Part 13

Let me halt here a moment to illustrate the military and public land systems of the United States. It last year entered the head of some genius connected with the War department, that the public interest or safety required the establishment of a military post at this point, and one was accordingly planted and maintained there throughout last winter. Of course, buildings were required to shelter the officers, soldiers, and animals in that severe climate, and they were accordingly erected; some of the timber being transported from Laramie—a distance of fully eighty miles. In the main, however, they are built of pine logs from the adjacent mountains, the crevices being plastered with mud. In the spring, the troops were very properly withdrawn, leaving half a dozen good serviceable houses, and a superior horse-shed and _corral_ untenanted. Hereupon, three lazy louts have squatted on the premises, intending to start a city there, and to hold and sell the government structures under a claim of preëmption! I need hardly say that, in the absence of any United States survey, with the Indian title still unextinguished, this claim is most impudent; but that will not prevent their asserting it, and I fear with success. The private interest on one side will be strong, with none on the other; they can threaten to exert a political influence, favorably or adversely, as the case may be, to those whom they find in power; if they are only tenacious enough, impudent enough, they will probably carry their point. Yet, they might as fairly preëmpt the White House at Washington, should they ever chance to find it vacant.

We drove on across a badly-gullied region, wherein are the heads of Horse Creek—the first stream on our route that runs to the North Platte—and struck the Chugwater just where it emerged from the mountains, about eleven, A. M. Thence, we followed down this creek more than forty miles, crossing it four times, and finally leaving it on our left to cross the Laramie river, eight or ten miles above this place.

The Chugwater is a rapid, muddy mill-stream, running in a deep, narrow, tortuous channel, and constantly gouging into one bank or the other, except where the willows and some other small shrubs oppose the resistance of their matted roots to the force of the current. The rocky hills sometimes crowd the stream closely, compelling the road to make a circuit over the high prairie adjacent to avoid the impracticable cañons through which the stream frets and foams on its devious way. The “Red Buttes” are numerous and conspicuous on the upper course of this creek—the ochry earth or rock which gives them their peculiar color being accounted a rich iron ore. On the lower bottoms of this stream, we found far better grass than elsewhere on this journey. But the day was hot, and our mules suffered so much from musketoes and flies that they ate fitfully and sparingly where we halted for dinner, and again where we stopped for the night. We were unable to stop where the grass was best, because we could not there get our animals down the steep creek-bank to water.

We made our last camp at a point thirty miles from this post, having made one hundred and sixty miles in three days’ steady travel, hampered by the necessity of finding grass and water for our beasts. With grain, I think they would easily have made sixty-five miles per day. We stopped beside a stone-and-mud shanty of very rude construction, where a Frenchman had this spring made a small dam across the Chugwater, so as to irrigate and fence (by a ditch) a small piece of intervale, on which he had attempted to grow some grains and vegetables, with rather poor promise of success. He was absent, and no person or domestic animal to be seen about his place. The night was uncommonly warm for this region—the musketoes a good deal more attentive than obliging. We rose early again, came on ten miles for breakfast, passing almost continually between two rows of magnificent buttes, often looking in the distance like more or less ruined castles; one of them reminded me strongly of the Roman Coliseum. Two miles after breakfast, we crossed the Chugwater for the last time, and left it running north to the Laramie, while we struck a more easterly course for this place. Two miles further on, we came to a most excellent spring—the first I had seen since I emerged from the Rocky Mountains, by Clear Creek, two weeks before. I had been poisoned by brook water—often warm and muddy—so long that I could hardly get enough of this. We now passed over twelve or fifteen miles of high, rolling, parched, barren prairie, and halted for dinner by a little brook—the only one that crosses our trail between the Chugwater and Laramie—after which we drove down opposite this place in an hour, but were obliged to go two miles below, and pay $2 50 bridge-toll to get across the Laramie, now very high, and looking decidedly larger at their junction than the North Platte itself.

I have been tediously minute in my record of this cross-march to reach the high road to California, because some kind friends have remonstrated with me against the fancied perils of my journey, as if I were running recklessly into danger. I believe this portion of my route is at least as perilous as any other, being the only part not traversed by a mail-stage or any public conveyance, and lying wholly through a region in which there are not a dozen white settlers, all told, while it is a usual battle-ground between hostile tribes of Indians. But we were never in any shadow of danger; and, though I was compelled to economize steps in order to complete the healing of my lame leg, I have rarely had a more pleasant journey. Let any one who wishes an independent and comfortable ride, just run up to Denver and ask my friend D. B. Wheelock to harness up his four-mule team to the Rockaway wagon and take him over to Laramie, and if he does not enjoy a fine prospect, bracing breezes, a lively pace and excellent company, then he will be less fortunate than I was.

