Greater Britain Part 8

The eastern and western portions of the plains are not alike. In Kansas the gra.s.s is tall and rank; the ravines are filled with cottonwood, hickory, and black walnut; here and there are square miles of sunflowers, from seven to nine feet high. As we came west, we found that the sunflowers dwindled, and at Denver they are only from three to nine inches in height, the oddest little plants in nature, but thorough sunflowers for all their smallness. We found the buffalo in the eastern plains in the long bunch-gra.s.s, but in the winter they work to the west in search of the sweet and juicy "blue gra.s.s," which they rub out from under the snow in the Coloradan plains. This gra.s.s is crisp as hair, and so short that, as the story goes, you must lather before you can mow it.

The "blue gra.s.s" has high vitality: if a wagon train is camped for a single night among the sunflowers or tall weeds, this crisp turf at once springs up, and holds the ground forever.

The most astounding feature of these plains is their capacity to receive millions, and, swallowing them up, to wait open-mouthed for more. Vast and silent, fertile yet waste, fieldlike yet untilled, they have room for the Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, for all the teeming mult.i.tudes that have poured and can pour from the plains of Asia and of Central Europe. Twice as large as Hindostan, more temperate, more habitable, nature has been placed here hedgeless, gateless, free to all--a green field for the support of half the human race, unclaimed, untouched, awaiting smiling, hands and plow.

There are two curses upon this land. Here, as in India, the rivers depend on the melting of distant snows for their supplies, and in the hot weather are represented by beds of parched white sand. So hot and dry is a great portion of the land, that crops require irrigation. Water for drinking purposes is scarce; artesian bores succeed, but they are somewhat costly for the Coloradan purse, and the supply from common wells is brackish. This, perhaps, may in part account for the Western mode of "prospecting" after water, under which it is agreed that if none be found at ten feet, a trial shall be made at a fresh spot. The thriftless ranchman had sooner find bad water at nine feet than good at eleven.

Irrigation by means of dams and reservoirs, such as those we are building in Victoria, is but a question of cost and time. The never-failing breezes of the plains may be utilized for water-raising, and with water all is possible. Even in the mountain plateau, overspread as it is with soda, it has been found, as it has been by French farmers in Algeria, that, under irrigation, the more alkali the better corn crop.

When fires are held in check by special enactments, such as those which have been pa.s.sed in Victoria and South Australia, and the waters of the winter streams retained for summer use by tanks and dams; when artesian wells are frequent and irrigation general, belts of timber will become possible upon the plains. Once planted, these will in their turn mitigate the extremes of climate, and keep alike in check the forces of evaporation, sun, and wind. Cultivation itself brings rain, and steam will soon be available for pumping water out of wells, for there is a great natural store of brown coal and of oil-bearing shale near Denver, so that all would be well were it not for the locusts--the scourge of the plains--the second curse. The coming of the chirping hordes is a real calamity in these far-western countries. Their departure, whenever it occurs, is officially announced by the governor of the State.

I have seen a field of indian-corn stripped bare of every leaf and cob by the crickets; but the owner told me that he found consolation in the fact that they ate up the weeds as well. For the locusts there is no cure. The plovers may eat a few billions, but, as a rule, Coloradans must learn to expect that the locusts will increase with the increase of the crops on which they feed. The more corn, the more locusts--the more plovers, perhaps; a clear gain to the locusts and plovers, but a dead loss to the farmers and ranchmen.

The Coloradan "boys" are a handsome, intelligent race. The mixture of Celtic and Saxon blood has here produced a generous and n.o.ble manhood; and the freedom from wood, and consequent exposure to wind and sun, has exterminated ague, and driven away the hatchet-face; but for all this, the Coloradans may have to succ.u.mb to the locusts. At present they affect to despise them. "How may you get on in Colorado?" said a Missourian one day to a "boy" that was up at St. Louis. "Purty well, guess, if it warn't for the insects." "What insects? Crickets?"

"Crickets! Wall, guess not--jess insects like: rattlesnakes, panther, bar, catamount, and sichlike."

"The march of empire stopped by a gra.s.shopper" would be a good heading for a Denver paper, but would not represent a fact. The locusts may alter the step, but not cause a halt. If corn is impossible, cattle are not; already thousands are pastured round Denver on the natural gra.s.s.

