Chapter III: Part 3

This was accompanied by gestures, throwing his body backward in imitation of the dying woman whom fear had killed, according to his dramatic story.

I told him something like this: "No, heap big lie. You go back Skull Valley, you stay home, no sojer ketchy you, you be heap good Injun!" Upon this he grunted deeply, shook hands cordially, went back to his many-wived tents over across the creek, and soon we saw them filing off through the sagebrush toward their Skull Valley home, many miles over the Onaqui range.

POLYGAMY OF TO-DAY

The man that lays his hand upon a woman,
Save in the way of kindness, is a wretch
Whom 't were gross flattery to name a coward.
--_John Tobin_.

A baby was sleeping,
Its mother was weeping.
--_Samuel Lover_.

Polygamy _may_ die in Mormondom, but has never yet done so. Cases are often reported, and from the manner of their finding it is a certainty that new alliances are being formed continually between married men and unmarried women.

Not long ago a very bright conversion was made in one of the missions of an evangelical denomination. The convert was a young woman of more than average intelligence. Some of her relatives had been polygamists, but she repudiated the whole cult and creed. For a while this decision made it necessary for her to find other residence than her rightful home.

Some time after she permitted herself to be persuaded that a young man of her acquaintance loved her more than he did the polygamous tenet of his church--he was a Mormon--and that he never would attempt to woo and win another woman while she remained his wife. She consented, and was happy in her home life. Not for a moment did she suspect him of double-dealing. Her honest heart was above entertaining such suspicion had it entered. Serenely she saw her children growing to useful womanhood. Not a cloud of anxiety appeared on the calm sea of life; all was fine sailing. One day she was making some repairs in one of her husband's garments when a letter fell from a pocket. It bore the postmark of a city where they both had relatives, and it was quite natural that she should look into its contents.

What despair and agony seized her when she read therein the statement from the "other woman" telling her "fond" husband of the birth of the child!

The poor, heart-stricken, and hitherto trusting wife immediately rose to the dignity of outraged womanhood and insulted wifehood and compelled the polygamist to choose at once between her and the concubine. He did so, choosing the younger woman and leaving her who had trusted him too fondly.

This is not a tale of the ancients in Utah, but a living, festering story of the vivid present.

One way of avoiding prosecution by the law is the surreptitious, clandestine rearing of children, whose mothers lose no prestige in the community; for it is well understood "among the neighbors and friends." "Public polygamy has been suspended," but the requirement of the doctrine remains unchanged.

GREAT SALT LAKE

So lonely 'twas that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
--_Coleridge_.

This is truth the poet sings
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering
happier things.
--_Tennyson_.

GREAT SALT LAKE

Many stories, weird and lurid, true and untrue, have been told of this body of saline water lying imposed on the breast of the beautiful and scenic State of Utah. Although one of the transcontinental highways of ocean-to-ocean travel has extended its bands of steel directly across its wide bosom for many miles, it is still a spot where mystery lingers.

Private as well as public legends are handed down from lip to ear rather than from page to eye. For that reason there are tales of this wonderful salt sea to be learned only by residing in the vicinity. Its natural moods are unlike the ocean, and its individual characteristics would make a book.

The briny pond is but a wee thing as compared with its gigantic dimensions in the days when its waters were sweet and had an outlet to the north. Then its arms spread far south into Arizona, over into Nevada and into Idaho. It was 350 miles from the northern end to the southern, and 145 miles across from east to west. The area was 20,000 square miles. This greater lake stood 1,000 feet higher than does the present one, although this one is 4,280 feet above the level of the sea. Geologists have named the earlier one Bonneville, in honor of the intrepid soldier-explorer whom Washington Irving has so well fixed in American literature.

By some as yet unknown cataclysm a great break was made at the north end of this inland ocean and its pent volume was poured into the cañon of the Port Neuf toward the ravenous Snake. This reduced the level four hundred feet, but the old beach line may still be easily noted. Gradually this diminished body became smaller and smaller until it reached the present stage of desiccation.