XVII. LARAMIE TO SOUTH PASS.

SOUTH PASS, Rocky Mountains, _July 5, 1859_.

I exhausted all the possibilities of obtaining a lodging in Laramie before applying to the commander of the post; but no one else could (or would) afford me a shelter on any terms; so I made a virtue of necessity, and applied to Captain Clark, who at once assigned me a room—there being few troops there at present—and for the five days I remained there I slept between a floor and a roof, after five weeks’ experience of the more primitive methods of keeping cold and storm at bay. I was treated with more than hospitality—with generous kindness—by Captain Clark, Lieutenants Hascall and Follett, and Dr. Johns—and yet the long tarry became at length irksome, because I had already lost too much time, and was most anxious to be moving westward. Finally, the mail-stage from the East hove in sight on the morning of June 30, but halted just across Laramie River all day, repairing coach; and it was eight, P. M., when it started—I alone perched on the summit of its seventeen mail-bags as passenger—he who had thus far filled that exalted post kindly giving way for me, and agreeing to take instead the slower wagon that was to follow next morning. We forded the swollen Laramie two miles above the fort, in the last vestige of twilight—hod the usual trouble with mules turning about in mid-stream, tangling up the team, and threatening to upset the wagon—but overcame it after a while, got safely out, drove on fifteen miles to Warm Spring—a fountain which throws out half water enough for a grist-mill, all which is drank up by the thirsty sands through which it takes its course, before it can reach the Platte, only three or four miles distant. We camped here till daylight, then lost two hours in hunting up our mules, which had been simply tied in pairs, and allowed to go at large in quest of the scanty grass of that region. They were found at last, and we went on our way rejoicing.

I shall not weary my readers with a journal of our travels for the last four days. Hitherto, since I left civilized Kansas, I had traversed routes either newly opened, or scarcely known to the mass of readers; but from Laramie I have followed the regular California and Oregon Overland Trail, already many times described, and by this time familiar to hundreds of thousands. Suffice it that, for over two hundred miles from Laramie, it traverses a region substantially described in my notes of my journey from the buffalo-range to Denver, and from Denver to Laramie; a region, for the most part, rainless in summer and autumn, yet on whose soil of more or less sandy clay, lacking support from ridges of underlying rock, has been more seamed, and gouged, and gullied, and washed away, by the action of floods and streams than any other on earth—a region of bluffs and buttes, and deep ravines, and intervales, and shallow alkaline lakelets, now mainly dried up, and streams running milky, even when low, with the clay gullied from their banks, and sent off to render the Missouri a river of mud, and to fertilize the bottoms of the lower Mississippi. Occasionally, but not so frequently as south of Laramie, the clay-hills, hardened into rock by some alchemy of nature, present the perpendicular fronts and ruinous-castle aspects already described—in a few instances, the scanty creeks which make their way from the mountains to the North Platte, or the Sweetwater run through narrow cañons of such rock; but usually each creek has washed out for itself a wide valley, and the bluffs or buttes, where they exist, are distant many miles on one side if not on both. In a few places, the mountains are so near that their thinly scattered, stunted, scraggy yellow-pines are plainly seen—are even close beside us; but usually the prospect is composed of rolling prairie very scantily grassed and often thickly covered for miles on miles by the everlasting sage-bush of this desolate region. This is not an anomaly, as might be supposed—the stem lives for years, perhaps centuries, though the shoots and leaves die[5] every autumn. Another shrub, less common, but which often thickly covers hundreds of acres, is the grease-wood—a low, prickly bush, growing in bunches, like the sage-bush, and looking like a bad imitation of the English privet. Besides these two miserable shrubs, the dry land, other than the mountains, for hundreds of miles, produces a very little burnt-up grass in patches, and a good many ill-favored weeds of no known or presumed value. Of wood, the Platte and its more easterly tributaries have, at intervals, a shred of the eternal cotton-wood of the plains, much of it the more scrubby and worthless species known as bitter cotton-wood, with a very little of the equally worthless box-elder—and that is all. But, one hundred and forty miles this side of Laramie, we leave the Platte, which here comes from the south, and strike nearly forty miles across a barren “divide” to its tributary, the Sweetwater, which we find just by Independence Rock, quite a landmark in this desolate region, with several low mountains of almost naked rock around it, having barely soil enough in their crevices to support a few dwarfish pines. Five miles above this is the Devil’s Gate—a passage of the Sweetwater, through a perpendicular cañon, some twenty-five feet wide, and said to be six hundred feet high—a passage which must have been cut while the rock was still clay. Here a large party of Mormons were caught by the snows, while on their way to Salt Lake, some years since, and compelled to encamp for the winter, so scantily provided that more than a hundred of them died of hunger and hardship before spring. Many more must have fallen victims had not a supply-train from Salt Lake reached them early in the season. And here is a fountain of cold water—the first that I had seen for more than a hundred miles, though there is another on the long stretch from the Platte to the Sweetwater, which is said to be good, but a drove of cattle were making quite too free with it when we passed. Here the weary crowds of emigrants to California were to gather yesterday for a celebration of the “glorious fourth,” and I was warmly invited to stop and participate, and I now heartily wish I had, since I find that all our haste was in vain.

