THE UNDEVELOPED WEST; OB, NTH OARS IN THE TERRITORIES: IB IE I ILsT O- A COMPLETE HISTORY OP THAT VAST REGION BE- TWEEK THE MISSISSIPPI AND THE PACIFIC, ITS RESOURCES, CLIMATE, INHABITANTS, NATURAL CURIOSITIES, ETC., ETC. LIFE AND ADVENTURE ON PRAIRIES, MOUNTAINS, AND THE PACIFIC COAST. "WITH TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY ILLUSTRATIONS, FROM ORIGINAL SKETCHES AND PHOTOGRAPHIC VIEWS OF THE SCENERY, CITIES, LANDS, MINES, PEOPLE, AND CURI- OSITIES OF THE GREAT WEST. BY J. H. BEADLE, WESTERN COEBESPONDENT OF THE CINCINNATI COMMERCIAL, AND AUTHOB OF "LIFE IN UTAH," ETC., ETC. Issued by subscription only, and not for sale in the book stores. Residents of any State desiring a copy should address the Publishers, and an Agent will call upon them.; See page 779. NATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA, PA.; CHICAGO, ILL.; CINCINNATI, OHIO; ST. LOUIS, Mo. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by J. R. JONES, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. oC PREFACE ANOTHER book on the West! Yes, and why not? The West is the future home of millions now living in the East, and there is more that ought to be known of its wonders and capabilities than is likely to be published by the few who have devoted themselves to the work. There ought to be a new book on the West, by some careful observer and thorough explorer, at least once a year ; for so many and so various are the changes, so important the new discoveries, that a volume is but thoroughly read before the facts it nar- rates are old. The undeveloped portions of the West make up an immense area, and no one can flatter himself that he has thoroughly explored it. The most that can be ex- pected is, that each traveler shall seize upon the salient features of certain sections and portray them to the popular mind. No man can hope in the short space of five years to see all of the undeveloped West. Arizona alone deserves years of careful study, and New Mexico is still almost an unknown region to Americans, containing material for a vast deal of investigation. This work is simply a personal record of my five years' 15 10 PREFACE. travel and residence in the new States and Territories where I went, what I did, what I saw and what I thought about it. Two points, however, of prac- tical interest I have kept steadily in view : to give care- fully arranged facts in regard to the lands still open to settlement; and to correct a number of popular errors in regard to soil and climate. The chapters treating specifically on lands in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Dakota, California, Oregon and Texas, it is hoped, will aid in the first object; in regard to the second object, I have pointed out most of the pre- vailing errors to call them by no harsher name found in numerous land circulars and railroad reports, and refuted them by a general statement of facts. It was my prime object to make this work a startling novelty in one respect: by telling the exact truth about the particular points to which settlers are most urgently invited. If my views and conclusions on the Northern Pacific Kailroad lands, and some other sections, differ very greatly from the reports of officials and their guests heretofore published, the reader must judge whether the difference is my misfortune or their fault. Having stated the objects of the work, the difficulties in the way of its execution, and the points where most criticism may be expected, I submit it to the public without further apology. J. H. B. EVANSVILLE, INDIANA, May 15, 1873. LIST OF ILLUSTEATIONS. 1. General View of the Yosemite Valley Frontispiece. 2. The Great Cafion and Lower Falls of the Yellowstone PAGE 3 3. Kock Pinnacles above Tower Falls, Yellowstone Kiver 5 4. In Camp with the Outlaw Navajoes 17 5. Lake and Mt. Tamalpais in the Distance 23" ' f 6. Mormon Tabernacle Endowment House in the Distance 27 -' 7. A Basin on the Columbia Kiver and Mountain Peak in the Distance. 2SK / 8. Down the Cafion 31 9. "Go West, Young Man; Go West!" 34 10. Autograph Letter 36 11. Afoot through Iowa 39 12. Outlet of " Wall Lake." 44 13. Doubling Teams in " Hell Slough." 47 14. Crossing the Plains 54 15. Stage Crossing the Desert 56 16. Needs a Haversack 57 17. " Wanted : Light and Genteel Employment." 64 18. Omaha City 66 19. Scene Near Fontanelle 68 20. Scene Near Papillion, Nebraska * 76 21. Eiver-Depot, Union Pacific K. E., Omaha 80 22. "Dog-Town" Union Pacific E. E 83 23. Indians Attacking U. S. Mail Coach 84 24. Pastimes of the Noble Eed Man 86 25. In the Hands of the Vigilantes 89 26. In the "Big Tent," Benton, Wyoming Territory 91 27. The Author as a " Mulewhacker." 97 28. Night-School of Theology 101 29. Scene in Echo Canon 105 30. " Eather Open at the Sides." 107 31. Salt Lake City (From the North) 109 32. Orson Pratt, One of the Twelve Apostles 110 33. George A. Smith Ill 34. Brigham Young 118 2 17 18 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 35. First Settler at Corinne PAGE 120 36. " Sunday-Night Amusements." 121 37. For the Benefit of Corinne 123 38. "Opening a Farm" Platte Valley 129 39. Cheyennes Reconnoitering the First Train 133 40. Chief Justice of Wyoming 135 41. Pyramid Kocks 137 42. Pulpit Kock, Echo Canon 139 43. Off for the Sevier Mines 143 44. On a Family Ticket 145 45. " You Go Hunt 'Em ! " 147 46. Lake Tahoe 155 47. Humboldt Palisades * 159 48. On the Truckee C. P. K. R 161 49. Placer Mining 162 50. Cape Horn C. P. R. R 163 51. Central Pacific Railroad in the Sierra Nevadas 164 52. Interior of Palace-Car on Central Pacific 166 53. Sacramento ' 168 54. Shoshonee Falls Idaho 170 55. Geysers, Pluton River, California 172 56. "NoSahvey." 173 57. In the Josh House 179 58. Ah Ching's Theology 181 59. Entrance to the Quicksilver Mine of New Almaden, California 182 60. The Author receives Mormon Hospitality 185 61. Orson Hyde, President of the Twelve Apostles 187 62. Domesticated Piute 188 63. Bear River Valley North of Corinne 189 64. " The Senator is Engaged, Sah." 192 65. Brigham Young's Residences, Salt Lake City 195 66. First Hotel in Lawrence 200 67. " Don't Mention it, Deacon." 205 68. On Rock Creek Allen Co., Kansas 208 69. Mounds on the Verdigris 212 70. Spouting Geyser 215 71. The Emigrant's Dream of Kansas 217 72. Kioways Killing Buffalo 219 73. Buffalo Plunters in Camp 221 74. Castle Garden the Emigrant's First View of America 232 75. A Bad Case of Trichina 234 76. Woman's Rights in Dakota 240 77. Any Port in a Storm 241 78. Approach to Black Hills Dakota 242 79. Winter Camp of the Friendly Dakotahs 244 80. Surveyor's Camp Central Dakota 246 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 19 81. Outline of Yosemite PAGE 252 82. A Monster 253 83. Hydraulic Mining 254 84. The Two Guardsmen 255 85. A Cotillon Party Dancing on the Mammoth Tree 256 86. Auger-Holes through the Big Tree (Showing how it was Felled) 258 87. The Fallen Monarch 259 88. The Pioneer's Cabin : " Koom for Twelve Inside" 260 89. Something of a Stump 261 90. First Log Hut in Mariposa Grove 262 91. Bridal Veil Fall 264 92. Cathedral Kocks 268 93. A Native of the Valley 270 94. El Capitan, 3300 Feet High 271 95. Sentinel Rock 275 96. The Yosemite Falls 276 97. North Dome and Koyal Arches 278 98. South or Half Dome : 279 99. Mirror Lake; Watkins' and Clouds' Best 281 100. Vernal Falls ; 350 Feet High 283 101. Nevada Falls ; 700 Feet High 285 102. Down by Vernal Falls 286 103. Liberty Cap (Mt. Broderick) 288 104. Bird's-Eye View of San Francisco 291 105. The Miner who "Struck it Rich." 294 106. " '49-Ers in Luck." 296 107. A Sunday Festival of the Foreign Classes 299 108. Sunday Evening on Dupont Street 301 109. Underground in the Barbary Coast 303 110. At the Bella Union 305 111. The First San Francisco Destroyed 307 112. An Anti-Goat-Island Meeting 308 113. The Days when California had no Families 310 114. Woodward's Gardens a Fashionable Resort of San Francisco 312 115. Chinese Theatre on Jackson Street. 315 116. Chinese Merchant on Post Street 317 117. Chan Laisun 320 118. Mrs. Laisun and Daughters 322 119. Chinese Students now at Springfield, Mass 324 120. A High Caste Mandarin 325 121. At "Brown and SloperV' 327 122. Little Pleasantries of a Mining Camp 330 123. Prospecting Party in Utah 332 124. Over to Big Cottonwood 337 125. In the West Jordan Mine 343 126. On Lion Hill Ophir District 345 20 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 127. Vertical Section of a Quartz Mine PAGE 347 128. One Language two " Smiles." 350 129. My Cherokee Friends .'. 356 130. " Moss Agates." 365 131. Amusements at Muscogee 370 132. Eaising a Native 373 133. At the Creek Agency 375 134. A Creek Charon 379 135. At the Mission 382 136. " Shorthandle." 385 137. Curing Snake-Bite 389 138. Ok-ta-ha-sars-ha-go 391 139. " On a Permit." 394 140. Pre-emptor's Cabin 395 141. Lively Times on the Canadian 398 142. At Tandy Walker's 400 143. Forest Scene 405 144. At Widow Skrimshee's : 407 145. Fight at Going Snake Court House 410 146 Gen. Marion in the Cherokee Country 413 147. The Last Cry of the Cherokee 416 148. Cherokee Legislature 422 149. An Osage Chief 425 150. "Man for Breakfast." 435 151. In the Buffalo Country 437 152. Denver 439 153. Gray's Peak Colorado 440 154. Georgetown Colorado 442 155. First Lesson in Spanish 445 156. "Caraja! Los Nervios!" 450 157. East Side of Plaza Santa Fe 452 158. At the Baile..... 456 159. Pueblo at Prayer 468 160. A Mexican Dray 474 161. "Caramba! Va Maladitto." 476 162. Southwest from Santa Fe 481 163. Pueblo Cacique 483 164. " My Belations, Sir." 485 165. Algodonas 487 166. Albuquerque Cathedral 489 167. "About so High." 492 168. Mexican Farm House 497 169. Pueblo Maiden 501 170. Agua Azul and Bed Butte 509 171. Officer's Quarters Fort Wingate 512 172. Distant View of Zuni.... .. 514 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 21 173. Upper Story of Zuni PAGE 516 174. Navajo Loom 518 175. Navajo Boy 525 176. Navajo Matron 531 177. Navajo "Gristmill." 533 178. Navajo Belle 534 179. Arizona Landscape 537 180. Through the Navajo Forest 548 181. Wind Carvings 550 182. Leaning Tower 551 183. " Ah-Yee ! Melicano, Ettah Hoganday ! " 554 184. Entering the Desert 562 185. "Vah! Melicano, Male, Malo !" .' 564 186. "The Shadow of a Great Kock in a Weary Land." 567 187. Sheep-Pens at Moqui 569 188. Entering Moqui " Jokow, Jokow, Melicano, Jokow!" 572 189. Northwest Front of Moqui 575 190. Distant View of Oraybe 577 191. Group of Moquis 580 192. Street in the " Dead Town." 583 193. Tuba and Telashnimki 584 194. One of Six Bronze Plates dug up near Kinderhook, 111., in 1843 598 195. " Break in the Formation." 604 196. A Friendly Apache 607 197. Skull of Mangus Colorado, or "Bed Sleeve." a "Good Indian." 608 198. Formation on the Streams 610 199. Scene on the Colorado 612 200. Peak of Conglomerate 616 201. Espanol 621 202. "Todos Muertos, P6ro mas Apaches." 631 203. Getting Down to the Colorado , 632 204. Mountain Meadow Massacre 132 Emigrant's killed by Mormons, etc.. 647 205. At Jacob's Pool 655 206. "Happy Family " Utes '. 657 207. Kanarra Southern Utah 660 208. Salt Lake Theatre , 668 209. Lower Falls of the Yellowstone, Wyoming, (350 Feet in Hight.) 670 210. On Guard 673 211. Tower Falls Wyoming 676 212. Bird's-Eye View of the Geyser Basin 679 213. Upper Falls of the Yellowstone 680 214. Yellowstone Lake 681 215. The Giantess Yellowstone 688 216. The Old Way Across the Plains 692 217. Monument Kock Echo Canon 693 218. Mormon Temple at Nauvoo, Illinois 696 22 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 219. Nauvoo Militia and "General" Joseph Smith PAGE 697 220. Trappers in Northern Dakota 699 221. People of Pembina, and their Ox-Carts 700 222. Old Fort Benton Montana 702 223. The Author, being in Feeble Health, Goes to Minnesota 707 224. The Author, being Feeble in Pocket, Returns from Minnesota 708 225. Scene on a Minnesota Lake 712 226. St. Paul 715 227. Falls of St. Anthony 717 228. Missionary among the Minnesota Indians 723 229. N. P. R. R. Bridge over Mississippi, near Brainerd, Minn 728 230. Dalles of the St. Louis 733 231. Duluth 735 232. In the Tunnel Sierra Nevada 742 233. Donner Lake Sierra Nevada 743 234. Snow Sheds on the Central Pacific 744 235. Acorn Caches of the California Indians 748 236. "Venus and Adonis" Digger Indians 752 237. Rough on the Old Man 755 238. Falls of the Willamette 760 239. Portland Oregon From East Side of Willamette 764 240. Street in Olympia Washington Territory. 766 241. Puget Sound and Mt. Rainier 768 242. "A Little Qualmish." 774 243. Point Arena Lighthouse Coast of California 776 244. Bancroft's great Publishing House San Francisco 777 VBR2ITY. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. I MAKE A START. Why I went West Poor health" Infallible cures " Impecuniosity Try the newspapers Doubtful prospects Leave Evansville Stop in Wis- consin The Mound Region Boscobel Into Iowa Swedes and Nor- wegians Westward afoot A model farmer Wire-fence Planting timber Resources of Iowa Iowa Falls "Wall-Lake" Fanciful theo- ries Scientific fact Fort Dodge Grasshoppers A pleasant excursion " Purgatory" and " Hell " Sloughs " Bad for women and oxen" Twin Lakes Ida City Over the " Divide " Denison Down the C. & N. W. R. R. Council Bluffs and Omaha On the border at last 33 CHAPTER II. A COMMON MISTAKE. Our land of promise Pleasing errors Painful but wholesome truths " The Great American Desert " not a myth Causes of sterility Drought Elevation and cold Alkali Minerals Bitter Creek " Journey of Death" Travel on the Deserts Bunch grass Grand divisions of the West View of the Plains Routes across the Continent Freighting under difficulties Railroad and emigration circulars Caveat emptor: "Let the buyer look out" 50 CHAPTER III. FIVE WEEKS IN NEBRASKA. Omaha Glorious anticipations Prosaic facts A bit of history Florence An invasion of place hunters Disappointment On the road to Fon- tanelle Elkhorn Valley Lost on the prairie "Any port in a storm " Down to the Platte Fremont Down Platte Valley Intense heat Want 23 24 CONTENTS. of domestic economy Romantic hash Victuals and poetry Bovine apotheosis Farming in Nebraska Room for three hundred thousand farmers Climate Society " Professional starvation " Through Sarpy County Youthful connubiality Artificial groves Increase of rain-fall Omaha politics " Bilks " " Hunting for work, hoping to not find it "... 63 CHAPTER IV. ON THE UNION PACIFIC. Up the Platte Valley Beauty by moonlight ; barrenness by day Getting on to the desert North Platte " The gentle gazelle " " Dog-town " Not dogs, but rodents " Indians ahead " The dangerous district Cross- ing the Plains in 1866 " The noble Red Man " Cheyenne Vigorous reduction of the population Black Hill Sherman Down to Laramie The Alkali Desert Benton A beautiful summer resort ! Manners and morals (?) Bravery of the impecunious Murder and mob Vigilantes Murderer rescued by the military and escapes Amusements " Big Tent " " Now, then, gentlemen, the ace is your winning card" "Cappers" and Victims No fairness in gambling 79 CHAPTER V. ON A MULE. A new profession Off for Salt Lake City A Mormon outfit Nature of the overland freight Its extent Great expenses and enormous profits Luxury of miners and mountaineers Changed to the railroad " Kiting towns" Jonah's gourd Benton a year afterwards Platte City Our company Mulewhacker's Theology Pleasant gossip on polygamy Journal of the route Horrors of Bitter Creek Heat, cold, thirst, dust, fatigue Green River Bridger Plains Echo Canon Weber Canon Parley's Park Down Parley's Canon Salt Lake Valley and City 96 CHAPTER VI. A YEAR IN UTAH. Discharging freight " Beautiful Zion " First impressions " Our Bishop " Arguments (?) for polygamy Rough on Rome Mormon Worthies Jews, Gentiles, and Apostates Queer condition of American citizens " Millennial Star " and " Book of Mormon "The original carpet-baggers " Jaredites " Mormon sermons Into the country A polemic race Mormon conference " No trade with Gentiles " A hard winter I be- come a Gentile editor Founding of Corinne Glowing anticipations " The Chicago of the Rocky Mountains " Ups and downs of real estate The Author comes to grief. 108 CONTENTS. 25 CHAPTER VII. THE UNION PACIFIC COMPLETED. The last rail and spike A visit home An unofficial tour Whitney, Ben- ton, Burton, Fremont, Stansbury, Saxton, and Gunnison Difficulties of constructure Where is the real starting point ? Missouri River Bridge Out the Platte Fremont Columbus On the plains again Jules- burg Smoothness of the route Delightful traveling Cheyenne A Western Jeffreys ! Laramie again A tragedy A miracle, perhaps! " Big Ed's " guardian angel Pyramid rocks Beauties of Laramie Plains Desert west of them Wasatch Echo and Weber Promontory Moral gamblers Reflections 126 CHAPTER VIII, THE GREAT BASIN. Hunting new fields Gentile needs Mines or nothing Southward Sevier Mines Gilmer and Saulsbury Rockwell's Ranche The Utah Basin Will it be sacred ground? A family ticket Social robbery- Chicken Creek " Them mules is in the sagebrush ; you go hunt 'em ! " Gunnison Sevier Valley Abandoned towns Marysvale Up the Gulch Drawbacks to the district Mr. Jacob Hess My later experience The habitable lands of Utah and Nevada Productions Fruits True policy with the State and Territory " Mormon enterprise " A silver State Sunken deserts Death Valley^Mournful reminiscence 142 CHAPTER IX, THROUGH NEVADA. Out of a place A wanderer again Tired of Utah Westward Promontory Salty district Queer calculations Down the Humboldt Elko White Pine "John Chinamen "Humboldt Canon Desert Reese River " Sinks "Morning at Truckee Beauty of the Sierras Eureka ! Don- ner and Bigler Lakes Western Slope " Forty miles of snow sheds " Mining towns Cape Horn Sublime scenery Scientific engineering Swiftly downward Scenery of the Pacific slope Out upon the plain The California autumn Suburbs of Sacramento 153 CHAPTER X. AFOOT IN CALIFORNIA. New Spain Poetry and fact Saxon and Spaniard Cavalier and Pioneer Our Heroic Age The American Iliad Sacramento Yolo county " Tules "Chinese California Central R. R. Ague High and Low 26 CONTENTS. Water-marksChinese and Chinese labor Acclimating sickness Davis- ville Sericulture Warner's Vineyard The land of grapes Pears, apples, and figs Up Putah Creek Drouth and dust The rainy season at hand Fruit farms near the coast range Ranches only, not homes Popular reasons therefor Agricultural items Shall we settle in rural California Chinese " Devil-drive " Mongolian Theology " Josh " Blowing up the Devil Ah Ching's opinion " China like Melica man ! " Off for " Frisco ".... .. 167 CHAPTER XI. UTAH AGAIN. Elected defendant Utah law Polygamous judges Trial at Brigham City Assault on the author Skilful surgery Rapid recovery " Write a history of the Mormons ! "Visit the East Return to Utah Political- Bear River canal scheme Author goes to Washington Miseries of a lobbyist Election of 1870 Gen. Geo. R. Maxwell Debate on polygamy Cui bonof Mormon morals and Gentile associations 183 CHAPTER XII. I START AGAIN. Another misfortune and change of scene Kansas City Lawrence Early tragedies Later horrors Last great success Southward Ottawa " Don't mention it, Deacon "Franklin County Anderson Ozark Ridge Allen County lola Western enterprise Montgomery County Beautiful Mounds Cherry vale Northward A modern Methuselah Troy Ready to report 197 CHAPTER XIII. STATISTICAL KANSAS. Emigrants, attention ! Topography of Kansas Climate Three divisions- Amount of good land Productiveness Figures Fruit Beautiful Homes Southern border Snakes Local flavoring Bad case of Trichina The Kansas farmer 216 CHAPTER XIV. A FLYING TRIP. Down to St. Joseph Up the Missouri Valley Omaha again Dull times on the Missouri Reasons given Off for Sioux City Up-country people Yankton Caught in a storm Dakota Black Hills Gold ! perhaps Sioux IAPE OAHYE Called westward Union Pacific Mormondom again Over to " Frisco" 235 CONTENTS. 27 CHAPTER XV. WONDERS OF THE SIERRAS. Off for Calaveras The route Copperopolis Up the Sierras First view of the Grove Particular trees Emotions excited Route thence to Yosemite Table Mountain Bret Harte Terrible descent Into the Valley A world of wonders Fatigue and reflection Description impossible 251 CHAPTER XVI. SKETCHES IN SAN FRANCISCO. Return from Yosemite Summary of trip Does it pay? Climate of San Francisco Of the State Variety in " Frisco "The Barbary Coast Chinese Theatre The Cliff House and Seal Rocks Literature of the Pacific Joaquin Miller Frances Rose Mackinley Morals and manners Excitement and wearing out An inventive Race The Chinese again... 290 CHAPTER XVII. " JOHN." Popular nonsense about the Chinese The bugbear Chinaman The roman- tic Chinaman The real article His history, art, music and drama Objections to them considered Do they cheapen labor? Will they over- run the country ? Do they degrade labor ? Their condition Missionary work Sacramento system Rev. O. Gibson Better specimens Yellow Chinese Mrs. Laisun and daughters Chinese students Hope for the race.... .. 313 CHAPTER XVIII. MINES AND MINING. A prospect Outline of mining region The Cottonwoods How I came there Mormon anti-mining sermons The dry summer Unhealthfulness of Salt Lake City I go to the mountains " Prospectors " We hunt a mine Mode of silver mining Different in gold mining One chance in twenty-five thousand for an " Emma " or " Comstock " " Struck a horse " Over to Big Cottonwood Fire in the mountains Promise of war in Utah False alarm Off for Bingham Chicago fire Thence to East Canon I invest And come out minus 326 28 CONTENTS. CHAPTER XIX. A CHANGE OF BASE. A hard winter The last rain Eastward A merry party The great Block- ade On the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad Southwestern Missouri Among the Cherokees Spring roads Up into Kansas Meet C. G. Du Bruler, Esq., and return Down to Muscogee 348 CHAPTER XX. MUSCOKEE. Desperadoes Laxity of Government Out to the Agency Stirring up a rattler "A free nigger settlement "Creek History Tallahassee Mission Delightful experiences Creek education System of government Back to Muscogee Reckless shooting State of the region 369 CHAPTER XXI. OKLAHOMA. Railroads The Thirty-fifth parallel route Down to the Canadian In the Choctaw Nation Tandy Walker, Esq. Secretary Delano visits the Terri- tory Tramp to Fort Gibson " White Cherokees " again An Indian feud At Widow Skrimshee's " Pikes," on the animal migration Tahle- quah Cherokee documents Curious records History of the Nation Summary of the Indian Territory 396 CHAPTER XXII. AROUND AND ABOUT TO SANTA FE. No thoroughfare from Indian Territory Northward through Kansas On the Plains at Last The Ride over the Kansas Pacific Ellsworth, and its Former Felicities In the Buffalo Country The " Big Pasture" of Amer- ica Arrival at Denver " Them's my Sentiments "The Country from Denver to Santa Fe A case of Delirium Tremens 431 CHAPTER XXIII. SANTA FE DE SAN FRANCISCO. First impressions Location of the city U. S. officials Learning Spanish The Baile Valse da Spachio Mexican Law Religion Children CONTENTS. 29 Dark vs. white races Mexican transportation Historical Remarkable journey of De Vaca and his companions Expedition of Coronado " The seven cities of Cibola ! " " The American occupation "Query 451 CHAPTER XXIV. " GREASERDOM." Off from Santa Fe La Bajada Rio Grande Valley The Pueblo de San Domingo Mexican farms Albuquerque Crossing the Rio Grande On the Desert Rio Puerco El Rito "Town of the Lake" Cubero McCarty's Ranche Murder by the Navajoes Agua Azul The extinct volcano Summit of the Sierra Madre At Wingate My soldier comes to grief. 479 CHAPTER XXV. AMONG THE NAVAJOES. At Fort Wingate Natural beauty Wealth of nature A region of curiosi- ties The Zunis Their wonderful civilization Cation de Chaco San Juan ruins On to Defiance Navajo history Their semi-civilization Their wars with the Spaniards American relations Major Brooks' negro Navajo War Subjugation and decline Their return and progress End of stay at Defiance Sounds of wrath from Santa Fe Apology An original " pome " 511 CHAPTER XXVI. A RIDE THROUGH WONDERLAND. Diamonds ! perhaps Curious stones in the Navajo country Ready Kind- ness of Agent Keams Navajo Forest Entering De Chelley The " Cliff Cities "An evening of beauty Out upon the Desert Water ! Water ! Sickness and exhaustion Navajo doctoring Climbing for water Down again, and night-ride Camp at last " Hah-koh Melicano ! " Reach Moqui Curious people Chino and Misiamtenah " Moquis steal nothing" 641 CHAPTER XXVII. THE LAST OF THE AZTECS. Theory and fact What I know about the Moquis Location Numbers Dwellings Dress A dinner of State Dog-meat and a Catholic stomach Strange dialogue on religion Tuba and Telashnimki Oraybe 30 CONTENTS. Radicals Further enquiries Division of the subjects Mounds in Ohio In Mississippi Valley Mexico Central America Peru Theories Jews, Chinese, Malays, Phoenicians, Romans, or Atlanteans Modest con- clusion 574 CHAPTER XXVIII. ARIZONA. A big country A strange parallelogram A region of mountain, canon and plateau Antiquities Wild Indians Maricopas and other village Indi- ans We leave Moqui Nature of the country Camp of the " Outlaw Navajoes" Romantic narrations Navajo beauty Their theology Fish, turkeys, and human beings Who are they ? Their treatment of women 603 CHAPTER XXIX. DOWN TO THE COLORADO. Diversion from intended route Summary of the Thirty-fifth parallel route Leave the outlaw Navajoes Addition to our party Our interpreter Lost on the desert An aboriginal joke A wonderful grazing ground Battle-field of Apaches and Navajoes Comparison of skulls Reach the Colorado Canon Sublime sight A fearful descent Nine hours going down hill No passage Find one of Major Powell's boats Dexterity of the Indians I risk the passage " Major Doyle " Indian romance Castilian and Navajo tongues Good-bye to my dark friends Safely over at last 624 CHAPTER XXX. FIVE HUNDRED MILES OF MORMONS. An astonishing revelation" Major Doyle " becomes John D. Lee, of Moun- tain Meadow notoriety He relates his version of that affair Comments Why verdict " Guilty "Off for the settlements Jacob's Pool Long, dry ride The Pi-Utes Into Kanab Jacob Hamlin Major Powell's party Pipe Springs Gould's Ranche Virgen City Toquerville Kanawa Into the Great Basin Beaver The "Jerky" An old com- rade Fillmore " Cutting off "Staging An unconscious joke Arrival at Salt Lake City Surprise of my friends 645 CHAPTER XXXI. MY SUMMER VACATION. Diamonds by the bushel ! My conclusion The sad fact Off for Soda Springs Cache Valley Gen. Connor and the Battle of Bear River CONTENTS. 31 Soda Mounds Health-restoring waters "Anti-polygamy" Spring Wonders of the Yellowstone Report of Hon. U. P. Langford Return to Salt Like CityPolitics and Religion Popular absurdities about Utah A blast at Brigham and his allies 669 CHAPTER XXXII. SHORT NOTES ON A LONG EXCURSION. Another ride on the Union Pacific Down to St. Louis Up to Nauvoo Historic interest A strange old place German vintners Beauty of the site Through Iowa Southern Dakota Yankton politicians Terri- torial Officials " The Government cannot afford good men " Down the Missouri An uncertain channel On the Sioux City and St. Paul Road 691 CHAPTER XXXIII. MINNESOTA. My stepmother An impecunious youth Trials of poverty I drive for excursion parties Not a success My Canadian friends Return home Mankato Crystal Lake Garden City The cabin of my friends My old employer Down to St. Paul The State Fair Northward by rail Lumbermen Big Lake St. Cloud Sauk Rapids Great water-power Northward stage The Lady Superior Belle Prairie Converting Indi- ans We reach Brainerd 706 CHAPTER XXXIV. ON THE NORTHERN PACIFIC. Brainerd The Pine forests of Minnesota Sioux and Chippewas Pahya Goonsey Detroit Lakes Down to Red River Moorehead Out to Jimtown Red River Valley" The equinoctial storm" Eastward again Russian Quakers Scandinavian settlers Scenery on the St. Louis Duluth Emigration Companies "POST OFF" Humbug of land cir- cularsClimate on the Northern Pacific " Be not deceived "The testimony experience of A. Toponce, Esq. Comments 724 CHAPTER XXXV. THE WAY TO OREGON. Westward again Iowa Union Pacific Utah Central Pacific Sacra- mento California and Oregon Railroad Chico General Bidwell's 32 CONTENTS. Ranche Semi-Tropical Fruits and Flowers Reading Shasta Joaquin Miller Shasta Indians" Venus and Adonis "Staging on the Sierras Mount Shasta Yreka Frontier justice Immense Forests Oregon- Rogue River Umpqua Willamette Portland 741 CHAPTER XXXVI. IN CONCLUSION. Season too late Washington Territory " Good-bye, Jonah " Down the Willamette In the Columbia A fog Salmon fisheries Strange instincts of the salmon On the heaving ocean" The first to fell "Down below " Just a little qualmish " Philosophy on the subject Smoother water " On an even keel " Arrival at Frisco Bancroft & Co. Homeward bound.... .. 767 DOWN THE CANON. UNDEVELOPED WEST; OR, FIVE YEARS IN THE TERRITORIES. CHAPTER I. I MAKE A START. Why I went West Poor health" Infallible cures " Impecuniosity Try the newspapers Doubtful prospects Leave E vans ville Stop in Wisconsin The Mound Region Boscobel Into Iowa Swedes and Norwegians West- ward afoot A model farmer Wire-fence Planting timber Resources of j owa Iowa Falls " Wall-Lake " Fanciful theories Scientific fact Fort Dodge Grasshoppers A pleasant excursion " Purgatory " and " Hell " Sloughs " Bad for women and oxen" Twin Lakes Ida City Over the " Di- vide " Denison Down the C. & N. W. R. R. Council Bluffs and Omaha On the border at last. ANUARY, 1868, found me an invalid in the goodly city of Evansville. A bronchical difficulty, produced ten years before by severe application to study, had in a year of army life developed to a confirmed asthma; and now, in the moist and enervating climate of Southern Indiana, I was shaken by an ominous graveyard cough, the heaviness of a mother and the despair of friends and creditors. I tried fifty remedies : cubebs, troches, caramels, hoarhound con- fections were my hourly refreshment ; a score of nasty syrups in villainous green bottles adorned my mantel; pastilles smoked upon my stove, and my chamber was redolent with the fumes of burning nitre. My friends sympathized and suggested : one had heard his grandmother say she never knew a tea made of chestnut leaves to fail in such cases, if taken in time; another quoted an equally venerable source in favor of bloodroot and whiskey, with snuff of powdered galingale ; a third had all confidence in the regular 300 oo 34 POPULAR ADVICE. "GO WEST, YOUNG MAN; GO WEST ! " school, while a military friend just from Texas contented him- self with the cheerful suggestion, " My boy, the angels have taken a fancy for you ; try a southern climate." If there is anything worse than dying of consumption, it must be the reception of the advice prevalent on the subject. The general voice ran in favor of travel. One thought a sea- voyage a dead sure thing; another was enthusiastic for Florida, and a third was positive the Lake Region would straighten me out. In a multitude of counsellors, n On -professional, there was anything but safety. My physician, watch in one hand, the other on my pulse, looked solemnly wise and thus pro- nounced : " Go west, young man ; go west." I went west. THE WAYS AND MEANS. 35 There was one little difficulty in the way of all these fine schemes advanced for my rejuvenation : I was impecunious. Young lawyers are not generally troubled with filthy lucre, and I had been in practice but one year, and out of health most of the time. After selling books and paying debts I had remain- ing a hundred and fifteen dollars on which to reach the Pacific Coast for there my physician thought was the Hesperian foun- tain which was to make me a new man. Manifestly if I ever reached it, economy was to be, not exactly a virtue, but some- thing not nearly so heroic a necessity. Newspaper correspon- dence suggested itself to my mind as a last resort. What wandering scholar, poor teacher, or feeble professional has not thought of it as the way to health-restoring travel, or the glories of a foreign tour ? I wrote a carefully worded proposition to six leading journals. Two replied. The Head Quill of the Indianapolis Journal briefly declined, adding, somewhat superfluously, that there were at least a dozen applicants to each vacancy, and Western corre- spondence was just now of no particular value. Murat Hal- stead, Esq., of the Cincinnati Commercial, (May his shadow never grow less!) answered thus, literatim et punctuatim: (Fac simile on next page.) I trust the reader may decipher these hieroglyphics with more ease and less of doubt and trepidation than I did. Through their jagged lines gleamed a ray of hope; and on this hint I wrote. I also made arrangements with the Evansville Journal, to practise a few weeks through their columns until I became more proficient with the pen, thinking that it was best my first effusions should be read only by friends and acquaintances a common error with beginners. For criti- cism, to be of any value, must come from strangers. One's friends will always praise his writings, though never so flat; and one's enemies say something spiteful though he speak with the tongue of men and angels. My plan was to work through to California during the good weather, remain there one winter, and work back home the next summer, after an absence of about eighteen months ; and by no means to settle in the Far West I came about as near to OFFICE OF THE A f FOURTH AND RACE STREETS. LEAVING HOME. 37 filling this schedule as young men generally do to working out their plans. It is necessary to have plans, but it is morally certain no man will ever realize them exactly. The precise thing one intends is about the only thing which never occurs, and of the great expectations of glowing youth we may philo- sophize as did the Hibernian over his dressed pig : " It didn't weigh half as much as I expected, an', be japers, I always knowed it wouldn't." All sad farewells over, I was off from Evansville on the 8th of May. It is seldom pleasant to start, no matter what enjoy- ment one looks forward to ; and the oldest travelers generally leave " winter quarters " with a feeling of despondency. De Quincy says : " We never do a thing consciously for the last time without a feeling of sadness; we never take final leave of a place even where we have not been happy without a sigh." And the experience of all Bohemians confirms this truth. Per- haps the inner sense sees by a divine instinct that all these occasional partings are but faint types of the last great parting, and sighs its regret by anticipation. Perhaps the soul feels in these minor departures that a great departure is not far distant, and intuitively warns man of his destiny. I had uncommon cause for despondency. Hitherto my journeys, though long, had been no farther from civilization than western Kansas and Minnesota ; post offices, stage roads, and even railroads were not far distant, and though I "dragged at each remove a lengthening chain," it was still a chain connecting me by suc- cessive links with home. But now, with feeble health and feebler pocket, I was to pass beyond the border, and across the central wild to where civilization " Shifting, turns the other way." It is not surprising then that a suspicious moisture gathered in my eye, as from the rear of the train I waved my adieus to the receding city. After a week in Northern Indiana, and three days at the Na- tional Republican Convention in Chicago, I left that city for Wisconsin by the Chicago and Northwestern Railway. I had gained on the season ; the coolness of early spring still prevailed 38 WISCONSIN. in this higher latitude, and I took a delightful rest of a week at Boscobel, in the valley of the lower Wisconsin. This is the centre of the "Mound Region" of Wisconsin so called from the many Indian mounds scattered about the valley. Some are circular, some oval, and one in the edge of the town is in the exact form of a Greek cross, the longer piece a hundred feet in length. None of these are more than four or five feet high, and the earth of which they are composed is different from the adjacent soil. Most of the original mounds have been removed in the process of settlement : some contained human remains, some implements of war and husbandry; but the most cpnsisted entirely of earth and decayed grass or straw. Of some the earth was so fertile that the people of Boscobel used it for enriching their gardens. North of the river are larger and more extensive quadrangu- lar mounds, evidently intended as a fortification, and command- ing a bend in the stream. Twenty-five miles south are the " Great Mounds of the Platte," two moles of earth and rock, about half a mile in length, rising abrujftly to a height of sixty feet from a level plain. But these are evidently of geologic origin. Boscobel is far enough north to be a pleasant summer resort; the climate is healthful, and just north of the Wiscon- sin game of many kinds is abundant, The prairie, spangled with the myriad flowers of advancing spring, allured me to numerous excursions; the bracing air from the Minnesota hills brought healing to my lungs, and I soon felt the exquisite joys of convalescence. Tourists who cannot aiford to go to the " Far West" may find here, and in the neighboring parts of Iowa and Minnesota, a pleasant and healthful summer residence. On the first of June I crossed the Mississippi from Prairie Du Chien* to McGregor, and started afoot across Northern Iowa, judging that the walk of three hundred miles would toughen me a little before encountering the real hardships of the plains. Of the next four days my recollections are of slow * " Prairie of The Dog.' 1 An Indian chief who dominated this region centuries ago. THROUGH IOWA. 39 sauntering over a beautiful rolling country, prairie and timber intermingled, and rather thickly settled with a thrifty and intel- ligent population. Iowa and Minnesota were doubtless settled by the most generally educated class of emigrants of any part of the West ; and I seem to be going into civilization rather than from it. Occasional colonies of Swedes and Norwegians are found in both States, and exhibit a rapid im- provement. Nine years before, during a summer residence in Minnesota, I had witnessed the colo- nies coming in, direct from Scandinavia, and often smiled at their uncouth and poverty- stricken appearance. Now they are there, as in Iowa, among the wealthiest people in the country; their national industry has raised them from poverty to opu- lence. Afterwards I saw people of the same races in Utah, by the most exhaustive labor a little better off than they had been at home, and heard them boasting what great things " the Lord and Brother Brig- ham had done for them." These in Iowa had no Prophet, and consequently made a good selection for their homes, and prospered without being tithed. At the end of a week I was but eighty miles from the river, but the general appearance of the country began to AFOOT THROUGH IOWA. 40 ON THE PRAIRIE. change rapidly. There were immense tracts of unsettled prairie ; timber was found only along the streams, and I soon learned to dread it on account of the heat. On the "bottoms" of Big Wapsie Creek, in Bremer County, was dense timber for ten miles the last complete forest I was to see for a year ; and I almost melted in passing through it. On the prairie there is nearly always a gentle and refreshing wind ; in the timber a sultry and oppressive calm. To leave the first for the second was like going from balmy May into sultry July. In my prairie travels I never saw a farmer's wife who had tried both, who did not prefer the prairie to the timber, despite the intense cold of winter. Sometimes, they admitted, when the ther- mometer was below zero, and the wind humming from the northwest at twenty miles per hour, they sighed for the leeward side of tall timber ; but for ten months in the year, give them the prairie. " We can house up, you know, and keep warm on the prairie in winter ; but we can't house up and keep cool in the timber in summer." Westward I began to toughen to my work, and on the 8th and 9th of June easily made my twenty miles a day. Over- taken on the open prairie by a storm, late in the afternoon of the 9th, I traveled nine miles in the rain to the first house, finding the settler like myself a retired professional, "out West for his health." Three years before he had paid seven dollars an acre for a quarter section of land, put a wire fence around forty acres of it, broke the sod and sowed it in wheat, which yielded twenty-two bushels per acre, and sold at a dollar and a quarter per bushel. He produced his " farm-books," which showed that, estimating his wire-fence and breaking sod at the highest rate, his first crop had paid for land, fence, and break- ing, and a slight percentage of profit. Vacant lands in that and the adjoining counties were selling everywhere from three to fifteen dollars per acre, according to locality. Wire fences were the only kind in use in this vicinity. Many farmers used but three strands, but a "lawful fence" required five, which, the local courts consider, will make it " horse-high, bull-strong, and pig-tight." Many plant trees UNOCCUPIED LANDS. 41 for posts, using "slip cleats," that the wires may be moved every year or two on the growing tree. An artificial grove is found on nearly every farm, mostly of the soft maple and cot- ton wood ; but a few have planted harder varieties of timber. The State exempts from taxation all land so planted ; the trees grow rapidly, and in twenty years Northern Iowa will be a timbered country. Iowa has less waste land than any other State in the Union. The sloughs, though rated as non-cultivable land, are sus- ceptible of drainage ; and with the exception of a little rocky and sandy land along the streams, every foot of the State is available for the support of man. Despite the national spirit of self-glorification, and the bril- liant apostrophes of " Western members," how few Americans realize the comparative greatness of that tier of States just west of the Mississippi. Minnesota has thirty thousand square miles of wheat-producing land; Iowa has more arable land than Eng- land proper, and not quite one acre in a hundred non-productive ; Missouri has more iron, coal, timber and water-power than the Kingdom of Prussia, and Arkansas will nearly equal the King- dom of Italy. Taking St. Louis as a centre, with a radius of three hundred miles, and describing a semicircle on the west, from the Missis- sippi above to the same stream below, and the area thus bounded, if cultivated like rural England, would supply food for fifty million people. Really America is not yet "settled," except, perhaps, a narrow strip along the Atlantic. St. Louis, with her western rail connections, is the natural entrepot of a section that will comfortably support a population equal to that of the Rus- sian Empire. We are lost in a maze of conjecture when we attempt to figure to ourselves the future American, as he will be when all that region is thickly settled, dotted with towns and villages, with perhaps a score of great cities. I journeyed on west-southwest to Iowa Falls, a city of romantic location, with a foundation partly of rock, at a point where the Iowa River leaves the "summit-divide" prairies, and plunges down by a series of cascades to the level of the lower valley. There 42 AN IOWA WONDER. is unlimited water-power in the vicinity, and an important city- is springing up rapidly. It was then the terminus of the Dubuque and Sioux City Hailroad, and indulged in bright dreams of future greatness. The inhabitants I found to be of the genus Western Yankee, willing to take a stranger in and do him. Accordingly I did not tarry long, and on the morn- ing of June 18th, took passage in a settler's wagon, to visit the celebrated " Wall Lake," which was reported afar off as the great wonder of Iowa. For many years fanciful writers had given us glowing accounts of a wonderful lake, surrounded by a compact wall of boulders and earth, with a beautiful drive on top, along which the Jehus of a "departed race" exercised their elk and buffalo teams in driving tandem. I reached the lake at dusk, having walked ten miles from the main stage road. The only inhabitant of the township lived on the border of the lake, monarch of all he surveyed, and evidently willing to have nobody live any nearer. The land was his, and the water and the cattle on a thousand sloughs ; but he cared nothing for the natural beauty at his door, had no boat on the lake, and only granted me lodging because it was evident there was no other chance. North, west, and south of the lake the country is marshy for several miles, but on the east rises a beautiful wooded ridge, in the edge of which the settler lives. Only the western and southern borders of the lake have a regular wall; the bank on the east is bold and abrupt, and on the north the lake yields gradually to an extended marsh. At the extreme southern point, a clearly defined rocky wall breaks down by almost regular steps to a " wasteway," through which runs a considerable stream continuing eastward to the Iowa River. From this outlet for half a mile northwest is the only part of the wall which has any appearance of human handi- work : it is six feet high, three feet wide on top, and very com- pactly built of rock and earth. The outer side is quite steep, but within it slopes away gradually to the water's edge, for several rods, beautifully adorned with grass and flowers. But even there a careful examination shows no regular masonry; all is in elemental, not mechanical order. ICE-BUILT WALLS. 43 Science has clearly demonstrated that these walls are not the work of the Red Man, nor yet of his possible predecessor, the Mound Builder; they are due merely to the expansive force of ice. Geologists are agreed that the lakes of this region date back to the close of the "Glacial Epoch," remaining as then mere depressions in the "drift" which formed the soil. The "Lake Region" whether in New York, Minnesota or I owa i s always found on the "summit-level." Farther down there were lakes once, but the drainage from higher ground running down the slope has cut channels far below their old beds and drained them. In Southern Iowa the careful eye can still see traces of ancient lake shores; but away up the bluffs, often fifty feet above the present surface of the river. On the " summit level," there was no such accumulation of water on higher ground to force a way through the lakes and drain them, and they remain as at first. In this climate ice often forms on them many feet in thickness. In 1863 this lake froze almost solid, killing most of the fish. Freezing to everything with which it comes in contact, boulders, earth, and rushes, the ice continually cleans the bottom of the lake and piles the materials at the edge. The expansive force of miles of miles of ice is exerted upon the rocks in a direction from the centre towards the shore ; and so powerfully that on the eastern side, where the bank is abrupt, the flat stones are in many places driven in upon the boulders with such an impetus as to splinter the former like glass. Each year this process is repeated, the lake rising to the height of the wall formed the previous year, and adding new materials thereto ; and this process continues till the loose material is exhausted, or the lake waters force an out- let, as this has done at the south end. That this theory is correct, is clearly proved by the existence of fifteen other lakes in this and adjoining counties with a similar formation, of which Lake Gertrude, Lake Cornelia, Twin Lake, and Little Wall Lake have even more perfect walls than this. In some, the water has gradually cut down the outlet, and drained the lake until a new wall has begun to form inside the old ones. Swans and wild geese abound on all 44 EAGLE CREEK. OUTLET OF "WALL LAKE." t the lakes. The entire region is well worthy of a visit by tour- ists or artists, and surely no reflecting mind will feel less inter- est in the " Wall Lake" from knowing that it is not the work of a u departed race," but a natural result of forces which have been in operation since the hour when "The morning stars sang together." After a day at "Wall Lake" I turned westward, traversing an unbroken prairie for fourteen miles to Eagle Creek. There I found six families scattered along the stream for two miles ; for in all this part of Iowa the only settlers were found near the streams or lakes where there was timber. Everybody was GRASSHOPPERS. 45 on the qui vive about the grasshoppers, which were reported to be coming from the west. Next day, in the twenty-five miles to Fort Dodge, I passed through three swarms of them, each about half a mile wide. Where I stopped for dinner the farmer sat the picture of dejection, while his wife and daughter were weep- ing and wringing their hands. Their farm lay directly in the path of the destroyers, and going with them to the field of wheat, now turning yellow for the harvest, I saw the insects pouring into it from the north by millions, with an ominous roar. Before them were green prairies and yellow fields of grain ; behind them blackness, desolation and death. At Fort Dodge, and for a day's travel west of there, I saw them in new swarms, now grown larger and flying high in the air, glistening in the sun like bits of white and yellow paper. Thence I saw them no more, and afterwards learned that their " visitation" was but partial, destroying about half the crop in three counties. Whence come they ? Where do they breed ? Whither do they go? Nobody knows certainly. In Iowa and Minnesota they are generally supposed to originate in the wastes of North- ern Dakota, but the only reason I know of for this opinion is that they come generally from the northwest. In the last named State they came in August and September in 1856, and destroyed about half the crop ; the next year, as soon as the weather grew warm, they seemed to spring suddenly from the ground in myriads, and chew away on the first thing they reached. Not a spear of grass or wheat, or a blade of corn escaped; and when I was there, in 1859, Minnesota had her celebrated " hard times." Every Western State and Territory has had them at first. But settlement certainly has some effect on them, as their visits grow gradually less frequent, and are less destructive when they do occur. West of Fort Dodge I fell in with a party of five, journey- ing with wagon and tent to Sioux City, and on invitation cast in my lot with them. We traveled but fifteen miles or so a day, hunted and fished and lived on the proceeds, slept in the wagon and tent, and had all outdoors to cook, eat and breathe in. For a hundred miles on our way, we passed perhaps ten 46 houses ; the general characteristics everywhere the same. Down a long slope for seven or eight miles, the road would bring us to a creek or slough, along which would be a scattering growth of timber; and about "one farm deep" on each side fenced in. From this valley we would rise by gentle inclines to the next "divide," five or ten miles of gently rolling prairie; then down another slope to the next slough, or creek, and consequent settlement, fifteen or twenty miles from the last. At one place we traversed twenty-five miles without sight of a house. Far as the eye could pierce the green and waving grass, now full grown, made the country appear a very paradise of herders ; and daily my ideas of vastness enlarged till I wondered where the people were to come from to cultivate these fertile fields. Then there was but one railroad across Iowa ; now there are four, all stimulated by the completion of the Union Pacific. It had just been made public that the Dubuque and Sioux City Railroad was to be completed soon, and the wave of immigration was rolling in. Two years after, the road was completed, and already the line I traveled presents a succession of cultivated fields and tasty homes, a region diversified with orchards, white and red with clover tops, or yellow with heavy-headed grain. Then Iowa had one acre in seventeen under cultivation ; now she has one in twelve, and a population of nearly a million and three quarters. The State will easily support fifteen million people by agriculture alone. The sloughs grew steadily worse as we proceeded westward, and were bridged but slightly or not at all. We passed " Pur- gatory" safely, but mired and stuck in "Hell" two very bad sloughs near Sac City. We stripped in the wagon, got out into mud and water waist-deep, and by an hour's hard work got over safely. Not so fortunate were a party of Norwegians just be- hind us, bound for Dakota, who stuck in the worst place. We " doubled teams " and worked with them two hours, but having horses while they had oxen, could do them little good. Our stoutest man went in and carried their women and children to dry land, and we left them in statu quo women and children cry- ing, men shouting, swearing, and beating their oxen, all in choice 47 48 A THIRTY-FIVE-MILE WALK. Norwegian. Doubtless they had to carry out their entire load, bundle at a time, and take the wagon to pieces. Well saith tho border proverb, " Western travel is rough on women and oxen." At Ida City, still fifty miles east of Sioux City, I parted company with the excursionists, determined to travel southward to Omaha. Ida City consisted of one house, blacksmith's shop, and accompanying stables and outhouses. Thence it was thirty- five miles over the "divide" to Denison, on the Chicago & Northwestern Road ; and, as there were no houses on the way, I must make the distance in one day. After a day's rest, with " cold bite " in valise, and canteen of water, I bore southward over the hills ; for the ridges gradually rise higher as one goes towards the Missouri. It was the 27th of June, and the heat was intense. Water I found but once on the road, and suffered considerably from thirst. It is cold enough in winter. The preceding one five persons had frozen to death on this route, having lost their way in sud- den snow storms. Twenty-eight miles on my way I found two new dwellings erected in a beautiful valley, where two brothers had just moved their families and opened a stock farm. This was a delightful surprise, and at this arcadia I rested till sundown and took supper, then finished my journey in the cool of the evening. By half past nine I had finished my walk of thirty-five miles with- out serious fatigue, nor did I feel any ill consequences next day. Not bad for an invalid. I felt that I was ready for the plains, and taking the midnight train entered Omaha early on Sunday morning the 28th. The place had been represented to me as a paradise for the enterprising, but first impressions did not confirm the idea. A furious rivalry raged between the city and Council Bluffs on the eastern side of the Missouri ; pretty much in the "You're another ! " style of argument. Omaha people spoke of the Bluffs as " East Omaha," " Milkville " and " Iowa-town ; " the Bluffites retorted with sarcastic remarks about "Bilkville," "Traintown," and the "Union Pacific Depot over the river." The Omahas assured me that the Bluffs were overrun by people OMAHA VS. THE BLUFFS. 