So impure is this heavy liquid that after evaporation there is a residuum of twenty-eight pounds of solid matter in every hundred. This is composed of salt, magnesium, and other elements carrying three dollars of gold to the ton; the gold is not made a matter of trade or of industry because facilities are lacking for its handling. Very little animal life is found in this brine, and none of vegetable; in fact, at every point where the water touches the shore vegetation vanishes utterly. The animal life is that of a very small gnat which, mosquito-like, lays its eggs on the surface of the water. The larvæ, when driven shoreward, collect in such quantities as to cause a strong, unpleasant odor observable for miles to the leeward. Myriads of seagulls here find a dainty feast.

Salt Lake affords the finest and really the only beach-bathing resort in the whole interocean country. The bathing is attended with little, if any, danger. In thirty years only two persons have been lost. These strangled before assistance reached them. One body was found after four years, lying in the salty sand at the south end of the lake, whither the high winds from the north had drifted it. All the parts protected by the sand were perfectly preserved and as beautiful as if carved from Parian marble.

The tops of a number of sunken mountains still protrude above the surface and form islands: such are Fremont, Church, Stanbury, Carrington, and others. Some of these are habitable, possessing fine springs and irrigable land. Very few people live on these islands, but some brave spirits dare to face the semiprivations of such isolation and stay there with their herds.

Doubtless, many tales of heroism and devotion could be told of those who have lived on these islands. One of the best known is that of Mrs. Wenner, who, a few years after her marriage, went with her husband and little children to live on Fremont Island. Her husband's health failing, the oversight of the herds fell largely upon her, but she cheerily took up the burden, the while she trained her little ones, and was ever a true companion to him whom she daily saw slipping away.

The end came on a dread and fearsome day, while the faithful man who worked for them was detained on the mainland by a raging storm. The children and an incompetent woman could give her little assistance or consolation. There on the lonely, storm-lashed island, with faint-whispered words of love, the dear one closed his eyes forever. Tenderly she cared for his body, and sadly she kept her vigil, replenishing through the long night the two watchfires intended as a signal to those on the mainland. On the night of the second day, the man made his dangerous way back to the island--and with his help she laid the loved husband in his island grave, with no service but the tears and prayers of those who mourned.

This is but one story of desolation and sorrow--but the deep, briny waters and the barren, forbidding shores hold in their keeping many suggestions of mystery and of tears.

ARGONAUT SAM'S TALE

I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul.
--_Shakespeare_.

ARGONAUT SAM'S TALE

"I panned him out over and over ag'in,
But found nary sign of color,"
Said Argonaut Sam one evening, when,
As sitting atop of a box, to some men
He was spinning a yarn of the gold-trail.

And then,
With arms set akimbo, he straightened his back
And said: "'Twuz one night in the fifties I know;
Ther' kem up the trail frum the gulch jist below
A youngish-like feller; but steppin' so slow
I heartily pitied him even before
I saw his pale brow and heerd the sharp hack
Of his troublesome cough, and plain enough lack
Of more'n enough power to bring to my door
That tremblin' young body.

"He hed a small pack--
A blanket an' buckskin--but that wa'nt no lack
In them days when notions an' fashions wuz slack;
When all a man needed, besides pick an' pan,
Wuz a wallet o' leather to tie up his dust--'R
a place to git grub-staked (that means to git trust
Till he found a good prospeck); an' then he'd put in
His very best licks; fur in them days 'twuz sin
Fer a man strong o' body, o' wind an' o' limb
T' hang erround loafin' all day, 'twuz too thin.

"Well, this puny feller hed grin'-stunlike grit,
But wuz clean tuckered out when my cabin he hit;
'N fell down a-faintin' jist inside my door--
His eyes set 'n' glassy--he seemed done fer, shore.
So I straightened him out, couldn't do nothin' more

Than to put back his hair an' t' dampen his brow,
An' to feel fer his pulse--joy! I found it--slow
An' flickery though, stoppin' and startin', an' now
Gone ag'in; then it revived, but so faint, don't you know,
That minute by minute I couldn't hev said
Whether the feller wuz livin' or dead.