Footnote 5:

I guess this is a mistake; farther observation induces me to believe that the sage-bush is an evergreen.

It was midnight of the 3d, when we reached the mail-route station known as the Three Crossings, from the fact that so many fordings of the Sweetwater (here considerably larger than at its mouth, forty miles or more below) have to be made within the next mile. We had been delayed two hours by the breaking away of our two lead-mules, in crossing a deep water-course after dark—or rather by the fruitless efforts of our conductor to recover them. I had been made sick by the bad water I had drank from the brooks we crossed during the hot day, and rose in a not very patriotic, certainly not a joyful mood, unable to eat, but ready to move on. We started a little after sunrise; and, at the very first crossing, one of our lead-mules turned about and ran into his mate, whom he threw down and tangled so that he could not get up; and in a minute another mule was down, and the two in imminent danger of drowning. They were soon liberated from the harness, and got up, and we went out; but just then an emigrant on the bank espied a carpet-bag in the water—mine, of course—and fished it out. An examination was then had, and showed that my trunk was missing—the boot of the stage having been opened the night before, on our arrival at the station, and culpably left unfastened. We made a hasty search for the estray, but without success, and, after an hour’s delay, our conductor drove off; leaving my trunk still in the bottom of Sweetwater, which is said to be ten feet deep just below our ford. I would rather have sunk a thousand dollars there. Efforts were directed to be made to fish it out; but my hope of ever seeing it again is a faint one. We forded Sweetwater six times yesterday after that, without a single mishap; but I have hardly yet become reconciled to the loss of my trunk, and, on the whole, my fourth of July was not a happy one.

Our road left a southerly bend of Sweetwater after dinner, and took its way over the hills, so as not to strike the stream again till after dark, at a point three miles from where I now write. We passed, on a high divide some miles before we were crossing of the Sweetwater, a low swamp or meadow known as “Ice Springs,” from the fact that ice may be obtained here at any time by digging down some two or three feet into the frosty earth. We met several wagon-loads of come-outers from Mormonism on their way to the states in the course of the afternoon; likewise, the children of the Arkansas people killed two years since, in what is known as the mountain-meadows-massacre. We are now nearly at the summit of the route, with snowy mountains near us in several directions, and one large snow-bank by the side of a creek we crossed ten miles back. Yet our yesterday’s road was no rougher, while it was decidedly better, than that of any former day this side of Laramie, as may be judged from the fact that, with a late start, we made sixty miles with one (six mule) team to our heavy-laden wagon. The grass is better for the last twenty miles than on any twenty miles previously; and the swift streams that frequently cross our way are cold and sweet. But, unlike the Platte, the Sweetwater has scarcely a tree or bush growing on its banks; but up the little stream on which I am writing, on a box in the mail company’s station-tent, there is glorious water, some grass, and more wood than I have seen so close together since I emerged from the gold diggings on Vasquer’s Fork, five hundred miles away. A snow-bank, forty rods long and several feet deep, lies just across the brook; the wind blows cold at night; and we had a rain-squall—just rain enough to lay the dust—yesterday afternoon. The mail-agent whom we met here has orders not to run into Salt Lake ahead of time; so he keeps us over here to-day, and will then take six days to reach Salt Lake, which we might reach in four. I am but a passenger, and must study patience.