49 out of employment ; that there were ten lawyers to every case, doctors till no one could count them, and so impecunious that when a man once fell on Main Street and broke his leg they rushed up in such numbers, and made such contest over the patient, that the mayor was compelled to read the Riot Act. I soon found, as a faithful chronicler, that, like Herod Otus, fami- liarly known as "History's Dad," I must carefully distinguish between what I saw and what I heard. The Western mind is expansive and generous; full measure is what they always give in local history. I think it must be in the air; that men breath- ing this light, dry and health inspiring atmosphere, like the Dolphian priestess, go mad in poloquent fury, and talk in strains of poetic exaggeration. Therefore, before I go far enough West to catch the same disease, I will indulge in one chapter of hard, prosaic fact. As I have now reached the border of the Far West proper, a general description of the whole country beyond the Missouri will better enable the reader to understand the next four years wandering. The facts are collated from observations in fifty thousand miles of travel, from the reports of personal friends in whom I repose confidence, from official surveys, and other ac- credited sources. Many facts in a limited space being my chief object, the reader who is bent only upon amusement may skip the following chapter. 4 CHAPTER II. A COMMON MISTAKE. Our land of promise Pleasing errors Painful but wholesome truths " The Great American Desert" not a myth Causes of sterility Drought Eleva- tion and cold Alkali Minerals Bitter Creek " Journey of Death" Travel on the Deserts -Bunch grass Grand divisions of the West View of the Plains Routes across the continent Freighting under difficulties Railroad and emigration circulars Caveat emptor : " Let the buyer look out." C? J)/iTHE "Far West" is the land of promise to ten million young Americans; but of all those who go West, nine out of ten go just far enough to form an erroneous idea of all beyond. They visit eastern Kansas and Nebraska, and traverse the fertile strip which extends from one to two hundred miles west of the Missouri the only part of the entire West which answers to the rosy views of the expectant pilgrim. There they find the rich bottom lands, the green rolling prairies and fertile vales of political romance; and it is that region, perhaps two hundred by twelve hundred miles in extent, intermediate between the Missouri line and the high plains, which is taken as the basis of comparison by the hopeful visitor, who imagines that with the exception of a fe\v mountain chains it is much the same all the way to the Pacific. It is difficult to convince such that in the West are regions of utter desert so vast that a New England State might be hidden in them, and only pass for a respectable oasis. Any route across the continent must traverse a complete desert from five hundred to a thousand miles wide. The Union Pacific enters upon it about Laramie, and with the exception of Salt Lake Valley, and perhaps two or three others, con- tinues in it all the way to the Sierras. The Northern Pacific strikes it at the Mauvaises Terres of Dakota, and thence bar- 50 THE AMERICAN DESERT. 51 renness is the rule and fertility the exception to the entering in of Washington Territory. The Southern and thirty-fifth par- allel roads strike it in western Texas or at the Rio Grande, and traverse it to Southern California. Draw a line on longitude 100 from British America to Texas; then go 800 miles westward, and draw another from British America to Mexico, and all the area between these two lines 800 by 1200 miles in extent; or in round numbers a million square miles is the "American Desert:" a region of varying mountain, desert and rock; of prevailing drought or complete sterility, broken rarely by fertile valleys; of dead volcanoes and sandy wastes; of excessive chemicals, dust, gravel and other inorganic matter. Only the lower valleys, bordering perennial streams, or more rarely some plateau on which water can be brought from the mountains for irrigation, or still more rarely a green plat in some corner of the mountains where there is an unusual amount of rain, or percolation of moist- ure from above, constitute the cultivable lands; all the rest is rugged mountain, rocky flat, gravel bed, barren ridge scantily clothed with sage brush, greasewood or bunch grass, or complete desert the last covering at least one-third of the entire region. The causes of these deserts may be summed up under four heads : I. Drought. II. Elevation and consequent cold. III. Excess of inorganic matter, as rock, gravel, etc. IV. Excess of chemicals, such as soda, alkali and plant- destroying salts. Generally more than one, and often all, of these causes com- bine; but for the convenient reference of the reader I will con- sider them in their order: I. Drought is the prevailing characteristic of all the country far west of the Missouri increasing westward from that river till one has crossed to the Pacific slope. The causes of this west- ward increasing aridity are found in the greater elevation, the TTWTV] 52 A IJTTI..E SCIENCE. trend of the mountains and the direction of the prevailing winds. Look upon the map of the eastern hemisphere, and observe the alternations of desert and fertility between the parallels of 20 and 30 north, and note that the desert steadily increases as we go westward. The causes briefly stated are these : The clouds, surcharged with moisture from the Pacific, are carried by the prevailing winds over China and Anam, with abundant showers; they are wrung dry, so to speak, in passing the high Himalayas, and float over southern Persia and Afghanistan without discharge. They gather again a little moisture from the Persian Gulf, and hence there is rain a little way inland in Arabia; a little more water is obtained from the Red Sea, and light showers sometimes fall in Egypt, whence they sweep over the whole length of the Sahara with- out a fertilizing shower. Thence across the Atlantic, loaded with moisture, the clouds yield immense rains upon the next intervening continent, producing the dense jungles and luxu- riant vegetation of tropical America. In like manner the sum- mer winds from the Pacific send in upon California heavy mists, which are caught and .condensed by the Coast Range, whence the valleys opening toward the west are green through- out the year. Between the Coast Range and the Sierra Neva- das the great interior valley of California has rain in winter only when the moisture is wafted from the south, and east of that range the Great Basin is nearly all a complete desert, the rim of the inclosing mountains admitting only the clouds of highest range and least moisture from the south. Between that and Kansas still interposes the loftiest range of the Rocky Mountains, more completely shutting off the summer clouds and leaving all that elevated region, for three hundred miles east of the mountains, to depend upon the uncertain chance of winter snows, upon southeast winds and the percolation of moisture from higher basins and mountain hollows. Progress- ing thence eastward, we come more and more within the range of winds from the Gulf, and more into a region of moisture. Hence all Western Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota must suffer from frequent droughts, and the region as far east as West- ern Iowa and Minnesota occasionally from the same cause. HIGH AND DRY. 53 II. The general elevation of the Great West would alone render much of it unfit for agriculture. Let us for illustration take the Platte Valley and general line of the Union Pacific. Omaha is nine hundred and sixty-six, and Cheyenne nearly six thousand feet above sea-level ; and through this long ride of five hundred and sixteen miles there is a gentle and -almost continuous up grade, averaging ten feet to the mile. In no place does it exceed thirty feet, while in two places it sinks to a level, and on two short distances there is a down grade : the first on entering the Platte Valley from the hills just west of Omaha, and the second from Archer, a few miles east of Cheyenne, down into Crow Creek Valley. From a car window one may note a curious though very gradual and almost imperceptible change in soil and climate, and consequently in landscape and natural productions. Four hundred miles west of Omaha we find a high, dry country, for the most part fit only for pasturage, where frost may be looked for any month in the year. Wyoming contains 97,000 square miles, and not a foot of land less than 4000 feet high. Colorado has about the average elevation of Wyoming, Denver being nearly on the level of Cheyenne. Manifestly the high plains of these two Territories can never be of value except for grazing. Utah, as reduced, contains over 60,000 square miles; but, except possibly a few of the sunken deserts of the south, the lowest valley is higher than the average summit of the Allegheny Mountains, the sur- face of the Salt Lake being 4250 feet above the sea. Of the 121,210 square miles in New Mexico, all are upwards of 3000 feet above the sea, except some small portions of the plains east of the Rocky Range, and the lower part of the Rio Grande valley. All of the Territory west of that river rises in a series of lofty plateaus, and Santa Fe, the capital, is so high that its summer temperature is about that of Quebec. Nevada has the same general level as Utah, but its principal towns are much higher than those of the latter, having been built by miners COLD SUMMERS. CROSSING THE PLAINS. instead of agriculturists; and the smallest number of its citizens can find fertile land enough for a garden. With 98,000 square milas the State has ab.out as much good land as three average counties in Ohio. Even in the most elevated regions considerable tracts are found with every element of fertility, but yielding only grass, every attempt to raise grain having failed. In Parley's Park, in the Wasatch Mountains, Heber Kimball cultivated wheat for several years ; it was in the flower by the first of September, and was cut off by the first frost. At Soda Springs, Idaho, the " Morrisite " Mormons tried for many years to raise crops, and only succeeded, and that but poorly, with potatoes; they then turned their attention to cattle raising, in which they prospered. At the Navajo farms in Arizona I have seen icicles six inches long on the rocks, only 300 feet above the fields, on the 18th of June; and in 1871, when the Indians had with great labor brought forward a crop of corn, and planted young orchards, on the night of May 31st a storm of sleet froze every plant ALKALI. 5f> and tree solid to the ground. A similar experience has followed the attempt to cultivate tiie soil in most of these high localities; and if there were no other causes, elevation alone would render half the Far West unfit for the farmer. Nor is this a difficulty that can be overcome by any art of man. Those who talk so glibly of the reclamation of waste lands in the West must wait until nature flattens out the country, and brings it down into the region of warmer air, and more abundant moisture. Provi- dence seemingly did not intend that farming should be the leading interest of the Rocky Mountain region ; its true wealth is to be found in mining and grazing. III. Of barrenness caused simply by lack of soil little need be said. I have traveled for days together over ridges of gravel, or tra- versed hundreds of miles with a basis of little more than solid rock, or with barely soil enough for scrubby growths of pine; and generally throughout the Rocky Mountains, instead of being green as are the slopes of the Alleghenies, all the steeps are gray and bare. From the summit of the Sierra Mad re in New Mexico, 400 miles westward, I saw no other rock than sandstone, which, disintegrating and blowing down upon tho valleys, was slowly covering the fields of the "lost race" and obliterating what little fertility remained. IV. ALKALI is the popular name applied everywhere in the West to that bi-carbonate which whitens thousands of square miles of the interior plains between the Black Hills and the Sierras. East of the former it is often seen in quantity suffi- cient to appear like hoar frost upon the grass, or render barren a small plat of ground; but farther west it lies in vast beds, or mingled with the soil in such quantities as to poison the water, and destroy all vegetation. Gazing from a car window on the Union Pacific, somewhere not far west of the Platte crossing, the traveler is surprised to see flour or very white ashes, as he supposes, sowed in streaks and patches along the ground ; and 56 WHITE DESERTS. STAGE CROSSING THE DESERT. here and there in the fertile soil of the valleys a pale purple streak on the ground, completely bare of grass, shows the pre- sence of alkali. But west of Medicine Bow one finds it in the mass: for miles the country is of a dirty white complexion, and in dry weather the irritating dust powders the traveler till all races are of one hue. Where the trace is very slight, it can be " worked out "by cultivation ; but in general it destroys all plants except the hardy greasewood and sagebrush. For sixty miles on Bitter Creek, Wyoming, the soil is a mass of clay, or sand, and alkali a horrible and irreclaimable desert which has made the place a byword. Nearly a hundred miles THE GREAT BASIN. 57 square of southern Idaho consists of a vast alkali plain, crossed only by stage routes; and in Nevada and Utah a single desert of "sand and soda" covers 30,000 square miles. Similar tracts are found in all the territories, notably the Jornada del Muerlo, or "Journey of Death," in New Mexico, the "white desert" of Arizona, the "forty mile desert," of almost pure alkali, in Wyoming, the Salt Lake desert 5000 square miles of sand, salt and alkali and the central desert or basin of Nevada, in which are " lost" the Hurnboldt, Carson, Truckee, and Reese rivers, and a hundred smaller streams. On the stage routes across such tracts the animals labor through a cloud of dust and the coach drags heavily, the wheels often causing a dis- agreeable "cry" in the sand and soda, while the passengers endure as best they can the irritation to eye and nostril, and the slime formed upon the person by dust and sweat. This pene- trating alkaline dust sifts in at the smallest crevice, and even the clothing in a close valise is often covered with it. Salt is another ele- ment destructive to vegetation, but found in such excess only in the Great Basin. Just west of the Great Salt Lake is a tract of some five or six thousand square miles, which presents the general appearance of a dried salt marsh ; the subsoil is of sand and hard clay, mingled with flint and gravel, while the surface in the dry season dazzles and torments the eye with the glisten of salt and alkali. The Pacific Railway runs just north of this tract, and the old stage road crossed the narrowest part of it. For seventy miles water is found in but one place, by digging; and in popular local phrase, " A jack-rabbit can't cross it without a haversack, while an immigrant crow sheds tears at the sight." So much for the bad features of the Great West : let us now NEEDS A HAVERSACK. 58 BUNCH-GRASS. consider what there may be of value in such a country. First to be noted among the redeeming features is the growth of bunch-grass, which is found in patches over a country at least a thousand miles square. Bunch-grass chiefly differs from the verdure of the East in that it never forms a continuous sod or green sward; it grows in scattered clumps, six or eight to the square rod, or thicker where the locality is favorable. One can span a bunch at the roots, but above it spreads; sometimes several bunches grow so as to form a clump a foot wide. It is never of a deep green, and for three-quarters of the year is a regular gray-brown ; hence an Eastern man might ride all day through rich pastures of it, and think himself in a complete desert. It gets its entire growth in about six weeks, some- time between January and July according to the locality. It then cures upon the ground, and stands through the year look- ing very much like bunches of broomsedge. It is as nutritious as ripe oats, the species with a white top, containing a small black seed, being particularly fattening. With it animals make journeys of a thousand miles without an ounce of grain ; with- out it, nine- tenths of America between meridians 100 and 120, would be totally worthless. Probably the most disappointing feature in Rocky Mountain scenery, to all new comers, is the absence of a green landscape; for with rare exceptions the traveler's eye does not rest in sum- mer upon an unvarying carpet of green as in the East. The bunch-grass is a pale green, or quite gray or yellow; the small sage-brush is white, and the large variety blue, the greasewood is a dirty white, and the earth and rocks white, yellow or red ; hence the result is a neutral gray, which seems to shroud all creation in sober tints. One may ride all day through good bunch-grass pasture and his horse be walking in sand all the time ; or through a tolerably rich country and never see an acre of that lively emerald which is the charm of an Ohio landscape. A plat of green sward is a rare sight in the Rocky Mountains; but eastward, on the high plains, other grasses appear, changing by slow degrees to the heavy verdure of the Missouri Valley. But the true wealth of all that country is in its minerals. It DIVISIONS OF THE WEST. 59 is ray belief that there is not a range in the Rocky Mountains in which paying minerals cannot be funnel somewhere. Every year valuable mines are discovered in places which had been given up as hopeless by men of science. Four years ago there was scarcely one in a hundred who believed in the mineral wealth of Utah; now her developed mines are worth $25,000,000. With more experience, more thorough prospect- ing, and improved modes of working, every part of that vast region will be found rich in some kind of minerals. The agricultural wealth of the country has been vastly over- rated; its mineral wealth equally underrated. Two or three more railroads across the continent are needed, to transport machinery and supplies, and then we can say that our mineral development has begun; what has been done will appear as nothing. Of timber all the West east of the Sierra Nevada has barely enough to supply local necessity ; of the immense forests on that range I will treat in the proper place. The Great West falls naturally into five grand divisions: 1. The Plains. 2. The Rocky Mountains. 3. The Colorado Basin. 4. The Great Basin also known as Fremont's and the In- terior Basin. 5. The Pacific Slope. The term "plains"' is often, improperly, applied to the whole country between the Missouri and the Pacific; it belongs only to that vast inclined plane stretching from the river, from four to six hundred miles, to the foot of the mountains, and extend- ing from Texas far into British America. Ascending this gentle grade anywhere between parallels 35 and 45, nearly the same general features are observable. Let the traveler start at the eastern border and go westward, on any section line, he will for fifty miles traverse a region rich in all the elements of plant growth; the bottoms of inexhaustible fer- tility, the slopes equal to the Miami Valley, and the ridges generally good for wheat, and always most excellent pasture. 60 THE HIGH PLAINS. Along the streams is found a heavy growth of elm, walnut, hackberry and cottonwood ; on the slopes and in the valleys, dense grass, almost the height of man, and over all the ridges, rich prairie grasses mingled with a few other plants, and beauti- fully varied by thousands of bright-hued flowers, mingling the colors of the temperate and semi-tropical regions. Westward up the streams we first notice a disappearance of the forest growth ; the timber shrinks to a mere fringe along the water's edge, or to stunted and gnarled bushes, contending feebly for life against increasing drought and annually recurring prairie fires. Walnut and ash disappear, and of large timber we find only the cottonwood, box-elder and willow. A hundred miles out, west of the Neosho or near the Verdigris, a marked change is observable; only the valleys are first class land; the slopes are but medium, and the ridges full of rock and yielding scant grass. Fifty miles farther, on the slopes and ridges verdure in its strict meaning disappears ; buffalo grass and gama grass take its place, and these show a tendency to bunch together, leaving large portions of the surface bare. The land rises into long ridges stretching away swell on swell as far as the eye can reach as if a heaving ocean had suddenly become firm, fixed earth and immense pampas spread away, alternating flint and gravel with strips of wiry, curly grass, or, at long intervals, a protected growth of stunted shrubs. The bright flowers of the lower valley disappear ; those that remain appear to have lost color and odor; the blue larkspur alone retains its brightness ; the wild sunflower and yellow saffron become dust- hued and dwarfish, while milkweed and resinweed sustain a sort of dying life, and cling with a sickly hold to the harsh and forbidding soil. Still the immediate valleys are rich ; still occasional depressions or oval vales along the streams contain a few thousand acres of fertility, and half or more of the upland furnishes scant pasturage. The traveler, after toiling for hours over half-barren ridges, stunted grass-plats, or acres of bare gray rock or dead clay, finds his road leading down to some stream, and from a rocky point beholds spreading for miles an oasis, beautiful by nature and delightful by comparison, watered DIFFICULTIES OF TRAVEL. 61 by a clear stream, bordered by rich meadows, and marking the course of a long and narrow tongue of rich land. Here are the buffalo and antelope; all settlements are far behind, and the plains in all their vastness are around us. Three hundred miles out and we are on the Great American Desert; it exists, all doubts to the contrary notwithstanding, though more than half of its surface east of the mountains is of some value for grazing. Now appear depressed basins, and valleys with vast patches of white saline matter dried upon the soil; short stunted grass, half-white with salt, saline plants resembling many upon the seashore, and vast flats and marshes, drying in the summer to beds of stifling dust. Travel over the high country with teams is there an impossibility. We must follow some stream for grass and water, and hence from time immemorial, aborigine, trapper, and emigrant have had three great routes across the plains the Platte Valley, the Smoky Hill, and the Arkansas routes. The aborigine adopted these routes from the buffalo ; the hunter followed the Indian ; the emigrant was piloted by the hunter, and on the last two lines following came the railroads, obedient to the same neces- sities for water and a smooth route. Leaving these narrow routes as we approach the mountains, we find foothills and ridges extending far eastward on the plains, cut by narrow gullies hundreds of feet in depth, with perpendicular sides a series of covered ways, equal to the best devised by military skill, admirable hiding places and lines of approach for marauding Kiowas or murderous Arrapahoes. Between the streams which create and mark out the lines of travel, extend broken ridges, crossed by the traveler only on low " divides," where the demands of commerce have made a crossing an imperative necessity. There the discouraged team- ster contends equally with heat*, thirst, and fatigue; grows old before his time in an unequal struggle with nature ; toils over stony ridges destitute of grass and water, or labors through beds of noxious alkali, rising in ever wind-obeying clouds to excoriate his nostrils, weaken his eyes, or embitter the scant streams which are his only resource. 62 SOME GOOD LAND. Toiling through this last and worst stage of the plains the traveler enters among the foothills and first valleys of the Rocky Mountains, and finds renewed signs of fertility, but of a totally different kind from that along the Missouri. But we leave a full description of the other divisions of the West until we reach them in the course of travel. Let not the reader hastily conclude that there is no good land in all the region I have outlined. There is considerable in scattered patches, though I have been more particular in describing the bad. The object of this chapter is to tell what you will not otherwise learn. The good land you will cer- tainly hear of from the magnificent circulars of railroad and emigration companies. CHAPTER III. FIVE WEEKS IN NEBRASKA, Omaha Glorious anticipitations Prosaic facts A bit of history Florence An invasion of place hunters Disappointment On the road to Fontanelle Elkhorn Valley Lost on the prairie " Any port in a storm " Down to the Platte Fremont Down Platte Valley Intense heat Want of domestic economy Romantic hash Victuals and poetry Bovine apotheosis Farm- ing in Nebraska Room for three hundred thousand farmers Climate Society " Professional starvation " Through Sarpy County Youthful con- nubiality Artificial groves Increase of rain-fall Omaha politics " Bilks " " Hunting for work, hoping to not find it." is Omaha, George Francis Train and the Credit Mobilier! Such was the shibboleth of the Omahas when I first made their acquaintance in June, 1868. He who was not prepared to swear by this local trinity was jocu- larly advised to emigrate or make his will. At the pre- sent writing the second is for the tenth time a " martyr to prin- ciple/' nobody knows to what principle, viewing the world through crossbars, and the third has become a national scandal, from which an odor of corruption pervades the whole land ; but the first still survives, and with a more solid basis of prosperity. It took me two hours to discover that there was no situation waiting for me in Omaha. For some weeks before reaching the city I had continually heard, "It's the great city of the near future/' " The heart of the Continent beats there," etc. ; and in walking twice along Farnham Street I encountered some fifty persons looking for "light, easy and genteel employment." But after a few days' stay I was convinced that no place in America had been "so well lied about," as no place had been exposed to a wider range of praise and blame. That the city had a future and a bright one was certain ; but that five men were dazzled in the hope of that future, and destined to lose 63 64 PRIMITIVE TIMES. time and money waiting for it, to every one that made a success, seemed equally certain. Let us on this point indulge in a little history. Omaha was laid out in 1854, soon after the organization of Nebraska Territory, and for several years gave little promise of future greatness; in fact, it was quite outrun by the little settle- ment of Florence, six miles north, of which the Omahas now speak patronizingly as a "very pretty suburb," destined in their san- guine view to be the Spring Grove or Brook- lyn to their future Go- tham. Florence was the original " Winter- Quarters" of the Mor- mons, where they ar- rived late in 184G, after their expulsion from Naovoo and journey through Iowa. Hun- dreds of them died there of actual want; some were poisoned by eating wild roots, and the Flo- rence graveyard con- tains the remains of seven hundred of these victims. J. K. Mitchell, founder of Florence, induced the Legislature to finish one ses- sion there after that body had broken up in a row at Omaha. Soon after Mitchell died, and his town ceased to be a rival. Omaha contained, in 1860, two thousand people; in 1864, four thousand; then the Union Pacific got fairly under way, and in three years the population doubled. A census taken by the city authorities a few days before my arrival, returned the popu- lation at 17,600, and the next year they made it 25,000. One 'WANTED : LIGHT AND GENTEEL EMPLOYMENT. " SITUATIONS WANTED. 66 year thereafter came a fearful epidemic and swept away 12,000 of these at least, that strikes me as the easiest explanation, for the National Census of 1870 only credited Omaha with some 13,000 people. Council Bluffs, which had never claimed more than 12,000, suffered but little reduction from the census epidemic. The growth of Omaha was encouragingly rapid ; but the Western mind is queerly constructed, and great on anticipation. The air is light, dry and healthy, and the world looks big west of the Missouri ; every man feels that the range of all outdoors- is his pasture, and is hopeful as a millionaire if he have a few corner lots, and ten dollars in his pocket. Hence magnified re- ports, and glowing promises of more rapid growth in the next two years ; and thousands of young men in the Northern and Eastern States imagined that all they had to do was to come to Omaha, and fortune would shower her favors on them. There was an immense immigration in 1868, of just such material as a new State does not want, and for every clerk's or bookkeeper's position there were a hundred applicants. But the ninety-nine rejected did not particularly suffer. Some footed it eastward, some tried their fortune farther west, and some went into the country and learned to till the soil ; for men will work rather than starve, and there is abundant provision in Nebraska for men to hoe corn and cultivate muscle. But each of the disap- pointed wrote to his friends or to the press, and for the rest of that year Omaha was the best abused city in the West. The heated term was at its worst, and after ten days in Omaha I once more took my pilgrim staff for the country, fol- lowing out the California Trail. The telegraph by the road side, continuous to San Francisco, awakened some singular reflections : of the time but a few years past when this was the last outpost of civilization on the long route to the Pacific; of the tens of thousands who made this their starting point for a new Eldorado, and the thousands from every State whose graves line the trail all the way to the Sacramento. Now the border of cultivation and settlement is hundreds of miles west- ward ; half the distance to the mines is traversed by rail, and 5 PAPILLION VALLEY. OMAHA (MTV. in a year or two more the California Trail will be but a trail on the page of history. I own no real estate in Nebraska no corner lots in Omaha; why, then, should I go into raptures over the neighboring country? But I cannot forbear an expression of gladness at my recollections of that trip: of miles on miles of cornfields with heavy crops, and wheat fields just ready for harvesting; farm products of every kind in the best of order, and plenty snffling over all the land. Eight miles from the city brought me into the valley of the Little Papillion (pro. Pap-ee-onh), where I spent the night with a minister of the German Refor- med Church. That people have quite a settlement here, and are temperate, industrious and most desirable citizens. July 8th. Journeyed on in a northwest direction. As this has been a hot dry summer, and no rain has fallen for two weeks, I am surprised at the appearance of the corn, which shows no sign of drought, is waist high, of a rich dark green, and growing rapidly. It appears that the soil and crops seldom SOIL AND CLIMATE. 67 show the effects of drought, though much less rain falls in the course of the year than in Indiana. The hard freeze of the winter makes the ground pulverize finely and hold moisture better in summer, and it is generally dry enough to plow in the spring as soon as the frost is out of the ground. Settlers report that the soil is nearly as dry in winter as in summer, and it is only during the month of May is it because the snows are then melting in the mountains? that they have heavy rains here. The winda bother me a little. I am not yet free from the neuralgic affection consequent on last winter's troubles, and the breeze makes me feel giddy more by its steadiness than its force. So my old neighbor contemplating emigration to Nebraska, may ask himself whether it is nobler in a man to suffer the stings and buffets of these outrageous winds, with freedom from winter rain and mud, or take refuge in the wooded region of Indiana, avoid the winds, and have the other evils. Turned straight north up the Papillion, lay by in the heat of the day, and took dinner with a Swede who had been i.erc a year and understood perhaps fifty words of English. Fortu- nately he had served as a mercenary in France and Italy, and spoke both languages like a native. I recalled a little of my boarding-school French, which I hadn't had a chance to air for five years, and we carried on a mongrel conversation in a very barbarous mixture of French and Latin. He tells me there has been a famine in his native province, and that all Swedes here who can raise money have sent it to their friends and relations to pay their passage out, and that accounts for the many young people I see among them who do not appear to be of the family. They are stopping with their friends till they can get homes, which is but a little while in this marvelously fertile region, where every laborer is in demand, and where the State wants the hardy Scandinavian almost as badly as he wants it. I stop for the night with another of the " Deformed Dutch," as the Yankees hereabout irreverently style these German Pres- byterians. 68 A ROUN 1) FONTA N ELLE. SCENE NEAR FONTANELLE. July 9th. Bear away westward toward Fontanelle,and through a most delightful country, wandering at random among the far- mers, and boring them with questions on climate, soil, etc. The immigration here this year is great, and composed largely of the best class of foreigners. Vacant lands have advanced in price from three to five dollars an acre; and farmers are buying land near their homesteads as fast as they can command the means, in the assured belief that it will double in value in a year or two. This is accounted the "garden spot of Nebraska." If the country only had plenty of timber it would be perfect. And the settlers are fast remedying that lack; for every farm has an artificial grove, and most of them are now old enough to add great beauty to the landscape. In places, large plats which have boon planted ten or twelve years present the appearance LOST ON THE PRAIRIE. 69 of natural forest. The country is gently rolling and the views very fine. At every turn in the road I exclaim, "Surely this cannot be excelled," and yet the next view as I move towards Fontanelle seems still more beautiful. July 10th. A day about Fontanelle, which is a neat, country village, elegantly situated on a commanding ridge above the Elk horn river. Turning southwest late in the afternoon, I lost my way on the unbroken prairie north of the Platte, and soon after sundown reached a farmhouse which looked very uninviting by starlight, but was my only chance within ten miles. To my earnest in- quiry for fresh water, the settler answered that he had dug two wells, one seventy feet deep and got no water, but struck sand which "caved so he could not curb." This is the only such case I have found in the State. Sometimes they must dig deep, but they get as fine water as I ever tasted. The family were using water from the creek, of which one tinful satisfied and dis- gusted me. To my request for lodging he answered that I would find hard accommodations, but he never turned anybody away at night. No mention was made of supper, and I was conducted at once by a ladder to the upper story, where I turned in for the night on a shuck bed, and soon forgot in sleep all my troubles but thirst. But oh, the visionary springs that tantalized me, the crystal streams that flowed in inviting, tormenting beauty through my dreams. How often did I see the "cot of my father, the dairy house nigh it, and the old oaken bucket that hung in the well," and wake, just as the treacherous water fled from my lips. July llth. Daylight revealed a situation. My host's wife was insane as he expressed it, "clean daft" and his six chil- dren, ranging from one year old to ten, were growing up like wild bulrushes. A sort of breakfast was prepared, and I forced a scant ration of bread and coffee, but it was a signal triumph of a catholic stomach over a protesting nose. My host was going to Fremont, " to git his sod plow sot and sharped," and I took a seat in his wagon, and in an hour reached 70 FREMONT. the summit of the slope leading down to the Platte Valley. As I viewed the panorama of beauty my heart swelled at the glory and magnificence of the scene. Far as the eye could pierce to the east and west spread the plain, its surface covered with tall grass, now waving and sparkling in the morning sunshine; along the opposite bluff ran the broad Platte fringed with tim- ber, and on the near bank, some five miles distant, the town of Fremont showed like a toy village half buried in the green car- pet. Up the valley from the east rumbled the morning train on the Union Pacific, while far to the westward a band of Pawnees were just passing out of sight, seeming on the level plain, to fade into the blue horizon. The whole scene was em- blematic of progress, breathing the spirit of borderland poetry. I wanted to shout or sing. Eagerly I wished for a companion to talk in harmony with the scene and my feelings. But the man at my side was utterly unconcerned. He had seen it a thousand times, and Gallio-like, cared for none of these things. From the bluff the road across the plain looked like a deep ditch with green banks, but this appearance was due to the rank grass reaching on each side nearly as high as the horses 7 backs. Entering between these green banks, the hitherto apathetic far- mer suddenly seized his whip and applied it vigorously to his team, shouting at every blow till they were in a gallop, while the wagon made fearful lurches, and our seatboard rattled over it in every direction. I bounced about the wagon-box, exerting all my ingenuity to save my limbs, and as soon as I could get breath shouted that there was no occasion for such hurry, to take it easy. His only reply in the intervals of plying the whip, was to point to the tall grass, from which I then observed pour- ing by hundreds, a peculiar sort of clipper-built fly, with green heads, black bodies, and yellow shoulder-straps, which were trying to settle on the horses, and only prevented by the latter's speed. I held on in desperation, and our speed did not slacken for two miles, until we reached the rising ground and got among the cultivated fields near Fremont. There, while I gathered myself up and took stock of abrasions and cuticular losses, the DOWN THE PLATTE. 71 farmer killed the few flies which had stuck, each one leaving a bright red drop of blood on the frantic animals. July 12th. Spent Sunday at Fremont, a flourishing western Yankee town of 1200 people. No church or Sabbath school that I can hear of, but plenty of loafers on the hotel porch all day, sociable and communicative, discussing the hot weather, the grasshoppers, and the " craps." All agree that the " hoppers " are coming, and that it will be " mighty tough on the new set- tlers as ha'int got their claims paid for yet.'' Late p. M. walked five miles down the valley. July 13th. The " hoppers" have come, but fortunately only a light invasion, and doing very little injury. A few fields of wheat "in this valley are " nipped," and passengers say that for two or three miles on Papillion, nearly half the crop is destroyed. Travel slowly towards Omaha through the most fertile country I ever saw. Farmers estimate their wheat will average thirty bushels per acre. Corn still looks thrifty in spite of long con- tinued heat and drought. Thermometer stood at 100 for four hours to-day. Consequently I stood not at all, but lay by on the porch of a farmer's house till 4 P. M. Stopped for supper in Big Papillion Valley, at an inviting frame dwelling sur- rounded by fine fields of corn and wheat, from which I argued good cheer. My disappointment was terrible. Tea that drew my mouth awry, without milk ; butter, that defied me in self- conscious strength ; pork, the rankest that ever smelt to heaven ; and bread that defied my geology to classify. After due trial I ventured to assign it to the palaeozoic period. It lacerated my mouth ; it would have killed rats. For this entertainment (?) my host required " six bits." Left in an ill-humor, and proceeded to criticize the western farmer's style of living. Why do so many of our people poison themselves even those who are able to do better when good food is just as cheap? How many families in Indiana and Illinois are cursing the climate for evils which three months' attention to the chemistry of common life would relieve ? Know ye not, that what a man eateth that he is ? Science has demonstrated that we are totally remade, bone and blood, brain 72 G ASTRONOMICAL. and muscle, every seven years. Thus our present selves are ever scooping up our future selves with knife, fork and spoon. And have not I, A. B., a vital interest in what the A. B. of seven years hence shall be ? Fried pork, watery potatoes, sloppy coffee, and sad bread ! How can the Hoosier or Sucker retain his self-respect when he remembers his component elements ? The classic Greeks did well to locate the soul in the stomach. I am not so sure but the enlightened moderns will return to that philosophy. The greatest philosophers to a man were lovers of good eating. Man, dominating the whole animal kingdom, selects only its noblest representatives as worthy to sink their individuality in his, by giving their meat and muscle to become part of his corporation. The highest compliment man can pay the ox is to eat him. By so doing he demonstrates that the bovine is worthy to be absorbed in the human ; and if we may believe that animal has a soul, how cheerful to reflect that it meets its proper apotheosis by adoption into the human spirituality. Viewed in that light these animals are indeed im- mortal ; they survive in us, their federal head and final repre- sentative. When a man says of the idol of his soul, " I love her well enough to eat her," what does he mean but this : that he has so intense an appreciation of her excellence that he would literally absorb it, swallow up as it were her rare combination of soul and body beautiful simile! translate her, so to speak, and make her a part of himself in fact as well as in figure. In this philosophical light, the lover's tender suggestion of amatory can- nibalism is really the most delicate of respectful compliments. Favor is deceitful, and beauty's only skin deep, but there is no discount on boned turkey and scalloped oysters. I have no sympathy with that class of transcendentalists, fortunately small, who deprecate any deep interest in the mere pleasure of eating. " We may live without sentiment, music and art, We may live without poetry, pictures or books, But civilized man cannot live without cooks." Having thus grumbled myself into good nature, I sauntered BEAUTIES OF NEBRASKA. 73 on towards the city, stopping late in the evening with a prosper- ous farmer in Little Papillion Valley. July 14th. A beautiful artificial grove of twenty acres on this farm, shows that, whatever be the true theory as to the origin of these prairies, the soil and climate have the capacity to pro- duce timber in abundance. My host says the trees are made to grow twice as fast for the first three years by cultivating corn among them. Most are cottonwood and soft maple. The locusts along the road have attained a foot in thickness in eleven years. Nebraska has the land, the air, and the water; but lacks somewhat the timber and rock, though the last abounds in a few localities. Reached Omaha to-day, and now sum tip a few notes on rural Nebraska: For the width of the State and a hundred and fifty miles back from the Missouri, almost every foot of land is adapted for the comfort and sustenance of man. Thirty thousand square miles of the most fertile land in the world has even now (1873) but a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. There is abund- ant room for at least three hundred thousand farmers and stock- growers. Vacant lands can be purchased at from three to fifteen dollars per acre, according to location, the vicinity of railroads, etc. I had offers of as fine land as I ever saw, in the Papillion Valleys, within ten or twenty miles of the Union Pacific, for eight dollars per acre; but it has no doubt doubled in price since. On the Elkhorn, above Fontanelle, is still much vacant land to be had very cheap. In the southern part of the State, between Lincoln and the eastern border, are large sections of railroad land to be had at moderate prices, on annual payments for seven years. Any live Yankee farmer can make the pay- ments on the land after the second year. Farther back lands are still cheaper, with fine facilities for grazing. On the slopes and in the valleys, the soil is continuous of the same quality for six feet below the surface. Immediately under this, lies a bed of soft, rather moist sand, which probably causes the soil to remain moist so long. In spite of the long droughts of 1868, the crops were very fine. While the valleys and 74 HEALTH AND CLIMATE. slopes are best for corn, the uplands produce better wheat. After the hard freeze of winter, with no thaws, the soil pulver- izes finely in summer. It is never water soaked ; consequently never " bakes " or clods. The best farmers do not plow the land in spring for wheat, after it has been cultivated two or three years; but merely harrow in the seed. Later experience in Nebraska convinced me that the State averaged as many clear days in winter as any part of America. I grumbled considerably about the wind at first ; it caused a giddy feeling in my head. But after I got over the neuralgia, bronchitis, catarrh, and six or eight other complaints I brought from Indiana, I rather liked it; and now I quite prefer a region with a continuous gentle breeze of six or eight miles an hour. My observation in the West has led me to conclude that regions with steady winds are the most healthful. Society in Nebraska will average. There is no section where they will murder a man outright because he is a Christian; and none where they will disfranchise him if he is not. The standard of popular intelligence is high. The people are the most enterprising classes from those Eastern States, which have good public schools. The school system is equal to that of any State in the Union. So, on the whole, if you are native to any climate north of latitude thirty-five degrees, and have any "get up " about you, and can and \vill work, there's a show for you in rural Nebraska. As for professionals well, most of the towns have doctors and lawyers to all eternity, and insurance agents till you can't rest. Omaha had, in 1868, fifty-three attorneys: business, I should say, for about six. However, for an enterprising young man, without any capital to speak of, and just beginning a pro- fession, it offers as fine a field for successful starvation as any place I know. Finding at Omaha a dozen or more letters from old friends inquiring about Nebraska lands, I again started afoot, this time toward the southern part of the State. For a few miles below Omaha the country may be called hilly ; then it sinks by gentle slopes to the Platte Valley, and thence rolling prairie extends A VENTURESOME YOUTH. 75 to the Kansas border. Traveled for the first day through a fine wheat region in Sarpy County, the farmers everywhere at work, but complaining much of the intense heat. Where I stopped for dinner there had been, the previous day, two cases of sunstroke, but neither seemed likely to prove fatal. Instead of the breeze generally prevailing on the prairie there was a dead calm, sultry and oppressive. At sundown I turned aside to an humble cabin flanked by a pretentious stable. Found no one at home but a girl and boy as I supposed, of whom seeking hospitality I enquired for the man of the house. An audible smile greeted me, and the lad replied that he was "the only man o j the house there was about." Further conversation developed the fact, that this youthful pair had been married ten months, and still lacked six weeks of nine- teen and sixteen years respectively. The girl-matron, " reck- oned she could get rne something to eat, an' I could sleep in the barn-loft with brother Perry." Under the influence of a cup of tea she became more than social, stating that " Ike's folks was much agin the match, but Ike was a com in' out to pre-empt, and swore he'd have a woman to help him." I gazed at the young husband with that admiration the timid always feel for the brave. They " was married in Iowa, and both worked for one farmer three months to get money to pay for their things, then came right out an' pre-empted." Then she turned questioner, and put me in the witness-box: Where was I born and raised? Didn't I like this country better than Injiana? And finally, after a pause, and with a sudden jerk of the head as if she had forgot- ten something important, " What do you do with your wife while you're trarnpin' round lookin' at the country?" I told her I had no wife, at which she was somewhat taken aback, but recovering handsomely, in a minute or two returned to the fl large by asking why I had never married. I answered that I had hardly thought I was old enough, and no more questions were asked. I had her there. Darkness came, and with it dense swarms of musquitoes from the neighboring bayous of the Missouri and Platte^ 76 SCENE NEAR PAPILLION, NEBRASKA. The married boy ventured a remark that " Some J un had told him a muskeeter only lived one day, but he reckoned not; for they come up that holler by the fillion, and he was keen to swear that some big ones come back every day for a \veek." " Smudges" were lighted about the yard, and the house was enveloped in a cloud of smoke which soon silenced the cozening tormentors. "Brother Perry" then led the way, carrying an old kettle containing a "smudge," to the stable; we ascended to the loft by an outside ladder, and retired. The bed had a maximum of cord to a minimum of feathers, and I soon found that we had "jumped a claim" which the original squatters were determined not to vacate. Though small, they were nu- merous and unanimous, and enforced squatter law with blood- thirsty zeal; so, after tossing and battling till midnight, every KAIN AND TIMBER. 