a total traveling kit of two blankets. We traced him to California by the trail of falsehoods which he left on the road. His comrade, Mr. A----, a New Englander, was also an apostate Mormon, a youth of good family and liberal education, who, after ruining himself by city sites and copper mines on Lake Superior, had permanently compromised himself with society by becoming a Saint. Also a Lothario, he had made his escape, and he proved himself a good and useful member of society. I could not but admire the acuteness of both these youths, who, flying from justice, had placed themselves under the protection of a judge. They reminded me of a debtor friend who found himself secure from the bailiff only within the walls of Spike Island or Belvidere Place, Southwark.

Another notable of the party was an apostate Jew and _soi disant_ apostate Mormon who answered to the name of Rose. He had served as missionary in the Sandwich Islands, and he spoke Kanaka like English. His features were those which Mr. Thackeray loves to delineate; his accents those which Robson delights to imitate. He denied his connection with the Hebrews. He proved it by eating more, by driving a better bargain, by doing less work than any of the party. It was truly refreshing to meet this son of old Houndsditch in the land of the Saints, under the shadow of New Zion, and the only drawback to our enjoyment was the general suspicion that the honorable name of apostate covered the less respectable calling of spy. He contrasted strongly with Jim Gilston of Illinois, a lath-like specimen of humanity, some six feet four in length--a perfect specimen of the Indianized white, long hair, sun-tanned, and hatchet-faced; running like an ostrich, yelping like a savage, and ready to take scalp at the first provocation. He could not refrain, as the end of the journey drew nigh, from deserting without paying his passage. Mr. Colville, a most determined Yankee, far advanced in years, was equally remarkable. He had $90 in his pocket. He shivered for want of a blanket, and he lived on hard bread, bacon, and tea, of which no man was ever seen to partake. Such were the seven “free men,” the independent traders of the company. There were also six “broths of boys,” who paid small sums up to $40 for the benefit of our escort, and who were expected to drive and to do general work. Traveling soon makes friends. No illusions of _amicitia_, however, could blind my eyes to the danger of entering an Indian country with such an escort. Untried men for the most part, they would have discharged their weapons in the air and fled at the whoop of an Indian, all of them, including Jake the Shoshonee, who had been permitted to accompany us as guide, and excepting our stanch ones, Howard, “Billy” the colt, and “Brandy” the dog.

[“GENTLE ANNIE.”--“YOU _BET_.”]

The station was thrown somewhat into confusion by the presence of a petticoat, an article which in these regions never fails to attract presents of revolvers and sides of bacon. “Gentle Annie,” attended by three followers, was passing in an ambulance from California to Denver City, where her “friend” was. To most of my companions’ inquiries about old acquaintances in California, she replied, in Western phrase, that the individual subject of their solicitude had “got to git up and git,” which means that he had found change of air and scene advisable. Most of her sentences ended with a “you _bet_,” even under circumstances where such operation would have been quite uncalled for. So it is related that when Dr. P----, of Camp Floyd, was attending Mrs. A. B. C. at a most critical time, he asked her tenderly, “Do you suffer much, Mrs. C.?” to which the new matron replied, “You _bet_!”

We set out about noon, on a day hot as midsummer by contrast with the preceding nights, for a long spell of nearly fifty miles. Shortly after leaving the station the road forks. The left-hand path leads to a grassy spring in a dwarf kanyon near the southern or upper part of a river bottom, where emigrants are fond of camping. The hills scattered around the basin were of a dark metallic stone, sunburnt to chocolate. The strata were highly tilted up and the water-lines distinctly drawn. After eight miles we descended into the yellow silty bed of a bald and barren fiumara, which was not less than a mile broad. The good judge sighed when he contrasted it with Monongahela, the “river of the falling banks.” It flows northward, and sinks near the western edge of the lake. At times it runs three feet of water. The hills around are white-capped throughout the winter, but snow seldom lies more than a week in the bottoms.

After twenty miles over the barren plain we reached, about sunset, the station at the foot of the Dugway. It was a mere “dug-out”--a hole four feet deep, roofed over with split cedar trunks, and provided with a rude adobe chimney. The tenants were two rough young fellows--station-master and express rider--with their friend, an English bull-dog. One of them had amused himself by decorating the sides of the habitation with niches and Egyptian heads. Rude art seems instinctively to take that form which it wears on the banks of Nilus, and should some Professor Rafinesque discover these traces of the aborigines after a sepulture of a century, they will furnish materials for a rich chapter on ante-Columbian immigration. Water is brought to the station in casks. The youths believe that some seven miles north of the “Dugway” there is a spring, which the Indians, after the fashion of that folk, sensibly conceal from the whites. Three wells have been sunk near the station. Two soon led to rock; the third has descended 120 feet, but is still bone dry. It passes first through a layer of surface silt, then through three or four feet of loose, friable, fossilless, chalky lime, which, when slaked, softened, and, mixed with sand, is used as mortar. The lowest strata are of quartz gravel, forming in the deeper parts a hard conglomerate. The workmen complained greatly of the increasing heat as they descend. Gold now becomes uppermost in man’s mind. The youths, seeing me handle the rubbish, at once asked me if I was prospecting for gold.