For horses, for merino sheep, these rolling table-lands are peculiarly adapted. The New Zealand paddock system may be applied to the whole of this vast region--Dutch clover, French lucern, could replace the Indian gra.s.ses, and four sheep to the acre would seem no extravagant estimate of the carrying capability of the lands. The world must come here for its tallow, its wool, its hides, its food.

In this seemingly happy conclusion there lurks a danger. Flocks and herds are the main props of great farming, the natural supporters of an aristocracy. Cattle breeding is inconsistent, if not with republicanism, at least with pure democracy. There are dangerous cla.s.ses of two kinds--those who have too many acres, as well as those who have too few.

The danger at least is real. Nothing short of violence or special legislation can prevent the plains from continuing to be forever that which under nature's farming they have ever been--the feeding ground for mighty flocks, the cattle pasture of the world.

CHAPTER XIII.

ROCKY MOUNTAINS.

"What will I do for you if you stop here among us? Why, I'll name that peak after you in the next survey," said Governor Gilpin, pointing to a snowy mountain towering to its 15,000 feet in the direction of Mount Lincoln. I was not to be tempted, however; and as for Dixon, there is already a county named after him in Nebraska: so off we went along the foot of the hills on our road to the Great Salt Lake, following the "Cherokee Trail."

Striking north from Denver by Vasquez Fork and Cache la Poudre--called "Cash le Powder," just as Mont Royal has become Montreal, and Sault de Ste Marie, Soo--we entered the Black Mountains, or Eastern foot-hills, at Beaver Creek. On the second day, at two in the afternoon, we reached Virginia Dale for breakfast, without adventure, unless it were the shooting of a monster rattlesnake that lay "coiled in our path upon the mountain side." Had we been but a few minutes later, we should have made it a halt for "supper" instead of breakfast, as the drivers had but these two names for our daily meals, at whatever hour they took place.

Our "breakfasts" varied from 3.30 A.M. to 2 P.M.; our suppers from 3 P.M. to 2 A.M.

Here we found the weird red rocks that give to the river and the territory their name of Colorado, and came upon the mountain plateau at the spot where last year the Utes scalped seven men only three hours after Speaker Colfax and a Congressional party had pa.s.sed with their escort.

While trundling over the sandy wastes of Laramie Plains, we sighted the Wind River chain drawn by Bierstadt in his great picture of the "Rocky Mountains." The painter has caught the forms, but missed the atmosphere of the range: the clouds and mists are those of Maine and Ma.s.sachusetts; there is color more vivid, darkness more lurid, in the storms of Colorado.

This was our first sight of the main range since we entered the Black Hills, although we pa.s.sed through the gorges at the very foot of Long's Peak. It was not till we had reached the rolling hills of "Medicine Bow"--a hundred miles beyond the peak--that we once more caught sight of it s.h.i.+ning in the rear.

In the night between the second and third days the frost was so bitter at the great alt.i.tude to which we had attained, that we resorted to every expedient to keep out the cold. While I was trying to peg down one of the leathern flaps of our ambulance with the pencil from my note-book, my eye caught the moonlight on the ground, and I drew back saying, "We are on the snow." The next time we halted, I found that what I had seen was an impalpable white dust, the much dreaded alkali.

In the morning of the third day we found ourselves in a country of dazzling white, dotted with here and there a tuft of sage-brush--an Artemisia akin to that of the Algerian highlands. At last we were in the "American desert"--the "_Mauvaises terres_."

Once only did we escape for a time from alkali and sage to sweet waters and sweet gra.s.s. Near Bridger's Pa.s.s and the "divide" between Atlantic and Pacific floods, we came on a long valley swept by chilly breezes, and almost unfit for human habitation from the rarefaction of the air, but blessed with pasture ground on which domesticated herds of Himalayan yak should one day feed. Settlers in Utah will find out that this animal, which would flourish here at alt.i.tudes of from 4000 to 14,000 feet, and which bears the most useful of all furs, requires less herbage in proportion to its weight and size than almost any animal we know.