77 inch of my cuticle in a fever, I rose with a full appreciation of Byron's beautiful line "No sleep till morn," and sat by a "smudge" till daylight. Thence south west ward for a few days, I found the country about as that west of Omaha, but with more and cheaper vacant land. Every settler had an artificial grove of from ten to twenty acres. It is a frequent subject of remark in Indiana, that cutting the timber and clearing up the country is slowly tending to dry up the streams ; that springs " go dry every summer which never did before." But here exactly the reverse phenomena are presented. It is supposed that breaking up the land allows it to absorb more moisture than it could in the prairie state; and the settlers tell me that breaking up a hun- dred acres of sod will renew an old spring, and branches are starting in gullies which have been dry for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. The oldest pioneers add, that the fall of rain in Western Nebraska and Kansas has doubled within the memory of man. I returned to Omaha to find it hot, physically and politically* The campaign of 1868 inaugurated; the days were too sultry for politics, but the nights were made hideous by party meet- ings. General Grant and party, including Generals Sherman and Sheridan, arrived from the West, and fifteen thousand people turned out to welcome them. Ornaha then had a "float- ing population" worth studying. It was the half-way place between the East and the West. Thousands started for the mountains, got to Omaha, got out of money, and stopped dis- heartened. Thousands were started home from the mountains and got to the city in the same impecunious condition. Daily the tide of emigration rolled in from the East, and passed on to the Far West, leaving here a deposit of its worthless materials; and daily the refluent tide rolled back from the mountains, leaving a larger deposit of more worthless materials. The streets were crowded, but the crowds did not indicate a corre- sponding amount of money. Nineteen hotels and restaurants 78 "FLOATERS." \vere in operation, and at every one of them "bilks" abounded. The floating class were in just that condition when men will steal or beg their provisions, but carefully save their money to buy whiskey. A thousand idlers were sitting about Omaha complaining of "hard times," and cursing the country, while in the rural districts the farmers were hunting in all directions for help, and offering three dollars a day for harvesting and hay- ing. Verily something was wrong : " The chain and the bucket were not hitched together." CHAPTER IV. ON THE UNION PACIFIC. Up the Platte Valley Beauty by moonlight ; barrenness by day Getting on to the desert North Platte " The gentle gazelle " " Dog-town " Not dogs, but rodents " Indians ahead " The dangerous district Crossing the plains in 1866 " The noble Red Man" Cheyenne Vigorous reduction of the popu- lation Black Hill Sherman Down to Laramie The Alkali Desert Benton A beautiful summer resort! Manners and morals (?) Bravery of the impecunious Murder and mob Vigilantes Murderer rescued by the military and escapes Amusements " k BigTent " " Now then, gentlemen, the ace is your winning card " " Cappers " and Victims No fairness in gambling. " The Yankee's place of heaven and rest Is found a little farther West." ND therefore, at 6 P. M. of July 31st, I started westward ,1 by the Union Pacific. The intense and protracted heat had yielded at last; a heavy rain of twenty-four hours had cooled the air, and washed the dust from the grass, leaving all the region along the road a beautiful rich green. The road ran through, a well settled and cultivated country for about fifty miles, but a little west of Fremont, we ran out suddenly into the open prairie, consisting of the rolling slopes and broad fertile valley of the Platte. The sky was clear after the storm, and the sunset was one that, in Italy, would have been "gorgeous/ 7 "unrivalled," and worthy of any amount of florid description, but on our western prairie was simply beautiful. Then rose the harvest-moon, now at its full ; and leaning out of the car-window I drank in quiet enjoyment while grove, bluff and broad silvery Platte rolled by in ever varying panorama of loveliness. Nor was it till mid- night that wearied of gazing I went to sleep. Daylight came, the loveliness was gone, and the whole scene Jiad changed. For landscape beauty there was only grandeur ; 79 80 FIRST VIEW OF THE PLAINS. 81 for rich green prairie and picturesque groves there was only the majesty of distance, an expanse without life, vast plains and rol- ling hills. The broad Platte, like a stream of molten silver by moonlight, now appeared its real self: a dirty and uninviting lagoon, only differing from a slough in having a current, from half a mile to two miles wide, and with barely water enough to fill an average canal ; six inches of fluid running over another stream of six feet or more of treacherous sand; too thin to walk on, too thick to drink, too shallow for navigation, too deep for safe fording, too yellow to wash in, too pale to paint with the most disappointing and least useful stream in America. Here and there in the river are low islands, barely rising above the water and scantily clothed with brush ; and in the bends of the stream, more rarely, clumps of large timber or green meadows. Vegetation begins to show signs of drought. The grass is short and wiry, with a sort of dried, cured look ; no more bright flowers are seen, and neither house nor cultivated field appears. As we move westward through the day we occasionally see the blue larkspur and then the resinweed and greasewood ; finally appear the "sand-burr," a species of cactus, and a stunted flower resembling the fuchsia with weakened pink and blue tints. We appear to be running on a dead level ; for though the route is up the Platte Valley, the ascent is so gradual as to be quite imperceptible. At places the road is perfectly straight for several miles, and at one point I can stand on the rear plat- form and note the lines of rail steadily converging till they unite and fade away beyond the reach of the eye in far per- spective. We take breakfast at North Platte 291 miles from Omaha an excellent one, too ; all the delicacies of an Eastern hotel, and antelope and buffalo steaks in addition, for the moderate price of a dollar and a quarter. Such were the rates till the road was finished. Now one dollar is the standard price for a meal from Omaha to Ogden. Thence we move out upon a high, dry plain, following near the South Platte, having left the junction at North Platte, and at 10 A. M., the cry of " Ante- 6 82 STRANGE ANIMALS. lopes ! " brings every tourist to the window. Our car was filled exclusively with " pilgrims ; " not a man in it had ever been west of the Missouri in his life, and none were ashamed to ex- hibit curiosity. For an hour or two we saw only single ante- lopes, and at a distance ; then they appeared in considerable numbers, one herd containing seventy. They came so near the track that we could see the brightness and inquisitive stare of their eyes, then at the sound of a pistol shot from the platform turned and bounded swiftly away over the hills, displaying in perfection all the poetry of motion. They are a little larger than our common goat, but rather resemble the deer. The meat I think equal to venison in the fall and winter, but it is rather hard and tough from May to September. They can be tamed, but domesticating and handling appear to take all their wild vivacity out of them. Their sleek and shining coats roughen and the hair turns the wrong way; the eye loses its bright, and mobile softness, and they walk slowly about, looking more like sick goats than the "gentle gazelle" of poetry. They can be taken East, but with great difficulty; for they are singularly tender in the back, and a slight blow will break the vetebra3, though one can carry off half a dozen shots in the legs or breast, and still escape the hunter. We next entered " Dog-town," eastern border of the prairie- dog country, which extends nearly two hundred miles eastward from the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains, and over ten degrees of latitude. For over a mile the train runs through a continuous town, the prairie thickly dotted all the way with their mounds. It was a " good day for dogs " when we passed, and the little creatures seemed no way disconcerted by the train, but would sit on their haunches, and converse with each other in short yelps till a shot was fired from the cars, when hundreds of feet would twinkle in the air, and the whole community go under with amazing suddenness. One by one they would peep cautiously out, and soon reappear to gaze and bark till another shot. This peculiar yelp, like that of a young puppy, seerns to be the only reason they are called dogs, for they have nothing else in common with the canine genus. They are not carni- A SCARE. DOG-TOWN " UNION PACIFIC R. R. vorous, but live entirely on grass and roots; they are shaped midway between a squirrel and a ground-hog, have teeth like the former, and belong to the class Rodentia. The usual rumor was circulated of Indians having attacked and plundered the next train ahead of ours, producing the usual amount of nervousness to reward the perpetrators of the hoax. Such rumors were started regularly on every train for a year or two after the road was completed, and obtained ready credence from the well-known fact that this section on the South Platte had been the most dangerous part of the old stage route. In 1866 the U. S. Mail Coach, carrying a military guard and several armed passengers, was attacked near here by a hundred mounted Sioux and Cheyennes, and escaped after a running fight of twenty miles. A private party, in prairie ambulances, just behind were not so fortunate. They lost all their stock, and took refuge in a "buffalo wallow "a few rods in circumference a splendid natural earth-work and kept the savages at bay FOUR HUNDRED MILES OF DESERT. 85 for two days till they were relieved by a party of soldiers. Two of their number, captured by the savages, were roasted in full view of the besieged. But now a costly peace had been purchased, and Spot Ed. Tail and lady were guests of the Rollins House in Cheyenne. Xow as we glide swiftly through the "dangerous district," a small squad of soldiers appears at every section house, drawn up to receive us, and standing at a " present," till the train has passed. Their barracks are walled to the roof with sod, and a little way off is a small sod fort, connecting with the barracks by an underground passage. Occasionally we see a group of Indians looking on from distant sand-hills, and the romantic may fancy them musing sadly, or mutually indulging in lofty strains of pathos, over this curious smoke-breathing monster which is fast hastening the destruction of their race. But in prosaic fact the Indian seldom if ever thinks of such things. He is moved by a blind instinct to plunder and kill, and is not capable of a definite war policy. Not one in a hundred of the plains Indians has any conception of the comparative greatness of the white race. For four hundred miles on our way there are no towns unless the eating stations deserve that name. We dine at Sid- ney, and late in the day reach Cheyenne, live hundred and six- teen miles, and twenty-five hours, from Omaha, where I stop for two days note-gathering. Six months since it was the "great city of the plains," lively and wicked, with perhaps six thousand people ; now it is a quiet and moral burg of some fifteen hundred inhabitants. Seeking information of a young resident, a traveler was informed that the population origin- ally amounted to ten thousand, but they had lately shot and hanged so many that he " reckoned three thousand was now about the figure." From Cheyenne the road is nearly level to Hazard Station, officially pronounced the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains; and thence the grade rises a-n average of eighty feet to the mile to Sherman, highest point on the whole road, and Summit of the Rocky Mountains that part, however, better known in the West as the Black Hills. 86 ALKALI PLAINS. 87 Thence the road makes a vast bend, running rapidly down- ward all the time, for forty miles to the new city of Laramie. It had enjoyed three months of remarkable prosperity as the terminus, and had sprung from nothing to a city of five thou- sand people ; but the terminus town had just been moved a hundred miles farther west to Benton, and Laramie, in the sixth month of its existence, was entering on a sickly old age. After two days there I boarded a construction train for the terminus. Westward the grassy plain yields rapidly to a desert ; at Medicine Bow we took final leave of the last trace of fertility, and traversed a region of alkali flats and red ridges for fifty miles. In the worst part of this desert, just west of the last crossing of the Platte, we found Benton, the great terminus town, six hundred and ninety-eight miles from Omaha. Far as they could see around the town not a green tree, shrub, or spear of grass was to be seen; the red hills, scorched and bare as if blasted by the lightnings of an angry God, bounded the white basin on the north and east, while to the south and west spread the gray desert till it was interrupted by another range of red and yellow hills. All seemed sacred to the genius of drought and desolation. The whole basin looked as if it might originally have been filled with lye and sand, then dried to the consistency of hard soap, with glistening surface tor- menting alike to eye and sense. Yet here had sprung up in two weeks, as if by the touch of Aladdin's Lamp, a city of three thousand people; there were regular squares arranged into five wards, a city government of mayor and aldermen, a daily paper, and a volume of ordinances for the public health. It was the end of the freight and passenger, and beginning of the construction, divi- sion ; twice every day immense trains arrived and departed, and stages left for Utah, Montana, and Idaho; all the goods formerly hauled across the plains came here by rail and were reshipped, and for ten hours daily the streets were thronged with motley crowds of railroad men, Mexicans and Indians, gamblers, "cappers," and saloon-keepers, merchants, 88 BEAUTIES OF BENTON. miners, and mulewhackers. The streets were eight inches cleej in white dust as I entered the city of canvas tents and pole- houses ; the suburbs appeared as banks of dirty white lime, and a new arrival with black clothes looked like nothing so much as a cockroach struggling through a flour barrel. It was sundown, and the lively notes of the violin and guitar were calling the citizens to evening diversions. Twenty-three saloons paid license to the evanescent corporation, and five dance- houses amused our elegant leisure. In this place I wasted my time for two weeks, waiting for something to turn up, and lounged about the places most dangerous to pocket and morals with the happy indifference of a man who has nothing to lose. It cannot be denied, I think, that the man who has nothing is much braver than he who has plenty ; and I further suspect the bravest of our soldiers will admit, that if, about the time he was ready to advance on Yicksburg or Richmond, he had learned that some obliging old relative had conveniently died, after leaving him $50,000, his appetite for fight would suddenly have lost much of its edge. The regular routine of business, dances, drunks and fist- fights met with a sudden interruption on the 8th of August. Sitting in a tent door that day I noticed an altercation across the street, and saw a man draw a pistol and fire, and another stag- ger and catch hold of a post for support. The first was about to shoot again when he was struck from behind and the pistol wrenched from his hand. The wounded man was taken into a cyprian's tent near by and treated with the greatest kindness by the women, but died the next day. It was universally admit- ted that there had been no provocation for the shooting, and the general voice was, " Hang him ! " Next day I observed a great rush and cry in the street, and looking out, saw them dragging the murderer along towards the tent where the dead man lay. The entire population were out at once, plainsmen, miners and women mingled in a wild throng, all insisting on immediate hanging. Pale as a sheet and hardly able to stand, the murderer, in the grasp of two stalwart Vigilantes, was dragged through the excited crowd, and into the i AM; INC, SPOILED. 89 IN THE HANDS OF VIGILANTES. tent where the dead man lay, and forced to witness the laying out and depositing in the coffin. What was the object of this movement nobody knew, but the delay was fatal to the hanging project. Benton had lately been decided to be in the military reservation of Fort Steele, and that day the General commanding thought fit to send a pro- vost guard into the city. They arrived just in time, rescued the prisoner and took him to the guard-house, whence, a week after, he escaped. But the excitement thus aroused seemed to have created a thirst for blood. I had just retired to the tent when I heard a 90 series of fearful screams, and running, to the door, saw the pro- prietor of a saloon opposite beating his " woman." He was a leading ruffian of the city, and of a hundred men looking on not one felt called upon to interfere. At length lie released his hold, and struck her a final blow on the nose which completely flattened that feature, and sent her into the middle of the street, where she lay with the blood gushing in torrents from her face, mingling with the white dust and streaking her clothing with gore. The provost guard arrived again, after it was all over, and took the woman away, but paid no attention to the man. Four days after, I saw them together again, having apparently made it up and living on the same free and easy terms of ille- gal conjugality. Two more rows wound up the evening, the last ending with a perfect fusillade of pistol shots, by which only two or three persons were " scratched " and nobody " pinked." For a quiet railroad town I thought this would do, and began to think of moving on. The great institution of Ben ton was the " Big Tent," some- times, with equal truth but less politeness, called the " Gamblers' Tent." This structure was a nice frame, a hundred feet long and forty feet wide, covered with canvass and conveniently floored for dancing, to which and gambling it was entirely devoted. It was moved successively to all the mu^iroom ter- minus "cities," and during my stay was the ^eat public resort of Benton. A description of '< -so. towns is a description of all ; so let us s^vwu 1 one evening in the " Big Tent," and see how mm- amuse their leisure where home life and society are As we enter, we note that the right side is lined with a splen- did bar, supplied with every variety of liquors and cigars, with cut glass goblets, ice-pitchers, splendid mirrors, and pictures rivalling those of our Eastern cities. At the back end a space large enough for one cotillon is left open for dancing ; on a raised platform, a full band is in attendance day and night, while all the rest of the room is filled with tables devoted to monte, faro, rondo coolo, fortune-wheels, and every other species of gambling known. I acknowledge a morbid curiosity relat- 92 ing to everything villainous, and, though I never ventured a cent but once in my life, I atn never weary of watching the game, and the various fortunes of those who " buck against the tiger." During the day the " Big Tent " is rather quiet, but at night, after a few inspiring tunes at the door by the band, the long hall is soon crowded with a motley throng of three or four hun- dred miners, ranchmen, clerks, " bullwhackers," gamblers and "cappers." The brass instruments are laid aside, the string- music begins, the cotillons succeed each other rapidly, each ending with a drink, while those not so employed crowd around the tables and enjoy each his favorite game. To-night is one of unusual interest, and the tent is full, while from every table is heard the musical rattle of the dice, the hum of the wheel, or the eloquent voice of the dealer. Fair women, clothed with richness and taste, in white and airy garments, mingle with the throng, watch the games with deep interest, or laugh and chat with the players. The wife of the principal gambler a tall, spiritual and most innocent looking woman sits by his side, while their children, two beautiful little girls of four and six years, run about the room playing and shouting with merri- ment, climbing upon the knees of the gamblers and embraced in their rude arms, like flowers growing on the verge of frightful precipices. We take our stand near the monte table, where a considerable crowd gathers, silently intent on the motions of the dealer. He throws three cards upon the cloth, points out one as the " winning card," then turns them face downward, and proceeds to toss them about, talking fluently all the time. "Now, then, here we go; my hand against your eyes. Watch the ace ! The ace is your winning card. The eight and ten spot win for me. Here is the ace, the winning card (turning it face up occasionally). Watch it close ! I have two chances to your one unless you watch the ace. Now,, then, I'll bet any man twenty dollars, as they lie, that he can't pick up the ace, and I'll not touch the cards again. Will you go twenty dollars on it, sir?" As he says this, he turns his head away, and addresses a man 93 at his left a conservative-looking neatly-dressed man, whom I should take for a merchant. But while his head is turned, a roughly-dressed, horny-handed miner by my side snatches over the nearest card, satisfies himself that it is the ace, and makes a faint pencil-mark on the back of it before the dealer can turn around. Then the miner becomes all at once anxious to bet; puts up all the money he has $20 is anxious for some one to go in with him ; then pubs down a watch and revolver, valued at $20 each. The dealer covers the pile, the miner turns the ace, and walks off with a gain of $60. There is a sensation around the board. Old plainsmen look at each other with a peculiar smile which may mean anything, but others get inter- ested. The dealer curses his bad luck, and continues to throw the cards, and now the pencil-mark seems plain on the back of the ace. As soon as the cards are laid down a young fellow of nineteen or twenty, who came on the same train with me from Omaha, hastily produces a ten-dollar note, and offers to bet. " Ten dollars is no money to me, sir/' says the dealer ; " I've lost too much to fool with small bets; I'll make or break to-night. I propose to bet forty dollars on this turn." The boy has no more money, but produces a pistol, which is counted at ten dollars. " I'll go halvers with him," shouts the conservative-looking chap at the corner of the table, and lays down the twenty dollars. The boy eagerly seizes the pencil-marked card, turns it, and, to his horror and amazement, it is not the ace, but the ten-spot! I see the boy turning pale, for, as I happen to know, it is his last ten dollars, while the dealer rakes in his pile and goes on with his harangue. Not a smile, not a chuckle, not a single ex- pression of triumph appears ; he has had a simple business transaction, and rakes in the money, coolly, quietly, the same affable, conversable, stony-eyed gentleman. The game is now plain. The horny-handed miner, and the dapper, conservative looking gentleman, are " cappers ; " they have borne their part in the game, and " hooked a gudgeon," and carelessly stray off to some other table to' repeat the operation. The charm is broken ; the little circle about the monte table take the alarm 94 u THE HAZARD OF A DIE." and begin to scatter, and we walk down to the " chuck-a-luck " board. Here a smooth oil-cloth is divided evenly into squares, numbered from six to thirty -six. On two-thirds of the numbers are some articles of value, the rest are blanks. On No. 36 is a gold watch and chain, value $300, and it is not a sham either, and on No. 6 is a $100 greenback. On numbers 7, 8 and 9, and 33, 34 and 35, are articles of considerable value, none less than $50, while the remaining numbers are blanks, or covered with some article of trifling value. Half a dollar is the charge for a throw. The cup con- tains six dice. If you throw all ones you add up six, and get the hundred dollars; if all sixes you add up thirty-six, and get the watch and chain, and the dealer will soon show you how you can ruin the bank, and most learnedly explains how you have just one chance in thirty of getting the watch and chain, and the same of getting the greenback. But you will see that your- self. There are but thirty squares six to thirty-six and, of course, you stand as good a chance to hit one as another. Do you, though ? Try it and see. If you don't throw somewhere between twelve and twenty-five for ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it will be a new fact in physics. And on just those numbers from twelve to twenty-five are all blanks or trifling articles. Of course you do not see this by first glance at the cloth, for the numbers do not run in regular order, but in such ingenious irregularity that prizes and blanks all seem in undis- tinguishable order, side by side. The dice are not loaded either. You may use your own if you wish, and the result is the same ; and if you have any curiosity about it, reader, just try it with six dice on your own table, keep a record of your throws, and see how seldom you will reach very high or very low numbers. And having tried it thoroughly for two or three hundred throws, a moment's reflection will convince you that it would be little short of a miracle for a man to throw all sixes or all ones with dice not loaded. Then take your thirty numbers and make your calculation from the table laid down in the " theory of probabilities," and you will find there is just one chance in 990,000 that you will throw the highest or lowest number. In MORAL : DON'T. 95 other words, you stand fair to get the watch after nine hundred and ninety thousand throws at half a dollar a throw ! Rather an expensive watch. Guess we wont invest. But while we stand here philosophizing, the crowd is pressing to a long table at one side where an airish youth is shouting at the top of his voice, " Come down here now, you rondo coolo sports, and give us a bet." This game, like keno, has less of the "cutthroat" about it than the others. There is a per cent., small but regular, in favor of the dealer; every thing is carried by an exact rule, and the careful player can calculate just what his chance is. But if any man imagines there is the least measure of fairness in ordi- nary gambling, let him dismiss the thought. I have watched hundreds of ga-mes, and never saw a man gain a large sum with- out learning, sooner or later, that he was a " capper." The evening wears along, many visitors begin to leave, the games languish, and a diversion is needed. The band gives a few lively touches, and a young man with a capacious chest and a great deal of "openness" to his face, mounts the stand and sings a variety of sentimental and popular songs, ending with a regular rouser, in the chorus of which he constantly reiterates in other words however that he is a bovine youth with a vitreous optic " which nobody can deny." As he wears a revolver and bowie- knife in plain view, nobody seems inclined to deny it. A lively dance follows, the crowd is enlivened, and gambling goes on with renewed vigor. CHAPTER V. ON A MULE. A new profession Off for Salt Lake City A Mormon outfit Nature of the over- land freight Its extent Great expenses and enormous profits Luxury of miners and mountaineers Changed to the railroad " Kiting towns" Jonah's gourd Benton a year afterwards Platte City Our company Mule whacker's Theology Pleasant gossip on polygamy Journal of the route Horrors^ of Bitter Creek Heat, cold, thirst, dust, fatigue Green River Bridger Plains Echo Canon Weber Canon Parley's Park Down Parley's Canon Salt Lake Valley and City. 'ATE: August 14th, 1868. Place: Benton, Wyoming. Scene : The writer in the rear apartment of a tent, post- ing his books. Results : Cash on hand $8.65; Resources none ; Friends distant. Moral : Something must be done. Thus may be summarized the result of a day's hard thinking. I had got thus far, more by good luck than good man- agement; was wonderfully improved in health, and eager to goon. But when I resolved myself into a committee of one on the ways and means, the committee was obliged to rise and report the mat- ter back without a resolution. I had written six letters to the Commercial, but did not know whether any had been accepted, and was not well enough acquainted to ask a remittance ; and there was absolutely nothing for me to do at Benton. One resource remained. Teamsters were in demand, and I thought I knew something about mules. Under ordinary cir- cumstances I should have shrunk from boasting myself skilful enough to drive them, but these were extraordinary circumstan- ces, and as the Turks say to justify the use of wine, " Desperate diseases require desperate remedies." The resolution passed, with an emergency clause, and I started to hunt a job. A Mormon train was to start next day, and just one man 96 98 LUXURIOUS MINERS. was needed. The outfit consisted of ten "prairie schooners" with six mules to each, the property of Naisbitt and Hindley then a prosperous Mormon firm in Salt Lake City. Our " wagon -boss," absolute monarch of a train while on the road, rejoiced in the name of John Monkins, a Mormon saint in good and regular standing. Seven of the drivers were Mormons, but the " night-herder," Billy Keyes, and two other drivers, Charley Robinson and "Big Frank," were Gentiles, with whom I fraternized readily. Our load was " packed," and about noon of the 15th, we took to the road, the writer seated on his "nigh- wheeler," and wielding a " big-bellied blacksnake " over the backs of six mules. Freighting across the plains, which had grown in the past ten years to an immense business, was now being rapidly less- ened by the railroad. From 1860 to 1869 there were in Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Montana and Colorado, two hundred thousand people to be supplied; and every pound of groceries, manufac- tured goods, foreign products, mining tools and the like, had to be hauled from six to sixteen hundred miles across the uninhabited regions which lay between the Missouri and the gold mines. The original price, of course, was a trifle; the freight, which ranged from fifteen to forty cents a pound, was the chief item of cost. Hence the apparent paradox, that the difference between first and second rate articles was comparatively much less than in the East. Hence again, the fact that when the miner or mountaineer used foreign luxuries at all, he used only the best quality; for the freight was no more on that than the worst. The difference between crushed white sugar at twenty cents, and common brown at ten, was all important to the Eastern family ; but when one added thirty cents a pound for freight, and a hun- dred per cent, for dealer's profit, the difference was not worth calculating about away up in Montana. Business men neces- sarily invested large capital, and took big risks, and so indemni- fied themselves with enormous profits. The best was cheaper than the second best. Hence also, an apparent extravagance in living, of which the effects show to-day in Rocky Mountain communities. MOVING HEAL ESTATE. 99 This overland trade successively built up Independence, Westport, Kansas City, Atchison, Leaven worth, St. Joseph and Omaha ; but when two or three hundred miles of the railroad were completed, it took that route. Hence those "roaring towns/' at the successive termini, which sprang up like Jonah's gourd, and withered away with few exceptions almost as sud- denly, when Government had accepted another hundred miles of the road, and a new terminus was located. To look on Ben- ton, a motley collection of log and canvass tents, one would have sworn there was no trade; but in those canvass tents immense sums changed hands. E. Block & Co., Wholesale Dealers, in Liquors and Tobacco, with whom I lodged in Benton, in a frame and canvass tent, twenty by forty feet in extent, did a business of $30,000 a month. Others did far better. Ten. months afterwards, I revisited the site. There was not a house or tent to be seen; a few rock piles and half destroyed chimneys barely sufficed to mark the ruins; the white dust had covered everything else, and desolation reigned supreme. Transactions in real estate in all these towns were, of course, most uncertain ; and everything that looked solid was a sham. Red brick fronts, brown stone fronts, and stuccoed walls, were found to have been made to order in Chicago and shipped in (pine) sections. Ready made houses were finally sent out in lots, boxed, marked, and numbered ; half a dozen men could erect a block in a day, and two boys with screw-drivers put up a "habitable dwelling" in three hours. A very good gray- stone stucco front, with plain sides, twenty by forty tent, could be had for $300; and if your business happened to desert you, or the town moved on, you only had to take your store to pieces, ship it on a platform car to the next city, and set up again. There was a pleasing versatility of talent in the popula- tion of such towns. An army officer told me that he went up the Platte Valley late in 1866 and observed a piece of rising ground near the junction of the two streams, where for miles not a live shrub or blade of grass was to be seen. Six months after he returned and the " Great and Growing City of the Platte " covered the IJ~.rt 100 MOVING A CITY. site; three thousand people made the desert hum with business and pleasure ; there were fine hotels, elegant restaurants, and billiard halls and saloons, while a hundred merchants'jostled each other through banks and insurance offices. All tiie machinery of society was in easy operation ; there were two daily papers, a Mayor and Common Council, an aristocracy and a common people, with old settlers, new comers, and first families. Six months after he returned and hunted for the site. A few piles of straw and brick, with debris of oyster cans nearly covered by the shifting sands, alone enabled him to find it. The "city " had got up and emigrated to the next terminus. Our trip was one of unusual hardship, mingled with much that was novel and amusing. For three hundred miles west of Medicine Bow the country is the real "American Desert." The surface seems hard enough at first view, but a little travel soon works it up into a fine powder ; and standing on a little knoll one can see for twenty miles the white clouds of rolling dust which mark the course of teams, and an approaching " bull- whacker" looks at a little distance like an animated flour suck, or the disembodied spirit of Metamora. Our little party of sixteen (four passengers), fraternized much more readily than one could have expected from such a motley crew. On the plains mutual dependence calls for mutual help, and mutual help softens religious and national asperities. We had both. The Mormons were half English and half natives; the Gentiles half Northern and half Southern. Religiously the Gentiles were in the minority, but did the most talking. The native Mormon boys, who had never been east of Beuton, were full of curiosity about the States. From the general tone of Mor- mon sermons, they had imbibed the notion that outside of Utah the world was given over to fraud and lasciviousness, and sold wholly to Satan. That a majority, or anything like a "working minority" of the American people were honest and virtuous, was something they were slow to believe ; and that there were rural districts of ten thousand people where grogshops were unknown and a lewd woman a rarity, was nothing short of a " monstrous Gentile lie" to their minds. That all govern- A MULEWHACKP;IIS' DEBATE. 101 NIGHT-SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY. merits but their own, and all people but themselves are going straight to the Devil, and that by the fastest route, is a fixed fact to orthodox Mormons ; and these lads had grown up in such an atmosphere of self-sufficiency and spiritual pride, that the mere assertion that the Mormons were not the best people in the world struck them as a blasphemous absurdity. And yet they sometimes felt, instinctively, I suppose, that some- thing was wrong; and that polygamy at any rate needed apolo- gizing for. Toiling wearily across the plains of Bridger, one day, walk- ing beside our teams, the one next me who 3 at the early age of 102 POLEMICAL TEAMSTERS. twenty-two was already an elder, delivered an exhaustive ment in regard to the finding of the "golden plates" by JOQ Smith, to which I promptly made reply : " Don't believe it. No proof." "Do you believe Moses got stone tables from the Lord?" asked the young elder. (Excuse the contradiction between ad- jective and noun.) "Yes." "Where's your proof?" This struck me as the nearest to a "clincher" of all I had heard, and I launched into an elaborate argument on the history of the Bible, internal proofs, analysis of its principles and the like; but it was all Greek to him. And so such arguments must always be to such as fill the Mormon Church. Truly, says Eggleston : "No man ever embraced religious error, from Gnosticism to Mormonism, without a previous mental training to fit him for it;" and he might have added, a previous want of training generally predisposes a man to coarse and sensual beliefs. Reason appears to be wasted on those sects who have just knowledge enough to read the Bible and interpret it lite- rally, without enough to realize that certain principles of natural equity must always remain true, no matter what the Bible may appear to say on the subject. Such did not reason themselves into their errors, and of course, cannot be reasoned out. And so our Mormon companions always thought they had the "best of the argument." Fanatics always do have the "best of the argument" in their own conceit. For they can understand their own reason- ing, and cannot understand that of an intelligent opponent. In Utah one continually hears such statements as this: "Why don't they answer our arguments? They can't." One can go into any lunatic asylum in the land, and find a score of men whose arguments he cannot answer to their satisfaction. There is a fish called the mullet-head, that cannot be in- toxicated by any amount of liquor. It can even swim in that fluid. Reason why : it has no brains, consequently nothing for the alcohol to act upon. In like manner some sects are invinci- ble in argument. ROMANCE OF POLYGAMY. 103 But we had one young saint not at all troubled with rever- ence for the dignitaries, who professed to give us a revelation of the home life of all the Latter-day Prophets. He told us that Brigham, when in his prime, habitually fell in love every spring and fall. Botanically speaking, his affection was a sort of flowering annual, clinging to new supports each time. Also that he then kept a registry, ruled for two hundred schedules, specifying name and style, which he called every Saturday night to see that none were lost, strayed, or stolen. Our boy ran over the list thus : " Black -eyed Sally, Red-headed Milly, Carroty Jane, Sally No. 2," etc., etc. But of all his heroes it appeared to me that Apostle Sammy Richards truly had, as our companion expressed it, " the softest layout in the business." He had seven wives, and spent one day in the week with each. His office kept him comfortably supplied with clothing, and each wife would exert herself to set her best table when he came around ; she would be all smiles and favors to win as much of the dear man's love as possible, and thus Sammy's existence was a perpetual round of courtship. With such domestic romance, varied by song and story, we amused the evening hours, while the two cooks "slung up slap- jacks " to the extent of two or three bushels ; for supper was our only full meal, and we had it hard enough during the day. The first night we formed corral at Rawlins' Springs, only fourteen miles from Benton. Here are three large springs rising within a few feet of each other, one pure water, another charged with soda, and the third with sulphur. Next day we left the railroad line and made a toilsome journey straight south over the hills, to reach the old stage road; but having two wagons mired in an alkali marsh, made but eight miles, and formed corral in a singular mountain- walled basin known as " Dug Springs." In the centre was an alkali lake of several acres, which, moved by the evening breeze, looked like foaming soapsuds; but on its margin was a spring of pure sweet water. The grass around the lake was of the purest white, coated with alkali to the appearance of fancy frost- 104 THE SORROWFUL WAY. work ; but near the mountains we found good bunch grass for our stock. For a few days our average elevation was 7000 feet above sea-level, and the nights were extremely cold. On the 22nd we reached Bridger's Pass, and next day entered on the Bitter Creek region horror of overland teamsters where all possible ills of western travel are united. At daybreak we rose, stiff with cold, to catch the only temperate hour there was for driving. But by nine A. M. the heat was most exhausting. The road was worked up into a bed of blinding white dust by the laborers on the railroad grade, and a gray mist of ash and earthy powder hung over the valley, which obscured the sun, but did not lessen its heat. At intervals the " Twenty-mile Desert," the "Red Sand Desert," and the "White Desert" crossed our way, presenting beds of sand and soda, through which the half choked men and animals toiled and struggled, in a dry air and under a scorching sky. In vain the yells and curses of the teamsters doubled and redoubled, blasphemies that one might expect to inspire a mule with diabolical strength ; in vain the fearful " black-snake " curled and popped over the animals' backs, sometimes gashing the skin, and sometimes raising welts the size of one's finger. For a few rods they would struggle on, dragging the heavy load through the clogging banks, and then stop exhausted, sinking to their knees in the hot and ashy heaps. Then two of us would unite our teams and, with the help of all the rest, drag through to the next solid piece of ground, where for a few hundred yards the wind had removed the loose sand and soda, and left bare the flinty and gravelly subsoil. Thus, by most exhausting labor, we accomplished ten or twelve miles a day. Half an hour or more of temperate coolness then gave us respite till soon after sundown, when the cold wind came clown, as if in heavy volumes, from the snowy range, and tropic heat was succeeded by arctic cold with amazing sudden- ness. On the 27th of August, one of my mules twice fell ex- hausted with the heat; that night ice formed in our buckets as thick as a pane of glass. We turned northward from Bitter Creek before reaching the present railroad crossing at Green River, and on the morning SCENE IN ECHO CANON. 105 106 MORMON SETTLEMENTS. of August 28th, forded the latter stream twenty miles above the main road. Thence we again turned southwest, traversing the plains of Bridger, and entering again on the stage road near Bear River. The whole region appears to my eye totally barren, but among the foothills, and in a few of the gulches, we found enough of the yellow bunch-grass for our animals, and sage-brush for our fires. The nights were still cold, but not so much so as east of Green River ; and some stimulating property in the atmosphere enabled me to get along with half the usual amount of sleep. We slept upon the ground under the wagons, generally with a thickness of gunnysacks under us, joining blankets two and two; for though the ground was dry as a featherbed, our sleeping apartment was rather open at the sides and extensively ventilated. My bed-fellow was a lank Mormon with about as much bodily warmth as a dried corn- stalk, nevertheless he used to complain that I "snugged up" al- together too much, and by morning usually had him jammed tight against the hind wheel. At noon of September 4th, we entered the head of Echo Cafion, by way of the round valley below Cache Cave, a beau- tiful and romantic place. Two days we consumed in the journey down Echo, sometimes down almost in the bed of the stream, and sometimes hundreds of feet up the rocky sides, where the road wound in and out on the face of the projecting ridges. Gangs of Mormon laborers were scattered along the cailon, con- structing the grade for the railroad, on Brigham Young's con- tract. At noon of the 6th, we emerged into Weber Cailon, and turned southward on the old stage road. There we found nu- merous Mormon settlements, and the first stone-built houses and growing crops I had seen for five hundred miles. The dwel- lings would have appeared poor and mean indeed in the States, but to us, just from the hot and barren plains, the valley seemed like a section of paradise. Next night we formed corral near Bill Kimball's hotel, in Parley Park, a round green valley al- most on top of the Wasatch Mountains; and on the 8th com- pleted half the passage down the wild and ragged gorge known as Parley's Caflon. NBA RING " ZION. 107 Late afternoon on the 9th we emerged from Parley's Caflon upon the " Eastern Bench," and saw the great valley of the Jor- dan and Salt Lake spreading seventy miles to the northwest. Twenty miles west the Oquirrh Range glowed in the clear air, a shining mass of blue and white; Great Salt Lake extended far as the eye could reach to the northward, its surface level as in a dead calm, and glistening in the light of the declining sun, while to our right the "City of the Saints" as yet appeared but a white spot on the view. A few miles to our left the Caflon of the Jordan seemed to close, giving the impression that that stream poured down from the hills ; and down the centre of the valley the river and bordering marshes extended like bands of silver. We were nearing "Zion" at last, and Mormon and Gentile were equally delighted that the long drive of four hundred miles was soon to end. Darkness overtook us four miles out, and we formed corral for the last time on the level near the " Sugar House." ; KATHER OPEN AT THE SIDES/' CHAPTER VI. A YEAR IN UTAH. Discharging freight^-" Beautiful Zion "First impressions" Our Bishop " Arguments (?) for polygamy Rough on Rome Mormon "Worthies Jews, Gen- tiles, and Apostates Queer condition of American citizens " Millennial Star " and " Book of Mormon " The original carpet-baggers " Jaredites " Mormon, sermons Into the country A polemic race Mormon conference " No trade with Gentiles " A hard winter I become a Gentile editor Founding of Co- rinne Glowing anticipations " The Chicago of the Rocky Mountains " Tips and downs of real estate The Author comes to grief. E entered the city September 10th, and even now my arms ache at recollection of the day, and our eight hours' work of unloading. For overland transporta- tion goods were tightly packed in huge bales, heavy and unwieldy ; and furthermore, most of our load con- sisted of stoves and castings. To lift against an average " mule- whacker" on such freight was no joke to a man of my calibre, and aching in every limb I sought a "Teamster's Home" at dark, and lay down to a heavy sleep of ten hours. I awoke to a revelation of beauty. " Zion " then seemed to me indeed the joy of the whole earth. The bright sunlight, streaming through the rugged gaps of the Wasatch, cast a flood of glory upon the city, and showed the plat marked out like a checker-board, and streams clear as crystal lacing all the squares with flowing borders. I thought it the most beautiful place I had ever seen. And failing to note that nearly all this beauty was of nature's making, it appeared to me that they could not be a bad people who occupied such a place; I was prepared beforehand to like them. It was a nice place to rest, and I concluded to stay two weeks. The city had a singularly quiet Sabbath-like air, and the people 108 PL.UKALITY. 109 SALT LAKE CITY (FROM THE NORTH). still more so; they were demure, subdued in demeanor, and did not look as if they could ever be excited. They were the last people I should have suspected of fanaticism. I called first upon " our Bishop," for so even the Gentiles then spoke of the presiding bishop of the Ward. Without waiting for a banter he entered at once upon a wordy defense, eulogy rather, of Mor- mouism and " plurality " Mormon euphemism for polygamy. A rose by any other name apparently would not smell as sweet in Utah. And such an argument: " Plurality was the original order of marriage established by God. Laws against it were all of man's device, and first set up by Rome. It was because that city was settled by robbers and runaways, and of course they had very few women. Women were so scarce that a law was made that no man should have more than one, and that was the origin of monogamy, and the first law ever made against the Celestial Order of Marriage. The Church of Rome took that 110 "GENTILE LIES." ORSON FRATT, ONE OF THE TWELVE APOSTLES. law from Heathen Rome, and the sects of the day, which are Rome's daughters, took the law from Catholic Rome. But all the churches established by God have always practised plurality." Before the enunciation of such history (?) as this one can only gape and remain silent. But after a breathing spell I endea- vored to quote authorities to the effect that Greece was mono- gam ic centuries before Rome was founded ; but the bishop promptly squelched me: "Them histories is nothing but Gentile lies, and the writers priests and tools of Rome. In fact there is no real history come down from the time when Rome ruled all fixed up lies to justify the Pope, and all the sects of the day wont publish nothing but what suits their creed." This summary suppression of history of course ended the argument. But the zealous bishop, warmed by his triumph, enlarged on the subject: "There's no priest or preacher among the sects that's really authorized to solemnize a marriage none outside of the Latter- day Saints. Where's your preacher's authority ? Can you trace it back to anything? No man's a right to administer the NOTABLES OF SALT LAKE CITY. Ill GEORGE A. SMITH. Gospel ordinances unless he's specially sent. You've six hun- dred and sixty-six sects now, they can't all be right. Which one of them can show credentials ? They've all gone astray; with the form of godliness but denying the power. There was no prophet or authorized teacher on earth for eighteen centuries. But Joseph Smith was called to re-establish the true priesthood. Alexander Campbell was a sort of fore-runner like John, the Baptist, before Christ. But he had only a glimmering of the truth," and so on, ad nauseam. Is it worth one's while to argue with men who are in such an intellectual muddle? I called on various other worthies. First on Orson Pratt, whom I found deep in an astronomical work, and not inclined to talk ; also on George A. Smith, President's Councilor, Elder, Historian, etc., a round, fat and unctuous man with a pig-eye and soaj) fat chin, and on his colleague Daniel H. Wells, Mayor, Second Councilor and Lieutenant General a gaunt and angular Saint, whose face and head bore involuntary witness to the truth of Darwinism. Also on Hon. W r . H. Hooper, a slim and ner- vous Saint, monogamous Delegate to Congress from this poly- 112 MORMON LITERATURE. garaous Territory ; and T. B. H. Stenhouse, editor of a secular paper, the Daily Telegraph, who seemed to be a sort of guerilla captain in the church militant, in no particular hurry to join the church triumphant, and quite indifferent as to whether I favored Mormonism or not. He treated me most courteously as a brother of the quill, and as I listened to his jolly tones, I little thought we were soon to become such savage opponents on paper. The Gentiles I found non-committal. They did not know exactly what was about to happen. They numbered but six or eight hundred in a community of fifteen thousand Mormons, surrounded by sixty or seventy thousand more ; and the heads of the church were even then concerting measures to deprive them of their trade. They consisted, in nearly equal numbers, of Jews, Christians, and apostates, all in the same society, and supporting the same school and church. The jo.ke about Utah being the only place where Jews are Gentiles, is an uncommonly good one, it has the merit of a fine old age. But it is true in more senses than is generally imagined ; the Jews in Utah are the most intensely American, and opposed to polygamy of any part of the population. At odd hours I read the Millennial Star and " Book of Mor- mon," the last the Old Testament/>f the Latter-day Saints. I read how Lemuel, Lehi, Nephi and other Israelites, being warned of God in a dream, left Jerusalem six hundred years before Christ ; traveled eastward many years till they reached the sea, then made a wonderful vessel, and crossed it ; landing in Central America, called in the record the " Land of Promise." And then is recorded a real miracle : " And we did find in the forests all manner of animals both wild and tame, both the horse and the ass, and the sheep and the ox" They found the horse two thousand years before the Spaniards introduced him here, and the ass, which naturalists have always told us was not native to this country. They spread over America in a few generations, finding in many places the remains of the "Jaredites" a colony which had come immediately after the dispersion from Babel; and by 1 ' ~ " ' <] ' liiiiilliil QUEER EMIGRATION. 