A word on the Salt Lake mail. Of the seventeen bags on which I have ridden for the last four days and better, at least sixteen are filled with large bound books, mainly Patent Office Reports, I judge—but all of them undoubtedly works ordered printed at the public cost—_your_ cost, reader!—by Congress, and now on their way to certain favored Mormons, franked (by proxy) “Pub. Doc. _Free_, J. M. Bernhisel, M. C.” I do not blame Mr. B. for clutching his share of this public plunder, and distributing it so as to increase his own popularity and importance; but I do protest against this business of printing books by wholesale at the cost of the whole people for free distribution to a part only. It is every way wrong and pernicious. Of the one hundred and ninety thousand dollars per annum paid for carrying the Salt Lake mail, nine-tenths is absorbed in the cost of carrying these franked documents to people who contribute little or nothing to the support of the government in any way. Is this fair? Each Patent Office Report will have cost the treasury four or five dollars by the time it reaches its destination, and will not be valued by the receiver at twenty-five cents. Why should this business go on? Why not “reform it altogether?” Let Congress print whatever documents are needed for its own information, and leave the people to choose and buy for themselves. I have spent four days and five nights in close contact with the sharp edges of Mr. Bernhisel’s “Pub. Doc.”—have done my very utmost to make them present a smooth, or at least endurable surface; and I am sure there is no slumber to be extracted therefrom unless by reading them—a desperate resort, which no rational person would recommend. For all practical purposes, they might as well—now that the printer has been paid for them—be where I heartily wish they were—in the bottom of the sea.

XVII. SOUTH PASS TO BRIDGER.

BIG SANDY, Oregon, _July 6, 1859_.

I wrote last from the Mail Company’s station-tent in “Quaking Asp Cañon,” at the east end of the South Pass, three miles off the direct and well-beaten road from the Missouri to Salt Lake, and so to California, which was formerly the road to Oregon as well. But Col. Lander, at the head of a U. S. exploring and pioneer party, has just marked and nearly opened a new road through the Cañon aforesaid, which makes a Northern cut-off, and strikes the old Oregon Trail some fourteen miles south of Fort Hall, saving sixty miles on the journey to Oregon, and striking through to California on a northerly route, which I think passes to the north of Honey Lake, and thence over the Sierra down one of the forks of the Yuba. I cannot, of course, say that this is better than the old route, but it can hardly be more destitute of grass; while the naked fact that it divides the travel, affords cheering hope of a mitigation of the sufferings and hardships of the long journey. I missed seeing Col. Lander, to my regret; but I am sure he is doing a good work, for which thousands will have reason to bless him. At all events, a great majority of the California, with all the Oregon emigration, are turning off on the new route, and I pray that they may find on it food for their weary, famished cattle, and a safe journey to their chosen homes.

Though the elevation of the Pass is nearly 8,000 feet above the ocean level, I never endured heat exceeding that of yesterday in and about the station-tent. The sun rose clear, as it almost always does here in Summer, soon dispelling the chill which attends every night in this region; and by nine o’clock the heat was most intense. But the afternoon brought clouds, a wind and a petty rain-squall, and the following night was cold enough to still any mosquitoes but those of the Rocky Mountains. I suspect these would sing and bite even with the mercury at zero.

Toward evening, I climbed the hill on the east of the Cañon, and obtained from its summit a wide prospect, but how desolate! These hills are of volcanic formation, a kind of coarse slate, the strata upheaved almost perpendicularly, the surface shattered and shingly, with veins of hard quartz running across them. There is scarcely a bushel of soil to each square rod, of course no grass, and little vegetation of any kind. To the north, say ten to twenty miles away, is a snow-streaked range of the Rocky Mountains; to the south, some miles across the Sweetwater, are lower and less barren hills, with some snow-banks and some wood—quaking-asp and yellow-pine—on their northern slopes. The Sweetwater heads among the mountains to the north and north-west. There is a little well-gnawed grass on its immediate banks and on those of its tributaries—on the high rolling land which fills all beside of the wide space between the mountains north and those south, there is not a mule-feed to each acre. Some grease-wood at intervals, the eternal sage-bush, and a few weeds, with the quaking-asp and yellow-pine aforesaid, and a thick tangle of bitter cotton-wood (which is a bad caricature of our swamp-alder) thatching portions of a few of the smaller streams, comprise the entire vegetation of this forlorn region.