"All night I watched by him; an' 'long a-to'rds light
I seed that a change hed come: so, honor bright!
I made up my mind that I'd save that young life
If it took me all summer. I'd fight
With grim death to a finish fer him.

"An' so I begun.
I quit workin' my claim
Where I'd git on an average ('pon my good name)
An ounce or more daily of number one gold.
An' in them days we thought nothin', you see,
Of layin' by stuff fer a rainy day; we
Hed plenty; the diggins wuz rich, an' wuz thick
Scattered over the kentry. Most every crick
Hed plenty o' gold in nuggets or dust--
An' the man who wuz stingy hed ort to be cussed.
So I shouldered my task.

"It wuz wonderful how
The new life appeared to come back to my boy;
(Fer that's what I called him--'my boy') an' the joy
O' perviden fer suthin' besides my lone self
Made me happy. Y' see, th' experunce wuz new;
Fer I'd lived all alone ever since forty-two,
When, back in Ohio, I'd buried my wife
An' baby. Since then I'd looked on my life
As a weary, onfriendly, detestable load.
So that's why I lived all alone, don't you see?
I didn't love nothin' and nothin' loved me.

"But now of young Josh--his name wuz Josh Clark--
He'd come frum ol' York State--could sing like a lark--
Wuz finely brung up, an' that mother o' his,
A sister he tol' me, an' a girl he called Liz.
'D a give the hull earth if they only could know
If he wuz alive; but so hard-hearted, he
Would never be grateful to them nur to me.
Though I had no claim on him, yet it would seem
After all I hed done fer him, shorely some gleam
O' thankfulness somewhere might some time be seen.
'Sides spendin' my all I hed broken down too,
Wuz a shattered ol' man, though but then fifty-two;
Fer I'd give up my health an' my strength to pull through
My boy--fer I loved him, if ever men do.
But, no; it appeared that he hedn't no heart.
Not once did he thank me, and never asked why
I nussed him to life, 'stid o' lettin' him die.

"His wants wuz demands, his wishes commands,
An' once in the dusk, as we set on the sands
Of a stream that run by, he reached with his hands
So quick an' so blamed unexpected, you see,
Grabbed me by the hair an' out with a knife,
An' demanded my gold. I thought fer my life
He wuz jokin'; but no, when I seed that fierce look
Of murder an' pillage, I knowed what I'd done;
I'd thawed out a viper upon my hearth-stun
An' now wuz becomin' its prey.

"But, I'd none:
I'd spent all the surplus I hed to save him.
I'd missed all the summer an' fall to nuss him
Who now like a tiger wuz takin' my life.
'Hol' on, my dear Josh! Hol' on, my dear boy!'
No further I got, fer his hands clutched my throat--
I squirmed myself loose, but grapplin' my coat
He throwed me ag'in, now a madman, indeed.
His dirk-knife wuz raised. I said, 'Do yer best.
I've give you now all that I ever possessed
But life. Take it now if you like!' An' he struck.

"How long I laid there in the dark, I don't know;
But when I kem to I wuz layin' in bed,
An' the people wuz talkin' so easy an' low,
An' I knowed by the bandages too on my head
That I hed been nigh to the gates o' the dead.

"An' 'Where wuz Josh Clark?' did you say? I don't know.
He never wuz seen in the diggins below,
Ner heerd of in them parts ag'in, fer I know
He'd a-swung to the limb that come fust in the way;
Fer the boys in them days hed little to say,
But wuz mighty in doin'. So he got away.

"So it seems that some people is jist so depraved
There ain't a thing in 'em that ort to be saved.
'Twuz jist so with Josh, who I loved as a son;
He lived fer hisself an' fer hisself alone.
'N' 'at's why I remarked at the fust of this yarn,
The thing 'at it's cost me so dearly to larn--'I panned him out over
an' over ag'in,
But found nary sign of a color.'"

THE WRAITH OF THE BLIZZARD

The night it was gloomy, the wind it was high;
And hollowly howling it swept through the sky.
--_Southey_.

What matter how the night behaved?
What matter how the north wind raved?
--_Whittier_.