113 revelation learned that they had been "destroyed for their ex- ceeding great wickedness/ 7 which matters fill the "Book of Jared," and two or three others. And here conies in another miracle. These people crossed the ocean in " whale-like barges/ 1 made by direction of the Lord, "with holes above and below," under these lucid instructions : If they needed air and light, they were to open the holes above and below (!), and if the water came in they were to shut them again. ' The only possible con- clusion from the cumbrous sentences is, that the barges rolled over and over like tubs, which must have made it uncomfortable for the Jared ites. Then the various divisions of the transplanted Hebrews got to fighting among themselves, and fought till only two of the " righteous race " were left, viz : Mormon and Moroni. They two, about 400 B. c., collected all the histories of those who had preceded them, and added a book apiece, and most curious of all, we are told it was written in "Reformed Egyptian, which is of the language of the Jews and the writing of the Egyptians/' though why the mischief these Israelites, who had been in America for a thousand years, should give up their own lan- guage and adopt that of the Egyptians, is enough to puzzle philologists. Sunday came, and six or seven thousand people attended ser- vices in the huge Tabernacle irreverently styled by Gentiles the " Mud-turtle " and I among them. In the afternoon we listened to Orson Pratt, who gave the people to understand that the city of the Saints was a most glorious spot, but back in Missouri was a blessed and chosen spot where they would all be glorified and live a thousand years in happiness. But just be- fore that time fury would be poured out on the Gentile world, and all that were to come would have to make tracks to get in on time. He would meet them all there ; yes, and the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and every kind of cattle they needed. In short, he gave them to understand that they were bully boys, and their goose would finally hang high in spite of outside pressure. And the audience sat almost breathless, with 8 114 NORTHERN UTAH. open eyes and mouth, and swallowed it all down, even as soap suds run into a sink hole. Utah in my original plan was only to be one of several stop- ping places on my way to California. I expected to take a short rest, find another team going out with produce from the fall crop, to drive to Austin, Nevada, and thence work my way on to the Pacific. Nothing was farther from my thoughts than to subside into a " Gentile," one of that hated minority, who, until quite lately, lived in Utah upon a sort of uncertain suffer- ance. Yet I did become a Gentile, and a somewhat noted and slightly " persecuted " one too, for a while ; and on this wise. Finding no teams ready to start westward, I determined upon a trip to the northern part of the Territory. I traveled afoot and by easy stages nearly to the Idaho line, purposing a visit to Soda Springs ; then got tired, and slowly retraced my steps, finding abundant enjoyment in noting the manners and customs of the rural Saints. Near Ogden I found an old Dane living with a mother and two daughters as wives ; in Brigham City I saw a bishop with six wives, two of them his cousins and two his nieces, and a little farther on, visited another Dane living with three wives iii the single room of a cabin about sixteen feet square all of which did not strike me as exactly the highest type of domestic felicity which might be hoped for as the result of two thousand years of Christianity and cultivation. As an old bachelor I had not found single blessedness the best possible condition, but it suited me far better than such multiple cussedness. One wife, I thought, would be enough for me, if she were a good one ; and if a bad one, why should any sane man multiply his misery ? I found the rural Saints an exceedingly polemic race ; they were ready for an argument any minute. No kind of mental exercise is so dangerous as theological disputation, especially if a man knows nothing else ; and the Mormons had all read the Bible, and were ignorant of nearly all besides. But I got interested in them. Their absurdly literal rendering of Scripture amazed and amused me, and I began to study their ways with much GENTILE REPORTER. 115 the same kind of interest, morbid perhaps, with which the student in anthropology would investigate a new phase of mono- mania. At that time I knew little of their history, or their more obscene and disgusting tenets, and regarded them merely as a curious class of fanatics, silly but harmless. So I returned to the city half persuaded to stop awhile in Utah. The October Conference of the Mormon Church was in session, and the people were in a white heat of hatred against the Gen tile world. I had never seen anything like it. The leaders had concocted a plan for getting the entire trade of the Territory into a few hands, and the first move was to have the people vote en masse that they would not trade with Gentile merchants. Ten thousand people all the New Tabernacle would hold adopted this resolution without a dissenting vote ! To bring them to the proper degree of frenzy the speakers had recited the entire history of the Church, Mormon version, and reopened every wound that the "Lord's peculiar people" had suffered for the past forty years ; and the result was such a condition of fanatical hatred against Gentiles that the timid "smelt blood in the air," and began to talk of flight. But the experienced said. " There is no danger whatever in the city ; Brigham has too much at stake to allow trouble here; it is only out in the caflons and distant settlements that the Gentile may be in danger." And this I afterwards found to be true. There was a daily paper in Salt Lake City, in the Gentile interest, known as the Reporter. It was about a foot square, and contained perhaps as much reading matter as four pages of this volume. During the excitement over Conference and its decrees, I wandered into the office, and for want of something to do wrote a few lines of editorial. The proprietor, Mr. S. S. Saul, forthwith suggested to me that I try my hand as editor for a few weeks. The salary was to be twenty dollars per week, about as good as half that amount in the States. I had sent East for money and got no response ; my cash on hand was three dollars, and I was in debt for a week's board ; it is need- less to add that I accepted the magnificent offer. The paper was enlarged a column width on each side. Mr. A. Aulbach, 116 A FEEBLE JOUENAL. the foreman, was put in charge of the business; Mr. Saul went East to solicit advertisements, and I ran that paper to suit my- self for seven weeks. Saul then returned without a dollar's worth of patronage. I had received a hundred and fifty dollars from Mr. Halstead for my first fifteen letters, I felt opulent, and was eager to go on to California. But almost without knowing it, I had slid into the position of an editor; and once there, my destiny was fixed. The course of the Reporter had given satis- faction to the Gentiles, and when I spoke of leaving, they bound me with these flattering words, " We can't do without you." If there ever was a more sickly childhood than that of the Salt Lake Reporter, I never heard of it. Established in May, 1868, it had, when I began to edit it, just sixty-nine paying sub- scribers. When Saul returned from the East we had increased the number two hundred. Saul was cast down ; Aulbach and I were confident. We reasoned after the foolishly sanguine manner of newspaper men, that if we could do so well for another, we could do ten times as well for ourselves a com- mon conclusion with hopeful youth, and one which is not necessarily correct. Saul surrendered the entire office to Gene- ral P. E. Connor, of whom he had bought it ; and we A. Aul- bach, John Barrett, and myself purchased it. The price was $2500, to be paid at the rate of $300 a month. By the most heroic exertions we raised the first payment of $100 each; the second was paid, I believe, some three months after. Eight months from the day of sale the General was pressing us, for the third instalment, six months over due ; but you cannot " draw blood out of a turnip," and he never did get his money till both my partners had sold out to a man of some wealth. I was fixed as Gentile editor in Salt Lake, but the Gentiles were in cruel straits. The decree of the Mormon Church had been carried out strictly, and Gentile stores were empty. It was amusing and provoking to take a walk along Main Street that winter, and see the melancholy Jews standing in the doors of their stores looking in vain for customers. For six months the ten Gentile firms did not sell one-twentieth the usual QUEER LAWS OF TRADE. 117 amount of goods; their disgust was beyond expression, and their curses against Brigham not loud but deep. It is indeed a singular fact, to the Eastern reader quite incomprehensible, that one man should be able by his simple will to corral the commerce of ninety-thousand people, nullify the laws of trade, reverse the popular current in favor of certain dealers, and completely ruin the business of a score of merchants; and yet that is precisely what was done in Utah. There was no great violence, nothing that the law could take cognizance of, nothing that would make much of a showing before a Congressional Committee; and yet to the sufferers it was actual " persecution," fully as hard as any the Mormons have any just reason to complain of. One by one the Gentile merchants lost heart and emigrated. The leading firm was that of Walker Brothers; four gentlemen, now worth together probably a million dollars; born Mormons, but delivered early in life, by the grace of God, from the body of that death. They offered their immense property and stock at very low figures to the Mormon Co-operative Institution, but being refused, enlarged their store and determined to fight it out on that line if it took no end of summers. For a year or so they sunk money, but pluck and public spirit conquered ; the mining development of Utah more than doubled their former prosperity. They are now the merchant princes of Utah, investing heavily in mining enterprises, men of national reputation, and forward in all works to advance the liberal cause. But theirs was the only vessel that outrode the financial storm without serious loss; and Salt Lake City held by July, 1869, no more than one hundred and fifty Gentiles. The Mormon Hierarchy had determined to corral the trade of Utah by a grand co-operative scheme, for the benfit of the Church ; and men who can stand it to live with six or eight wives apiece must be credited with some resolution. And here I may remark that I never was in a country where a little talent would sell so high as at that time in Utah. There were but few men of real genius ,on either side of the contro- versy; far more, of course, among the Gentiles than the Mormons. 118 A QUEER " MOSES." BRIGHA3I YOTJXG. The entire Church of Latter-day Saints does not contain ten men who would take rank as average merchants in an Eastern city not one man of real commanding talent. The claims put forward for Brighara Young are simply silly, as the plain figures show. He has been at the head of the Church for twenty-five years; it now numbers one-half the adult adher- ents it had when Joe Smith died. He led his people a thou- sand miles into the wilderness, where every acre of cultivated land has cost from fifty to a hundred dollars in labor, when two hundred thousand square miles of the richest land in the world were begging for inhabitants. What sort of a Moses do you make of such a man ? The apostate Mormons were often men of some genius, but it was all of the hair-splitting kind. They were fluent on the "rights of man," u liberty of intellect," "spiritual develop- ment," and the like; but when concerted action was required, they were a set of impracticables. They were beyond doubt the most skeptical class in the world. They had been so badly deceived once, that they regarded all religions as delusion or fraud generally both. I recall one in particular, with whom I was intimate, who was at once the most credulous and the most skepti- THEATRICAL. 119 cal of men. He talked long and loud of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but cursed the administration and despaired of repub- lican government; be quoted Tom Paine and Herbert Spencer by the hour, was poloquent on First Principles and Universal Law, and argued on the Supreme Good, the origin of evil, and the control of passion, till he was black in the face with anger. He swore by woman, yet doubted her virtue; unhesitatingly rejected the New Testament miracles, and unhesitatingly ac- cepted everything published in the Banner of Light; put his trust in a miserable half-faith which he called Spiritual Phi- losophy, and believed every book but the Bible. Such were the materials we had with which to build up a liberal party in Utah. By the middle of the winter the Gentiles had given up the hope of business, and devoted themselves to amusement prin- cipally dancing and the theatre. Brigham's Theatre was then the institution of Salt Lake; and Madam Methua Scheller, John C. McCullough, George B. Waldron and lady, and other "stars" gave us three months of varied entertainment princi- pally such pieces as the " French Spy," "Daughter of the Regi- ment," " Naiad Queen," and other sensational and spectacular dramas. Two or three times they ventured on something better, particularly " Romeo and Juliet/' which failed of an audience, of course; the parquette, where the Mormons sat, was nearly empty. Indeed, the idea of playing "Romeo and Juliet" before a Mormon audience is a self-evident absurdity. That play repre- sents the essential duality of true love : one man loves one woman, her, and her only, and swears by all creation that he will never love another, while the audience have been taught all their lives that a man can love six women just alike. Single- ness of love they hold to be selfishness. If they could have six Juliets leaning half a dozen heads on as many hands out of six windows, all in different orders of architecture, and all the Juliets of different styles of beauty, and one old frog of an elder making love to all by turns, it would probably take. It would have Mormon spice in it. 120 FIKST CORIN2STETHIANS. FIRST SETTLER AT CORINNE. Spring approached, and by general consent the more enter- prising Gentiles began to look for a new place of settlement. On the 25th of March, the City of Coriiine was laid out at the railroad crossing on Bear River, some six miles north of the north end of the lake ; we 'moved the Reporter there early in April, and all went to work with a hurrah to make a "great Gentile city." It was a gay community. Nineteen saloons paid license for three months. Two dance-houses amused the elegant leisure of the evening hours, and the supply of "sports" was fully equal to the requirements of a railroad town. At one time the town contained eighty nymphs du pave, popularly known in Mountain-English as " soiled doves." Being the last railroad town it enjoyed "flush times" during the closing weeks of building- the Pacific Railway. The junction of the Union and COKINNETHIAN ORATORS. 121 1 ' SUNDAY-NIGHT AMUSEMENTS. ' ' Central was then at Promontory, twenty -eight miles west, and Corinne was the retiring place for rest and recreation of all the employes. Yet it was withal a quiet and rather orderly place. Sunday was generally observed : most of the men went hunting or fishing, and the "girls" had a dance, or got drunk. Legitimate business was good for the first two months of the city's existence; for the railroad was just being completed, and everybody supposed that the harvest of gain was about to begin. We had public meetings in abundance. Two or three times a week flaming posters called the citizens together, to consult on " improvements for the benefit of Corinne." Bonfires were 122 UN-REAL ESTATES. lighted, a stand improvised by turning up a dry-goods box, and a number of florid speeches delivered; the crowd then voted unanimously for various heroic resolutions, and dispersed to read their proceedings in the next morning's Reporter. Sanguine real estate owners predicted a city of ten thousand people within two years. And they believed it too. Let no man imagine that the citizens of new and lively western towns are only talking to draw in outsiders ; they convince themselves long before they try to convince others as witness the fact that very few of them sell out when the excitement is at its Light. They hold on for higher prices, and ninety-nine out of a hundred who are rich when the city is on the rise, grow poor again when it goes down. Corner lots in Corinne went up to fabulous prices. All seemed to be satisfied that the loca- tion of the "Chicago of the Rocky. Mountains" was definitely settled. And they had some ground for their belief. At the Lead of navigation on Bear River, connecting with the lake, and the most favorable point for shipping freight from the railroad into Montana and Idaho, it was reasonable to suppose that a large town would spring up. Chief among our eloquent real estate owners was Dr. O. D. Cass, better known as " The Doc," formerly of Denver, who had invested largely in Corinne ; and many delightful hours have I spent in his office, hearing him demonstrate from the map the certain future greatness of Corinne. Every morning the Reporter contained a new and encouraging scheme to insure commercial importance. Here was to be an enduring city, the entrepot of all trade from the northern Territories; here was to be the " Queen City of the Great Basin." The Mormon papers rarely alluded to us, but their speakers denounced Corinne as the home of devils, and warned their young men to avoid it as the place of destruction to manners and morals. They ransacked the Scriptures for precedents : it was too dry for wells, too barren for gardens ; it was to be as Tyre, desolate and a warning to the Gentile ; it was as wicked Sodom to perish under Heaven's wrath ; it was Moab, the Lord's wash- pot ; it was Edom, over which he would cast out his shoe. THE BUBBLE BURSTS. 123 FOR THE BENEFIT OF COHEN^E. Vain denunciations, and equally vain hopes. The railroad was completed, and all our floating population drifted to fresh fields; the "dull times " of 1869 came on, and Corinne sub- sided to a moral and quiet burg of perhaps four hundred in- habitants. Better times came in 1870, and in the last two years, and the " Queen City " is now a thriving country village of perhaps twelve hundred people. My corner lots, which cost me $500, are for sale at a discount, and other real estate owners are in the like case. I met "The Doc" a few weeks since on my last visit there. He was still social and lively; but there was no speculation in his eyes. 124 CITY LOTS. The history of Corinne is the history of something near a thousand towns in the " glorious free and boundless West." In a new country, when the first towns are laid out, every body speculates, one makes money and nineteen come to grief. Well do I remember when, now twenty years ago, the people of our place in Indiana first felt the excitement about Minnesota as a place of settlement. Oregon and California had been " all the rage " for four years, and the former State was generally regarded as a cold, barren region, with a few Indian trading posts ; and, perhaps, some good land, but quite too far North for Hoosiers and Buckeyes. But about that time the tide began to set that way. Two young men from our town went out to Winona, remained a few months, and returned with fabulous accounts of the fertile soil, fine timber, and healthful air ; " and as to cold," they added, "the ground is so dry and the winters so uniform, we didn't suffer half as much as in Indiana." Then every body wanted to go West to Minnesota. And one old gentleman, noted for his prudence, thus pronounced : " Now you see, I ain't ? er goin' to be led away by any excitement about any one place. I've got money to invest, and I'll put in one whole season ridin' about, and a man can tell by the lay of the country where the big town's a goin' to be and there I'll stick my stake." And he went and rode all one summer about the State, and was convinced by unmistakable signs that there was to be one big city in the Northwest, and that was to be at the southern end of Lake St. Croix. All this he demonstrated on his return home by unanswerable arguments on the map and went out again with some ten thousand dollars and invested it all at Prescott at the south end of that Lake ; and to the best of my knowledge and belief his lots there are worth as much as they were in 1854, if not more. At any rate I have not heard a word about Prescott then the "great coming town " for ten years past. For aught I see in the papers it, like Paddy's little brother, " died a bornin'." In like manner I have heard people demonstrate that Omaha and Kansas City could not be the big places ; the true location was a few miles up or a few miles down the river ; the site was unfortunate, VERY UNCERTAIN. 125 and the other place, whatever it was, must finally get ahead. But somehow these " other places " seldom get ahead if they lose the first two years' start. Moral: you can't most always tell out West where the "big place " is going to be, simply from the " run of the river" or " lay of the country." Nature only determines the general neighbor- hood within, perhaps, fifty or a hundred miles of cities in the new "West ; between any two sites in the same neighborhood, the pluck and energy of the first settlers always determine the matter. Moral again : If you are in the biggest place, the one that has the start, don't be seduced away to a new place because it appears to have a little better site, but stay where you are, even if " times are dull " just now, and ten to one the place that has the start will keep it. CHAPTER VII. THE UNION PACIFIC COMPLETED. The last rail and spike A visit home An unofficial tour Whitney, Benton, Burton, Fremont, Stansbury, Saxton, and Gunnison Difficulties of construc- ture Where is the real starting point? Missouri River Bridge Out the Platte Fremont Columbus On the plains again Julesburg Smoothness of the route Delightful traveling Cheyenne A Western Jeffreys ! Laramie again A tragedy A miracle, perhaps ! " Big Ed's " guardian angel Pyra- mid rocks Beauties of Laramie Plains Desert west of them Wasatch Echo and Weber Promontory Moral gamblers Reflections. ) |N the 10th of May, 1869, I attended the ceremonies con- nected with laying the last rail, and driving the last spike, on the Pacific Railway, which events took place on the Promontory north of Great Salt Lake. A few days after I came East on the completed road, visiting my home after an absence of thirteen months; and then, in company with other correspondents, made an unofficial inspec- tion of the entire line for our several journals, stopping at all the towns along the way. Reams of paper and gallons of ink have since been exhausted on the great work, and still the read- ing public asks for more. And there is always more to be said ; for the ever-varying circumstances of Western life, the shifting phases which characterize existence beyond the Mississippi, re- quire a new historian every month. History has not decided to whom belongs the honor of ad- vancing the idea of a Pacific Railroad. Probably to no one man. The scheme was such as to suggest itself to many of our earlier statesmen. When Whitney proposed to build it for a grant of land thirty miles in width along its track, it was looked upon as the fancy of a monomaniac. I think myself he would have come out some thirty millions in debt, unless he could 126 PRELIMINARY SURVEYS. 127 have persuaded Eastern capitalists to purchase the grant between the Black Hills and the Sierras without visiting it. When the great Benton began to agitate the matter, it was regarded as premature the harmless fancy of an old politician. And as late as 1856, when the National Republican Platform contained a clause in favor of the work, it was regarded as a piece of cheap electioneering " buncombe " rather shallow at that. Again, in 1860, the English traveler and scientist, Capt. R. F. Burton, in his " City of the Saints," says of the road : " The estimated expense is one hundred millions ; it would cost at least twice that sum ; it is expected to build it in ten years, but it will consume at least thirty." In nine years from that utterance the road was completed. Fremont, Stansbury, Saxton, Gunnison, and other explorers, seem to have been slow in convincing themselves that the road could be built at all. Stansbury, however, has the honor of being the first to demonstrate satisfactorily that there was any route more direct than the old emigrant trail by the Sweet water River and South Pass. On his return, in 1850, from his sur- vey of the Great Salt Lake, he followed up the mountain pass directly eastward from Laramie Plains, crossed the Black Hills about on the present railroad line, and descended eastward to a point very near where the city of Cheyenne now stands, follow- ing down Lodgepole Creek to its junction with the Platte. Southern influence was all-powerful in Congress in those days, and was against the road. The national charter was first granted in July, 1862; the preliminary organization was com- pleted in October, 1863, authorized capital, a hundred million dollars ; and the first contract for construction was made in August, 1864. The first forty miles of the road were not com- pleted till January, 1866. Still the work languished : capita- lists doubted it; the government appeared indifferent; the war absorbed every energy of the people, and for a time the very idea seemed forgotten. But all that time a few bold and deter- mined men were working incessantly to insure its completion. By the war the necessity for a closer union with the Pacific States became more apparent, and the mighty energies evolved 128 AT THE MISSOURI. by the civil strife, found their proper object in iron girding the continent. These energies were needed in view of the difficulties. Omaha, the initial point, was not then connected with the East by rail. A gap of a hundred miles or more intervened, over which everything had to be transported by teams. The mag- nificent engine of seventy-horse-power, which for a long time ran the company's works at Omaha, was hauled by oxen from Des Moines, Iowa. Under the stimulus caused by the Union Pacific, three through lines have already been completed from Chicago to Omaha. Was the road then built too soon ? By no means. But the cost was undoubtedly much greater than it would have been at a later day. It is strenuously claimed by Iowa men that Omaha is not the real starting point ; for the plat designated by charter the common junction of half a dozen roads is east of the Mis- souri, some four miles southwest of Council Bluffs. Hence a wordy war between the two cities, which threatened all sorts of terrible things, and was once of sufficient importance to get into Congress. Hence, also, the great Union Pacific Bridge over the Missouri, which completed the continuous line of rail from Atlantic to Pacific. This structure, entirely of iron, has eleven spans of two hundred and fifty feet each ; is fifty feet above high water mark, and seventy above low. The piers are formed of iron cylinders, filled in with boulders and concrete; the cylinders being merely rings, each ten feet high and nine and a half in diameter. In forming the pier one ring was placed upon the sand, tightly capped, and the air within pumped out, when the pressure would drive it down to the level ; after which it was uncapped and another bolted tightly upon it, and the process repeated. The eastern pier, first completed, went down seventy- five feet below the surface before it rested on solid sandstone. On the 10th of July we left Omaha for a review of the "first division" extending in our arrangement, to Fremont, the first place of note, forty miles out. A year before I had entered it from the north, afoot, weary and disconsolate. It looked much 130 COLUMBUS, NEBRASKA. better when entered from the cars, in bodily comfort and good company. Fremont has "great expectations." It is the center of a plain of great beauty and richness, is the point of junction for the Sioux City branch of the Union Pacific, and has a population of three thousand. We are here not quite " out of civilization," but merely on its borders ; the extremes of society are closely mingled, and both nature and humanity seem full of the spirit of border-land poetry. From Fremont forty-five miles of gentle up-grade aver- aging throughout the Platte Valley seven feet to the mile bring us to the ambitious " city " of Columbus. George F. Train settled in his own mind that this was the geographical center of the United States, though most people place that point some- where near Fort Riley, Kansas; consequently he pronounced it " the future Capital," and proceeded to buy and lay out a town plat. A great railroad was projected from Sioux City to this point, with branch straight north across the Niobrara country to Yankton, Dakota, and a continuation southward through the valley of the Blue to connect with some of the numerous projected roads in Kansas. " The wind-work is all done, and grading will commence about September first" the sanguine citizens confidently affirmed. They further assured me, seeing that I was a journalist, and only wanted the exact truth to lay before my "numerous and intelligent readers," that Columbus was sure to be quite a metropolis, the great central city of this valley, certainly the capital of the State, and possibly of the Nation. And, like the hopeful builders of my own Corinne, they believed every word of it; town lots were at handsome figures and advancing, and there was speculation in the eyes of real estate owners. We remained a day, but did not "invest in lots." Columbus is one of the "stakes" of the " Joseph ite Mor- mons" so-called by the profane, but styling themselves the "Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints "- and here I met Alexander and David Hyrum Smith, sons of the late Prophet Joseph, who were gathering the "sinews of war" for a raid into Utah, to wrest the kingdom from the BUFFALO AND EMIGRANT. 131 usurper Brigham. They traveled with us the next stage to Cheyenne, and continued on to Utah. They went, they saw but they did not conquer. Their appearance excited little enthusiasm among the saints. Fanaticism, like revolution, never goes backward. Religious bubbles, like all others, must rise till they burst. Very few in Utah were prepared to leave the developed stage of Mormonism to go back to the original. Beyond Columbus there were then no " cities" for four hun- dred miles. Of all which sprang up on the road, only two or three survive in anything like their first greatness. A specula- tive and uncertain character attached to all of them; lots in the " wickedest city," Julesburg, which once sold readily for a thousand dollars, are now the habitations of the owls and prairie dogs. But there is one lot in the deserted site of Jules- burg whose tenants will not remove to the new railroad town. I mean the cemetery, where lie the bodies of at least a hundred victims of midnight rows, violence and vigilantes. The town lasted only five months, but was quite successful in establishing a graveyard, In that neighborhood, or a little farther east, in the years before the railroad, two great lines of migration and emigration annually intersected : the first of the millions of buffaloes which had wintered in northwestern Texas and were thus far on their spring travel ; the second of the overland travelers who had journeyed from the Missouri, reaching this point about the latter part of May. From here to the foot of the mountains was then a great buffalo range ; and it is stated that emigrants were hindred from crossing the Platte for several days at a time by the herds which were crowding to pass it. Now they are rarely seen here. The Indians hunt them to the south of Republican Fork, and the Kansas, not the Union, Pacific is the route on which to see buffaloes. One can speak in the highest terms of the smoothness and ease of travel on the Union Pacific particularly on that por- tion in the Platte Valley. Hour after hour the traveler is carried rapidly along without jar or discomfort, generally free 132 SEVERE SENTENCE. from dust, with sensations as agreeable as if upon rails of glass. On a table in the sleeping car a glass of water, filled within half an inch of the brim, can be carried hundreds of miles without spilling a drop ; and in these moving palaces all the parlor entertainments of books, cards, chess, and even sewing and writing to some extent, can be enjoyed without dis- comfort. Cheyenne stands on a beautiful plain, half encircled by the bend of Crow Creek ; to the west the Black Hills break the horizon, while Long's Peak, ninety miles to the south, and tho snowy summits of the Rocky Mountains show with dazzling brilliancy through the rarified air. The city is no longer the paradise of " roughs," but a quiet and orderly community. The political and social revolutions of its first year are worthy the pen of a Macaulay. It is confidently stated by old settlers that Colonel Murrin, while mayor, raised the value of city- scrip eighteen cents on tho dollar, by requiring every man who shot at another to pay a fine of ten dollars, " whether he hit or missed." But this unheard-of severity built up a powerful opposition, and Murrin lost his office. This genial official often had the "girls" before him for such trifling charges as " drunk and disorderly," when the following colloquy usually ensued : "Your fine is ten dollars and twenty-five cents." "Yes, y'r honor, but what's the twenty-five cents for?" "To buy your honorable Judge a drink in the morninV In those days Cheyenne was in the Territory of Dakota, Wyoming not being organized; but as it was eight hundred miles by the shortest route to Yankton, the new city did not wait for a regular charter, but had a complete government with no basis but the will of the people. A year or so afterwards, those who had fined and imprisoned culprits, or sent them to work with ball and chain, became apprehensive of legal ven- geance, and applied to the Dakota Legislature, which legalized the original charter, nunc pro tune. We rolled westward from Cheyenne on the 17th of July, but the morning was cold ; and the train crept slowly up the moun- tain-side enveloped in a chilly gray mist, which gave an air of 134 BLACK HILLS. added desolation to the gloomy defiles of the Black Hills. The ascent upon the eastern side is everywhere so gradual as to be scarcely perceptible ; and even at Sherman, highest point on the road 8342 feet above sea-level the spectator is less conscious of being upon a mountain than at any other point, the high bare rocks, with a few green plats, spreading away to the north and south, giving rather the appearance of a high meadow than a mountain top. Passing the wild scenery of Granite Canon just as the fogs of the morning were giving way to the clear sunshine and blue sky of the mountains, we emerged upon the first rocky " bench," with a free outlook to the west, then passed Dale Creek bridge, at a dizzy hight over a narrow gorge, which seems to split the highest ridge of the mountains from north to south ; but a little south of the road it turns sharply to the eastward, and the creek caiions out upon the eastern bench, and running across the high plains, empties into the South Platte. Thence, west- ward and northward, we move down the mountain, first through ragged gaps and rock cuts, then along embankments and rock flats, and then out upon the head of Little Laramie, where the road gets much smoother, but still bearing swiftly downward, till we run out upon the grassy plats and wonderful scenery of Laramie Plains, and stop for a few days at the " city " of Laramie. Laid out in May, 1868, this place had an early history much like that of Cheyenne. But the better citizens, impatient of the law's delay, took the matter into their own hands, and an explosion of popular wrath ended in a "judicious hanging." On a beautiful midnight of the next October, three notorious villains were seized by the Vigilantes, given a short trial, and at daylight of a clear Sabbath morning, "Con" Wagner, Asa Moore, and " Big Ed " Bernard, were hanging stiff and cold to the projecting timbers of an old log-house. And then an inci- dent occurred which long furnished matter for surprise to the curious, and conjecture to the superstitious. A neighboring photographer, knowing that the bodies would be removed as soon as daylight discovered them, arranged his instruments and THE ANGEL IN THE CLOUD. 1 :>>:> CHIEF JUSTICE OF WYOMING. waited patiently for the first light, to secure a sensational view of the executed. The light clouds were just scattering before the coming sun when he bared the sensitive plate, and turned it towards the bodies in a little too great haste as it proved and there appeared fixed upon the negative, formed by the parting of two clouds, an exact representation of a weeping angel over "Big Ed's" shoulder. Her long hair fell on each side of the swinging murderer ; her down-cast eyes appeared to rest in deep sadness on the rope encircling his neck, while two tear-drops trembled on her cloudy cheeks. At first view of the negative, preserved in memory of this curious accident, the 136 angel appears as a real figure in the scene; and it is not till one traces the joining of the clouds that he perceives the illusion. Another of the same gang, "Long Steve" Young, had been warned the previous day to leave town; but instead of doing so, he armed himself and swore to revenge the death of his com- rades. He was seized at once, given a fair trial, and at nine o'clock of that Sabbath morning was hanged to the telegraph pole at the end of the depot. At his first suspension the rope broke, and he fell to the ground, when an old mountaineer who had been garroted and robbed a few nights before, jumped upon him and stamped him furiously in the face. This extra horror was ended at once by the Vigilantes, and the prisoner hanged till dead. Young had been hanged twice before in Colorado, and cut down at the point of death. The Vigilantes wore no mask, and attempted no concealment; the Deputy United States Marshal was the only official in the vicinity, and he had fled the night before, being rather more than suspected of complicity with the robbers. Some twenty miles southwest of Laramie is a region known as Pvramid Rocks, well worthy a few days 7 visit. At a distance the rocks look like the ruins of an ancient city, but on near approach are found to consist of clusters and columns of red and white sandstone, from ten to twenty feet in diameter, and from fifty to eighty feet in hight, worn by the ceaseless winds or by the waters of a geologic age till they are round and smooth as if polished with the lapidary's greatest skill. The summits of many of the columns are crowned with a species of parachute, often extending fifteen feet over the edge. Where the columns gather in clusters, these projecting summits unite, forming a solid roof and appearing to one below like vast arches support- ing a cathedral dome. Towards the center of the largest group the light fades away, owls and bats peer down from numerous crevices upon the intruder, while still farther into the'recesses can be heard the suppressed growl of foxes, badgers and coyotes, and the floor is strewn with the bones of their prey. The great bald eagle has appropriated many places upon the summit for LA RAMIE PLAINS. 137 PYRAMID ROCKS. his eyrie, and the prairie wolf finds a retreat in the deepest cav- erns. At a distance one column has the exact appearance of an old baronial castle, and another that of a Roman arch. The loose sand, driven about by the wind for thousands of years, has worn away the softer portions, and carved a thousand gro- tesque faces upon the rock. Here is written as upon an open book, the pre-Adarnite history of these rocks and plains, the erosion and drift, and then the wear of wind and sand, which have made these level plains among the mountains, leaving only these solid monuments to show the lapse of years. These singular plains of the Big and Little Lamarie are really parks, quite similar in formation to those of Colorado, but of less elevation, being but G500 feet above sea-level, and entirely surrounded by mountains, except the passes north and north- 138 A WEARY LAND. west through which flow Laramie and Medicine Bow Rivers. Here the vegetation of the East and West mingles, and the larger part of these plains is covered by a mixture of buffalo and bunch grass, very nutritious, and already the grazing land of numerous stock-growers. We find near Medicine Bow a number of lakes with no outlet, strongly impregnated with alkali, and with borders quite barren except for an occa- sional stunted growth of sage-brush, greasewood, and desert cactus. Thence for nearly four hundred miles westward, all nature is a weariness to the eye and a burden to the flesh white deserts of alkali, bare deserts of gravel and sand, gray rock, red buttes, yellow hills, dry gullies, and hot bare plains. Two or three green valleys appear, in which some enthusiastic settlers have half-persuaded themselves that they can " make a country/' One such resident met the Honorable (and bluff) Ben. Wade, while the latter was on his tour inspecting the Union Pacific, and with a deprecating air, remarked, " This isn't such a bad country all it lacks is water and good society. 7 ' " Yes," retorted the Senator, with equal truth and point in application, " that's all that Hell lacks." The comparison nearly does justice to the country. From this region the road rises by the eastern slope of the Wasatch Mountains to Wasatch Station, the summit of the "Rim of the Great Basin," seven thousand feet above sea-level, a place of wild, rare beauty, and during a large part of winter, entirely above the clouds. I visited the place in January, 1869, and during my stay of a week the thermometer never rose to zero, ranging from three to twenty degrees below, though there was not a cloud in the sky except the light masses near the horizon, and the sun shone with a peculiar dazzling brilliancy. The air, too, was quite still, and sitting in a well-warmed frame tent, and looking through the windows on the yellow waxen sunlight, it seemed impossible that winter held such savage reign without, but a step into the open air soon showed the reality. The terminus was to remain there the rest of the win- PROMONTORY. 139 ter, four thousand men. were at work on the grade and rock-cut within a few miles, who must do their trading there, and as by magic a city of fifteen hundred people sprung up in two weeks in the dead of winter. During my stay, the sound of hammer and saw was heard day and night, regardless of the cold, and restaurants were built and fitted up in such haste that guests were eating at the tables, while the carpenters were finishing the weather-boarding that is, putting on the second lot to "cover joinings." I ate breakfast at the " California" when the cracks were half an inch wide between the " first siding," and the ther- mometer in the room stood at five below zero ! A drop of the hottest coffee spilled upon the cloth froze in a minute, while the gravy was hard on the plate, and the butter frozen in spite of the fastest eater. T- - - ? -- This was another " wicked city." During its lively existence of three months it established a graveyard with forty-three occupants, of whom not one died of disease. Two were killed by an accident in the rock-cut; three got drunk, and froze to death ; three were hanged, and many killed in rows, or mur- dered ; one " girl " stifled herself with the fumes of charcoal, and another inhaled a sweet death in subtle chloroform. From Wasatch we pass through a long rock-cut and tunnel, and PULPIT ROCK, ECHO CANON. enter Echo Canon, which leads us into Weber Canon and that out to Salt Lake Valley. A hun- dred miles from Wasatch bring us to Promontory, for six months after their completion, the junction of the Union and Central Pacifies, the spot where, " Civilization shifting turns the other way," And the tide of progress rolling westward, was met by the 140 GAMBLING MORALITY. reflux tide of Pacific " self-risers," assisted by the almond-eyed Mongolian. Here we rested for a day at the last " U. P. town " 4900 feet above sea-level, though, theologically speaking, if we inter- pret Scripture literally, it ought to have been 49,000 feet below that level; for it certainly was, for its size, morally nearest to the infernal regions of any town on the road. In two days I had the pleasure (?) of seeing at least a score of " smart Alecks " relieved of their surplus cash by betting on the "strap game," "patent lock," "ten-die game," "three-card monte" and other beautiful uncertainties, which are so worked as to appear " a dead sure thing" to the uninitiated. What I particularly admire in the "sports" is the fine morality they display in always having the loser in the wrong. The latter is certain he is going to cheat the gambler, otherwise he would never venture. He thinks the gambler ignorant of the fact that the card is marked, or the lock " hampered," or the strap changed, as the case may be, by the " capper ; " and goes in on what he considers a "dead sure thing." Hence I maintain there should be no legal action to recover money lost in gambling. Between the gambler and the loser the moralities are equal ; both are rogues at heart, only the former is the more expert. My journalistic inspection of the Union Pacific was ended, and on the 1st of August I stood upon the " last rail," which was laid three months before with such imposing ceremonies, and which has, in literal prose, been whittled up, carried off and replaced six times; so that we have had no less than seven last rails, and the end is not yet. Here Irish and Chinese laborer met in their great work, to place the last jet in the band which weds the Orient and Occident, and solemnize their union by the shores of America's Dead Sea. The scene on this burning August day is not provocative of sentiment; the theme is ex- hausted in song and 'story, but worthy still of extravagant eulogy as the .great triumph of peace in this age; and as I gaze upon the rocky hights around, I almost fancy I can CREDIT MOBILIER. 141 see the shade of Columbus, still pointing westward, still affirming : " / was right after all : This is the way to India." NOTE : This chapter originally contained floridly complimentary notices of all the great men engaged in building the Union Pacific, but about the time it went to press, the Credit Mobilier investigation was in progress in Washington, so I thought it safest for my reputation as an author and Gentile prophet, to mention no names. Never praise a man, or name your children after him, till he is dead. CHAPTEK VIII. THE GREAT BASIN. Hunting new fields Gentile needs Mines or nothing Southward Sevier Mines Gilmer and Saulsbury Rockwell's Ranche The Utah Basin Will it be sacred ground? A family ticket Social robbery Chicken Creek " Them mules is in the sagebrush ; you go hunt 'em ! " Gunnison Sevier Valley Abandoned towns Marysvale Up the Gulch Drawbacks to the district Mr. Jacob Hess My later experience The habitable lands of Utah and Nevada Productions Fruits True policy with the State and Territory " Mormon enterprise " A silver State Sunken deserts Death Valley Mournful reminiscence. HE Union Pacific and overland excursion had become too common. Every man who could command the time and money was eager to make the trip, and all who could sling ink became correspondents. At least ten thousand columns had been written about the Mormons, and my local occupation was spoiled. The Bedouin instinct stirred within me, and I longed for fresh fields and pastures new. The Gentiles in Utah were ruined in business if that business depended on the Mormons, and a few of us turned eur eyes towards the hills as a last hope. We wanted to live in Utah ; to do so we must have a Gentile population, and the only hope for such a population was in developing paying mines. Trade with the Mormons no Gentile could count on, and in agricul- ture no American could go into the country and compete with the foreign-born Mormons, who worked little five and ten-acre patches, and thought themselves in affluence if they had a hundred dollars' worth of surplus produce. Unless Utah had rich mineral deposits, we might prepare to emigrate. Cotton- wood, Rush Valley and Sevier were spoken of the last far in Southern Utah. The place was beyond the settlements, in the 142 PORTER ROCKWELL. 