Название: Greater Britain
Автор: Charles Wentworth Dilke
Издательство: Public Domain
Жанр: Книги о Путешествиях
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This was our first sight of the main range since we entered the Black Hills, although we passed 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 shining in the rear.
In the night between the second and third days the frost was so bitter at the great altitude 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 grass. Near Bridger‘s Pass 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 yâk should one day feed. Settlers in Utah will find out that this animal, which would flourish here at altitudes 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 Pass 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 passes 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 Pass 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 masses 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 grass 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 passed 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 passes 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 Thermopylæ of Utah, the pass that the Mormons fortified against СКАЧАТЬ