THE WRAITH OF THE BLIZZARD

We dread the unseen. Fear is always enervating; sometimes even deadly. Who has not fearsomely anticipated that which never came and wasted valuable energy and time in building bridges none are ever to cross? The surgical patient actually suffers more at sight of somber white-clad nurses, and the thought of the operation, than he does from the ordeal itself. It may be that we subconsciously dread the helpless state of unconsciousness into which the anæsthetic plunges us, and hesitate at a trip, no matter how short, into death's borderland, preferring to keep our own hands as long as possible on the helm of the ship of life.

I wonder why we become terror-stricken at the thought of ghosts. The untutored child needs only a hint to make him shy at the dark; and a lad has to be pretty large before he can walk far at night without once in a while looking behind him, just to be certain there is nothing following.

Thus spirits, spooks, bogies, wraiths, and other uncanny apparitions are unintentional inheritances of the race; a race that knows little more about the impending and impinging unseen than did the Saxon fathers who gave us our spooky speech.

I once had an experience which grows in interest as the years pass by. I had no fear or thought of fear that night, and the scenes of the evening were absolutely unannounced; they entered upon the sleety stage for whose violent acts I held no program.

One afternoon I was to go to one of my appointments, a mining town in Utah. In order to relieve home cares I took with me my four-year-old son, who thus would get some novel entertainment as well. To the buggy I hitched Jenny, the strawberry-roan cayuse, and started for the distant point. It was a little stormy all the way, and by the time we had well begun the service it had thickened so that a hard snow was setting in. It was dead in the north and continued with such strength that soon there appeared no slant to the falling columns. By the time church was dismissed the blizzard was on in full force, and the roads were already so filled with the new drifts that to return with the buggy was hardly thinkable. I borrowed a saddle, and leaving the little lad with friends, started for home, where I was under appointment to preach that evening. My way lay in the north, in the very teeth of the raging storm. With head tucked down, I trusted the reins to Jenny, who had never disappointed me in many a mountain trip, but I had not gone far until I found the storm was at my back. Peering sharply through the fast falling darkness, I discovered that the mountains were on my left instead of on my right, as they should have been. Jenny had turned tail to the storm. Feeling herself unwilling to face the arctic onset, she was retreating.

Only the dire necessity of the occasion made me compel her to face the torturing attack of the icy shafts that were hurling themselves on us like steel points.

We were forced, Jenny and I, to abandon the only road, now drift-filled, and take an unbroken way through the sagebrush, junipers, buckbrush, and other tangled chaparral, where there was no trail at all, and farther to the right, that I might keep an eye on the mountains and not get turned around again. I felt the force of Cardinal Newman's immortal hymn,

... amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on!
The night is dark and I am far from home;
Lead thou me on!

We had not gone far until I began to hear the sweetest music. I could not imagine from whence it fell, as I knew there was not a human home in all that plain between the two settlements. Then I heard personal conversation; in fact, the night was full of pleasant travelers. The awful storm seemed not to affect them in the least. They seemed to have an open road too, while we were plunging through deep snowdrifts, my feet already dragging along their tops.

When the first carriage load came up I saw it was only a desert juniper. The boreal gale sweeping through its shivering branches made converse in the music of the wild, Jenny and I being the only seat-holders in that grand opera. Soon another caravan of belated folks drove up; but it was only a load of hay that had been over-tipped. Others came, but they were only bushes or some inanimate object. There was little life out on that perishing night.

After hours of fearsome and benumbing travel, Jenny stumbled with me into the little home town. A good feed of oats and a warm shelter doubtless ended the story happily for her. But for me--the ghost of the desert and the wraith of the blizzard had become real. They spoke to me that night and I understood.

THE GREAT NORTHWEST

God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this
planting.--_Longfellow_.

Westward the course of empire takes its way.--_Berkeley_.

In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the
desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the
thirsty land springs of water.--_Isaiah_.

THE GREAT NORTHWEST

Possibly there are those who find themselves thinking that Western tales are travelers' tales and must be taken with "a grain of salt." Some also say that the man who crosses the Missouri never is able to tell the truth again; this is crude, I know, and in some cases true, but they who are so afflicted were just the same before they ever saw the Missouri.