143 OFF FOR THE SEVIER MINES. edge of the Indian country, and the route thither lay through the dark regions of Polygamia. But the reports appeared favorable, and I determined to visit the district. Gilrner and Saulsbury, successors to Wells, Fargo & Co., ran a tri-weekly line to Fillmore, the old territorial capital ; and from Chicken Creek, north of that city, a miners 7 express sometimes ran to the Sevier region. The " State Road," so-called in allusion to the proposed " State of Deseret," runs southward up the Jordan and through the "'Narrows," to the Utah Lake region. The last station on the Jordan is known as Rockwell's Ranche, having long been the residence of the notorious " Port " Rockwell, reputed Danite and undoubted desperado. Making due allowance for western exaggeration, enough is certainly known of his life to make it one of singular and horrible fascination. Most of the evidence I have of his life is from Mormons, but Porter himself only owns to having killed a dozen men, most of which cases he justifies, and complains of having been slandered by journalists, particularly Fitzhugh Ludlow. That writer visited Porter at his ranche, and afterwards collected his history from various sources, and credits (or debits) him with fifty murders, as if all were proved facts. " Port " used to grit his teeth when that 144 UTAH LAKE BASIN. history was mentioned, and say if he met Ludlow he would make it fifty-one! "Port" disappeared from his usual haunts while Judge McKean's Federal Court was running ; but when that condition was reversed by the Supreme Court, he was again to be seen and heard in " Zion." His custom, when drunk, is to walk Main Street and give vent to a regular series of pro- longed yells, which are sufficiently murderous in tone to make a stranger believe almost anything about him. But time would fail me to tell even that part of Rockwell's life which is well proved; the palmy days of such men in Utah are passed, and the " Danite Captain's" occupation is gone. From Rockwell's we pass the " Point o' Mountain " and " Narrows," and thence down a long slope into the fine valley east of Utah Lake the Galilee of modern Saints. Through the flourishing settlements of Lehi, Battle Creek, and American Fork, we pass to the city of Provo, second place hi age, and third in size, in the Territory. The bishop of this place was immortalized by Artemus Ward, who tells of giving him a " family ticket," and after congratulating himself on the size of his audience, discovering that all but a dozen of them were the bishop's wives and children. The point of the joke is in the fact that, though the bishop has five wives, he has never been a father. This case illustrates the folly of polygamy, in a politico- economical sense, a little more clearly than most others. .If the four superfluous wives of this potentate had each a husband, we might, in the course of nature, expect a score of children where now are none. There being one woman to one man in the world at large not near so many in the Territories and all men being "created free and equal," who gave one man the right to take five men's shares of womanly sweetness ? What robbery so bad as that which robs a man of any chance for a wife or domestic happiness? A community of polygamists is an absurdity rather an impossibility. From the nature of the case, polygamists must form an exclusive aristocracy, like that of slaveholders. Night had overtaken us before passing Springville, at the SPECULATIONS. 145 ON A FAMILY TICKET. southern point of Utah Lake. The Provo, or Timpanogos, Spanish Fork, American Fork, and a dozen smaller streams feed this " Gem of the Desert/' which only sends off one-third as much water by the Jordan as it receives from these mountain affluents. Some may find its way under ground, but more is accounted for by evaporation. The lake contains forty square miles. Myself and the driver were left alone, and rattling along the shores of this modern Sea of Galilee, which, with the Jordan and Salt Lake, forms so strange a copy of the wonders of the Holy Land, while I enjoyed the calm beauty of the Utah moonlight, I could but wonder if this region was to become historic in aftertimes as the starting-point of a new religion, where future pilgrims should wander by the voiceless shore, and look back over eighteen centuries to the cradle of their faith. Mormonism is now forty-three years old, dating from the first baptism in the brook of Sharon, New York, and claims to have more converts than did Christianity 10 146 HUNTING MULES. at the same age. Will it in time be purged of its extraneous abominations, polygamy, incest, and blood-atonement, and with a purer theology develop into a new form of worship, in more vital harmony with the age ? In another generation will some great leader, some impassioned orator and reasoner, like Saint Paul, seize upon the growing sect, and convert millions to its progressive faith ? If so, then Sharon, and Manchester, Kirt- land, and Far West, Nauvoo, Salt Lake, and the shores of the American Jordan will become places of holy renown and pious pilgrimage, while Governors Boggs and Ford, yes, and some who have employed their pens against Mormonism, will rank in the future Church History like Pilate and Herod in their connection with the true faith. So much by way of riotous fancy. But the prospect, melan- choly as it might appear to a good Mormon, did not prevent my catching a few minutes' sleep on the smoothest parts of the road, till daylight revealed the north point of Iron Mountain, and my last station on the stage road. This was Chicken Creek, whence the main road bears westward, and a trail through a high uninhabited valley leads to the Sevier road. It was the day for the miners' express, and the station-keeper informed me " The mules was in the sagebrush ; driver would start as soon as he got 'em." All new staging enterprises in the West begin with mules. They take whipping and cursing more kindly, and in emer- g^ncies can live on the white sage, which horses cannot. The first coaches from the Missouri to Denver were drawn entirely by mules, the stations often forty miles apart; and in some instances a " whipper" was employed to gallop beside the team, and urge them forward. Arrived at the station, the mules were turned out till the next coach came in, when the passen- gers were expected to hunt them, the penalty for refusal being severe if the driver had power to enforce it. An old plains- man gave A. Ward the following account of the style : "A while back there went along here one of them fellers dressed out to kill in Boston cloze, and the first station they come to they wan t no mules. Says the chap with Boston AN UNLUCKY BOSTONIAN. 147 "YOU GO HUNT 'EM!" cloze, says he, 'Where's them mules ?' Says the driver, 'Them mules is in the sagebrush ; you go hunt 'em ; that's what you do.' Says the man o' Boston dressin', 'Oh, no.' Says the driver, 'Oh, yes;' an' he took his big stage-whip, an' he licked the man o' Boston dressin' till he went an' got the mules. How does that strike you for a joke?" We consumed two days in making the hundred miles to the mines, traveling up the Sevier River, and passing through seven abandoned towns. The Mormons settled most of this valley many years since, but were driven out by Indians in 1866; their well-built towns, surrounded by immense stone walls, still stood in perfect preservation, but uninhabited. 148 UP PINE GULCH. My memory does not recall a more pleasant journey. The "coves" opening back into the mountains were rich in bunch- grass, which was fairly alive with jack rabbits; sage hens, and other small fowl were abundant on the lower plain, and vast flocks of ducks were found along the river. The valley has a general elevation of five thousand feet above sea-level ; the air was cool, pure and invigorating, and the sky without a cloud, deep blue and dazzling. Southern Utah has probably the finest climate in America, or, taking it the year round, in the world. The snow seldom falls more than three inches deep, or lies on more than one night. Cattle live upon the range nearly all winter, and yet the district is free from the scorching summer heats of Arizona. At Marysvale, last town on the Sevier, we found the Mor- mons returning to their homes, after three years 7 absence, the Indians being once more peaceful. There we turned west- ward, and toiled for six miles up Pine Gulch, on which the mines are situated. Along the mountain stream by a narrow " dug-way," with an average up-grade of one foot in four, but cut by cross ravines, and often turned by immense rocks, we slowly made our way towards the mountain top. One moment we were on the edge of a narrow track where an overturn would have sent us a hundred feet into the bed of the stream, and the next struggling through a narrow chasm at the bottom of the gulch, with walls of granite rising on both sides of us, and above them the sloping sides of the canon half a mile in hight, with a descent of more than forty-five degrees, and cov- ered with immense pine forests to the very summit. The roar- ing brook, now beside, now far below us, and again under our wagon-wheels, seems to be singing of the snowy hights that form its source ; and at every place where a short level or natural dam of rock forms a pool, the shining mountain trout are to be seen in numbers through the clear fluid, though its temperature is but little above that of ice-w r ater, which indeed it is at its source a few miles above. A\ r e find Bullion City a straggling row of houses along the one street, which inclines some thirty degrees towards the bed SEVIER. 149 of the stream. Miners, particularly in new districts, are always delighted to see a journalist; I was warmly welcomed, made free of the hospitality of the most pretentious cabin in the place, and spent three days looking at the mines. Then, for the first time, I became familiar with those mysterious terms of the mining language : " lodes," " croppings," " wall-rock," " foot and hang- ing wall," "dips," "spurs," "angles," "variations," and "sinu- osities." At the end of three days I concluded that I knew all of the science which was of any particular value, and proceeded to write an authoritative report on the Sevier Mines. Two years afterwards, at the end of three months' hard travel, and parti- cularly hard study of shafts, tunnel, etc., I concluded that my education for a " mining expert" had just begun, and was quite likely never to be finished. I discovered that there was about the same difference between any two districts as between any two languages the student may acquire > while certain general principles pervade all, the. details are radically different. I discovered, after Utah began to be a mining country, that the position of mining reporter is one of exceeding liability to mis- takes, and taken all in all, certainly, the most thankless, unpro- fitable But I anticipate. To resume. Sevier ought to have been a rich and well developed mining region. Of that I am still convinced. But it was too far from the railroad ; the characteristic of the region was large bodies of low grade ore too low grade to reward transportation to a great distance the original locators were too poor to get in mills and machinery, and capitalists then had no faith in Utah mines. My sanguine predictions for the region were singularly falsified ; it was the last district in Utah to be developed. My friend and host, Mr. Jacob Hess, held on till the last, and when the district did "come out," had the satisfaction of retiring with a comfortable fortune. After a delightful sojourn in southern Utah, I returned to my editorial labors, a new man physically. I have since traversed the Great Basin in many different ways, and to avoid vain repe- tition append a few facts which the reader may refer to or avoid at leisure. 150 A HARD COUNTRY. The Basin contains nearly one half of Utah, all of Nevada, a large portion of southeastern California, and small sections of Idaho, Oregon, and Wyoming. In this strange region all na- ture seems to be reversed : a river is bigger at the head or middle than at the mouth, where it has any mouth ; the lakes have no outlet to the ocean, though receiving large streams ; timber grows only on the mountains, all the interior plains being bare ; about one-eighth the quantity of rain falls as in the eastern States, and possibly one acre in fifty is fit for cultivation. The rest consists of alkali beds, salt plains, rocky flats, barren mountains, bitter pools and brackish marshes, extinct volcanoes, lava beds, and " dry rivers," with occasional patches of bunch- grass the last rendering perhaps one-third of the Basin of some value for grazing. Geographically it is divided into a number of smaller basins, each with a water system of its own, that draining into Great Salt Lake being the largest. The only land fit for cultivation is found along the base of the highest mountains, where melting snow furnishes some moisture throughout the dry season ; or in narrow strips of valley along the streams, where irrigation is practicable. Even of the fertile land, not more than one- third can be reclaimed without a most expensive system of irrigation. In Utah the Mormons have nearly exhausted the valleys which can be cultivated by the common mode; agriculture can only be extended further by more scientific engineering, carrying out canals from the heads of the larger streams upon higher plateaus. In this manner they might reclaim the great plateau west of Bear River, that west of the Jordan and perhaps three or four others. That territory has about reached the limit of its farming population, except some such plan be adopted. Nevada, with 81,539 square miles, has about as much good land as three average counties in Ohio. But where the land is fit and irrigation practicable, the yield is immense. Wheat averaged last year in Utah, twenty bushels per acre; oats, barley and potatoes are produced in abundance; a little Indian corn is raised, but the climate is not favorable; peaches and apples may be counted on every year, and nearly DEATH VALLEY. 151 all the fruits and vegetables of the temperate zone yield boun- teously. Politically the Great Basin ought to be all included in one State. It would then have about population enough for one Representative in Congress, which neither of its divisions will have for the next twenty years, unless the number of members is increased every decade ; for the country at large is increasing in population as fast, if not faster, than either Nevada or Utah. The proposed State would be a mining commonwealth, w r hose laws would apply equally. Mormonism out of the way, its people would be homogeneous, with interests substantially the same in every section, and with the railroads already done and in a fair way for completion communication would be easy, as the population is located only around the edges, leaving the cen- ter uninhabited. The Mormons are much praised for what they have done in Utah ; but it seems to me a people who were so absurd as to settle in such a country, when empires of good land were beg- ging for inhabitants, have too little judgment to be relied on for anything. We can scarcely respect the general intellect of a man who squats in a mud-hole, though we may wonder at his energy in getting out. As we go towards the south west all cultivable land disappears. The " Great Desert" of Nevada and Utah covers some 30,000 square miles, and is succeeded by the sunken deserts which ex- tend down to the Colorado. Most notable among these is Death Valley, so called from the loss of an emigrant train, of which the following account is given : " It is said to be lower than the level of the sea, and wholly destitute of water. The valley is some fifty miles long by thirty in breadth, and save at two points it is wholly encircled by mountains, up whose steep sides it is impossible for any but ex- pert climbers to ascend. It is devoid of vegetation, and shadow of bird or beast never darkens its white, glaring sand. In the early days trains of emigrants bound for California passed, under the direction of guides, to the south of Death Valley, by what is known as the old ' Mormon road.' In the year 1850, a 152 APPEARANCE OF THE DEAD. large train with some three hundred and fifty emigrants, mostly from Illinois and Missouri, came south from Salt Lake, guided by a Mormon. When near Death Valley a dissension broke out in a part of the train, and twenty-one families appointed one of their number a leader and broke off from the main party. The leader determined to turn due west; so with the people and wagons and flocks, he traveled for three days, and then de- scended into the broad valley whose treacherous mirage prom- ised water. They reached the center, but only the white, glar- ing sand, bounded by the scorched peaks, met their gaze on every hand. Around the valley they wandered, and one by one the men died, and the panting flocks stretched themselves in death under the hot sun. Then the children crying for water, died at their mothers' breasts, and with swollen tongues and burning vitals, the mothers followed. Wagon after wagon was abandoned, and strong men tottered, and raved and died. After a week's wandering, a dozen survivors found some water in the hollow of a rock in the mountains. It lasted but a short time, when all perished but two, who, through some miraculous means, got out of the valley, and followed the trail of their for- mer companions. Eighty seven persons, with hundreds of ani- mals, perished in this fearful place, and since then, the name of Death Valley has been applied to it. Mr. Spears says when he visited it after the lapse of eighteen years, he found the wagons still complete, iron works and tires bright, and the shriveled skeletons lying in many places side by side." CHAPTER IX. THROUGH NEVADA. Out of a place A wanderer again Tired of Utah Westward Promontory- Salty district Queer calculations Down the Humboldt Elko White Pine " John Chinamen "Humboldt Canon Desert Reese River" Sinks " Morning at Truckee Beauty of the Sierras Eureka ! Donner and Bigler Lakes Western Slope" Forty miles of snow sheds " Mining towns Cape Horn Sublime scenery Scientific engineering Swiftly downward Scenery of the Pacific slope Out upon the plain The California autumn Suburbs of Sacramento. RETURNED from Seyier to Corinne to find the affairs of the Reporter in a condition of beautiful uncertainty. Both my partners had previously sold out to a new man, who had, in my brief absence, quietly installed another editor, without the little formality of consulting me. The " Josephite " Mormons were just then gaining a little ground in Utah, and it was proposed to make the paper a sort of "Josephite organ," which did not at all suit me. After ten days of fruitless effort to compromise our views, I gave up the contest, put my share of the concern " on sale," and was out of employment. There remained nothing for me but the uncertain chances of travel, so I renewed my determination of the pre- vious year and started westward. Utah is a favorite place for the curious, but one grows tired even of Utah, with all its curiosities of nature and religion ; its hot springs and hotter passions; its pure air and water and impure ethics; its lofty mountains and low conceptions of human nature ; its social perversions, blood-mixtures, ignorance and priestcraft. All these charms could not always interest, and on the afternoon of September 23d, 1869, I took the train westward, determined to see how the tide of human life moved on 153 354 SALINE BAYOUS. " 'Mid sage-brush in Nevada State, Where silver-miners congregate." Reaching Promontory, still the junction of Union and Cen- tral, by dark, I was surprised, not very agreeably, to find that my fame had preceded me. All the " sports'" seemed to know me at sight, which I could not account for till a friend handed me an old copy of the Cincinnati Commercial, and therein I saw my former letter, containing a description by no means flattering of this same "Robbers' Roost/' and a partial expose of the little games practised here. But one copy had reached the place, and that had been handed around and read as long as it would hold together, causing a dangerous mixture of wrath and mirthfulness. An old wonfe-dealer, whose acquaintance I had made at Benton the previous year, soon hastened to take me by the hand with many compliments : " Capital, sir, capital ! Almost equal to Mark Twain; good burlesque; much pleased with your account of how we roped the old Californians. Now then, as long as you stay here, stick by me, and you shan't be hurt." I availed myself of his kind offer, but found it conve- nient to go west on the first train. We change here to the plainer cars of the Central Pacific, and a down grade of fifty miles brings us to Indian Creek, and Kelton Station, at the northwest corner of the lake, and in a valley of alkali flats and salt beds of indescribable barrenness. The town of Kelton will certainly never spoil for want of salt. The spring rise of the lake covers all the adjacent low lands, and retiring during the dry season, leaves thousands of acres crusted with salt, and here and there a little pond with deposits of the pure crystal a foot in depth. One enterprising firm proposes to dam the mouth of a long bayou near, and place a windmill on the lake shore, with force sufficient to keep the pond thus created full all summer; the evaporation would be continuous and rapid, making, in one season, half a million tons of salt. The lake has an average width of forty, and length of ninety miles ; in the center it is forty feet in depth, the borders shelving gradually, and the entire body will average 18 per cent, of salt, or a little over one gallon in six of the 155 156 "CROCKER'S PETS." fluid. From these figures it is estimated that the entire body contains five billion tons of salt. Rather a big estimate, but probably it would take that much to sweeten the kingdom of Brigham. Westward from the Promontory we find California work and ideas, pay in coin, and encounter everywhere the Chinese, with their singular dresses of silk and linen, their chip hats, rice feed, and cheap labor. " Crocker's pets," as they were then styled on the Central, worked for thirty-one dollars per month and boarded themselves, which amounted to an effectual em- bargo on white laborers wherever they came into competition. Of course there was furious opposition, " prejudice against color," and jealousy about "our proud Caucasian blood," and the old-time talk about the freed men was repeated over and over again, without the merit of variation. Naturally enough, the politicians are deeply interested, and inquiring earnestly, "What shall we do with them?" It never seems to occur to these inquirers, as it did not in the case of the free negroes in the North, that the objects of their solicitude are doing quite well without their interference. It appeared to me somewhat ridiculous that those who took such strong ground against enfranchising the negroes because they were " lazy, improvident, and worthless," were just as savage against the Chinese for exactly the opposite reasons: that they are so patient, temperate, laborious, and saving, that they can work cheaper and supplant white men. I stopped for a few days' observation at the new, enterprising and furiously speculative town of Elko, situated in the best part the only good part of the Humboldt Valley, and the point of departure for the White Pine mines and other newly discovered districts. With its enormous freighting business to the mines of Eastern Nevada, Elko has better chances for a continued existence than most of the "mushroom towns" on the Pacific Railway. I found it a pretentious and lively city. Most of the business men were " Californiaized Jews," an improved variety of the race. All transactions are on a gold basis. Greenbacks w r ere then taken from " pilgrims," and A BIG DIGGER. 157 under protest, at seventy-five cents on the dollar, not following the fluctuations of the gold-room except at long intervals. The climate is a combination of hot sun and cold winds, with occa- sional wind-storms and frightful clouds of alkali dust rather disagreeable much of the time. The stages from White Pine came in loaded heavily every day, making an agreeable liveli- ness and change of population ; and from ten to forty tons of freight went on to the same place by the long mule trains, . making an equal liveliness in business circles. To all business intents, Elko was a White Pine town. White Pine, the great sensation of Nevada, was discovered in 1865, by a band of " prospectors " from Austin. After a weary journey over the barren mountains of Eastern Nevada, they came upon the first " indications 7 ' at what is now known as the Piute District. Not satisfied with these they descended from Diamond Range into the present Mohawk Cailon, where they came upon the first "float" now so celebrated. Returning to camp one evening from a w r eary hunt, they came upon a greasy Piute smelling around their meat-sacks, aud thrusting his filthy fingers into their pot of beans. With kicks and curses they drove away the aborigine, but next morning he returned hold- ing in his hand a piece of green-tinged rock, on which their practised eyes detected "horn silver." They were upon him at once with questions as to where he got it. " Heap hungry me like um beans," was the diplomatic reply in the best Eng- lish he could command. No kicks or curses, no driving out now. The best in the camp was at his command, and when gorged to repletion, probably for the first time in his life, the Digger led them to the spot where he obtained his specimen the place now famous as the original Hidden Treasure Lode. The photograph of that Indian now has an extensive sale in the towns of White Pine, and he may be said to have achieved immortality. Strangely enough White Pine remained almost unknown fora year or two after the discovery. October 10th, 1865, the pioneers organized the mining district, which they named from the forests of scrubby white pine which cover most of the hills. The White 158 RESTLESS MINERS. Pine range extends due north and south for twelve miles, with an average altitude of nine thousand feet; the summers are rendered disagreeable by storms of wind and dust, and for five months of winter the cold is excessive. There, as in most parts of Nevada, a man with an umbrella is hailed as a "pilgrim" just from the East ; for in the summer it rarely rains, and when it does, an umbrella would be torn to ribands in five minutes. Nevertheless, White Pine became the goal of all who desired to be suddenly rich. The "rush" began early in 1868; by the opening of 1870, fifty quartz-mills were in operation, and the county numbered twenty thousand inhabitants. The miner is the most restless of men except, perhaps, the sailor. In a poor camp he longs for a good one; in a good one he longs for a better. "With steady work, at six or seven dollars a day profit, he will drop his pick at a moment's notice to fol- low a new "excitement." Notwithstanding all the enormous fortunes made at White Pine, I met dozens every day who were cursing the place and their luck in it. Eberhardt, the richest location, is synonymous with Eldorado ; but for one Eberhardt there were ten thousand "locations" that never "paid grub wages." It is the history of all very rich mining districts ; people will draw too largely on the future, and the wealth of Potosi would not have averted the ruin of those who specu- lated too deeply and rashly. Leaving the fast town of Elko from Omaha 1305 miles, from Sacramento 496, above sea-level 5092 feet on the morn- ing of September 30th, we moved west-southwest and down the Humboldt. The scenery is not inspiring. The only view of any gran- deur is at Humboldt Canon, now better known as the Palisades, a wild gorge through which the river has forced its way in some far distant geologic age, and where the railroad track lies along the base of a perpendicular rock many hundred feet in hight. Far below the excavated track the waters of the Humboldt foam over the uneven bottom of a narrow channel, obstructed in many places by the immense rocks, which have fallen from the cliff. The lack of colors in the stone prevents that singular GINAST1CUTIS. 159 ifl HUMBOLDT PALISADES. variety which is the charrn of Echo and Weber Cafions, but the cold unchanging grey imparts a wild and gloomy beauty instead. On the south side of the canon the Devil's Peak rises fifteen hundred feet directly above the river. In a cleft near the top is a singular looking mass of sticks and long roots, just visible from below, which those who have examined it aver to be a mammoth bird's nest, strongly constructed of willows and rushes, which still endure the wear of the elements though abandoned long ago. If indeed a nest, it must have been in- habited in an age of birds larger than the condor or any exist- ing species. A fellow-traveler suggested that the occupant was cotemporary with the Hibernian fowl, generally denominated the " Ginasticutis." In the old days of crossing the continent the emigrants could not drive through this canon ; so left it at a side cafion some miles above, and toiled a wearisome way over the mountains, seeking the valley again by the first practicable route below. 160 A DRY STATE. This brought them down to Gravelly Ford, one of the few places where grass was rich and abundant; and here emigrant companies often remained several weeks to rest and recruit their stock. The Shoshonee Indians also knew the place well, and many a fight with them has occurred here ; sometimes, too, it is whispered, with " painted Mormons," caused in both cases by a conflict of opinion in regard to the ownership of stock. Thence down the long, shallow Humboldt there is little to be seen but the same dreary and unvarying wastes, relieved but rarely by patches of bunch grass or sagebrush. Sometimes a green plat appears in a depression of the valley, or an occa- sional strip of meadow land near the river; north and south" of us are continuous lines of hard, bleak and forbidding moun- tain peaks. Late in the day we reach the opening of Reese River Valley, forming a break in the line of hills south of the Humboldt. Reese River rises away in Southern Nevada, and after running two hundred miles northward, sometimes almost disappearing, and again, when swollen by mountain streams in some parts of its course, taking almost respectable rank as a river, it finally enters the open plain and forms a "sink" before reaching the Humboldt. In this word "sink" the Western man embodies an empirical explanation of the disap- pearance of the water ; but elemental action and reaction are necessarily equal, whether in an enclosed basin or on the entire earth's surface, and the water really goes upward instead of downward. Eastern readers may wonder that all the rivers of Nevada " run to nothing," but a little experience in the State would explain the matter. If the Ohio were turned into the northeast corner of the Great Basin, not a drop of it would ever reach the Colorado at least above ground. The thirsty alkali soil, hot sun and drying air would exhaust it before it could traverse the State. Hot springs are found at various places along the Humboldt; at Elko, Cluro, or Hot Spring Valley, Golconda, and other places ; all of which are reported " highly medicinal " by those who own town lots in the vicinity I suppose, as I never heard of any chemical analysis. Of the towns along the route little DRY NEVADA. 161 ON THE TRUCKEE C. P. R. R. need be said. Carlin, Argenta, Winnemucca, and several others have simply the history of Union Pacific towns over again : a roaring, rattling period of boisterous life, with about an equal mixture of business and pleasure, as long as it was the terminus, followed by a sudden decay when the road moved on, left each in a state of half-hopefulness, waiting for mines to be discovered in the vicinity, or " something to turn up." At dusk we turn straight west, crossing for the last time the noted Humboldt, which has been decreasing for a hundred miles, and is now shrunk to a mere slough, meandering sluggishly to the southward, where a few miles further on, it has just enough vitality left to enter the "sink/' and then exit the Humboldt. There we enter upon the Great Nevada Desert horror of early 11 162 TIMBER AGAIN. PLACER MINING. Miners shovel earth, containing gold dust, into a flume the earth is washed away and the gold settles to the bottom. emigrants which greedily swallows the little moisture of creeks, rivers and clouds, but yields nothing in return. In it and on its borders are Pyramid, Humboldt, Carson, Winnenmcca, and Mud Lakes; its area includes all the Central Basin of Nevada, and in every part are found evidences of recent volcanic action. But sleep intervened, till daylight brought to view the wild scenery of the Sierras, upon which we enter along the course of the foaming Truckee, and soon after passing Verdi Station, at an elevation of five thousand feet, we cross the dividing line, and shout EUREKA, for we are in Eldorado, the Golden State California. Crossing the Truckee we take an additional locomotive and enter upon the ascent of the Sierras. The first large curve up the mountain side brings us above Donner Lake, with a fine view of it ; and soon after we are almost over Lake Bigler. A GRAND SCENERY. 163 CAPE HORN C. P. R. R. little farther brings us to Summit Station, highest point on the Central Pacific, 7042 feet above sea-level, 1669 miles from Qmahp, and 105 from Sacramento. We enter now upon the western slope, with its steep descent, and with the brakes "set up " and very little steam, we still rush along at a fearful rate, at one place running twenty-five miles in thirty minutes, with- out an ounce of steam. Forty miles of snow sheds have been erected along this part of the line at a cost of a million and a half of dollars ; to the great assurance of winter passage, but to an equal hindrance of our enjoyment of the view. Running out upon a more gentle grade we pass in rapid suc- cession Dutch Flat, Little York, You Bet, and Red Dog, all old mining towns, the largest still containing three thousand inhabitants. All along the road we see mile after mile of flumes running in every direction down the ridges, and carrying large streams to be used in hydraulic mining below, and in places pass hundreds of acres of "old dirt," which has been washed out and abandoned. But the feature of greatest interest, mm . 164 A HIGHWAY. 165 next to the mountains themselves, is the tall timber, everywhere covering the slopes and crests to the very summit. To one just from the treeless plains of Nevada and Utah the sight is de- lightful, and like an invalid from the lumber districts of Maine who lately passed this way, one feels to exclaim, " Thank the Lord, I smell pitch once more." The finest view is at Cape Horn, but the sight is not good for nervous people. An awful chasm, at first apparently right before us, and then but a little to the left, opens directly across the range ; and standing on the steps of the car, it seems as if the train were rushing headlong into it. The first view allows the sight to pierce a thousand feet, almost straight downward to the green bottom, where the trees shrink to mere shrubs, and the Chinamen working at the lumber seem like pigmies; a little further down the gorge the wagon bridge, hundreds of feet above the bottom, appears like a faint white band, and still fur- ther the sight is lost in a blue mist. The railroad track is ex- cavated along the sides and around the head of this gorge, where in aboriginal days the Indians had not even a foot-path, as the first descent from the head of the chasm is six hundred feet, nearly perpendicular. When the road-bed was constructed, the men who made the first excavation were secured by ropes let down from a higher point. , Coming out of this wild scenery into a region where settle- ments begin to thicken, and gardens, orchards, and cultivated fields appear, we pass Colfax, Clipper Gap, Auburn, New Cas- tle, Rocklin, and Junction. The climate changes rapidly; in place of the gray-brown vegetation of the Basin, we see the bright yellow grass and flowers of the California autumn, and the red branches and pale green leaves of the manzanita. By noon the air is quite warm. Down at last on the California side of the Sierras we emerge from the foot-hills upon a rather level plain, dotted with clumps of trees, and more rarely a cul- tivated field. We seem in a new world ; everything has a more southern or tropical appearance. The grass is quite yellow, in places with a coppery hue, cured, dried up, as if the surface had been uni- 166 CALIFORNIA PLAINS. formly scorched over. But this is the " dry season." During winter and spring this plain is . green with rich grass ; as the season advances the verdure dries upon the ground, and the Californian's season of short pasture comes, not in the winter, but in the late summer and fall. The soil is rather sandy. The little bayous and streams appear to have dried up many weeks ago, and the dust is quite annoying. When this dry, parched region has begun to grow monoto- nous, a fresh accession of green indicates that we are on marsh land. Soon after we run upon a long trestle work, then pass the bridge over American River, and enter upon a beautiful course between great vineyards, and amid the semi-tropical vege- tation, luxurious gardens and well-watered grass plats, which adorn the suburbs of the State Capital. INTERIOR OF PALACE-CAR ON CENTRAL PACIFIC. CHAPTER X. AFOOT IN CALIFORNIA. New Spain Poetry and fact Saxon and Spaniard Cavalier and Pioneer Our Heroic Age The American Iliad Sacramento Yolo county ''Titles" Chinese California Central R. R. Ague High and Low Water-marks Chinese and Chinese labor Acclimating sickness Davisville Sericulture Warner's Vineyard The land of grapes Pears, apples, and figs Up Putah Creek Drouth and dust The rainy season at hand Fruit farms near the coast range Ranches only, not homes Popular reasons therefor Agricultural items Shall we settle in rural California Chinese " Devil-drive " Mongo- lian Theology " Josh " Blowing up the Devil Ah Ching's opinion " China like Melica man ! "Off for " Frisco." his day-dreams, the Spaniard of the sixteenth century saw an Eldorado in the unknown West; a land of gold and glittering gems, of flowers and fruit, of shining sands and crystal streams, of soft air and mild skies ; where a temperate climate and fertile soil prom- ised bodily ease, and unfailing health was to be gained from fountains of youth-restoring virtue the Hesperia of ancient poets realized in the New World. For this, Narvaez, De Soto, and a host of others, sought long and traveled far, but died without the sight; nature had provided no " Islands of the blest,? even amid the soft airs of the Pacific. There was, however, an Eldorado there ; not the fabled clime which lured the imaginative Spaniard, but still a land of wealth and plenty, where industry was to find a bounteous reward, and enterprise build up a golden State. But not for a superstitious race, ignorant of true liberty, was this domain reserved. In the divine predestination of history this hidden wealth was to serve the puposes of freedom ; it was to aid a civilization based on individual thought and energy; to strengthen a free Republic, 167 168 A FULL-GROWN STATE. SACRAMENTO. and in the dark hour furnish the "sinews of war," in a death- struggle with slavery. For two centuries, men of Spanish extraction wandered amid the beauties of California, ignorant of her capacities and making but awkward use of the hundredth part of her surface wealth, till the fullness of time came, when enlightened freemen owned the soil, and so soon thereafter as to show a providence, her hidden wealth was made known. From that day the history of the State reads like a romance. At once, and from every part of the Great Republic, half a million of freemen came crowding to this coast; and with scarce a period of transition, without the slow, irregular growth of a territorial childhood, this commonwealth sprang, full-orbed, into Statehood, like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter. It is not at all surprising that Californians should be inclined to boast ; or that they should seem proud even of their vices. It is in the air, the clime, more than all in the history of their State. Their virtues and vices are so near akin in their origin : both spring from that riotous exuberance of nature, that prodi- gality of life both animal and vegetable, which makes existence on this coast a constant excitement. The material, too, which made California was of no common kind. The pioneers were HALF A MILLION HEROES. 169 men of extremes; they did not stop half way, either in their work or pleasures, and with the rapid changes of early days it is not surprising that dissipation and crime kept even pace with hardy enterprise, in the very recklessness of perverted energy. Of all who came to California in the various u excitements," from 1848 to 1855, in general only the most successful or the most utterly ruined, remained ; but, combined with the expe- rience of those who returned, their history makes one of the grandest chapters of our day. Time only is needed to add its bright halo, to make that our " heroic age," and those the demi- gods of our social and commercial history. Consider that twenty-five years ago the vast distance overland was alone enough to appal the ordinary mind ; add to that the broad prairies, the rugged mountains and scorched deserts, the great plains without water, the unknown character of the country, the great rivers with their fords of treacherous sands, the savage Indians, then threatening the whole route, the danger from sickness and loss of supplies, and to this all the imagina- tion could supply of unknown terrors, and it seems amazing that any considerable number of men should ever contemplate such a journey. But, despite all this, the love of gold and ad- venture led half a million men to brave all these perils. \Ve talk much of the noted men in our colonial history ; but there is scarcely a township in the United States but has one or more men who have traveled more miles, seen more of nature and adventure, risked greater danger and undergone more toil and hardship, than did the famous Captain John Smith in settling Virginia. Where is the Homer who shall sing the American Iliad of the half million heroes who attacked and conquered the wild obstructions of nature ; or the Odyssey of the re- turning brave, who retraced their steps for the most part with wounds and glory for their pay ? The Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo made California ours in October, 1848. A few weeks before, a laborer named Marshal picked up the first piece of gold in the almost unknown terri- tory. To-day we enter a rich and powerful State by the greatest railway in the world. SACRAMENTO VALLEY. 171 I remained a week in Sacramento, which I found lively and beautiful ; but the peculiar condition of the pocket-nerve ren- dered it insalubrious as a continued residence for me. Besides, the towns could give me but little idea of the natural wealth of the State, though the towns only have been described by the press, and in the accounts of most travelers San Francisco is California. So on the morning of October 12th, knapsack in hand, I started to see the rural districts. Crossing the Sacramento to the little town of Washington, in Yolo County, then the terminus of the California Central Rail- road, I followed the track of that road for ten miles as the best way to get through the " tule lands." These constitute a tract nearly ten miles wide, overflowed during the winter and spring, and till late in summer intersected by almost impassable sloughs. Tule is the Spanish or Indian name of a coarse reed which covers the entire tract, green during winter and spring, but now dry as tinder, and furnishing fuel for extended fires. Far down among the reeds, which often exceeded ten feet in hight, I saw cattle hunting for scattering clumps of grass which still had a little shade of green in the moisture preserved by the tules. Beyond this tract, the road emerges into a vast plain, overflowed for many miles out in winter, but now dry and dusty, and covered with coarse grass of a yellowish brown color, which looks to the Eastern eye as if every particle of nutriment were burnt out of it. Eight miles from Sacramento I rested at the Tule House. The previous winter a good-sized steamer ran out every day to this hotel, and tied up to the porch of the upper story, their water privileges being uncommonly good for four months in the year. Many and various are the schemes proposed to reclaim and utilize this overflow tract, extending some ten miles out from the river. The one most favorably received is, to cut an immense canal directly across the big bend of the Sacramento from near Marysville to the head of Suisun Bay, which, ac- cording to the engineers, would leave the land dry two months earlier in the spring. The soil is ten feet in depth, formed by deposits from the annual overflows ; and the advocates of 172 MA LA RIOUS COITNTR Y, GEYSERS, PLUTON RIVER, CALIFORNIA. rice culture here claim that it would support "five head of Chinamen to the acre." At present it is prolific of death rather than life, and at the first place I stopped, I was painfully reminded of the Wabash "bottoms," by finding the whole family suffering from ague. This was contrary to all I had heard of California, but I found all the country near this level tract abundant in bilious diseases. The inhabitants testify that, near the foothills, it was formerly healthy, but sickness was caused by the system of mining : " The water is used over and over again ; run into different reservoirs and left to settle, and when one fills up, a new one's made, and t'other left bare to the hot sun." Such is the local diagnosis, and I may add that I never visited any part of America where the inhabitants were not confident " it would be the healthiest place in the State, if" so and so were not the case. At one point I found the railroad running on trestle-work for CHINAMEN. 173 "NO SAHVEY. a mile, over a marsh filled with water four months ago, but now dry as the hot rays of a California sun, from six months of cloudless sky, could make it. Where a good sized steamer might have run last January is now a bed of dust, whence the lightest winds raises stifling clouds. A little green grass is occasionally seen in the shade of the tules, and a few thrifty shrubs indicate moisture beneath. After a year's experience it has been found necessary to raise the whole road-bed four feet. In this work I encountered many gangs of Chinese, with their wicker- work basket-shaped hats, stolid, impassive air, and universal no sahvey (" don't understand ") to every question. To me they all looked alike, the same size, and seemed to have been cast in the same mould. It hardly seemed possible that I could get well-acquainted with one individual. But their Yankee over- seers tell me this is "all a notion at first sight ; " that they see as much difference as among whites, and when called upon to identify one under oath, which is often the case, do so without difficulty. To me they appear to work very slowly, feebly 174 CALIFORNIA SILK. even ; but the overseers credit them with great steadiness, and aver that one does as much in a day as an average Irishman. They use no coffee and very little water, making tea their regu- lar beverage, both at meals and work. Those employed on this road receive twenty -eight dollars a month, boarding themselves and resting Sundays. It costs them a dollar and a half each per week to live. They have but two holidays, which they observe with great festivity : the Chinese New Year's, occurring either in January or February, as their year contains thirteen lunar months; and the "Devil- drive," which takes place in October. Chinese labor is only relatively cheap : in California it costs but half that of white laborers, or even less ; but in the Eastern States the difference is too little to furnish just grounds to that class who manifest so much horror about "an invasion of barbarous Mongolians/' My haste to reach the hills was moderated by sudden sick- ness, resulting from too free use of water from the shallow wells of the valley, and I learned by painful experience that new- comers must get acclimated in California as well as in the South. Taking a short rest at Davisville, fifteen miles from Sacramento, I was much interested in a Cocoonery just established there. A large field had been planted in mulberry trees ; a factory large enough to employ a hundred hands was being erected, and the experiment is now in active and favorable operation. Sericul- ture will, I have no doubt, constitute one of the leading interests of California, as capable men are entering upon it at several places, and there can scarcely be a doubt that the climate and soil are well adapted thereto. The want of cheap labor has been the great hindrance ; and this brings us again to the Chinese, who will probably soon become silk manufacturers here as they are at home. I also spent half a day in the noted vineyard of Fred. War- ner, Esq., which contains a hundred acres of grapevines, yield- ing several thousand gallons of wine yearly. The " picking season" was over, but there were still enough on the vines to furnish a plentiful repast. Many thousand bunches had dried upon the stem and tasted more like raisins than grapes, unless TROPICAL FRUITS. 175 they happened to be of the more acid Sonoma variety, which had a strong, fiery taste. The capacity of this soil and climate for grapes is indeed wonderful ; every variety from the extreme north to the tropics seems to find here a congenial location, a second native country, so to speak, where they attain a size and fineness of flavor almost incredible. In this vineyard I noted particularly a kind called the Black Hamburg, far sweeter than the variety of that name in Indiana, which seemed to me the perfection of grapes. The Californians also boast much of their apples, but I am not so well pleased with them; they seem to me overgrown, lacking in piquancy, cloying and " filling " to an extreme, and what we, when boys, used to call " pethy." From the vineyard we wandered through a large orchard, noting on the way a heavy growth of large yellow pears, which to my taste partook of the same fault as the apples ; and thence into a plantation of fig trees, with broad dark green leaves and purple fruit, of which we found enough of the last crop to satisfy a moderate appetite. When first gathered, figs are almost black, but when washed and dried they turn a pale yellow color the fig of commerce. The trees never bloom ; the heavy leaves are of one color nearly all the year, and the fruit starts like a small knob just below the joining of the foliage. Those on the south side of the tree are, in this latitude, generally best, as they require for protection both heat and shade. They are growing for ten months in the year, sometimes starting even in the coldest weather. The first crop ripens by the first or middle of July, and the second early in September. There is seldom a period of over two weeks be- tween the crops, and generally a few are ripe on the tree at any time. Sometimes enough ripen late in October to constitute a third crop. When gathered from the tree the fig is excessively sweet and rather juicy, full of soft red seeds ; perhaps not quite so cloying as the shop fig, but a very few satisfy. As I wan- dered through the brilliant maze of red and yellow flowers, and tasted these tropical fruits, it seemed impossible we could be in the same latitude as my home in Indiana, where I had enjoyed sleighing and skating for two months in the year. 176 THE DRY SEASON. From Davisville I travel up Putah Creek, all day through a rich level country, covered now with the rich haze of autumn, the air seeming full of red dust and smoke; pass occasionally clumps of trees and very inferior looking farm houses, seldom painted or well-finished ; traverse mile after mile of continuous wheat fields, with stubble still bright though the crop was har- vested four months ago, and find the same dry, dusty grassless look over the whole landscape. The entire valley is devoted to the growth of wheat and barley, with the exception of occasional stock-ranches which also appear devoid of life at this season, with the same old look, and half-Southern, half-Spanish air of shiftless discomfort. There is a painful monotony about the road, which runs unfenced through a constant succession of wheat fields, where the dust has blown in rifts till the surface appears to have been plowed again. But this is the worst and last of the dry season. A few weeks hence copious showers will drench this dusty plain, and a rich velvety coloring will transform the landscape; a few weeks more and the bright green of the " grow- ing season " will follow, and by the first of February, rural California will present a delightful and verdant appearance. Now my prevailing impression is one of drought: fields parched and cracked open, dust in great heaps among the dried vegetation, grass withered and burnt, while the largest creeks are entirely dried up or shrunk to mere rivulets, pursuing their sluggish and doubtful course away down at the bottom of deep gulches which in winter and spring are filled by immense tor- rents. At night the horizon is lighted up by fires raging in the stubble on the high lands or among the tulc-s lower down, and by day the sun is obscured and distant objects hidden by the smoke or light haze, which corresponds to our eastern Indian summer and is here the immediate precursor of the first rain. Reaching the foothills of the Coast Range I find an agreeable change among the fruit farms ; and after a few days 7 rest there, I incline to the opinion that most of the beauty of country life in this State, as poets have described it, is to be found in the fruit regions. The grain districts are certainly far from lovely at this season. Grass does not grow about the yards unless irri- AGRICULTURE. 