This Bridger's Pa.s.s route is that by which the telegraph line runs, and I was told by the drivers strange stories of the Indians and their views on this great Medicine. They never destroy out of mere wantonness, but have been known to cut the wire and then lie in ambush in the neighborhood, knowing that repairing parties would arrive and fall an easy prey. Having come one morning upon three armed overlanders lying fast asleep, while a fourth kept guard by a fire which coincided with a gap in the posts, but which was far from any timber or even scrub, I have my doubts as to whether "white Indians" have not much to do with the destruction of the line.

From one of the uplands of the Artemisia barrens we sighted at once Fremont's Peak on the north, and another great snow-dome upon the south.

The unknown mountain was both the more distant and the loftier of the two, yet the maps mark no chain within eyeshot to the southward. The country on either side of this well-worn track is still as little known as when Captain Stansbury explored it in 1850; and when we crossed the Green River, as the Upper Colorado is called, it was strange to remember that the stream is here lost in a thousand miles of undiscovered wilds, to be found again flowing toward Mexico. Near the ferry is the place where Albert S. Johnson's mule-trains were captured by the Mormons under General Lot Smith.

In the middle of the night we would come upon mule-trains starting on their march in order to avoid the mid-day sun, and thus save water, which they are sometimes forced to carry with them for as much as fifty miles. When we found them halted, they were always camped on bluffs and in bends, far from rocks and tufts, behind which the Indians might creep and stampede the cattle: this they do by suddenly swooping down with fearful noises, and riding in among the mules or oxen at full speed. The beasts break away in their fright, and are driven off before the sentries have time to turn out the camp.

On the fourth day from Denver, the scenery was tame enough, but strange in the extreme. Its characteristic feature was its breadth. No longer the rocky defiles of Virginia Dale, no longer the glimpses of the main range as from Laramie Plains and the foot-hills of Medicine Bow, but great rolling downs like those of the plains much magnified. We crossed one of the highest pa.s.ses in the world without seeing snow, but looked back directly we were through it on snow-fields behind us and all around.

At Elk Mountain we suffered greatly from the frost, but by mid day we were taking off our coats, and the mules hanging their heads in the sun once more, while those which should have taken their places were, as the ranchman expressed it, "kicking their heels in pure cussedness" at a stream some ten miles away.

While walking before the "hack" through the burning sand of Bitter Creek, I put up a bird as big as a turkey, which must, I suppose, have been a vulture. The sage-brush growing here as much as three feet high, and as stout and gnarled as century-old heather, gave shelter to a few coveys of sage-hens, at which we shot without much success, although they seldom ran, and never rose. Their color is that of the brush itself--a yellowish gray--and it is as hard to see them as to pick up a partridge on a sun-dried fallow at home in England. Of wolves and rattlesnakes there were plenty, but of big game we saw but little, only a few black-tails in the day.

This track is more traveled by trains than is the Smoky Hill route, which accounts for the absence of game on the line; but that there is plenty close at hand is clear from the way we were fed. Smoky Hill starvation was forgotten in piles of steaks of elk and antelope; but still no fruit, no vegetable, no bread, no drink save "sage-brush tea,"

and that half poisoned with the water of the alkaline creeks.

Jerked buffalo had disappeared from our meals. The droves never visit the Sierra Madre now, and scientific books have said that in the mountains they were ever unknown. In Bridger's Pa.s.s we saw the skulls of not less than twenty buffalo, which is proof enough that they once were here, though perhaps long ago. The skin and bones will last about a year after the beast has died, for the wolves tear them to pieces to get at the marrow within, but the skull they never touch; and the oldest ranchman failed to give me an answer as to how long skulls and horns might last. We saw no buffalo roads like those across the plains.

From the absence of buffalo, absence of birds, absence of flowers, absence even of Indians, the Rocky Mountain plateau is more of a solitude than are the plains. It takes days to see this, for you naturally notice it less. On the plains, the glorious climate, the ma.s.ses of rich blooming plants, the millions of beasts, and insects, and birds, all seem prepared to the hand of man, and for man you are continually searching. Each time you round a hill, you look for the smoke of the farm. Here on the mountains you feel as you do on the sea: it is nature's own lone solitude, but from no fault of ours--the higher parts of the plateau were not made for man.