After roughly supping we set out, with a fine round moon high in the skies, to ascend the “Dugway Pass” by a rough dusty road winding round the shoulder of a hill, through which a fiumara has burst its way. Like other Utah mountains, the highest third rises suddenly from a comparatively gradual incline, a sore formation for cattle, requiring draught to be at least doubled. Arriving on the summit, we sat down, while our mules returned to help the baggage-wagons, and amused ourselves with the strange aspect of the scene. To the north, or before us, and far below, lay a long broad stretch, white as snow--the Saleratus Desert, west of the Great Salt Lake. It wore a grisly aspect in the silvery light of the moon. Behind us was the brown plain, sparsely dotted with shadows, and dewless in the evening as in the morning. As the party ascended the summit with much noisy shouting, they formed a picturesque group--the well-bred horses wandering to graze, the white-tilted wagons with their panting mules, and the men in felt capotes and huge leather leggins. In honor of our good star which had preserved every hoof from accident, we “liquored up” on that summit, and then began the descent.

[THE DEVIL’S HOLE.]

Having reached the plain, the road ran for eight miles over a broken surface, with severe pitch-holes and wagon-tracks which have lasted many a month; it then forked. The left, which is about six miles the longer of the two, must be taken after rains, and leads to the Devil’s Hole, a curious formation in a bench under “High Mountain,” about ninety miles from Camp Floyd, and south, with a little westing, of the Great Salt Lake. The Hole is described as shaped like the frustrum of an inverted cone, forty feet in diameter above, twelve to fifteen below. As regards the depth, four lariats of forty feet each, and a line at the end, did not, it is said, reach the bottom. Captain Simpson describes the water as brackish. The drivers declare it to be half salt. The Devil’s Hole is popularly supposed to be an air-vent or shaft communicating with the waters of the Great Salt Lake in their subterraneous journey to the sea (Pacific Ocean). An object cast into it, they say, is sucked down and disappears; hence, if true, probably the theory.

[SLOUGHS.]

We chose the shorter cut, and, after eight miles, rounded Mountain Point, the end of a dark brown butte falling into the plain. Opposite us and under the western hills, which were distant about two miles, lay the station, but we were compelled to double, for twelve miles, the intervening slough, which no horse can cross without being mired. The road hugged the foot of the hills at the edge of the saleratus basin, which looked like a furrowed field in which snow still lingers. In places, warts of earth tufted with greasewood emerged from hard, flaky, curling silt-cakes; in others, the salt frosted out of the damp black earth like the miniature sugar-plums upon chocolate bonbons. We then fell into a saline resembling freshly-fallen snow. The whiteness changes to a slaty blue, like a frozen pond when the water still underlies it; and, to make the delusion perfect, the black rutted path looked as if lately cut out after a snow-storm. Weird forms appeared in the moonlight. A line of sand-heaps became a row of railroad cars; a raised bench was mistaken for a paling; and the bushes were any thing between a cow and an Indian. This part of the road must be terrible in winter; even in the fine season men are often compelled to unpack half a dozen times.

After ascending some sand-hills we halted for the party to form up in case of accident, and Mr. Kennedy proceeded to inspect while we prepared for the worst part of the stage--the sloughs. These are three in number, one of twenty and the two others of 100 yards in length. The tule, the bayonet-grass, and the tall rushes enable animals to pass safely over the deep slushy mud, but when the vegetation is well trodden down, horses are in danger of being permanently mired. The principal inconvenience to man is the infectious odor of the foul swamps. Our cattle were mad with thirst; however, they crossed the three sloughs successfully, although some had nearly made Dixie’s Land, in the second.

Beyond the sloughs we ascended a bench, and traveled on an improved road. We passed sundry circular ponds garnished with rush; the water is sulphury, and, according to the season, is warm, hot, or cold. Some of these debord, and send forth what the Somal would call Biya Gora, “night-flowing streams.” About 3 A.M., cramped with cold, we sighted the station, and gave the usual “Yep! yep!” A roaring fire soon revived us; the strong ate supper and the weak went to bed, thus ending a somewhat fatiguing day.

_To Willow Creek. 30th September._

On this line there are two kinds of stations--the mail station, where there is an agent in charge of five or six “boys,” and the express station--every second--where there is only a master and an express rider. The boss receives $50-$75 per mensem, the boy $35. It is a hard life, setting aside the chance of death--no less than three murders have been committed by the Indians during this year--the work is severe; the diet is sometimes reduced to wolf-mutton, or a little boiled wheat and rye, and the drink to brackish water; a pound of tea comes occasionally, but the droughty souls are always “out” of whisky and tobacco. At “Fish Springs,” where there is little danger of savages, two men had charge of the ten horses and mules; one of these was a German Swiss from near Schaffhausen, who had been digging for gold to little purpose in California.

A clear cool morning succeeding the cold night aroused us betimes. Nature had provided an ample supply of warm water, though slightly sulphury, in the neighboring pot-holes, and at a little distance from the station was one conveniently cool. The fish from which the formation derives its name is a perch-like species, easily caught on a cloudy day. The men, like the citizens of Suez, accustom themselves to the “rotten water,” as strangers call it, and hardly relish the purer supplies of Simpson’s Springs or Willow Springs: they might have built the station about one mile north, near a natural well of good cool water, but apparently they prefer the warm bad.

The saleratus valley looked more curious in daylight than in moonlight. The vegetation was in regular scale; smallest, the rich bunch-grass on the benches; then the greasewood and the artemisia, where the latter can grow; and largest of all, the dwarf cedar. All was of lively hue, the herbage bright red, yellow, and sometimes green, the shrubs were gray and glaucous, the cedars almost black, and the rim of hills blue-brown and blue. We had ample time to contemplate these curiosities, for Kennedy, whose wits, like those of Hiranyaka, the mouse, were mightily sharpened by the possession of wealth, had sat up all night, and wanted a longer sleep in the morning. After a breakfast which the water rendered truly detestable, we hitched up about 10 A.M., and set out _en route_ for Willow Springs.

[THE DESERT VIEW.]