177 gated occasionally, and not one family in twenty has a windmill or other arrangements for irrigation. The people seem to be aware of these deficiencies and are often profuse in reasons there- for : " The country is new, and we hav Vt all got our land paid for yet; many got 'grant land/ and got -too much, and are bothered to pay for it ; grass don't start up here like it does in the States ; it has to be watered and we're not fixed with pumps yet ; we want to make some money first, and after awhile when we can build larger houses it will be time to fix up," etc., etc. Another class fall back on this general formula : "If people would only economize here like they do in the States, they'd get rich mighty fast; but they don't economize, in fact, they can't; California's the best place in the world, splendid place, long's you've got plenty o' money; but it's the worst country in the world if you're out o' money." Which opinion I endorse with qualifications, and modestly add : The subscriber never found a good country in which to be " out o' money," having tried it often. As Yolo is an exclusively agricultural county, and a fair specimen of rural California, the prospective emigrant may be interested in a few plain figures, which I copied from the reports at Woodland county seat -which will enable him to make up his mind better than from any opinion of my own. Yolo has a long irregular shape, sixty miles from northeast to southwest, with an average width of fifteen miles. The eastern half is almost a dead level ; next west of that is a narrow strip of undulating prairie, rising gradually to the foothills of the Coast Range. The level strip consists of some five miles oftule tract and about as much more grain land. Cotton wood, syca- more and willow grow sparsely along the water courses, and oak and pine on the foothills. My figures are for the year 1866, the last obtainable, when 100,000 acres were under cultivation. These produced 867,590 bushels of wheat, raised on 26,408 acres; 70,000 bushels of oats, 1250 bushels of rye, 16,120 bush- els of Indian corn, 150 bushels of buckwheat, 200 bushels of peas, 4000 bushels of castor beans, 4042 bushels of peanuts, be- sides 1500 pounds of tobacco and 6 pounds of silk cocoons the 12 178 CHANCES FOB SETTLERS. last two industries being just established. The same year were produced 97,020 pounds of butter, 7040 pounds of cheese, 162,680 pounds of wool, and 26,244 pounds of honey, with small quantities of hay, potatoes, beets and onions. The pomo- logicai report gives the number of fruit trees : apple 29,430, peach 31,350, pear 12,148 fig trees not counted and a few lemon, orange and olive trees, were more as an experiment than otherwise. There were also a hundred thousand grapevines in the county, and 18,637 gallons of wine and 5687 of brandy were made from the vintage of that year. Of live stock there were 59,166 sheep, 14,644 hogs, 4480 horses, 1976 mules, 2492 cows and 4604 beef cattle. The population of the county was twelve thousand, which shows a good average of individual wealth. The price of land I found to be from one-third to one- half what it is in the old farming districts of Indiana. The climate for the first six months in the year I record my later experience in California is doubtless the finest in the world. For the last four, it is perhaps the worst two months of ter- rible dust, followed by torrents of rain and oceans of mud. The other two months are just as it happens. Sometimes July and August are delightful always so among the foothills and higher valleys ; but if a small amount of rain has fallen, or if the " later rain " has not put in an appearance, they are, in local phrase, "tolerable dry." An eastern man would pronounce them intolerably dusty. If you have average industry and intelligence and, of course, you won't be reading this book if you havVt and can get there with a thousand, or even five hundred dollars clear, you can do well far better than with the same amount in Indiana or Ohio. You ought to expect to make preparations for about six weeks of winter, but not one in twenty of the farmers do. Their stock take chances, and those which don't get through alive are merely considered " out o' luck." The country people are generally a trifle shiftless and lazy; and the probabili- ties are that when you have been there five years, you will be as shiftless and lazy as they are. With the capital above mentioned, you can get some kind of CHINATOWN. 179 IN Tin-: josii iiorsi:. a start on a stock-ranch, grain or fruit farm. But if you have no money, stay well, it don't make much difference where you are. In that case I don't know but California is as good a place as any other to fight out the battle of life on the line of hard work, but it will take all summer, and several of them. After a long "tramp" among the fruit farms, I returned to Sacramento, falling in everywhere along the road with parties of Chinamen going in to the great "Devil-drive." I made haste to reach the city in time for that performance, which took place October 18th, with imposing ceremonies. Nearly all the Chinese in Sacramento live on / street, which for ten blocks is 180 "TOP-SIDE JOSH." the same as a town in China. There were at least four thou- sand in the city on this occasion, the workmen from all the railroads being present; and with the blowing of horns, beating gongs, talking and yelling, by Mongolian courtesy called singing, and open air theatres and' bands, they made the evening lively. Nearly all the Chinese in America are Orthodox Boodhists, there being very few of the followers of Confucius, who are the fashionable infidels or philosophers of China, while the Bood- hists constitute the High Church party. They reason the matter thus: "If God good, why pray? Tend to the Devil." Hence this ceremony of driving out the latter. In company with a few whites I crowded through the mass of Mongolians to where a tobacco factory had been converted into a temporary "Josh- house." They are not at all sensitive or exclusive about their religion, and made way for us to reach the interior very good- naturedly. We found the Devil " out in the cold " a hideous black figure, easily recognized as the Evil One, set upon a pedestal just outside the door. Within were two enormous "Joshes" ten feet high, one in each corner, and over them a shelf filled with little household gods, two feet or so in length, while behind the altar the Boodhist priests and attendant boys were going through a ceremony very similar to High Mass. The Bood- hists, like the Mormons, believe in a regular gradation of gods, rising one above another to the great head god, whom the Mor- mons call Eloheim, and the Chinese "Top-side Josh." Outside, booths with open front were erected, in which vari- ous plays were being performed in. choice Tartar, the view free to the crowd. This continued till midnight, when a general chorus of priests and bands announced the close of the festi- val (?), and a torch was applied to the Devil. The figure, which proved to be full of fire-crackers, " went off" in brilliant style till nothing was left apparently but the hideous head and back-bone; these then shot upward like a huge Roman ciindle, leaving a trail of blue fire, and exploded high in the air with a loud report, followed by a shower of sparks and insufferable THE DEVIL GONE UP. 181 AH CHING'S THEOLOGY. stench and that was supposed to be the last of the Devil for another year. Poor Heathen ! They have no such simple devices as horse- shoes and sieves, nailed to the stable-door, or stuck up over the bed, nor any of the civilized contrivances known to our own en- lightened rustics ; and so they trust to keep off Satan's agents with inexplicable dumb show and noise. Turning away with a feeling of relief that the Devil was gone at last, I encountered Ah Ching, our Mongolian laundry- man at the Pacific Hotel, who spoke some English, and had an intellect that was " not to be sneezed at," of whom I sought information, and received it thus : " Hallo, John, do you believe in him?" 182 " PIGEON-ENGLISH." " Oh, velley, Melica man, me believe him." " All Chinamen believe in him?" " Oh, China like Melica man. Some believe him, sahvey ; some tink him all gosh damn." And I felt that I was answered. I went next to San Francisco and remained ten days; but as the subject is a large one, I beg leave to reserve my notes upon that city, which will be found under the appro- priate heading. NOTE : The word " Jesh," or " Joss," is not Chinese, but " Pigeon-English," a language used in the ports of China. It results from speaking English with Chinese idioms, and contains also a number of new words fabricated by sailors and traders. ENTRANCE TO THE QUICKSILVER MINE OF NEW ALMADEN, CAL. CHAPTER XI. UTAH AGAIN. Elected defendant Utah law Polygamous judges Trial at Brigham City- Assault on the author Skillful surgery Rapid recovery " Write a history of the Mormons ! " Visit the East Return to Utah Political Bear River eanal scheme Author goes to Washington Miseries of a lobbyist Election of 1870 Gen. Geo. R. Maxwell Debate on polygamy Cui bono ? Mormon morals and Gentile associations. HILE I was enjoying myself amid the soft airs of the Pacific, a beautiful mess of trouble was preparing for me * n Utah. In most of the Territories it is "Your money or your life ; " but in Utah a Gentile was after my property, and the Mormons seeking my life. Be- tween them they got the first, and came very near getting the second. As I previously stated, I had originally two partners in the Reporter, both of whom sold out to one man ; and in a month he and I quarreled about the policy of the paper. Dur- ing my absence he had fixed up a case under the peculiar attach- ment laws of Utah, and by the merest accident I received a copy of the paper containing the legal notice. Taking the train at once I reached Corinne the day before the trial, which was to take place at Brigham City, the county seat, on Monday, November first. My journal was now in the regular condition of half the Rocky Mountain papers : struggle, debt, and litigation make up their chronic condition, and failure their normal end. But in this case the beauties of Utah law were to be elegantly illustrated. Here was a suit between a Gentile and an " apostate Mormon," who had to leave their own town and go before a polygamous judge, an English Mormon, living in violation alike of the laws of Congress and the codes of Moses and Ma- 183 184 hornet. For this Judge Bishop Elias Smith, of Boxeldet County is not only the husband of six wives, but two of them are his cousins, and two the daughters of his own brother. These facts are notorious in Utah ; and I am informed, though of this I am not positive, that the girls were " sealed " to their uncle by Brigham Young against the protest of their father ! From the biography of this Judge, and a few of his colleagues in Utah, the reader may understand the late telegrams to the effect that the Gentiles are looking anxiously for some action by Congress which shall lessen the power of these Probate or County Judges, and bring all important cases before the U. S. District Judges. A few weeks before, I had published a severe criticism of this Judge Smith. His "strikers" now had me at Court as defendant, in a town of twelve hundred Mormons, and only half a dozen Gentiles with me. The facts brought out on trial were so clearly in my favor that I gained the suit. About sundown I started with the crowd to pass out of the Court House, and was just stepping off the portico when I heard the words, "You're the man that wrote that lie about my father," and at the same instant received a violent blow on the back of the neck and head, which sent me upon my face on the gravel walk. I remember nothing more than a succession of blows followed by the trampling of heavy boots, and next I was being raised by my friends, covered with blood, and only not quite senseless. I was hauled seven miles to Corinne, where a medical examination showed that my collar-bone was broken in two places, my temple badly cut, and right eye injured, a section of my scalp torn off, and a few internal in- juries received. Then took place what has always appeared to me a miracle of surgery, or of the healing force of nature. Dr. J. W. Graham dressed my wounds, set my fractures, and placed me flat on my back in bed, with instructions that I must "lie just so for three weeks." But the second day thereafter I grew so nervous that he decided the confinement so long would kill me, and invented a new process. Assisted by Dr. O. D. Cass, who ceased for A HEALING AIK. 185 THE 'AUTHOR RECEIVES MORMON HOSPITALITY. the time to speculate on the "certain future greatness of Co- rinne," he constructed a perfect strait-jacket, in which I was encased ; both arms were stuck tight to my body with adhe- sive strips, my right arm below the elbow only being free, and in that stringent condition I walked about Corinne for four weeks. With all these wounds I was in bed two nights and a day; in ten days my head showed only a deep and permanent white scar, and in five weeks I was able to travel. I had heard much of the rapidity with which wounds heal in the elevated regions of the Far West, but my case seemed most extraordinary. But notwithstanding my good luck, I have no desire to try it again, though repeatedly assured by the dignitaries at Brig- ham that mine was an unusual case. 186 MORMON JUSTICE. It turned out that ray principal assailant was the son of Judge Smith. He was arrested by the city authorities (Mor- mon), taken before the mayor, and fined five dollars ! It is well known in such cases in Utah, that the fine is very seldom paid. Two years afterwards a Gentile lawyer of Salt Lake, W. R. Keithley, having been abused in the Ogden Junction, a Mor- mon journal, attacked the editor and struck him two blows with a cane, doing no particular damage. He was promptly arrested, taken before Justice Clinton, fined one hundred dol- lars, and put under bonds of four hundred to keep the peace. That is about the percentage of difference between justice to the Gentile and the Saint in Utah. But let us be candid on this subject. It is nothing more than we ought reasonably to ex- pect, when a whole community are of one religious faith, and that of a debasing kind, bound together by the strongest ties, with unanimous vote and nearly absolute political power; and if seventy-five thousand Scotch Covenanters, Primitive Metho- dists, or any sect of foreigners or people not generally educated in liberal politics, had complete possession of any Territory, I suspect they would make it uncommonly lively for dissenters. Indeed, it is evident in the West that a single town occupied entirely or generally by people of one sect, * rapidly tends to grow intolerant and absurdly exclusive. Some think, or profess to think, that all religious sects should become one. I hope it will not be in my time. For I am con- vinced that, in the present imperfect condition of man, a multi- plicity of sects, each much weaker than all the others combined, and compelled by common weakness to mutual tolerance, is our best security for civil liberty ; and the day that sees a hint at any form of religion inserted in the Constitution, marks the beginning of liberty's decline. New sects always preach the New Testament till they get into power, then jump it and go back to the Old Testament for precedents. So the Mormons, who first preached a mixture of Campbell's doctrines and Primitive Methodism, now rarely quote Christ and the Apos- tles ; their trusted exemplars are the patriarch who married his half sister, and took a "dark Egyptian" for his concubine, the ANCIENT PRECEDENTS. 187 ORSON HYDE, PRESIDENT OF THE TWELVE APOSTLES. warrior who hewed captive kings in pieces, the missionaries who exterminated the Canaanites, the priest who slaughtered idolaters, and the prophet who hewed up Agag, varied by occasional exhortations on the piety of that woman who cut off Holofernes' head, or that other who with a tent nail did tho business for Sisera, The critical may insist that this is a long sermon on a short text, but as I never got satisfaction for my pounding in Utah, I now purpose to take it out of the suffering public. I have often observed in the West the curious fact that those sects which need toleration the most, are least willing to extend it. When the Mormons were a suffering minority, their Plea for Tolera- tion would have made Locke and Milton turn in their graves for envy, or weep with sorrow that they died two hundred years ago; but when they obtained the rule of a whole Territory, they suddenly became convinced of the necessity of " putting down the enemies of God, that the sinners in Zion might be afraid." A worried dog turning on his tormentors, a mad bull 188 I TUKN AUTHOR. charging his enemies, or fierce watch-dogs tearing in pieces the wolves which come near the fold, were the models they proposed for themselves in sermons still extant. Twenty years of such power made it seem to them indeed " the rule of God's priest- hood," and to dissent was rebellion against heaven, worthy of the fate of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. No wonder, I say, that they felt impelled to sacrifice the first of us who attacked their system. The only wonder is, that some, who call themselves statesmen, should want to revive a fanatic power by giving the Mormons a State government. Such should read a few of Apostle Orson Hyde's sermons, as published in the Mormon " Journal of Discourses." I was once more fit for business. But my investments in Corinne had proved failures. The town had gone down and the paper with it. The lawsuit de- stroyed half the value that remained; I sold out for a pittance, and every dollar of it was required to pay for bone-setting and expenses of convalescence. Fifteen months had passed since I entered Utah, and I was poorer than ever "down to bed-rock and couldn't show color." Disconsolately I sauntered down the street till I met ray friend Spicer, to whom my despondency found utterance: "Judge, what the mischief shall I do?" Promptly, and with the con- viction of inspiration, came the answer : " Write a history of the Mormons ; you are the only Gentile who can do it." Now this had suggested itself to my own mind, and but one encour- aging voice was needed. I went resolutely to work, and in ten weeks had the history completed. DOMESTIC ATKD PIUTE. CORINNE. 189 About that time, fortunate- ly, the Mormons began to at- tract public attention, and I soon found a publisher. I was despondent till the last, for it seemed to me no good could come out of Utah ; but, to my surprise, the book rose with a bound to the hight of popular favor, and I soon felt the ex- quisite joys of authorship handling the dividends. With these came a sense of power, renewed confidence, and a long- ing to get back to Utah, and engage once more in the old contests. So I returned to Corinne in April, 1870. Things had changed, and were changing faster. The mining era had just begun, and the Gentile interest was in- creasing. The merchants who had fled before the face of Brigham, began to return, and it was estimated that the non- Mormon population had dou- bled in a few months. The Liberal Party had been form- ally organized ; Congress had shown a disposition to attend to the wants of the Territory, better officials had been ap- pointed, and the star of the Gentiles was once more in the ascendant. Corinne again had hopes, for 190 SENT TO WASHINGTON. the hard year of 1869 was succeeded by better times in Idaho and Montana. There never was so dull a period in the moun- tains as the eight months following the laying of the last rail. Men had to get down from mountain prices to railroad prices, and the general disappointment made business men sick and hopeless. It is a well-ascertained fact that the Far West lost both population and capital the year the railroad was completed, instead of gaining either. (Everywhere west of Omaha the railroad means, of course, the Pacific Railroad.) In 1870 there was six times as much freight shipped from Corinne to Montana and Idaho as in 1869. Everybody thought that the next year would be " even as this, and much more abundant," and speculation was more lively than ever. Corinne organized a company to irrigate a hundred thousand acres of land in Bear River Valley by one main canal, to be taken out from the rapids at the last cafion ; and the writer was sent to Washington to get the company incorporated, and secure a small grant of the land to aid in the work. As we only asked two sections per mile, and of land which the Government would not sell in a thousand years without the canal, it scarcely entered our heads to doubt immediate success. It was then I learned the miseries of a lobbyist. Said my constituents to me thus confidently : " All those men want is just to understand the necessity and reason of this thing. You understand the mode of farming in this country. Now, just go down there and explain it to 'em, and she'll go through in a week. W^hy, the modesty of the request will insure its success. And tell 'em we intend to get in here a Gentile colony of a few thousands, and you've got J em." I did not find modesty at such a remarkable premium in Washington. I might, with much better success, have asked for ten thousand sections than the sixty I did ask for. I found there about five thousand other fellows with "modest requests," and as it was my first visit to Washington, I was but poorly " heeled " for the work. I soon found, too, that a man from the Territories is of very little consequence; he has no vote for Congressman or Governor, and none for a man who has a vote MY LITTLE BILL. 191 for Senator, and consequently the political strings he can pull are decidedly limited. I found that, first of all, my bill must be approved in committee the Committee of Public Lands then it must be approved by the " committee of the other House ;" then it must be introduced, then referred, then ordered printed, then passed to a third reading, and at the end of all this labor, it would be "on the calendar to take its chances," and the real work would begin. Then some member must call it up, with unanimous consent, and if nothing else was pressing, and nobody " objected," it would come to a vote. With a recklessness born of western life I addressed myself to the task of persuading each individual member of both Houses. Obviously there was no money in the scheme ; so the newspapers couldn't call it a "job," and my arguments were at least received without suspicion. After one month's exhausting labor I got a hearing before the Senate Committee on Public Lands ; at the end of another month my bill was introduced by Senator Williams of Oregon, read by title, and ordered printed. Then said the Senator, " Go home, and wait till after the elec- tions; members then will not be so afraid of a little land grant." I returned in December. The elections had weakened the Republican party, and land grants were thought to be among the chief causes. Everybody began to " hedge " at once, and talk against all grants big or little ; the tide had turned and was setting the other way too strong to be resisted, and, as on the previous flood many unworthy schemes had gone through with the worthy, so on the present ebb, many really worthy ones were defeated. For months I danced attendance on the committees ; waited and sought interviews with members, and cooled my heels in the ante-chambers of official greatness. After two trips to Washington and five months' work, I had got the bill "on the calendar," and now it only wanted a champion to call it up. Senator Warner, of Alabama, whether from intelligent interest in the scheme, or to get rid of my importunities, I know not, twice tried to bring it forward : both times, I, from the gallery, heard the ominous " I object." Surely lobbyists are a need- NO PLACE FOR ME. "THE SENATOR is EXGAGED, SAIL" lessly abused class ; if their experience is like mine they earn all they get. No man accustomed only to associate with equals, is fit for a lobbyist. No man from a Territory can work long for any measure before Congress, and retain his self-respect. To wait an hour in an ante-chamber, then to hand your card to a negro, and be told " the Senator is engaged, Sah," and wait another hour, then enter the awful presence and ask a favor which you cannot repay with a vote, is poison to the soul of a mountaineer. Who would condescend to dance attendance on men, whom he must secretly despise, when the best land in the West costs next to nothing, and grubbing hoes but two dollars apiece? But there came a day especially appropriated to the Com- mittee on Public Lands. One after another they called up and passed the bills they had reported favorably, until but two more FATE OF A LOBBYIST. 193 remained before they reached ours; and from the gallery I list- ened eagerly and watched the clock, which marked only forty minutes to "adjournment/' The Colorado Eailvvay Bill was called ; one clause was " ob- jected to ; " a debate followed and the Senate adjourned, when ten minutes more would have sufficed for us, and I walked out feeling, like the cynical politician, that republican government was a failure, and I should like to plant a ton of powder under the rotunda, blow the Capitol to atoms, and pound the head of the Goddess of Liberty. So Corinne did not get her canal. But the next Congress she started the matter again, and having the friendship of six [Senators instead of one, at the end of the long session, they had the bill once more " on the calendar," just where I left it. Early in the session of 1825, a young man from the interior of New Jersey rode up in front of a hotel, long since destroyed, a few rods east of the Capitol, and hitched his horse. Being told he had better have the animal put up, he replied, "No, it aint worth while, I have a little claim on the Government; it's all correct, and there's no doubt about my papers, so it'll take but an hour or two." Annoyed by the quizzical smile of the landlord, he swore he would not leave Washington or unhitch his horse till that claim was allowed and ordered paid. In an obscure boarding house in Georgetown may now be seen a ven- erable gray headed man. The excavations two years since for the new block on A street, brought to light the crumbling skel- eton of a horse and fragments of iron stirrups. They told the tale of a lobbyist and his horse. I sought him out, and as I extended my hand in sympathy, a smile of hope illuminated the withered features, and he informed me he had secured the friend- ship of the Senators from Kansas and Nevada, and was confident his claim would go through next session. He would then bid Washington a tearful adieu, and return to spend a green old age in Jersey. Young men of America, let this case point an awful moral ; and keep away from Washington. From my first trip to the Capital, I returned to find Utah hot with the excitement of a political campaign, which resulted 13 194 EXPERIENCED POLYGAMISTS. in giving Gen. Geo. R. Maxwell, the Liberal candidate for Con- gress, some two thousand votes. For the rest of the season I alternately traveled in the newly-opened mines of Utah, of which journeys the results appear elsewhere, and edited the Oorinne Reporter. We had one rare episode that summer the debate on Bible polygamy between Rev. J. P. Newman and Apostle Orson Pratt. It turned entirely on the Old Testament, and always appeared to me like a huge burlesque. Why not argue the morality and expediency of circumcision, slaughtering the heathen, or any other of the forty things done by the ancient Jews? If a man once admits that that people were for our ex- ample, he involves himself in a tangle from which no logic can extricate him. There are some things that a civilized man ought to know by nature; if he does not know them, no argument you can use will ever reach down to him. He ought to know that the free, honestly sought love of one good woman is a thousand times more valuable than the constrained embraces of fifty ; and if he does not know it, why waste time in arguments which he cannot understand ? Solomon, after possessing for many years a thou- sand women, thus gives in his experience : " One man among a thousand have I found, but a woman among all these have I not found. . . . And I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets. . . . Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of thy life, of thy vanity given thee under the sun." Ecclesiastes. And Brigham Young, with two houses full of women, says in one of his sermons, "If polygamy is any harder on them (the women) than it is on the men, God help them." The general summary to my mind is, that the polygamist is truly to be pitied, having robbed himself of a pure pleasure to wallow in sensuality. But long after polygamy shall have died out, or been abolished, the other evils of Morrnonisin will affect society in Utah. The great evil which is long to trouble Utah, is the terrible effect the past has had upon the young, the legitimate result of Mormon Jesuitism. Beyond all question it has been an estab- NATURALIZATION. 195 BRIGHAM YOUNG'S RESIDENCES, SALT LAKE CITY. lished tenet of Mormonism that, where the interests of the Church were concerned, it was perfectly right to deceive the Gentile. Take naturalization for instance. Many Mormons came up at the terms of the United States District Court in 1870 and '71, and solemnly swore that they were not polyga- naists, and did not intend to become such, forswearing a prime principle of their faith, and undoubtedly committing moral per- jury, in order to become voters. They openly justify this, and here is their mode of reasoning : " If a man seeks my life, I am right to use any means otherwise unlawful to defend it. The game is true of attacks upon my liberty or personal rights ; that which would otherwise be wrong becomes right in self-defence. The Federal judges have set up an unjust rule to take away my rights as a citizen, and I am justified in any means to defeat their aim. The judge has no right to ask such a question of the Saints." Twenty years' prevalence of such principles must weaken the moral perceptions, and soon affect others who come to live among them. Some Jews and Gentiles, too, often think it necessary to descend to the same low level and fight with the same weapons ; for, if they do not, they are at a disadvantage. Hence society in general becomes demoralized. The material future of Utah is bright ; of her moral and social future I have 196 RELIGIOUS LYING IN UTAH. serious doubts. She seems destined to universal infidelity. Mormonism dies away ; no other faith takes its place ; the young Saints as soon as they grow up divide into two bodies Spirit- ualists and infidels and the Territory bids fair to become the common hunting ground of every ism suggested by a heterodox and fertile fancy. Let what may happen, the residence of the Mormons will have left in the country a general uncertainty of ideas and a laxity of moral principle which will not be effaced in less than a generation ; perhaps not even then, or until they learn by dire experience that the way of the transgressor is hard. Religious lying seems to have been reduced to a science, and religious lying is the worst of all lying. Thus it stands in Utah : the Jews lie for gain, the Gentiles from association, and the Mormons for Christ's sake. CHAPTER XII. I START AGAIN. Another misfortune and change of scene Kansas City Lawrence Early tragedies Later horrors Last great success Southward Ottawa " Don't mention it, Deacon" Franklin County Anderson Ozark Ridge Allen County lola Western enterprise Montgomery County Beautiful Mounds Cherry vale Northward A modern Methuselah Troy Ready to report. HAVE to request that the courteous reader will make a big jump, from the conclusion of the last chapter of eight months in time, and out of Utah into Kansas. As previously stated, I went to Washington in De- cember, 1870, and remained three months, as agent of the Bear River Canal Company. I returned to Corinne with a painful disease of the eyes, which I thought not serious enough to prevent a trip to the mines of Little Cotton wood. From that journey I returned to Salt Lake City with both eyes swollen almost out of my head, and for six weeks lay on my back in a darkened room, fighting off blindness. Through the combined skill of Doctors Fowler and Vollum of that place, I recovered sufficiently to reach Cincinnati, and was put under the treatment of the renowned oculist, Professor E. Williams. Having learned a little wisdom by severe experience, I did not start again till he gave me leave, which he did on the 1st of July, 1871. This time I thought I would see something of the Missouri Valley, and on the 6th of that month left St. Louis in company with a journalist companion, by the Missouri Pacific. Indiana and Illinois were, when I left them, in the eighteenth month of an almost continuous drought; but across the Mississippi, the 197 198 ANOTHER OMAHA. evidences of rain and greater fertility increased as we moved westward. At Kansas City the Missouri Pacific ceases, and the Kansas Pacific begins, though the track is continuous ; and we halted for a day's rest. If Shadrach & Co. rested in Neb's furnace, then we rested at Kansas City. The heat was simply fearful, beyond all scope of dictionary terms. I don't wonder the ancient Persians worshipped the sun : it was worth while, if one could thus soften his rays, and it almost seems to me that the moderns will return to that belief. Certainly, if I ever turn heathen, I will become a Luminarian. Kansas City is a second Omaha, lifted up and moved two hundred and fifty miles south, and set down on eleven hills, from fifty to one hundred and fifty feet high, and with bluffs cast, north, and west. It is the place where people come to scatter out the starting point and toll-house to Kansas, New Mexico and the Indian Territory, as Omaha is to the Northwest. Thus set upon a hill, with real estate on the edge, it logically follows that there is twice as much profit in lands; so, at least, the people reason, judging from the price of lots. Still, real estate men assured us there was yet a chance for moneyed men, and a few choice lots can even now be had for cash almost as cheap as in Cincinnati. The people of Kansas City all looked, to my eye, as if they were expecting something to turn up. They are nearer heaven locally than morally, for the social and unsocial evils equally abound. But they are a little ahead of Omaha in hotels. They are satisfied to " size your pile " and take quarter of it. while farther north the aim is to take half or two- thirds. That night we ran out to Lawrence, the Athens of the West, a town of romantic history, delightful to dwell in, of which, though so often described, many good, and some new, things might be said. Its history is the leading romance of Kansas. In the summer of 1849, a party of gold hunters from "away down East," borne along with the flow of that year to Califor- nia, encamped for a night near the junction of the Kaw and Wakarusa. where the level prairie of the low valley begins to give way to higher ridges and rolling plains. Intelligent men A HISTORIC CITY. 199 and lovers of the beautiful, they were enchanted with the pros- pect, and their leader vowed that if California gave him a fortune, he would some day make this spot his home. He re- turned to Massachusetts in 1853, interested his friends in Boston, and by the time Kansas was open to the whites by law, the place was already marked as the destined location of a Massachusetts colony. The Kansas-Nebraska Act became a law early in 1854, open- ing this section to settlement, and to slavery, "The direful spring Of woes unnumbered." The North, beaten in Congress, transferred the conflict to this soil, and by the time the Act received the signature of Pierce, Boston was organizing Emigrant Aid Societies, and in the first formed were several of our California emigrants. Early in '54, Mr. C. H. Branscomb, of Boston, was sent here, reported favor- ably upon this site, and erected the first " habitable dwelling." The first party, of thirty persons, arrived in August, followed by two other parties late in the fall ; a town was laid out, called after Amos Lawrence, and by winter contained a population of 200. Log, "shake," pole and sod houses then constituted Lawrence, a lone settlement of " Free State Men," forty miles from the slave border a star of hope and advancing freedom. The "Pioneer House" was "all roof and gable," consisting of long poles joined at the top like rafters, with the other ends on the ground, covered with sod, a sort of improved wigwam. It gave way next spring to the Free State Hotel, burned by Sheriff Jones ; on the same spot was erected the Eldridge House, num- ber one, destroyed by Quantrel ; then came the Eldridge House, number two, from the upper windows of which we look down upon the crossing of Massachusetts and Ohio streets, on a scene of busy commerce, in the business center of a city of twelve thousand people. We are on historic ground here. Lawrence has an ancient, a modern, and a mediaeval period. Yes, I may add, a mythical and heroic age. The city suffered four regular invasions from Missouri in its first three years. March 30, 1855, the "border 200 BORDER WARS. FIRST HOTEL IN LAWRENCE. ruffians " came and made a population of nine hundred and sixty-two appear to cast a vote of one thousand and thirty-four. This is better than even the Mormons can now do ; their vote seldom runs over a third of the whole population. In Novem- ber, 1855, occurred the " Wakarusa War," in consequence of the Free State men refusing to recognize the justices elected by the " border ruffians ; " the city was regularly invested, and Barber and others killed. May 21, 1856, Sheriff Jones " exe- cuted the writ " of Judge Lecompte, burned the Free State Hotel and pillaged the town. In August, 1856, some twenty- eight hundred " border ruffians" invested the place, but failed to attack, as it had grown too strong to be captured without a fight. Better times soon followed. The Free State men got control of Kansas ; the Legislature refused to consider Lecompton the Capital, and met regularly at Lawrence, which was virtually the Capital for three years. The "depression" of 1857 fol- 201 lowed, and Lawrence declined for two years. There were fewer people here in 1860 than in 1857. But the country adjacent was rapidly developing; people ceased to look for the "spring emigration'' as their only chance to make money, and a more legitimate and healthy growth began. Early in 1863 the State University was located here, and the Kaw was bridged, both adding greatly to the prospects of the town, which had a popu- lation of nearly three thousand in August, 1863. Then came the List, most cruel blow. Occasional rumors of invasion from Missouri had agitated the city, but all had ceased, and Lawrence never felt more secure than on the evening of August 20, 1863. Even the little guard of Federal troops had been ordered away by the District Commander at Kansas City. At 2 P.M. of the 20th, Quantrel assembled his band in Missouri ; between 5 and 6 P.M. they crossed the border, and made directly for Law- rence, sending out scouts to guard all the roads and turn back all who might carry information. At the first glimmer of day they were seen passing through Franklin, a few miles south- east ; at sunrise they were here. They sent a squad to Uni- versity Hill, west of the city, to guard against surprise from that direction, and parties of two or three each took position at the principal points in the city, so quietly that those who saw them had not a suspicion of their designs. Then, just as most of the citizens were rising from their beds, the main body dashed into the town yelling like savages, and began the work of destruction. In two hours seventy-five business houses on Massachusetts Street, and all the central part of the city, were in flames, and one hundred and twenty-five citizens lay dead among the ruins or upon the streets. Many were horribly mutilated. At one house two men were killed, and in the presence of their shriek- ing wives their heads were cut off and stuck upon the gate. Those who died of their wounds brought the number of slain up to a hundred and forty-three. The brutality of the gue- rillas was only equaled by their cowardice. When resistance was made from any stone building they at once retreated, and many were thus saved. 202 "TWIN RELICS." All this is old, says the critic. Yes, it is ten years past, and we hear much of the political duty of forgetting. But it is well to refresh the public memory sometimes, that the younger class of Americans may not entirely forget just what it costs to tolerate a relic of barbarism in a Republic, or give power to its sup- porters. Slavery raised up a set of men capable of this trans- action, as polygamy made a community capable of the Moun- tain Meadow massacre. "When the politics or religion of a people teach them to disregard the rights and happiness of one class, they will soon come to look upon all the "outside and Gentile world" as lawful prey. One of the "twin relics" is extirpated from American soil; the other now knocks at the door of Congress, and asks only the political power of a State. The noted camel of classic fable only asked that he might put his head in at the door; the result was that those who did not like that camel's society might vacate the premises. Lawrence survived a martyr city in the cause of freedom. When I first visited the place, in the autumn of 1867, there were still traces of Quantrel's raid. The city appears to me to have nearly doubled in size since that visit, and present improvements indicate that she is still growing r&pidly. She has the trade of an agricultural population of thirty thousand, and a growing importance as the junction of the Leavenworth, Lawrence and Galveston Railroad with the Kansas Pacific. The new State University is completed, and ranks among the very best in the "West. Lawrence is the intellectual center of the Missouri Val- ley, probably the only city in the Far West that can boast an average intelligence and education equal to any in New Eng- land. Ten churches indicate that the religious element is pow- erful. Two daily, two semi-weekly, and four weekly papers, well supported, indicate that there is a reading population here and hereabout. Lawrence is one of the very few places I see in my western wanderings at which I always want to stop and take up my residence. It is to be the Athens of the West. Thence we took the Leavenworth, Lawrence and Galveston Railroad, now completed to Parker, on the line of the Indian Territory. The main offices are at Lawrence, but it is said the NEW EAILROADS. 203 real terminus is at Kansas City, from which there is a branch connecting with this at Ottawa, thirty miles south of Lawrence, on the Marais des Cygnes, in Franklin County. The history of these roads is a little curious. " Joy's road, 57 as it was, now known as the Missouri River, Fort Scott and Gulf Railroad, runs nearly straight south through the eastern tier of counties, in a few places within five miles of the Missouri line, and is popularly known here as the " border tier road. 7 ' It passes through Fort Scott to Baxter Springs, the present terminus. When the same parties obtained control of the Leavenworth, Lawrence and Galveston road, the terminus of which was then but a little south of Lawrence, the Kansas Pacific charged them such ruin- ous rates for transporting their iron over the little distance to Lawrence, that they found it cheaper to send it north to Leaven- worth, and ship the remaining distance over their own road. A further calculation, however, showed it would be cheaper to build a line of connection from Kansas City, which was done in a few weeks, and the Ottawa branch is the result. By the charters, the road which first reached the Indian Ter- ritory would be the only one entitled to pass through it, and Joy was first in the race until he reached the noted "Joy Pur- chase," when hostilities so hindered his progress that he aban- doned that scheme and bought a controlling interest in the Leavenworth, Lawrence and Galveston. Lately, however, he has retired from this road. At noon of a scorching day we moved out of Lawrence and through a beautiful grove of elm, black walnut, ash, and hackberry, southward into the valley of the Wakarusa. The rich dark green of grass and corn, the entire absence of dust, and the water standing in the furrows, indicated that this had been the rainiest season Kansas ever knew; all this was confirmed by the local testimony. Have Kansas and the Wabash Valley traded climates for the time? It seems so. The bottom-lands of this valley are mostly in corn, the slopes in wheat and corn, while for miles away extend beautiful rolling lands, covered with rich prairie grasses, and a variety of plants, the whole present- ing a strange mingling of the feature of Northern and Southern 204 SHARP TRADERS. farms, corresponding to the peculiar mild climate which charac- terizes this section. Being in the "agricultural report" line, we made a short stop at Ottawa, one of the " magic cities" of Kansas. Located in 1864, it now has a population of nearly four thousand, has two railroads and two more in course of construction. We found the citizens a decidedly lively people, but slightly prone to large talking poloquence, I might call it. To them might appro- priately be applied a bon mot of Sidney Smith's. Said a friend to him, speaking of a mutual acquaintance: "Thomson is a good fellow, a real entertaining fellow, but you must believe only half he says." " Certainly," was the reply, " but which half?" It is easier to tell which half to believe at Ottawa. But if you locate there, stay long enough to get acquainted before you go into trade. In the early days a popular clergyman of that city sold a " blooded mare," as he averred, to one of his deacons. Shortly after the deacon observed some motions in his new property he did not like, and sought the minister's study with, " Brother K., the mare I got of you is very stiff in the shoulders." Drawing a fine Partaga from between his lips, the reverend coolly re- plied : "Better not tell that, deacon ; it might injure the sale of her." New light broke in on the deacon. He " farewelled" and took his leave. The minister, however, had a weakness for " blooded sheep," and a prominent banker, afterward Lieu- tenant-Governor of Kansas, took advantage of it, and sold him two fine-looking rams, of common stock, at $150 each. He was to be paid in town lots, at a value appraised by two prominent citizens. They learned of the "blooded sheep" trick, and rated the lots at five times their actual value, adding at the bottom of the appraisement this item : "Fees, $10." The banker ran down the list to the "fees," and tapping it significantly, re- marked : " That is the only reasonable thing on this paper. That charge I will pay. As for the rest, the preachers got his rams, and may go to with them." South of the Marais des Cygnes, or " Swan Marsh," we run for ten miles on the Ozark Ridge, so called by the settlers, RIDGE LANDS. itnnwifflllllllll 205 " DON'T MENTION IT, DEACON. who tell us it is a spur from the Ozark Mountains. In all the cuts I observe the rock just below the surface not in ledges or boulders, but in successive layers of thin and narrow stones, not so compact but that the plow could be forced through them. "Buffalo stamps/ 7 are tracts of hard blue soil, supposed to be due, originally, to the presence of alkali and saline properties in the ground, causing numbers of buffalo to crowd together, lick- ing and stamping the life out of the soil. It is a curious fact that our domestic cattle, imported to Kansas, no matter how well supplied with salt, soon acquire the same habit, not licking the soil, but crowding and stamping upon the same spots. In such places the grass is very short, wiry and thick, looking like green hair, if such a comparison be at all allowable. Some people here say that it is really the best of land, and that after being broken up and sown in wheat a few years, it will become extremely fertile; but I will wait awhile and see results before endorsing that opinion. 206 SOUTHERN KANSAS. The Marais des Cygnes River is bordered most of its course by considerable forests of good timber. Franklin probably contains the least proportion of waste land of any county in southern Kansas. With an area of 572 square miles, it has a population (1870) of only 12,000; this in a country where every eighty-acre lot will support a family in affluence, with a com- mercial population half as large as the agricultural, and with no more manufacturing than is incident to a farming community. It is evident, then, that there is room in Franklin for ten thou- sand more. But already considerable tracts of the best land are in the hands of non-residents, who hold them a little too high to encourage rapid settlement. This railroad has no large amount of land in Franklin at least nothing like as large as in the counties south. The Leaven worth, Lawrence and Gal- veston seems to be more fortunate in its land grant than either of the other Kansas roads. The Fort Scott road obtained its grant along the border which had been settled many years, the Kansas Pacific strikes directly west towards the " American Desert," and the Missouri, Kansas and Texas tends in the same direction. The L. L. and G. ran through four of the richest counties in Kansas, while they were comparatively unsettled, in the best position for timber and far enough removed from the arid plains. The grant was made and the railroad sections allotted in 1863 and 1864, and the road mostly constructed in 1870 and 1871 ; but meantime the even sections were open to settlement and rapidly taken in expectation of the road. Hence the railroad lands are intermingled with old settlements and well-improved farms, and convenient to schools, churches, and all the advantages of society. From the ridge, and the fact that the railroad owns so much land there, it has resulted that Anderson County, next south of Franklin, is not nearly so well settled as the country north and south of it. For ten miles here we did not see a house or a rod of plowed land. Passing Divide, a station on the ridge separa- ting the waters which flow northeast into the Marais des Cygnes, from those flowing south into the Neosho, we run down into Allen County, the great agricultural center and leading county ENTERPRISING IOLA. 207 of southern Kansas. This county is much better settled. Every man owns the land upon which he lives, and society has made astonishing progress for so new a country. Ten days we wandered about Allen County, taking note of local manners, the price of lands and leading productions. lola, the county seat, so named from Mrs. Tola Colbourne, wife of an old settler, is another of the " magic cities " of Kansas. It was a village before the war, and went down, with all southern Kan- sas, in that period, but with the great "rush" of 1867-68 it took a start, which is a surprise even in this country of preco- cious cities. Stone blocks went up which would look well in Cincinnati. A stone bank building graces the square equal to any west of the Mississippi ; the pavement in front of it cost two hundred dollars ; mammoth glass, which cost in Chicago seven hundred dollars per pane, show the interior glories of the prin- cipal store, and generally improvements are conducted with an audacity astonishing even to the West. While lola was yet weak, the "King's Iron Bridge Manufacturing Company" were hunting a location for the western branch of their establishment. They tried Topeka, but Topeka was a little slow in accepting their terms. Mr. King visited lola, and proposed to locate the works there for a given space of ground and fifty thousand dol- lars in money. A meeting was called at once, the money was pledged that night, and the contract signed before he left town. A few days after, Topeka was ready to accept, but work was already begun at lola. Bonds were issued by the city, at a high rate of interest, secured by individuals, and it was stipulated in the contract that the works should employ at least three hun- dred men. The buildings were just finished, and work com- menced in one wing, and I had the pleasure of seeing the first bridge put together. All this was accomplished by a "city "then of eight hundred inhabitants. I am astonished at the boldness of these new coun- ties in the line of public works ; they cheerfully enter upon out- lays which would frighten the oldest counties in Indiana. Iron bridges span the Neosho at several prominent points the best at Neosho Falls and lola costing from twenty to forty thou- \ [JPP 208 SOLID IMPROVEMENTS. 