Early on the fifth night we dashed suddenly out of utter darkness into a mountain glen blazing with fifty fires, and perfumed with the scent of burning cedar. As many wagons as there were fires were corraled in an ellipse about the road, and 600 cattle were pastured within the fire-glow in rich gra.s.s that told of water. Men and women were seated round the camp-fires praying and singing hymns. As we drove in, they rose and cheered us "on your way to Zion." Our Gentile driver yelled back the warhoop "How! How! How! How--w! We'll give yer love to Brigham;" and back went the poor travelers to their prayers again. It was a bull train of the Mormon immigration.

Five minutes after we had pa.s.sed the camp we were back in civilization, and plunged into polygamous society all at once, with Bishop Myers, the keeper of Bear River Ranch, drawing water from the well, while Mrs.

Myers No. 1 cooked the chops, and Mrs. Myers No. 2 laid the table neatly.

The kind bishop made us sit before the fire till we were warm, and filled our "hack" with hay, that we might continue so, and off we went, inclined to look favorably on polygamy after such experience of polygamists.

Leaving Bear River about midnight, at two o'clock in the morning of the sixth day we commenced the descent of Echo Canyon, the grandest of all the gully pa.s.ses of the Wasatch Range. The night was so clear that I was able to make some outline sketches of the cliffs from the ranch where we changed mules. Echo Canyon is the Thermopylae of Utah, the pa.s.s that the Mormons fortified against the United States forces under Albert S. Johnson at the time of "Buchanan's raid." Twenty-six miles long, often not more than a few yards wide at the bottom, and a few hundred feet at the top, with an overhanging cliff on the north side, and a mountain wall on the south, Echo Canyon would be no easy pa.s.s to force.

Government will do well to prevent the Pacific Railroad from following this defile.

After breakfast at Coalville, the Mormon Newcastle, situated in a smiling valley not unlike that between Martigny and Saint Maurice, we dashed on past Kimball's Ranch, where we once more hitched horses instead of mules, and began our descent of seventeen miles down Big Canyon, the best of all the pa.s.ses of the Wasatch. Rounding a spur at the end of our six-hundredth mile from Denver, we first sighted the Mormon promised land.

The sun was setting over the great dead lake to our right, lighting up the valley with a silvery gleam from Jordan River, and the hills with a golden glow from off the snow-fields of the many mountain chains and peaks around. In our front, the Oquirrh, or Western Range, stood out in sharp purple outlines upon a sea-colored sky. To our left were the Utah Mountains, blus.h.i.+ng rose, all about our heads the Wasatch glowing in orange and gold. From the flat valley in the sunny distance rose the smoke of many houses, the dust of many droves; on the bench-land of Ensign Peak, on the lake side, white houses peeped from among the peach-trees, modestly, and hinted the presence of the city.

Here was Plato's table-land of the Atlantic isle--one great field of corn and wheat, where only twenty years ago Fremont, the pathfinder, reported wheat and corn impossible.

CHAPTER XIV.

BRIGHAM YOUNG.

"I look upon Mohammed and Brigham as the very best men that G.o.d could send as ministers to those unto whom He sent them," wrote Elder Frederick Evans, of the "Shaker" village of New Lebanon, in a letter to us, inclosing another by way of introduction to the Mormon president.

Credentials from the Shaker to the Mormon chief--from the great living exponent of the principle of celibacy to the "most married" in all America--were not to be kept undelivered; so the moment we had bathed we posted off to a merchant to whom we had letters, that we might inquire when his spiritual chief and military ruler would be home again from his "trip north." The answer was, "To-morrow."

After watching the last gleams fade from the snow-fields upon the Wasatch, we parted for the night, as I had to sleep in a private house, the hotel being filled even to the balcony. As I entered the drawing-room of my entertainer, I heard the voice of a lady reading, and caught enough of what she said to be aware that it was a defense of polygamy. She ceased when she saw the stranger; but I found that it was my host's first wife reading Belinda Pratt's book to her daughters--girls just blooming into womanhood.

After an agreeable chat with the ladies, doubly pleasant as it followed upon a long absence from civilization, I went to my room, which I afterward found to be that of the eldest son, a youth of sixteen years.

In one corner stood two Ballard rifles, and two revolvers and a militia uniform hung from pegs upon the wall. When I lay down with my hands underneath the pillow--an att.i.tude instinctively adopted to escape the sand-flies, I touched something cold. I felt it--a full-sized Colt, and capped. Such was my first introduction to Utah Mormonism.