Our waterless areas were considered by Captain Bonneville (as told by Washington Irving) utterly barren and forever hopeless wastes. In Astoria--chapter thirty-four--these words are used:

"In this dreary desert of sand and gravel of the Snake here and there is a thin and scanty herbage, insufficient for the horse or the buffalo. Indeed, these treeless wastes between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific are even more desolate and barren than the naked, upper prairies on the Atlantic side; they present vast desert tracts that must ever defy cultivation, and interpose dreary and thirsty wilds between the habitations of man, in traversing which the wanderer will often be in danger of perishing."

So thought Captain Bonneville; so wrote the matchless American _littérateur_, Washington Irving, of "Sunnyside," author and authority, creator of The Life of George Washington, and the Broken Heart, which made Lord Byron weep. The doughty Captain Benjamin L. E. Bonneville, who died as late as 1878, obtaining leave of absence and a furlough, endured the pleasure of hardships common to the explorer, and through his happy biographer added the Trail to literature; but his eye of vision did not see these great stones of the commonwealth, Utah, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. The very region so carefully pictured above as the dreariest of deserts, a veritable Western Sahara, is the exact location of Idaho and a large portion of Oregon; a region perfectly adapted to the sustenance of immense population and intense development.

Moses understood all the wisdom of the Egyptians. We do not, but we do know that the biggest thing in an arid country is the ditch. America's triumph to date in the twentieth century is the completion of the Panama Ditch. The ditch is in Idaho more valuable by far than the land, for without it the parched soil is practically worthless, being an area of shimmering sand, where the ash-colored and dust-covered sagebrush breeds the loathsome horned toad, the rough-and-ready rattlesnake, and the slinking, night-hunting coyote, which preys on the lithe-limbed, loping jack rabbit.

The modern Western American is rapidly learning a modified wisdom of the ancient irrigators of Egypt, and already knows how to drain the irrigated acres and leech these old alluvial plains. From the days when the frosty glacial plowman ran his deep basaltic furrows for the majestic Snake and other streams, these gorges of nature had been only mossy beds over which lazily slid the unmeasured volumes down to the western and "bitter moon-mad sea." Now man, the mightiest of all magicians, has lured the liquid serpents from their age-long couches, cut them into thousands of smaller streams, and sent them bravely abroad on the face of the protesting desert, drowning its death and making it to bloom and blossom.

As a concrete instance of the artificial possibilities of Idaho and contiguous regions, I will here instance a statement made for me by the Rev. H. W. Parker, superintendent of Pocatello District, and resident of Twin Falls, under date of October, 1914: "Where ten years ago this very minute there was not a fence nor a furrow (only the conditions above described by Washington Irving) there are now such municipalities as Twin Falls, Filer, Rupert, Burley, and others soon to be as fine. As pastor in 1904, my first official trip to Twin Falls was made on July 14. I found one or two frame buildings and some tents stuck around in the sagebrush; some streets had been marked out, but no grading had been done. Dust, heat, and sagebrush were the main features of the place. In October I preached the first sermon ever delivered by any minister in the new village. The congregation numbered forty-one. On February 5, 1905, I organized the first church with seventeen members; on May 23, 1909, we dedicated the present edifice at a cost of $18,000, exclusive of the lots.

"To-day this church has a membership of more than five hundred. This youngster has turned back into the treasuries of the denomination in regular collections more than $3,000. The city has to-day seven thousand people. There are between four and five miles of asphalt-paved streets, a perfect sewer system, and cement sidewalks throughout the whole municipality. An investment of $120,000 has been made in two splendidly equipped grade school buildings, besides a high school costing a quarter of a million dollars. These combined schools have an enrollment of over two thousand pupils with a teaching force of above sixty; the high school graduated forty-eight last commencement. There is not a saloon in the entire county."

Surely "progress" is here spelled in large letters.

Years ago, with the narrow strip along the Atlantic in mind, Longfellow wrote, "God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting." And as the mighty empire took its course toward the West of limitless opportunity the good God kept the sieve running full time, so that to-day

The best of the best
Are in the Northwest.