209 sand dollars. Farmers readily vote to tax their land two and a half per cent. sticking it to non-resident owners pretty steep, by the way to pay for these things. " Will it pay ? " I ask of them somewhat doubtfully, to which they, in substance, reply : " In the older States we have seen the folly of cheap improvements. Wooden bridges have been put over the same little stream every five or ten years for two generations. Here we purpose to begin with stone and iron ; double the cost at first, but cheaper in the lifetime of ourselves and children. Besides the difference between these and timber is not as great as in Indiana." There is sense in this exhibit. At one place in Parke County, Indiana, I have, in my short life, ridden over four successive wooden bridges, built at a cost, probably, of twelve thousand dollars each. Stone and iron would have bridged the stream for fifty thousand dollars, and lasted five generations at least. Eight miles below lola is Humboldt, the two enjoying a keen rivalry. Humboldt is the head of the United States Land District ; lola has obtained the county seat ; but Hulmboldt has secured the terminus of the branch road which is to connect the L. L. and G. with the " Border-tier " road at Fort Scott. This will give a through line from this section to Sedalia, Missouri. But the lolians say they will have a Y put in with the right branch terminating at their town, and offer to do the grading if the railroad company will insure the rest. This portion of Kansas has had two eras of settlement ; as a historian I might say a mythical, a heroic and a modern age. It was settled scatteringly in '55, '56 and '57, and by " free State men " for the most part. The " border war/' particularly the horrible Marais des Cygnes massacre, and the perfidy of the administration discouraged progress. It had barely recovered when the notable " dry season " of 1860 occurred. The bed of the Neosho was dry, and regularly used as a public road from the falls to Humboldt. The settlers contended successively against short crops, no crops, Indian thieves and all devouring grasshoppers. Whole families wintered on poor buffalo meat, 14 210 EARLY DIFFICULTIES. and dressed almost entirely in the skins and charity clothing. Some lived for weeks on condemned crackers. An old school- mate from Indiana lived seven months on corn bread "straight," and thought himself in luck to have it. Many lost their health, and a few, very few, died of want and exposure, or the diseases thereby engendered. Extreme want weakened the intellect or distorted the moral perceptions. The brain, lacking rich, red blood, distinguished but feebly between right and wrong. Men stole at first from want ; afterward, as evil habits create perverted principles, from second nature, or "because they had got into the habit and couldn't quit." " Jay hawk ing " was adopted into the language as a delicate euphuism for" taking what you really needed when you couldn't pay for it." Not a few men wandered off into the Indian Territory, became adventurers, and married squaws or practised aboriginal " free-love ; " and thus is growing up a race of half-breeds, with all the native cunning of the mother, and the intellectual meanness of the superior white race. Two fruitful seasons followed, and society took a second growth. Then came the war producing worse confusion. Most of the young men entered the army, and many families moved north- ward. Farms and new claims were abandoned, fences and even houses were burned for fuel, and the whole section went back ten years. Half breeds stole, Indians murdered, and Kansians retaliated, and the rebels impartially plundered all three. Peace came at last, and two years after, the "big immigra- tion" set in. Through '67, '68 and 7 69, the whole country put on a new appearance, and the old settlers saw with astonishment a new and more enterprising race seizing upon all the fair unoc- cupied spots, bringing with them all the habits of an old and cultivated society, and looked upon school-houses, churches and public improvements springing up with the rapidity of magic. Society in the settled portions of Woodson, Neosho and Allen Counties will compare favorably with any rural district in Ohio. There are more educated men than usually fall to the lot of new communities. Music is cultivated to a surprising extent. Com- mon schools surpass the average of those in Indiana, and are modeled upon the plan of Massachusetts. BEAUTIFUL MOUNDS. 211 Continuing our examination of rural Kansas by successive stages southward, just below the Neosho we pass a large extent of unsettled country. Part of it is a comparatively barren ridge, separating the waters of the Neosho from those flowing into the Verdigris; the remainder consjsts of rich slopes and the valley of the latter river, nearly all railroad and school land. This has just been brought into market, on easy terms, in seven yearly payments, and is filling up rapidly. Thence we bore down into Montgomery County, upon that beautiful plain, sloping gently towards the Verdigris River, of inexhaustible richness, and dotted at regular intervals by those cone-shaped mounds of rock and gravel, which are the delight of the traveler and the despair of science. All the central por- tion of Montgomery consists of rich prairie broken by these mounds. Some of them are perfectly circular, rising abruptly from the plain, with a rocky wall of from ten to thirty feet in hight, upon which stands the cone of gravel, loam and clay, often with a clump of bushes growing upon the top. Others rise gradually in long swells, abrupt at one end, and sloping gradually to the plain at the other; and still others are mole- shaped, of every length, from fifty to ten thousand feet, and from twenty to a hundred feet in hight. They were evidently islands at the time when this valley was a lake; beyond that period I do not venture a supposition. One of them, north of Independence, the county seat, overtops all the rest, and from, its summit one can obtain a magnificent view of all Montgomery, and much of Labette, Howard, and Wilson Counties. Neosho, to the northeast, is shut off by the ridge separating the waters of the Neosho from those of the Verdigris. Our last stop was at Cherryvale, then terminus of the L. L. & G., and confident of future greatness. It was about the size of Cincinnati, but only four squares were built up yet; mostly with frame tents. It was late in July, and the heat was most intense, so we turned northward, thinking it best to visit the cooler sections of the Missouri Valley. At Ottawa we took the Kansas City branch of the Leaven- worth, Lawrence and Galveston Railroad, traversing the beau- 212 AN OJJ) SETTLER. MOUNDS ON THE VERDIGRIS. tiful farming region of Johnson County. The Ottawa branch and road from Lawrence to Pleasant Hill, on the Missouri Pacific, form an X at Olathe, county seat of Johnson, and thence also the Missouri, Fort Scott and Gulf Road bears nearly due south, through Fort Scott to Baxter Springs, on the State line. Heavy rains soon refreshed the soil of Kansas, accompanied in many places by hail, and the intense heat gave place to a delicious coolness. We found Kansas City about as we left it, but the day of our return was notable as the last day on earth of the oldest man in the West, if not the oldest in America or the world. Jacob Fournais, or "Old Pinaud," as he was generally known, was a noted character on the Missouri, and deserves a place in history. He was born near Quebec in 1742, NORTHERN KANSAS. 213 and when only seventeen years old was present upon the field not as a soldier when Wolfe and Mont-calm died. He was in the same neighborhood when Montgomery fell, in 1775, but soon after the Revolution went to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and thence to New Orleans. At first it seems there must be some mistake in a man claiming to be one hundred and twenty-nine years old, but all the old mountaineers, including Jim Bridger, Jim Beckwith, Bent and Goodale, testify to his having been the oldest guide and trapper when they were boys. The journal of Lewis and Clark shows that he was in their employ in 1804 and 1805, and. the records of the Fur Company, and of the Chouteau family prove that he was in their service for over thirty years. He had resided in Kansas City for twenty-five years, waiting for death, never having had a day's sickness in his life. He often told with great glee that when the British marched on New Orleans, he offered his services, but was re- fused enlistment, " because he was too old." How amazing to think of a man living among us who in his youth was doubtless familiar with many survivors of the wars of William of Orange and Queen Anne, and who was of voting age before the Revolution ! Two such lives would carry us back to Crom- well's Protectorate, and overlap each other sufficiently for the story of that time to reach us at second hand. Perhaps tradi- tion may be of more worth than we have thought. A hundred average lives would reach back to the conquest of Canaan, and the same stretch of time would require but forty lives of a length such as we have in every county, and leave a margin for the story to be communicated through each successive link of the living chain. The evidence is conclusive that "old Pinaud " was nearly or quite as old as he claimed. He re- marked in the morning, while walking about the yard, that he " would never see the sun go down again," and just before sun- set expired without a struggle or sigh, dying of old age and without a sign of disease. Many of his mountaineer companions still survive, between the ages of eighty and ninety. From Kansas City northward we take the Missouri Valley Road, now owned and controlled by the Missouri Pacific Com- 214 AMBITIOUS TOWNS. pany in fact an extension of the same road. Wyandotte, just across the Ka\v into Kansas, has, perhaps, three thousand people, and is considered " merely a feeder of Kansas City." A short distance above Wyandotte I was surprised at the sight of half-a- dozen large stone houses, on a high, rocky flat, with some well- built four-story warehouses, and not a human being in sight. As the train swept on it brought to view more abandoned houses rather shells of every size, and finally a village, with some signs of life, behind a bluff. All this, I was informed, was once the renowned Quindaro, the great city which was to be, projected at the same time with Kansas City and Wyandotte, and contesting with them for the lead as metropolis of the border. It was laid out by a town company of ambitious Kan- sians, and supported a rattling daily, known as the Quindaro Chindowan. The first is the name of the Indian woman who sold the site to the whites, and the latter means, in the Kaw language, " a bundle of rods." Its bright pictures of the future of Quindaro exceed all the specimens extant of Kansas blowing. Here was to be an enduring city, founded on a rock a second Babylon, while Wyandotte, on the sand, would sink to nothing- ness ; here was to be the entrepot of all trade from tflte plains ; here was the natural point for all trade and travel from the States to Kansas and the mountains, and here was to be the city of the Missouri Valley. Wyandotte retorted in kind, and with equal vigor; but both soon succumbed to Kansas City, and Quindaro was, in the classic language of the " jayhawkers," "too dead to skin." The founders had kept even by selling lots, but many later settlers were ruined. The site was entirely abandoned for some years, and is now only settled by a few farmers. All these river towns were first built up by the freighting business across the plains; that past, they have passed, except where railroad interests unite. Leavenworth we voted "dull." Atchison a little more lively; then took the Atchison and Nebraska Railroad for the northern border. At Troy, county-seat of Doniphan, the oldest county in Kansas, we stopped for a day, finding a very different country READY TO LEAVE. 215 from that we had just left in the south. All this region is rolling or hilly, the soil is of great richness, and timber and running water abundant. The junction of this road with the St. Joseph and Denver City Railroad is a mile southwest of Troy, giving the traveler the benefit of a fine omnibus ride up Almond Avenue. At the corner of the avenue and Broadway, I noticed a splendid herd of native cattle grazing, and in this part of the city generally the stock have kicked down the surveyor's stakes, so it is difficult to determine one's bearings. A magnificent field of corn is included between Spruce and Elm, and extends from Sixth Street to the edge of the city. The city plat is two miles square, and the town of Troy, with one thousand inhabi- tants, lies in the northeast corner of the same. All this part of Kansas offers but little inducement to the emigrant, unless he comes with money enough to buy an improved farm from $1500 to $3000 at least; and I need only say that the crops here, as in all Kansas, exceeded, for 1871, anything in her former history. At the end of four weeks I was ready with my report on Agricultural Kansas, which, for convenience' sake, the reader will find summarized in the following chapter. SPOUTING GEYSER. CHAPTER XIII. STATISTICAL KANSAS. Emgrante, attention ! Topography of Kansas Climate Three divisions- Amount of good land Productiveness Figures Fruit Beautiful Homes- Southern border Snakes Local flavoring Bad case of Trichina The Kansas farmer. HIS chapter is exclusively for farmers and prospective emigrants. "No others need apply." If any one of the latter has been visited by rosy-hued dreams of an elysium to be realized in Kansas, where man has but to tickle the earth with a hoe, and she would laugh with a harvest of giant maize and wonderful wheat ; where bovine beauties rolled helpless with fat in perennial pastures, and the " honest farmer" lived in Arcadian simplicity, he had better dream on and not read. But, on the contrary, if he has heard only of "droughty Kansas," this chapter will do him good. The facts herein are collated from personal observations in twelve counties, during three tours in the State, from noting the courses of streams and comparison with similar Western localities; from reports of friends in whom I repose confidence; from official surveys, private letters, and other accredited sources. Statistics are barely allowable in a popular work, but some use of them must be permitted in the inception of such a design. Kansas extends in latitude from the thirty-seventh to the for- tieth degree ; that is to say, from the latitude of Cairo, Illinois, and Bowling Green, Kentucky, to that of Columbus, Ohio ; and in longitude from ninety-four degrees and thirty-eight minutes to one hundred and two degrees west from Greenwich : an im- mense parallelogram, about twice as long as wide, containing 81,318 square miles, ten times the size of Massachusetts, one- 216 EASTERN BORDER. 217 THE EMIGRANT'S DREAM OF KANSAS. fifth larger than Missouri, little more than twice the size of Ohio, nearly three times that of Indiana, and exceeding by one- third the surface of England. All the contradictory reports of Kansas are true if we apply each statement to the appropriate section. There are 20,000 square miles of most fertile land ; as much of good grazing coun- try, and more of dry and scantily clothed plains. Bear in mind that the country near the Missouri ranges from five hundred to one thousand feet above sea-level, while the base of the mountains at their most eastern parts is from forty- five hundred to five thousand feet in elevation ; thus the tra- veler, start where he may, must proceed along a general up grade from four hundred to seven hundred miles across the " plains," crossing the narrower part in Dakota, and the wider part in Southern Kansas. 218 TOWARDS THE PLAINS. Kansas stretches two-thirds of the distance westward, up this incline; hence, while the eastern border is comparatively low, the western part averages nearly four thousand feet in hight. Down this long plane, more or less regularly, flow all the streams of Kansas to the eastward; the average moisture in- creasing with continuous regularity, and with it timber and the productive fertility of the land, while salt, gravel, sand, alkali, and other characteristics unfriendly to agriculture, increase west- ward in an inverse proportion. We should thus naturally look for the best land along the eastern border ; but, practically little difference is observable until we reach the third tier of counties; and at a distance of from one hundred to one hundred and fifty miles out the rich prairie of the border begins to yield rapidly to ridges scantily clothed with grass and the half-desert of the plains. Of course there is no fixed line or point at which we can say agricultural land ceases, and that fit only for pasture begins ; wide and fertile valleys extend far beyond the as- sumed border; far reaching fertile slopes extend miles along all the larger streams, while occasional depressions present thou- sands of acres of rich natural meadow, or perhaps an entire township of first-class arable land. Such exceptions are found in the south far up the Wichita, Verdigris, and Arkansas; in the center upon the Kaw, Smoky Hill and Saline; and further north upon the Big and Little Blue, Republican and Solomon Rivers even as far as the border of Colorado. While this is true, each successive section of twenty-five miles westward would show an average decrease of fertility. In Colorado the only tillable lands consist of the low valleys and slopes along the streams, lying in a condition to be irrigated ; and yet not all the lands of a nature to be reclaimed by irrigation can be so economically treated because of the absence of a water supply. Thus it will be seen Kansas is naturally divisible into three sections: rich agricultural land, half agricultural and half graz- ing, and half grazing, half desert. The first-class farming land may then safely be set down as one hundred miles east and west, and the width of the State, two hundred and ten miles, from north to south : twenty-one thousand square miles y 219 220 WHERE TO GO. of unsurpassed fertility, an area sufficient for the homes of an agricultural population of two million one hundred thousand, without being more? thickly settled than rural New York. But it will sustain a more dense population than that State ; the uniform richness of the soil, and the vicinity of such vast graz- ing lands, will cause the fertile land to be more closely culti- vated with profit. The western third of the State is still the range of the buffalo, and three days' travel with teams will take sportsmen from the terminus of the L. L. & G. Road to the hunting grounds. There the Kioways and Osages still hunt them in the primitive style, but with the improvements in firearms, hunting by the whites is reduced to a science and a minimum of risk. The accounts given by my friends of their hunting exploits were of the most romantic character, until they came to describe their mode of cooking with " Buffalo chips ; " then I begged to be excused. The reader is referred to the cut for a fuller ex- planation. To return to agriculture. Where shall the immigrant from the Middle States or the central West go? At present, I should say, to one of the counties south of the Kaw; good land there is still to be had at prices not unreasonable. In Anderson, Allen and Montgomery in the second tier of counties there are still thousands of acres of the very best land at moderate rates. In the third tier we find Shawnee, Weller and Woodson Counties still almost unsettled, with some Government land and much private land for sale at three to five dollars per acre. Two- thirds of the surface of these counties is of extreme fertility. But the immigrant there has a still wider range. Far out upon the Verdigris or Wichita, and even upon the Arkansas, one- third or one-half of the country consists of fertile valley and slope, bounded by high pasture lands. Here the settler can still find public land in abundance, and take a homestead in the assured hope that a few years will surround him with all the society and resulting comforts he now finds on the Eastern bor- der. There are, however, considerable tracts of waste land be- tween these fertile strips lands which will not be settled or 222 KANSAS CHARACTER. improved for a hundred years ; but to my mind this is rather an advantage to the settled portions. It is unquestionable that in the Verdigris and Wichita region the valley land is very rich, though those ridges fit only for pastur- age take up half or more of the country. If I have a good farm in a well-settled township, what should I care if that be bordered by three other townships of ridges? The good land will be only the more thickly settled, with the waste land for public pasturage and for the ledges of rock, which go a long way toward supplying the lack of timber. And that region is settling fast. At least 60,000 people entered Kansas in 1870, and the first half of 1871 their own statisticians put it at 100,000 of whom two-thirds or more went into that section. The State, admitted in 1860 with 107,000, now (1870) has 360,000 inhab- itants. The rich valleys of the Neosho, Verdigris and neigh- boring streams are fast filling with an energetic population. In every direction the virgin sod is being turned, and claim shanties and neat dwellings are springing up like magic. The overflow of this living stream is just beginning to set toward the Wichita and Arkansas. Domestic economy has made more progress than in most new countries, and the traveler through the settled portion of Kan- sas can secure most of the comforts of life. The western spirit of toleration, added to the southern spirit of hospitality, and quickened by Yankee enterprise, forms the characteristic of southern Kansas. The immigrant gets a fresh start in character and society as well as in property. Not " What has he done East?" but " What does he intend to do in Kansas and for Kansas ? " is the question asked. They care the least for a man's record, if he fails to come up to the spirit of the times and country, of any people I have seen. If the new comer has been unfortunate, or even criminal, and is really desirous of taking a new departure in manners and morals, there he can have a clean sheet to begin his new record upon ; if he will start right he will never hear of the past, and if he is honest and public-spirited in Kansas the past will remain as a sealed book. Deducting some- thing of western swagger and a great deal of local exaggeration, BRAGGING. 223 the southern Kansian is really a first-rate fellow ; frank, gener- ous, and with ideas expanded by change and experience, he is a good fellow to travel with and a desirable neighbor. There the immigrant from the Ohio Valley will find a climate to suit him ; warm enough, the summers tempered by the wind, the storms of winter short, though sometimes severe, and all the fruits and grains of the temperate zone yielding bounteously. Cotton could be grown in the extreme south, while the long-leafed Spanish tobacco and the ordinary James-River are an undoubted success everywhere south of the Kaw. There are evils enough everywhere, but many, once thought peculiar to Kansas, are found to exist there no more than elsewhere. Wherever good land is found the season will be found to suit it. In the eastern division of the State drought is not a whit more to be feared, one year with another, than in the Wabash Valley; and when you go far enough west to find " droughty Kansas," the land is unfit for cultivation anyhow. So much for general facts before I come to details. But first a caveat. If the reader, after perusing this, could visit Kansas generally, he would be amazed to think I had drawn it so mildly, compared with the statements he will receive from resi- dents. According to them in most cases, there never was so rich, so great, so prosperous a region, never such a chance to make money before ; the towns are all certain to make great cities ; lots are sure to double in price in a year ; pure fat may yet run in the furrows, and corn tassel and silk in greenbacks ; a man's children will grow fat by mere contact with the soil, and his wife return to the beauty of her youth ; roasted shoats, with knife and fork stuck in their backs, will rub against him and beg to be eaten, and general prosperity awaits the happy emi- grant. And then it is so healthy. An old resident of Deer Creek, we are told, had lived so long, life was a burden (to his heirs probably), and yet the country was so healthy he could not die. Weary of existence he moved back to Illinois, and there succeeded in giving up the ghost, having stipulated that he should be buried on his Kansas farm. But such were the life- giving properties of this soil that when laid in it animation re- 224 DETAIL OF CROPS. turned to his limbs, his heart resumed its pulsations, and the incorrigible centenarian walked forth in renewed health, to the disgust of his heirs and the confusion of those who had doubts about Kansas. I thought I knew something about " blowing towns " on the Union Pacific, but Kansas boys can give them fifty in the game and " double discount" them. That the country has all the elements of a rich and prosperous State, I can see with my own eyes ; that there is still room for thou- sands to do well is equally plain, and that all who will work can acquire a competence, is simply an axiom. But your average Kansian is not satisfied with such a moderate statement. One would think them at first view the happiest people in the world, for every man seems perfectly satisfied with his own claim, averring it is the very best in Kansas. And yet, strangely enough, about one-third of them want to sell; not but that this is " God's own country/ 7 oh, no ! " But with the money they could raise on this claim, they could get twice as much out on the Wichita, and have enough left to stock it to their minds." To avoid showing symptoms of the same disease, I present a few figures mostly on Allen and Woodson Counties, where I stopped longest, and knew my informants to be reliable. The winter of 1870 '71 was one of unusual severity in Kansas, and owing to want of preparation therefor, nearly all the cattle began the spring in the last stage of attenuation. One terrible snow storm lasted an entire week, in which the wind blew almost a hurricane, filling the air with powdery snow, and quite a num- ber of cattle froze to death, as well as hogs and chickens. The winter of '69-'70 had been of unusual mildness, and nearly all the cattle in Allen County were wintered upon the lower range and in the wooded bottoms without feeding. It is common with many farmers to pursue this plan, and depend upon the chances ; but the stock are certain to come out miserably poor, and the chances are one in three of a hard winter in which ten per cent, of the stock will be lost. The best farmers prepare and expect to feed from three to four months two months less than in Indiana. The spring of 1871 opened early and dry, the rain gradually increasing with the advance of the summer, and this AGRICULTURE. 225 has proved the rainiest season Kansas has ever enjoyed. I say " enjoyed/' for it amounts almost to a certainty that this section will never have too much rain, while it may have too little. Old settlers say that " every other season in Kansas is wet last was the season to sow much small grain; this to plant much corn." It is impossible for corn anywhere in this latitude to do better than it did in 1871 in Allen County; the crop was at least twice as good as in any part of Indiana. That the land is never too wet, and consequently spring plowing can be done under the most favorable circumstances, is one reason why it endures drought so much better than further east. Land which is never water-soaked or broken, wet never clods or " bakes." In 1870 the average yield of corn in this county was forty bushels per acre. Of other crops there is no report for single districts, but the State at large produced (I quote the printed report) as follows: 312,000 acres corn yielded 15,000,000 bushels. 117,000 acres wheat yielded 2,100,000 bushels. 91,400 acres oats yielded 3,848,000 bushels. 19,600 acres potatoes yielded 2,158,000 bushels. - 221,000 acres hay yielded 441,000 tons. Wheat has never proved a perfect success in Allen County, though several average crops have been raised. The kinds generally sown are called the "Walker" and "May" wheat. The t{ Mediterranean " and "White Bluestem," so common in Indiana, do not yield well on the rank soil of a new country. A curious fact is noted, that land when first broken does best in wheat, and after being sown in that crop for some years will produce far better corn than when new. Hence " new ground " here is rarely, if ever, planted in corn. The peculiar saline properties of the soil render new land less fit for corn than old, while the same salts produce no bad effects upon wheat. The fly is a little troublesome to wheat, but its principal enemy is the chintz bug, so-called here, though I see no resemblance in the specimens shown me to our Eastern insect of that name. It will eat almost any crop, but prefers the small grains, having shortened those crops in this section about ten per cent. 15 226 ROOTS AND VINES. Rye, oats and barley do equally well, though but little of the last has been grown, and this section is thought to be particu- larly favorable for oats. Mr. A. Hall, whose farm is in the valley at the junction of Deer Creek and the Neosho River, har- vested in 1870 seventy bushels per acre from a large area; and J. C. Clark, on the upland near lola, gathered four thousand bushels from sixty-five acres, the entire yield being sold readily at fifty cents per bushel. This is the " money crop " of Allen County as, owing to stock raising and the vicinity of the In- dian Territory, there is always ready sale at good prices. Thus it will be seen, two or at most three good crops will still pay for an average farm in this section. Of ground crops every kind known in Ohio flourish exceed- ingly in this virgin soil ; potatoes and turnips particularly excel. The former grow to an immense size, and never seem " watery" or otherwise bad, while turnips do as well as I have ever seen them in Minnesota, which saying every one who has ever visited that State will consider the highest limit of superlative praise. Beets and pie-plant, I suspect, do but poorly ; I hear but little of them, and from comparison of this soil with that of Utah and California, I think the country needs a few years' cultivation to make those plants a success. Allen County in 1870 raised an average crop of potatoes, but in '71 the yield was immense. The Colorado bug has not put in an appearance yet, but will doubtless be along in due time, in spite of State rights. Of vines, every kind known in Ohio is grown ; but some few of them have special enemies, which destroy the hope of profit. A fatality seems to attend " Hubbard's Kershaws" and squashes. They are " took by bugs" so regularly that it is nearly impossible to raise any. Pumpkins and other kindred productions yield wonderfully, and watermelons far exceed any in Indiana. A singular phenomenon was observed last year in this sec- tion. A moderate crop of small but very sweet melons ripened in July, about which time a rainy period occurred, when a second growth appeared and were perfectly ripe by the last of CULTIVATED FRUITS. 227 September. Of course they were " out o' season," and conse- quently inferior in flavor ; still they were good enough to eat, and valuable as an indication of what the seasons of Southern Kansas will do. Wild strawberries are found in great abun- dance on the prairies, of several different kinds, as well as of different shapes. When cultivated, the same varieties are most excellent. A very large smooth gooseberry is found in great quan- tity in the timber, which every one here pronounces fine ; but as all gooseberries are slow poison to me, I can only say they look well. Many kinds of wild grapes are found, the "big blue" predominating. Of cultivated grapes the "Concord," " Hart- ford Prolific," and " Diana" are the only kinds I have met with, the first being by far the best for this section. The rank soil of a new country is not generally thought favorable to cul- tivated grapes, but so far they have done quite well. I have heard of no wine being manufactured; and rather suspect it would appear too mild a drink or too small a business for the thoroughbred Kansian, whose very life seems to depend on doing or appearing to do everything on a grand scale. On general principles, the people of all new countries will raise corn and cattle rather than wine and seeds. The country dis- tricts contain more tee-totallers than I would have expected. Allen County is more temperate than the average in Indiana. In the towns the standard drink is whisky "stone fence," "forty-rod," and "tarantula-juice." Indeed, whisky and bravery are thought to be necessary for each other ; " whisky is the only drink for men," and whoever drinks at all drinks whisky. So your true Kansian says with the Scotch Poet : " Let half-starved slaves in warmer skies See future vines rich clustering rise, Their lot fair Kansas ne'er envies, But blithe and frisky She eyes her freeborn martial boys Take off their whisky." Of wild fruits, plums, grapes, and gooseberries most abound. There are but few wild blackberries, but the cultivated Lawton does well, better than in Indiana, from the fact that it never 228 PEACHES. freezes out here. The country is too new to form a certain judg- ment on domestic fruits. Half a dozen orchards on Deer Creek are doing well, and the indications are good for apples. It is already proved that peaches can be grown with great success. The oldest settlers are enthusiastic upon this point, and Mr. E. R. Lynn, a Presbyterian minister, who has resided on Deer Creek for eleven years, tells me his experience goes to show that peaches will be grown nine years out of every ten. The only specific enemy of that tree is the " grub," so called here, an insect of the terebrce species, which works on the roots just below the surface. Growers must dig and examine the roots of peach trees every spring, when the presence of the "bore" can easily be detected. The roots must then be treated with ashes and lime, the latter being almost as plenty here as clay in Ohio. This process is quite effective in destroying the pests. Mr. Lynn says peaches have failed entirely but one year since he came here. They need a northern exposure and high ground ; on the southward slopes the buds come forward too early, and for some unexplained reason, the trees fail to do well on the low grounds along the creeks, notwithstanding such are the naturally timbered sections, where one would at first expect fruit trees to thrive best. The orchard of D. E^ Rhodes in lola, is the best in Southern Kansas. In 1870 he made his first sales a hundred bushels of apples at one dollar per bushel. I see no reason, either in climate, soil, or formation, why this should not be a first-rate fruit country, and yet many doubts are expressed upon the subject. Over in Missouri, where Kansas people have been buying fruit for many years, the farmers are setting out immense orchards in the assured hope that they will supply Kansas for the next forty years, and that the demand will increase with the population. My own opinion is that they will a slip up on it." The residents in new countries are generally grasping for land, but in Allen County they prefer cattle. After getting their land paid for a homestead merely they generally put every spare dollar in cattle ; for they reason, " the land may double your money in ten years or less, but with any kind of THE CATTLE BUSINESS. 229 care, cattle are certain to double it in two or three years. Messrs. Funkhouser & Longshore, of Carlyle, bought a drove of Texas cattle in November, 1869, and sold them in August, 1870, for ex- actly double the purchase money. Deducting all cost of winter- ing, and herding, they realized sixty per cent, on their investment. It is quite common to purchase in Missouri one spring and sell the second autumn thereafter at twice the amount thus realizing from fifty to eighty per cent, profit in twenty months. There is still so much range in Allen County, and owing to the Ozark Ridge and other ridges, will be so for many years, that this is the great money-making business. Farmers gadly borrow money at ten per cent., secured by mortgage, to invest in cattle, with the assurance of making at least thirty per cent, upon their investment. Of course this kind of business will not last always, but while it does last, for the next few years, is the time to immigrate here. There is still abundant room for farmers and stockhandlers. If people would work here as they do in Ohio, every farmer would be rich in five years. But people in new countries are lazy. The first settlers seem to get it naturally, and newcomers soon fall into their ways and catch the same disease. I thought people on the Wabash were lazy. They are fearful bundles of steaming energy compared to the Kansians. Allen County is settled by a superior class, but I perceive they are fast falling into the old ways. A man can live in a log cabin, wear ragged clothes, and go bare-footed and still be an aristocrat ; so what is the use of working to se- cure a social position. People seldom work for what they have already, except where long habit has made it almost a necessity. For mechanical labor of nearly every kind there is a steady demand, at prices considerably in advance of those paid in Ohio. For stone-masons and house-carpenters the demand is greatest and the wages best. Much good land is still to be had from private owners at from four to ten dollars per acre, unimproved. If one can raise the money it is fully as cheap, if not cheaper, to buy an improved as a new farm ; for there are always plenty wanting to sell. There are always some dissatisfied, always many wanting to change their location, and the nearer 230 THE SOUTHERN COUNTIES. the border you get, the more you will find who want to sell out and move West. Already there is a considerable movement from this section to the Verdigris, a hundred miles west, and many pioneers are starting for the Wichita, twice as far off. Beautiful and fertile, but narrow valleys, with four times as much half-barren, rolling pastures, as it is so far west, suits the true borderer far better than this section, which is three-fourths fertile and one-fourth barren ridge. The best chance here just now is in the railroad lands, which are just brought into market. They can be had at prices as low or lower than prairie lands, with annual payments for ten years at seven per cent, interest. Better terms could not be offered. By the fourth year a good farmer can have enough raised to pay for his farm, at from five to ten dollars per acre. When we consider that timber grows readily on the highest prairie in Eastern Kansas, when the sod is once broken, and fire kept off, and that all the cultivated grasses and evergreens need but to be sown or planted, it appears that the facilities for making a beautiful home exceed even those of Ohio. In 1872, I traversed the southern tier of counties, and found the region rich in soil, but not so healthful for Northern people. The traveler from the State line northward observes a gradual rise in the country. About Chetopa or Parker he will find ex- tensive flats and occasional sloughs. Coming up the Neosho or its tributaries to Humboldt or Tola, he reaches a higher, gently rolling prairie, sloping toward the south, without sloughs, and nowhere rising into barren ridges. From southeast to northwest, from the northern part of Cherokee County to Fort Scott, and thence to Emporia, he finds a fair medium between flat and high lands. In the northern part of Allen County, about Divide Station, on the Leaven worth, Lawrence and Gal- veston Railroad, he leaves this fertile slope for the " Kidge." This is a sort of spur from the Ozark Mountains, running northwest between the waters which flow into the Neosho and Arkansas, and those flowing eastward into the Osage. For ten miles there, along the Leavenworth, Lawrence and Galveston Railroad, the country appears to me very barren ; in the cuts REPTILES. 231 the rock shows in compact layers but a few inches below the surface, and the soil is evidently hard and cold. Having passed the divide, a reverse process is noticeable, the country improv- ing northward by similar gradations. "Noxious varmints" are not over-plentiful, still they give some trouble. Snakes are, in local phrase, " uncommon thick and lively," near the southern border. But I suspect it is nearly impossible for the average Kansian to tell the truth about snakes. The temptation to make a " pilgrim " open his eyes is too great for his virtue. I killed one of the species known as " bull snake," which was five feet three inches long. They are quite harmless, and get their name, I suppose, from their thick bodies and blunt heads. Their hiss is so loud and resonant that strangers often mistake it for that of a rattlesnake. But no western man, who has often heard that blood-curdling h'r-ah-h-h, of the real crotalus, will ever mistake any other sound, made by man or brute, for it. It is unique, not to be imitated by any art of man's device. We heard so many stories along the bor- der about snakes that we were perpetually on the look-out, and my companion generally walked with eye on the grass and legs limbered, ready for a jump. Besides the accounts which proved authentic, one farmer told us of a diamond snake biting his horse so badly that the animal fell dead, and when he ex- amined the wound, the marks of the fangs were four inches apart. Another related that he was hoeing corn, when he stirred up an immense rattler. He aggravated it till it struck its fangs into the hoe-handle. Having killed it, he was pro- ceeding with his work, when he observed the hoe-handle grow- ing larger, sensibly swelling with the poison. It continued getting worse for an hour, when the eye of the hoe popped out. Worms, also, are reported bad ; and as Kansians always do more and have more of anything, even of a disease, than anybody else, the Trichina spiralis was peculiarly bad in Kansas. An account is given of one man in Doniphan County, during the prevalence of that newspaper epidemic, who had all the symp- toms, had the " spirals " bore' through his skin, in fact got de- cidedly " wormy." He accordingly took a powerful emetic, and "HONEST FA KM EH." 233 threw up three or four handfulls of pork worms, three lizards, a section of the worm of a still, two bull snakes, and a few rods of worm fence, after which, adds the local chronicle, he bqgan to feel better. The most dangerous snakes in Southern Kansas are the short prairie rattlesnakes, seldom over two feet long. They are some- what dull and sluggish, and farmers come upon them or touch them before seeing them, but I never heard of their bite killing any one. "Ye honest farmer," of Kansas, is like the same individual in Ohio, only a little more so ; as the farther West one goes the more he finds the people prone to exaggeration. At any rate, tilings lose nothing in the telling. And the beauty of it is, every man is satisfied with his claim, pronouncing it the very best, richest, best located and watered in that section. True, he would sell, sometimes, if a reasonable price, cash, were offered; but only because he has another claim in view, nearly as good, but farther out, which he can buy cheap for cash, and have enough left from this sale to stock it. There are two kinds of farmers in America. The first is the e t simple, artless yeoman, who never plots, and is incapable of guile, who does right because he scarcely knows how to do wrong; who will point out the defects of anything he is selling to the citizen ; who goes singing to his work, is the pillar of the country church, and a condensed epitome of all the virtues possessed by Adam before he became a laborer. This is the farmer of romance, of city pastorals, written in a third-story back, by men reared in the city, who don't know white clover from dandelion, but must coin their imagination by running city bucolics at a quarter of a penny aline, or less; but this is not the kind of farmer I am acquainted with. The other kind, with whom and his compeers I spent the first eighteen years of my life, is a totally different being. He is not at all lacking in art. He knows how to ask all he can possibly get, and a little more. He is a being with whom written contracts are quite in order, for I am sorry to say he will too often fail to deliver the promised produce if the second comer offers a little more. Reason : he has no commercial character to sustain, his business 234 GO TO KANSAS. is to get all he can. He is honest enough after his fashion, free and frank with his neighbors, but looks upon the " city gent " as lawful prey. Too often he has an easy-fitting morality to the effect that, as all others " look flown upon the laborer," the laborer is perfectly justified in gouging all others at every chance/ The Kansas farmers, generally, belong to the class I have known most about. Seriously, though, if my city reader ima- gines there is any less artfulness, envy, or gossip, or " taking advantage," in the country than in the city, let him dismiss the thought. Or, better still, let him go to the country, live and work there a year or two. Kansas, then, is not paradise. There is no paradise anywhere West that I am aware of. I have visited no section where " grain, flour, and fruit gush from the earth until the land runs o'er ; " but there is yet abundant room there to secure a farm, where labor will surely result in competence, where the laws are peculiarly favorable to small holders ; society is making rapid progress, peace and plenty reign, and all who will be virtuous may be happy. A BAD CASE OF TRICHINA. CHAPTER XIV. A FLYING TRIP. Down to St. Joseph Up the Missouri Valley Omaha again Dull times on the Missouri Keasons given Off for Sioux City Up-country people Yankton Caught in a storm Dakota Black Hills Gold ! perhaps Sioux IAPH OAHYE Called westward Union Pacific Mormondom again Over to " Frisco." FTER " doing " Kansas properly we set out from Troy, Doniphan County, on the first of August, to hunt a cooler climate. From Troy to Elmwood, opposite St. Joseph, we pass rapidly over a down grade. St. Joseph looks well from the opposite side, and, like Kansas City, was a sort of exception to Missouri River towns in 1871, in that it had some business. From there we pass to Council Bluffs on the Kansas City, St. Joe and Council Bluffs Railroad, an exceptionally good one. I remarked the apparent youthful- ness of its management. It seems to be owned, governed, and run almost entirely by young men ; the majority of those I saw connected with it being not over thirty years of age. The whole road had a general air of newness and freshness ; the cars were clean and provided with all the latest attachments. Among these was the air-brake, which was a novelty to me, and a perfect success, while the cars, locomotives and water-tanks were of the latest patterns. We passed right up the Missouri Valley on the east side of the river, all the distance through grassy meadows, stretching from river to bluffs, with enough air, free from dust; and it is superfluous to add it was one of the most enjoyable trips I have taken out West. It was a surprise to me how little of that valley was under cultivation, being of rich soil and supplied with near markets. I would not have thought so much of it, but the Nebraska side was thickly set- 235 236 LAND GRANTS. tied. In fact, the eastern sides of nearly all these Western States are more thickly settled than the western sides of the State adjoining to the east. Before one State is filled to its western border another is partially surveyed in the eastern part, aild immigration commences to fill it. The new State is a new field for selection, and all open to choice. It thus presents new features of attraction, and the succeeding waves of people pass over into it. Another cause is that large and numerous grants of public lands were made to railroads in Iowa. There were five such wide squares granted east and west across Iowa, and other shorter ones. There was also a grant along this railroad to Council Bluffs, and another thence to Sioux City. On the opposite side of the Missouri the lands were all left free to set- tlers. At least on that side the grants run westward from the river, and not parallel with it. Upon the Government lands each settler can take a quarter section of one hundred and sixty acres, while within land grants he can take only eighty acres, for which he must pay double price. The railroads also hold their alternate sections of land higher than the Government price. There are thirty-six sections in each township. Of these the railroad gets eighteen odd-numbered sections. The sixteenth and thirty-sixth sections are set apart for school pur- poses, leaving only sixteen even numbered sections for settlers, preventing solidly continuous settlements unless they purchase from the railroad. When the great bodies of Government lands are near they naturally prefer them. We reached Omaha after this pleasant journey, to find it painfully dull. This was shown in its hotels, in its streets and its business houses. There was no movement of people or appearances of trade adequate to the size of the ciiy. One walked along quiet streets and passed fronts of business houses without feeling the hurry and jostle of men deep in business transactions. Clerks had time to sit down and read, and the ledger was often closed. The stir which attended the rapid growth of Omaha was not there, and I did not observe the same surplus crowds of mixed people that once thronged its public places. MISSOURI VALLEY. 237 The people, however, gave many reasons for this : it was hot, and public energy was relaxed ; farmers were busy harvesting and did not buy of the small towns, which in turn could not buy of the cities. The trade had ended for the spring and had not set in for the fall ; the crops of this year had not begun to move. The city, however, proposes large plans to control the wheat trade for a large area north and west, and ship grain direct after the plan of St. Louis, receiving return shipments of merchandize and groceries to send out from this center. While there are not apparent reasons present to justify the realization of this plan, there are also other ambitious markets that would object by virtue of their railroad and river highways. Of the four leading towns on the Missouri, St. Joe alone ex- hibited, in 1871, average life; Kansas City was doing some- thing, while Omaha and Leavenworth seemed to be living in hope of the t autumn. All the four did less paying business than Evansville, Indiana, or Toledo, Ohio. We proceeded north to Sioux City, Iowa, by the way of Missouri Valley Junction and the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad. All this distance a hundred miles is over the level, broad valley of the Missouri. The southern part of the valley is low and in places very wet and largely occupied by sloughs and old ba- yous. Particularly is this the case west of the junction of the Northwestern and Sioux City Railroad. ' The country is settled only on the bordering higher lands and slopes. This improves ^s we pass northward, and Onawa and Woodbury are fair little villages in fine stretches of land, and near Sioux City the coun- try seems more generally occupied and better improved. Before reaching Missouri Valley Junction it seemed as if all the passengers were through passengers from the East or West, and one could hardly see a person destined for the Upper Mis- souri. But when the call to change cars for Sioux City was obeyed we soon found a car full selected from all the others. These seemed generally acquainted, and the assorting process improved tRe sociability. At once inquiries commenced about Upper Missouri affairs, and the characteristic interest, callings, business and modes of life of the upper country were soon de- 238 sioux CITY. veloped. There were Sioux City bankers, merchants and citi- zens, emigrants for northwest Iowa or Dakota, Indian traders or agents, cattle dealers who had contracts, herders, fur dealers, soldiers returning from furlough, and many other good people. We soon reached Sioux City, and looked at it for the first time. Not prepared to expect much from so young a place, we were rather pleased than otherwise with its showing. While the trade of the Missouri cities was so dull, Sioux City could hardly be called active, yet its travel, trade and business movement was all the season justified. After a brief stay I wrote thus of Sioux City : "The city is fairly and advantageously located at a great bend of the Missouri, where coming from the west between Dakota and Nebraska it curves south between Iowa and Ne- braska. The point had long been favorably mentioned in advance of the completion of any of Iowa's railroads. At one time it was supposed the line of the Union Pacific would be westward from this point. Whether by fair means or foul, Sioux City lost that advantage. She now has, however, two good lines of railroad completed, the one connecting with the Northwestern, and the other east to Dubuque, run by the Illi- nois Central. Another line is rapidly approaching completion from Minneapolis, and lines are prospected one north to Red River, one west to .Yankton, Dakota, and one southwest to Columbus, Nebraska. The population is about four thousand ; there are several large firms and heavy business houses. The town is well built in part with some excellent buildings and large blocks, while there are the usual board houses. Heavy fires are rapidly clearing these away, and where ten days ago a block of shanties was burned, brick stores are being built. What was then accounted a loss, is now declared a gain. Two daily newspapers are proofs of thrift and enterprise. The Journal, edited by G. D. Perkins, Esq., is a reliable Republi- can paper, devoted to the interests of the region, and well sup- ported. The Times, edited by Charles Collins, Esq., is the oldest paper, is independent, but rather Democratic, strikes here and there as occasion offers, and is hardly so prosperous." DAKOTA FARMS. 239 The railroad to Minneapolis is now completed, as is another to Yankton. Early next morning I mounted a stage for Yaukton. The previous night had brought one of the heaviest rains ever known, and the morning was dull, cloudy, and hot. The mud was like glue. There was a peculiarity in it I never saw before. It seemed to collect constantly on the wheels, at times com- pletely wadding them up, and then it would fall off in a huge pile. The mud was a peculiar mixture of clay and sand, and its tenacity was increased by the prairie grass mingled with it. After all this is a musical world if it is only wound up right, and there never was a stage trip unrelieved by humor. Our load had its characters who told their stories in spite of heat and mud. One suggested that this would be a good country in which to store mud for winter use, or catch tadpoles and bleach them for oysters; while his excuse for smoking in the stage was that his corns hurt him in wet weather, and he smoked for his corns. Northwestward, up the Missouri, we struggled, and in twenty miles reached better roads and finer farms, with neat cottages. In the corner, between the Big Sioux and Missouri River, is a French settlement, while further on are many Scandinavian settlements, and elsewhere Bohemians, though the prevailing population is American. The Valley of the Missouri is from five to fifteen miles wide, a broad, high, level flood plain, bor- dered along the streams with heavy bodies of timber. On either side of the road were waving heavy fields of grain, just ripe, and in them were reaping machines at work. All the people seemed busy and fairly prosperous. We saw one notice- able sight. A Dane, about six feet in hight, was driving four oxen to a self-raker, and two big Danish women binding after it. Farther away were Norwegian women binding and shock- ing wheat. Oh ! Anthony, Stanton, Stevens, how would not your tears of sympathy have been shed at this sight. But I suppose there is no relief. The Legislature of Dakota, last winter, refused to enfranchise the sex of which ye are the representatives. In Dakota they evidently have an eye rather 240 AT YANKTON. WOMAN'S RIGHTS IN DAKOTA. to the utility of women than her rights. But I thought how blessed were these people from Norway and Sweden, that they could come to so goodly a land and on their own farms be pri- vileged to gather such crops. At 9 P. M. we entered Yankton, the ambitious capital of Da- kota, where I spent a delightful week with my brother, then Surveyor General of the Territory. There was not so much difference in climate between this and Kansas as one would expect. The nights are a little cooler, perhaps, but in August the days are about as hot. One of the vagaries of the climate I was destined to realize in a way more novel than pleasant. On the hottest afternoon in early August I went driving upon the open prairie, with my nieces, aged twelve and fourteen years. When ten or twelve miles from town, the sky suddenly darkened, and in a few minutes was overcast with heavy black clouds, a strong wind springing up in a moment from the northwest. I made all haste towards Yankton, but before SUDDEN CHANGE, 241 ANY PORT IX A STORM. I had driven a mile the rain was coming in torrents. The wind being across our track, threatened every moment to overturn the carriage, and I was forced to diverge from the road and drift before the storm upon the open prairie. In ten minutes our way was so obscured, I could only determine that we were going down a gentle slope, but where I knew not. Coming upon a few stout posts, set up to mark a "claim/' I ran the team over one so as to anchor the carriage fast upon it by the doubletrees, and determined to sit out the storm. In less than half an hour the thermometer must have sunk thirty degrees. The wind increased to a perfect hurricane, howling by us in a way that threatened destruction ; the top of the carriage gave way, and in the slight lulls of the tempest I could hear the horses groaning and the girls crying and praying. We were drenched already by the chilling rain, and nothing was to be gained by staying in the carriage, which every moment threatened to fly into splinters. We determined to 16 242 ROUGH EXPERIENCE. leave it, and try to make our way to a cabin we remem- bered a mile back on the road. Foot by foot we fought our way along, sometimes crouch- ing to leeward of the highest knolls for a moment's breath- ing, then plunging on, all clasped together, through the mud and rain. Every low piece of ground was covered by torrents of running water. I could not carry both the children, and if we had sepa- rated, the smaller was in dan- ger of being blown away ; so we waded with clasped arms through water up to their waists. We reached the cabin in an hour. I was too much ex- hausted to speak, and the chil- dren sank breathless upon the floor, to the no small astonish- ment of the inmates. By a vigorous application of hot whiskey, flannel, and bricks, myself and the younger child escaped without injury; but the older suffered a long and serious illness. Evidently it requires some " weather wis- dom " to carriage-ride in Da- kota. Not more than a third, perhaps a fourth, of the Territory is good arable land, FRIENDLY DAKOTAHS. 243 and of that third, less than one-tenth is settled. The only white inhabitants are in the southeast corner and in the far northeast, at Pembina, near the British line. Along the eastern border, including the valleys of Big Sioux and Red River, is a fertile strip a hundred miles wide; this also extends a little way up the Missouri. The good land may be represented rudely by a V, the left arm much the shorter and more narrow; all the rest consists of high and half-barren plains, sometimes scantily clothed with grass, and often entirely bare. All the center and west are occupied by various bands of the Dakotahs or Sioux. Those at the Lower Agency are "civilized," that is, they raise some crops, swear, drink whiskey, and dress with some approach to the white costume. One flourishing church, Episcopalian, is composed of Sioux, who have also a weekly paper. It is called the lape Oahye, meaning "Talk carried about," is Republican in politics, and ardently supports the " humanitarian Indian policy " of President Grant. The western part of Dakota extends into the Black Hills, and every year or so exciting rumors reach us of gold dis- coveries in that section ; but as it is in the great Indian Reser- vation, the U. S. officials forbid all immigration. Northward and east of the Missouri are the "Bad Lands,' 7 regions of deso- lation and death, to which all that can be said of Western deserts fully applies. The eastern part, and as much of the central as is valuable, is being rapidly surveyed ; the Territory has doubled in population within four years ; and presents an inviting field to the emigrant from our most northern States and Northern Europe. My second Sunday at Yankton, I was startled by a telegram bringing notice that a party was then waiting at Omaha, and earnestly desiring my company on the great overland excursion. On Monday I staged the sixty-five miles thence to Sioux City, and of all the staging I ever did in the West, I am qualified to say that experience was the worst. Starting at 4 A. M., we jogged on for sixteen weary hours in the dead air of the Mis- souri bottoms, the bluffs shutting off all air from the northward, and the timber along the Missouri giving the effect of a hot A HOT RIDE. 245 brick wall on the other side. The sun in that latitude shines fifteen hours daily in August, and most of that time the thermo- meter never sank below ninety degrees. Seven men were crowded into a close "jerky," without springs, the stock was miserable, and the drivers apparently half dead, and in the middle stage we were six hours going fifteen miles. One pas- senger was half insane with heat and fatigue; another was attacked with gastritis; the other four, besides myself, were dis- charged soldiers returning from Fort Berthold, who made the day hideous with blasphemy, constantly cursing the driver until the air was so impregnated with damnation I am confident it added ten degrees to the temperature. I reached Sioux City completely exhausted, but somewhat relieved to find that the intense heat or some other motive power had produced even worse effects there, as there had been one deadly assault, two bloody riots and a daring robbery, all within twenty-four hours. It was a black day in the calendar of Sioux City. As I walked out to get cool before retiring, the open doors of half a dozen concert rooms invited the weary ; saloons seemed surprisingly thick for a State which gave forty thousand majority for a tem- perance ticket, and evening business of all sorts was lively. And yet Sioux City was not happy. It had been so generally prosperous, ami grown so rapidly since the completion of its two railroads, that the general dulness on the Missouri seemed to its citizens twice as bad by contrast. The average of business was good, but average business the old settlers call "dull times." The ride down the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad to Mis- souri Valley Junction is through a broad, rich prairie bottom almost unsettled, and in northwestern Iowa generally the towns are a little ahead of the country. The new telegraph line from that place to Yankton is a worthy exhibit of the enterprise of western Young America. It was projected by Mr. Rome J. Percy, known to journalistic fame as correspondent of the j\ r ew York Herald from Mexico, at the time of Maximilian's occupa- tion. With two others he put up the line from Sioux City to Yankton as a purely private project. There their means gave 246 WOMEN TOURISTS. 247 out, but Congress came to their aid, and granted a small sub- sidy for its extension, and they are now engaged extending the line to the forts on the Upper Missouri. The valley down to Omaha is only interesting for prospective agriculture; man has not much improved on nature as yet. Reaching Omaha, I found an unusually merry party ready for the trip to California; and I may add as a wonder that most of the ladies enjoyed it even more than they had anticipated, for women are nearly always disappointed with the western tour. Woman, as a tourist, is not a success. In the first place, she is too elaborate in the relations of space as well as time; requires too much room, and has too many needs and dependencies. Perhaps I should say this of the eastern woman on a tour out west. We approach such criticisms or reports with proper awe, but are driven to them by the manifest suffering about us. The woman suffers from the alternations of heat and cold, sun and shade, to which she is unable, by experience or habit, to accom- modate herself. More than all else, she suffers in the item of provisions. A man rushes in to the table without elaborate toilet, and eats heartily, even if the place does look doubtful. Woman prefers temporary starvation to a questionable meal. This dilemma is unavoidably presented frequently. A little starving may be all very well were it not for the consequences. The result is generally a headache, an illness at the next stopping place, and inability to eat when she reaches a suitable table. The nerve from the brain to the stomach is not so large in woman as in man, so she can starve with less present pain, but it produces worse effects. Farther west comes the alkali, or in places the chemical springs; the vicious air turns the rouge to green and the toilet powder to a dirty brown. Lovely woman becomes a fright, realizes it through her jaundiced feelings, and suffers in temper and spirits accordingly. It is not wonderful that we sometimes hear her asked such questions as, "What is the matter, now I" the last word with more of irony than art, suggesting that something is generally wrong. All this is very sad, and perhaps unavoidable; but there are three-fold greater evils, most of which might be avoided if fully informed before setting out. 248 TAKE THE TRIP. Of all the women who for any motive are known to cross the Plains not one in ten really enjoys it. There is an excess of baggage ; they seem to regard it as a long picnic, and expect the same attention from their male companions. All is very nice for a day or two, like a picnic or brief excursion, but such a style becomes a fearful bore when kept up for five or six weeks. A trip across the plains should be a practical exem- plification of woman's rights. She should be self-reliant and largely able to take care of herself. In fact it is a terrible di- lemma presented to the female mind in this shape less baggage or very little comfort. I noticed one little Missouri woman to whom this was evi- dently neither a first nor second trip. She wore a short dress, not elaborated much beyond usefulness, of stout material, not of a kind to show dust. She had one trunk and no hand pack- ages, enjoyed reasonably broad soled walking shoes, and carried not an ornamental fan, but a tough Japanese. The cars and accommodations suited her because she was prepared to suit them. With some such outfit, and a determination to start right and keep even, an eastern lady may make the western tour with little more annoyance than a man. To these reflec- tions I am driven by observations on various trips. The majority of the passengers are eastern people looking at the West. Many of them are ladies, and these are all about equally miserable. Of course no American will think of going abroad till he has seen something of his own country particularly that important part which may be seen by a trip over the Union Pacific. I wish that sentence were as true as it appears to me reasonable. For really there is no excuse now for one who wants to travel and can afford it, and does not see some of the wonders of the West: especially when so great a variety may be seen at compa- ratively little expense. The company have exhausted the re- sources of railroad ingenuity, and what with palace cars, obser- vation cars and dining stations, with other appliances of art, all may enjoy the trip to the utmost, and excursions are more in favor than ever. Great has been the rhetoric expended over REVOLUTION. 249 this line, but it has not become stale; still the overland railway seems as great an accomplishment as ever. The com- pany has lately issued an elaborate series of views representing points of greatest interest, from which the tourist can most easily learn what he wants to see and how to see it. We reached Salt Lake City at the end of fifty-three hours from Omaha, and after the inevitable visit to the warm baths I strolled over to Main Street, and as I turned the corner of First South Street, I stopped with amazement. Never, in all my experience with western cities, have I seen such a change as had come over Salt Lake within a year. Stacks of bullion silver and lead graced the corners, crowds of miners thronged the pavements; half a dozen hotels were full of visitors, capital- ists and superintendents, all Gentile ; bright open fronts and gay lights displayed the interior glories of the " Alhambra," " Mag- nolia," "Salt Lake Billiard Rooms" and half a dozen other places of resort, and for two or three squares Main Street was emphati- cally an eastern more than all, a Gentile institution. At least ten thousand miners were at work in this, Toelle and Juab Counties, and a financial, social, and political revolution was in such rapid progress that the actors therein stood amazed at their own work. That revolution has continued, but more slowly; never so fast as in 1871. Still the Mormon Church is the really dominant power; still it governs the city and Territory, though the popular exclusiveness is yielding so fast that the priesthood are alternately in rage and despair. Revolutions invariably bring hidden evils to the surface, and the Mormons show eager haste in pointing out the bad effects of which a few have followed this great influx. The evil must come with the good. On either side of the dead-line of moral mediocrity and religious formalism, lies a broad field of evil or good ; and it is impossible to open to a man the highest range of the one with- out leaving him free to enter the other -if so he will. Mormon- ism boasted that it had produced a city of quiet and order; and so it had the quiet of mental stagnation ; the order of a perfect religious conformity, of a system which brooked no schism and of which the advocates " knew they were right, and wanted no 250 one about who did not think as they." With more liberty for action has come more license, and in the period of transition, evil is more noisy and demonstrative. But the Liberals of Utah need not shrink from the comparison. Surely it must be more pleasing to God and to intelligent men, that some should freely and willingly do right, though others with equal freedom do evil, than that all should be cast in the mould of an iron- bound necessity a cold, compressed union, under a theocracy which ever boasted that it prevented some evils, because it tolerated no individuality, and allowed no evil but its own. This was one of the good points of Mormonism : the Church monopolized the crime. She punished unsparingly whatever was not done by her order. She permitted crime to run in cer- tain channels, but she resolutely kept it there. Now that the Church monopoly is broken, individual sinfulness is more open, noisy and apparent ; but the aggregate, I am sure, will average for the better. To such conclusions did I come on my third visit to Utah. Our trip thence to " Frisco" was uneventful. Late in the afternoon of a bright August day we left the cars, under the clear sky and in the warm air, at Oakland, and steamed over the Bay into the cold, chilly evening fog of San Francisco. There we enjoyed ourselves three days and made ready for the grand tour to the Yosemite and other wonders of the Sierras. CHAPTER XT. WONDERS OF THE SIERRAS. Off for Calaveras The route Copperopolis Up the Sierras First view of the Grove Particular trees Emotions excited Route thence to Yosemite Table Mountain Bret Uarte Terrible descent Into the Valley A world of won- ders Fatigue and reflection Description impossible. LL aboard for Yosemite and the Big Trees ! How the mind swells as these words are called through the hotel, and the fancy paints what is to come : visions of giant vegetation and wondrous woods ; of riotous nature in a tropical clime and fertile soil, exceeding all the wonders of romance with growing reality ; of rocky canons and happy valleys ; of glacier-hewn cliffs, reared thousands of feet in the air; of waterfalls and mirror lakes; of immense flumes, cut by living streams in the solid granite; of majestic falls, and crystal cascades foaming from a hundred hills. But between us and these wonders intervene many miles of wearisome travel, days of toil and nights of broken rest. Before my visit I wondered that so many excursionists visited Califor- nia, and never went to Yosemite or the Big Trees. I wonder no longer; for the trip is one which may well make the most hardy hesitate, though truly assured that in the end he shall see wonders that have no equal upon this planet. Two hundred and fifty miles of staging upon the rocky Sierras, beneath an August sun, and half the time enveloped in red dust, are enough to make one seriously ask, Does it pay to visit Yosemite? We leave chilly " Frisco" at 4 p. M., and spend the night at Stockton, experiencing in that short distance .about as great a change of climate as if we should go in April from Chicago to New Orleans. Thence at daylight we take the Stockton and 251 . 252 A DESIRABLE COMPANION. 253 Copperopolis Railroad, which is to run to the latter place, on the lower foothills of the Sierras, but does run to Milton, where the foothills begin. In California, everything under two thousand feet high is called a hill ; if it leads up to a mountain, a foothill. At 8 o'clock of a sultry morning we, take the stage at Milton and strike northeast, over a dusty road, cheered at rare intervals by a transient breath of wine}. Of a car full of excursionists, but two were ready to start now : myself and scientific companion, Mr. J. W. Book- waiter, of Springfield, Ohio, who has earned an honorable place in the history of our State. Fourteen years ago, he and I left our homes in the Wabash Valley for the Michi- gan University, and surely two poorer or more thorough " Hoosiers " never entered that far-famed institute. We cal- culated the very interest on shoe-leather, and studied how to rest our arms on a writing- desk so as to least wear out our sleeves. Eight years after- ward, Mr. Book waiter was a noted inventor; in I860 he became the managing head and principal stockholder in the t A MONSTKFL 254 " M. KETCH UM. ' HYDRAULIC MINING. 76 WONDER-WOULD. THE YOSEMITE FALLS. ' We rise to view a new creation as it seems a wondrous rift in the earth, a great void five miles long and one and a-half wide in the center, walled in by ever-enduring granite three thousand feet high, impassable but at a few points, with rocky, narrow outlet westward and two sharp inlets from the eastward, where the Merced pours down from snowy peaks still eight thousand feet higher. Here is a minor cosmos, shut off from the greater, THE GREAT FALL. 277 whore nature seems to have proceeded on a more extensive plan, as if determined to outdo all in the outer world of common-place. A forenoon we give to rest and gazing, for there is enough to be seen for that time from the porch of the hotel. After noon we start out northward, to the foot of Yosemite Falls, one and ii half mile from us. The cliffs in front rise nearly three thou- sand feet above us, and all along the perpendicular wall we see the marks of ancient glaciers and waves wearing smooth the rocky face ; but above, where first the peaks rose from the sea of primal chaos, rough and frowning battlements attest the vio- lence of the rent which divided this from the southern side. About half way up the cliff is a small offset, where grows a beautiful pine, with branch and foliage forming a perfect cone, seeming like the larger growth of ornamental shrubbery. Yet that shrub is a monster tree, one hundred and sixty feet high, and above it the perpendicular cliff is just eleven times its hight. Go into the forests of Ohio or Indiana and select the tallest tree, and remember that the upper division merely of Yosemite Fall is at least ten times that hight! Or imagine ten Niagaras piled one above another. A thick forest of pines and firs fills the center of the valley, and through it we follow up the bed, now almost dry, of Yosemite Creek, the boulders increasing regularly in size as we proceed, until at last the way is blocked by vast masses of granite, hurled, as in Titanic war, from the cliffs above. The immense wall gives back leaving an inlet into the mountain, the sides of which, like buttresses, approach each other at a sharp angle, and down one side of this inlet pours Yosemite, now shrunk to a mere rill. But in May and June the con- gealed floods on hights five thousand feet above are loosed and fill the high flume with a raging torrent. Then great liquid volumes fall from the first hight sixteen hundred feet, strike and break to a thousand splintered streams, lacing all the second fall for four hundred feet with dazzling lines of foam; then gather in another flurne, take another plunge, and re- bounding from the cliff in a million comminuted streams, roar into the basin below. Large logs from the mountain forests 278 A GENERAL VIEW. NORTH DOME AND ROYAL ARCHES. plunge a thousand feet without check and splinter to fragments, but sometimes pass entire and with myriad tumblings are drifted far down the plain. The three divisions of the fall measure respectively sixteen hundred, four hundred and thirty-four, and six hundred and thirty-three feet, making the total fall two thousand six hundred and sixty-seven feet. Climbing for two hours we reach the highest available ledge, inscribe our names and return. Wearied out with a day of sight-seeing I lie upon the porch at Hutch ings', gaze and think. To the northwest is El Capi- tan, glorified in the soft moonlight; opposite Yosemite Fall, to the right the Royal Arches, over all this wondrous sky, and all around us monster battlements with shrubby fringe, till we seem to be walled in far down in the depths of the earth, shut out from human hope or help, and must involuntarily ask : What if ancient order suddenly return, and these cliffs unite as science tells us they were once united. But soon, as I gaze, all ether thoughts become absorbed in one; through all my musing runs one central vein, an all- pervading, oppressive consciousness of time, the time required to produce all that is before me. Ages seem compressed into one moment of thought countless cycles of years crystalizing IMMENSE TIME. 279 their results in my brain into one instant of swift conception. What ages of cosmic process were required to bring about this wondrous combination which I can survey in one quick glance; what infinite forces working silently in God's laboratory for inconceivable ages produced all this scene my eye can sweep over in ten seconds. What ages, what unending a3ons of duration an immensity clip- ped out of eternity were re- quired to perfect this work. Can the mind with utmost stretch revert to a period when all was ethereal, gase- ous ; when earth was a nebu- lous mass; when Cosmos first had being then the time re- quired for it to become a molten mass the ages thence to solidity the first crust the shrinking, the ridging, the upheaval ; then the earth- quake wave which rent these cliffs asunder; then the con- vulsions lasting through mil- lions of years, and ending in the mighty subsidence in the bottom of this fissure crevice ! Then came the age of ero- sion, the glaciers successively writing their history on these rocky tablets; the ages of wear required to polish SOUTH OR HALF DOME. smooth these granite walls, and symmetrize the facings of the cliffs. At last came the age of disintegration, of mold, of soil, of growth, of animals, and last of all man the last by all reasoning the shortest. And all this is a mere atom to Omniscience, a tip upon the 280 DREAD ETERNITY. dial-plate of eternity : this work the littleness of Omnipotence. Read, ye that murmur at what men count slackness; because vengeance against an evil work is not executed speedily, because all seems as it did in the moral or material world read in these eternal walls that with God there can be no haste. Time is no element in Divine plans. Duration has no place in Heaven's problems. With him can be neither past, present, nor future; an eternal NOW. From this sublime book get a faint idea of the infinite patience of the Eternal Mind. Then, from the immense past, come faint conceptions of the future eternity, and the mind shrinks back appalled whose does not, let his hope or belief be what it may? and seeks to dismiss the thought. All these cycles a million years to wear one inch upon the brow of El Capitan are but a dance upon the dial's point to the vast eternity. Awe seizes us at the thought, but we cannot shut it out with those scenes in view; and dread- thought through all those ages, unending aeons, we must go on, on, ox " Through what new changes must we pas>. Through what varieties of untried being." And through all these changes we must still think, still act, still move, still put sequent to antecedent, still pursue some de- finite object, some final end and aim. Let us hope what we may, let our destiny be what it will still our condition must be action, action, ACTION. Eternal motion without ceasing. Heaven take away the thought in kindness! I shrink from it appalled. While feeling its weight I could almost renounce im- mortality. Aye, give me, rather, give me annihilation eternal repose the final heaven of the Boodhists. But this horror is but for a moment. Reaction comes, and with it quiet and the pleasure of rest after fatigue. The mind is exhausted by striving to take in immensity; the eye is wearied with gazing, the body with unwonted fatigue; the soul swelled for hours by lofty conceptions, reacts to earthly weakness : all clamor for rest and " Sweet sleep knits up the raveled skein of cuiv." 281 282 MIRROR LAKE. No, not care, but rather that pain which comes of excess in ecstasy. The next day is set for the great excursion to Mirror Lake, Nevada and Vernal Falls; and at 5 A.M. the voice" of the genial Hatchings is heard ringing through our chambers in the distich with which he rouses the sleepy : " Oh, come ye down, my noble nob, The kettle's singing on the hob, The toast and cakes will all be spoiled, And every egg be over-boiled." A hasty breakfast, and off for (lie most toilsome and yet most enjoyable day to be spent in the valley. Saddles are carefully set and mules "cinched" with these mountain girths, eight inches wide, until it seems they can scarcely breathe; for we are to have perils of water and mountain perils by the way. We cross the crystal Merced of deceitful depth it looks four feet and is really ten and lively with mountain trout, in front of the hotel, and take our way eastward up the valley, with the Royal Arches to our left. In some convulsion past the granite has fallen from the north side in successive sections in .such shape as to form the likeness of five great arches, one within the other, half a mile long from west to east and rising in the center fifteen hundred feet. We found Mirror Lake simply a pretty mountain tarn of clear water, to my mind the least of all the wonders of Yo- semite, though greatly praised. We are assured, however, that we saw it at a most unpropitious time. The day was not clear and the water was discolored being low by tamarack trees in its source at Lake Tinayah some miles above and eastward, in the very midst of snow-peaks. Standing on the northern shore we viewed reflected in the lake from right to left, South Dome, Old Man of the Mountains, Clouds Rest, Mount Watkins, and the Watch Eye, all notable and noble peaks upon the south side, rising from two thousand to four thousand feet above the cliffs that bound the valley. Crossing in a skiff to the south side we see reflected from the north, Mount Washington, Mount Cal- houn. and the far-reaching wall of the lower valley. The lake UP THE VALLEY. 283 VERNAL FALLS ; 350 FEET HIGH. is a great crystal map of all the adjacent hills and cliffs, beautU ful only because of beautiful surroundings, not remarkable in itself, but dazzling by reflection of greater glories. From Mirror Lake we come back on the same trail a little way, then straight south across the valley till we are directly under the southern cliff which, instead of being perpen- dicular, here overhangs and seems momentarily to threaten destruction; then eastward up what may be called the main branch of the Merced to the head of the valley. The smaller branch comes in from the northeast under the shadow of the North Dome and the Cap of Liberty the last a wondrous cone rising directly from the north cliff, one thousand feet of beauti- 284 CLIMBING MULE-BACK. ful yellow and smooth rock, completely inaccessible. From this side the Merced plunges down from its source in the ice- peaks by two magnificent cataracts, Nevada and Vernal Falls, and a series of beautiful rapids and cascades between them. But there is no reaching the foot of the lower fall on horseback; we are to return by it from above, down a perilous stairway, and now must make a wide detour to scale the cliff, or first offset, which frowns two thousand feet above us. No possible passage is visible to our unaccustomed eyes; the side seems almost perpend feu 1 a r, and when the guide tells us we are to "go up there/ 7 pointing with his finger at an angle of eighty to a flat projecting peak seeming to our vision half way to the sky we shake bur heads incredulously. " But I have piloted two thousand people up there," says the con- fident Brightman, and we are reassured and follow him. I dare not venture on a description ; even now I can shut my eyes, see it all, and shudder. Imagine the route in, with all its difficulties doubled, and going up instead of down, and some faint idea may be formed. Here, we are told, there has been one accident. Three weeks before a saddle, not carefully girted, slipped back and the mule straightway went to " bucking;" the rider jumped off on the upper side, and the mule undertook to run down the mountain, but soon lost his footing and went rolling from rock to rock, till ricocheting one hundred feet from one offset, he fell upon the next flat with every bone splintered and his flesh reduced to jelly. "A plaguey good mule, too," says Brightman, pathet- ically, "worth one hundred and fifty dollars any day; and had a first-rate saddle on him smashed to giblets, not a piece as big as your pencil." This last with a voice of deep concern, as if cruel fate might have spared the saddle, even if she took the mule and rider. Two hours of this toil bring us upon the level above the Vernal, and turning a sharp rocky point, we come in sight of Nevada Falls, and in a few moments are directly at its foot for here the approach is easy. All that we have seen seems as nothing to this, the largest and highest fall in one body. Rushing down a rocky flume from hights four thousand UITI7EJ A SHEET OF FOAM. oar C 285 feet above and miles away, the Merced comes clear as alcohol to the edge and takes the first plunge, four hundred feet clear; then dashes against the rocks, and rebounding in comminuted foam of dazzling white, then collect- ing again to a hun- dred tiny streams, it is off at last from the rocky face in filmy slanting lines of cloud and foam, transparent mists, so delicately flowing downward that one can scarcely say they move. The silvery sheen like a hanging crystal web, is lifted by the wind, swaying now against the rocks and now far out over the valley; then in a momentary calm falls back to break into a thousand transparent, fluted sections, creeping, gliding downward over the rocks in ever-unfolding, ever re- ^ newing liquid lawn, in distant seeming like the mimic vails of the spectacular drama. While we view this scene with keen de- light, the howitzer is fired at the Mountain House across the gulch. The echo breaks sharply upon us from our side, and returns from Clouds Rest on the north ; then seems to die away amid peaks and hollows, but suddenly NEVADA FALLS, 700 FEET HIGH. PI-WY-ACK. breaks again upon the startled ear, then repeats in slow declin- ing reports from peak, cliff and point, again to renew and again die away in a thousand repetitions of splintered sound. The effect of these sights upon different persons is a curious study. The noisy are still, the garrulous silent, and even the least profound are awed to a solemn reverence with something akin to fear. With people of deep emotional nature the eyes glis- ten, the body twitches, and the tears start; and one tourist, a Quaker lady from Philadel- phia, in common seeming most unmoved and impassive, fell upon her knees on the rock, and with mixed sobs and ejacu- lations prayed with the earn- estness of an exhorter, thank- ing God with streaming eyes and broken voice for having lived to see this sight. After a frugal dinner at the Mountain House everything has to be packed thither on mules we came down by the hand-rail beside Vernal Falls, while Brightman returns the mules by the other route as far as LtiMTis:rv Rock, the first point where we can meet him. Piwyack "cataract of diamonds" as I he Ind ians call it, well deserves the name ; DOWX BY VER- i ' -\7 i 17 11 XAL FALLS. though known by the whites as Vernal .ball, from the beautiful emerald tints it displays. It consists of one clear fall of three hundred and fifty feet, and is accessible from more points than any other fall in the valley. The water starts from the cliff in two great rocky flumes, twenty feet wide and perhaps a foot in depth ; but long before reaching the bottom is utterly broken into minutest fragments and rolled into one great airy sheet of foam ; snow-white and dazzling, bordered apparently by pearl-dust, it seems a column GREAT KALEIDOSCOPE. 287 of cloud breaking upon the rocks to light surf and starry crys- tals. As the foam floats upward the sky clears suddenly, and the sun pours a flood of bright rays into the gorge ; the dropping lines of emerald take on a brighter tint, and a rainbow in five concentric rings springs upon the sight. The wind sways back the gauzy column; the penciled rays lose their exact focus; the rainbows break into two, four, eight, an infinite division of indie tints, and the whole presents a luminous aureole a hun- dred feet in diameter: another draft of air and we have a dis- solving view, then a lull, and back swings the fleecy foaming column in two bodies, and twice the number of circling rain- bows delight the eye. Back comes the wind and away swings the watery column, bringing again the double breaking linos of iridic tints; the eye is relieved by new prismatic combina- tions, and the overwrought senses roused to new delight by fresh showers of more brilliant constellations. The stairways about Vernal Falls are well arranged, and the steps hewn in the rock afford many favorable points to view the entire fall. Gladly would we have lingered here, but the approach of evening called us away while our enjoyment was still at its hight. The hours of rest pass pleasantly at our hotel on the banks of the pellucid Merced. The inhabitants are only second in interest to the valley. Mr. J. M. Hutchings walked in ten years ago and pre-empted the land where his hotel now stands. It was unsurveyed public land, and the State of California, to which this section was granted by Congress, disputes his title. He relies upon a clause in the law of 1841, giving title even on unsurveyed lands in case of a certain term of occupancy, and the question is still pending. Years ago he came in on snow shoes to see if the valley was habitable in winter, and soon after moved his family in. From May till October all is lively in the valley, then a gloom, born of perfect isolation, settles upon the place; and the few who winter through are as completely cut off as one can imagine. Once a month or so, an Indian works his way down the south slope on snow-shoes, bringing in mail and taking out reports from the imprisoned. With three 288 PLEASANT QUARTERS. hotels, a saw-mill and two ranches, some fifty persons reside in? there, including thirty voters. For seven years Mr. Hatchings rode a hundred miles yearly to vote ; but lately a precinct has been established at his place. But the wonder among the buildings of Yosemite is the " Cosmopolitan," containing saloon, billiard hall, bathing rooms and barber-shop, established and kept by Mr. C. E. Smith. Everything in it was transported twenty miles on mules; mir- rors full-length, pyramids of elaborate glassware, costly service,. the finest of cues and tables, reading-room h a n d s o m e 1 y f u r - nished and supplied with the latest from Eastern cities, and baths with unexcep- tionable surround- ings, attest the nerve and energy of the projector. It is a per- fect gem. The end of the wagon -road was twenty miles away when the enter- prise began, and yet such skill was used in mule-packing that not an article was broken. I have not seen a finer place of resort, for its size. The arrangements for living are such that one could spend the summer there delightfully, and we found several tourists who remained for weeks. Space forbids a full account of the sights upon the southern cliifs: of Pohono " Spirit of the Evil Wind" called by the whites Bridal Vail, a tiny stream with fall of 940 feet; of Lung-oo-too-koo-ya " Long and Slender " or the Ribbon Fall, amounting in different cascades to 3300 feet; of Tis-sa- LIBERTY CAP (MT. BRODERICK). NO DESCRIPTION ADEQUATE. 289 ack " Goddess of the Valley "or the South Dome ; or of Tu- lool-we-ack " The Terrible " the wild, craggy gorge of South Cailon. Nor is my pen equal to the task of doing justice to Tu-toch-ah-nu-la " Great Chief of the Valley "or El Capi- tan, rising at something more than a perpendicular, leaning over the valley, to an elevation of 3300 feet ; nor to Wah-wah- le-na " The Three Graces " whose heads shine from a hight of 3750 feet. Vainly have I tried to convey some faint idea, and now drop my pen with a feeling of half despair. All that is to be seen elsewhere in our country seems to me as nothing or fit only to be used as a basis of comparison, whence one may gain a faint idea of the lesser glories of Yosemite. All that the utmost stretch of fancy can picture of the giant-like, the colossal and Cyclopean, is but a shadowy conception of this im- mense reality. No description has ever been written. None can be written on this earth. The subject is beyond the pro- vince of mere word-painting. A man must die and learn the language, of the angels before he can describe Yosemite. 19 CHAPTER XVI. SKETCHES IN SAN FRANCISCO. Mr Return from Yosemite Summary of trip Does it pay ? Climate of San Fran- ciscoOf the State Variety in " Frisco "The Barbary Coast Chines* Theatre The Cliff House and Seal Rocks Literature of the Pacific Joaquin Miller Frances Rose Mackinley Morals and manners Excitement and wearing out An inventive Race The Chinese agaii-. i UR return from Yosemite was still more exhaustive than the going, but fortunately not so long. From the valley to Milton is two-thirds of the way down hill, and at a continuous run we made it in less than a day and a half the distance which requires two long tiresome days in going up. We varied the route by taking a boat from Stockton to " Frisco," leaving the former place by the San Joaquin River at 5 P. M., and reaching the wharf of the city at 2 A. M. next morning. And having completed the trip, the question again seriously arises : Does it pay to visit Yosemite? The same route would be too laborious for any other curiosity that I know of, but one twice as long and toilsome would here be handsomely repaid. From Milton present terminus of the Copperopolis Rail- road by the way of the Big Trees to Yosemite, is 150 miles; and from Yosemite back by Chinese Camp direct is 109 miles, making a total of staging of 259 miles. Add 100 by rail going to Milton, and twenty by rail and 100 by steamer returning, and we have a total of 220 by rail and steamer, and a grand total of 479 miles in going and return.* For all this hauling, House worth, Sisson & Co. charge us the moderate * There are two other routes. All needed information for tourists, with chart and guide, may be obtained by writing to Thomas Houseworth & Co., San Francisco. *290 k. 291 292 REVIEW OF THE ROUTE. price of forty-six dollars per man. To this must be added three dollars per day for necessaries upon the road, and the same for each day in the valley for guide and horse; that is, if you go to see all that is there, and if you do not, you had better not go at all. But hundreds of visitors never go out of the little open flat around the hotel, contenting themselves with a general view of distant wonders. Horace Greeley, when he visited the valley, rode sixty miles on horseback, though he had not been in a saddle for twenty years, reaching the hotel at midnight com- pletely exhausted, and minus at least two square feet of abraded cuticle. He went supperless to bed, and having an engagement to fill, left at noon next day, and the second night thereafter lectured at a town nearly tsvo hundred miles away. When the railroad is completed southward to the Merced, it is estimated that a first-class stage road could be built from the crossing right up the Merced to Yosemite, for $100,000, and certainly the State could not make a better investment. The road would have to be blasted out of the foot of the cliffs along the gate- way, where the Merced flows out of Yosemite ; below, the grade would not be difficult, and it would save two-thirds of the wear at present required. All that man can do has been done on the present route, and still the trip is very exhausting. We find four changes of climate : high up the Sierras it is cool and balmy; in the foothills, sultry and calm ; out in the main valley, blazing hot, but tempered by a little wind, and in crossing the bay, and in San Francisco, damp and chilly. To sum up : if a man have $100, two weeks time, and a tough backbone, he can go to Yosemite and see more of the wonderful than is contained in America besides. The cold weather was giving way and the warm season about setting in; for in " Frisco " everything goes by the contrary ; the seasons are all mixed up, and winter comes exactly in the middle of summer. August is the coldest, and September the warmest month of the year. The reason is obvious when we note the course of the Pacific trade winds. The easterly wind, which has been setting on the coast since May, begins to retire slowly southward in July, and by the middle of August the GO IN THE SPRING. 293 heavy body of it is striking full on the city, bringing with it fog and chills, piercing the bones. By September 1st or 15th, the central column so to speak of this wind has passed "Frisco," and is setting in on San Diego and Mexico ; and behind it comes what is called "the suck," almost a calm, or even a wind blow- ing off the coast. But this takes place while there is still hot sun enough to produce warm weather, and thus the chilly breeze retiring southward before the September sun is quite ready to follow, this and the next are the warmest months. The first six months of the year are the best time to visit California ; everything is bright and growing, and from January to June there is comparatively little dust or heat. After that the drouth is parching, and the whole interior, from the Sierras to the Coast Range, becomes yellow and arid. For days of travel not a green spot is to be seen, for not one house in fifty has a grass plat about it, the same requiring a little irrigation and the use of a windmill. The old fields from which the wheat has been cut in May or early June look distressingly barren in their coat of dirty yellow ; all the foothills are brown or dirty gray, and over everything is dust, dust, dust. Not a drop of rain falls from May till late October; then come the drenching rains of autumn, and the whole plain becomes a sea of liquid mud a little too thick for navigation and a little too thin for roads. But this passes away in a month or two ; the roads harden, and only moderate showers fall, and by the middle of January the growing season is fully begun. Then everything is lovely for a while. Strawberries are abundant in March, and every kind of early fruit and vegetable most plentiful. But the heavy fruit season comes later ; so, if you can not visit the State before July and avoid the dust, then come late in August or in September and enjoy the fresh fruits. Do not, as the majority of Eastern tourists do, come in July, get all the evils and miss the comforts. I like San Francisco for its variety. If one don't like staid American society, there are French, Italian, and Spanish quar- ters, and not far off Kanakas, and ever-present Chinese. Having a few nights to spend in sight-seeing, we give the first to the " Barbary Coast" and the second to the California Theatre, the 294 UA I A FORM A A M U8EMENT8. THE MINER WHO STRUCK IT RICH. last just then the great attraction of the city in the way of amusements. California taste runs more towards the spectacular and splendid in scenery and properties than to the solid or classic drama, and this theatre is noted for paying more money for scenery than any other in America. They had then upon the stage a play entitled " Ready ; or California in 1871," which was written with a view to illustrate the wonders of the State from Cape Horn to Yosemite. The various views were of SOCIETY. 295 familiar places in San Francisco, of Caper Horn, the Central Pacific, the Vernal Fall at Yosernite, and of a Chinese opium den, all painted with exact fidelity to the originals. The scene representing Vernal Fall surpassed nature almost; the illusion of falling water being produced by a new invention, consisting of a cylinder with lights inside revolving behind the transparent curtain. The theatre was crowded from orchestra to third circle by representatives from every part of the globe, and a represen- tative California audience is only second in interest to such scenery. The play is nothing. The "villains" of the piece concert to throw the Central Pacific train off at Cape Horn, in order to rob Wells-Fargo's treasure boxes ; they are defeated in the very act by the " virtuous hero," who clears the track of stone just in time for a splendid train of nine cars to go by, in exact semblance of the reality, filling the Californian's soul with delight and the theatre with cheers. The " model detec- tive," disguised as a Chinaman, feigns stupidity in the opium den, and overhears the villains plotting to rob the " pious old gentleman " of the play. The hero finally marries the heroine in the most magnificent church of the city, and they set out on a tour to the Yosemite, where they come across the " villain," who has been crushed by a rock overturning upon him half way up the cliff to Vernal Falls. Policemen, tourists, Chinamen and diggers, in appropriate costumes, crowd the scenes. Every view of city or country is exact and natural, and visitors can get about as good an idea of California at large in four hours of this play as in a week's travel. Critics there claimed that this was the greatest local and sensational success ever produced in America. Society in " Frisco " seems to be in a transition state. It is a land of the beggar and the prince. There seems to be no middle class. Public taste inclines to the showy, sensational and flashy, rather than the quietly elegant. More "loud" dress- ing, gaudy jewelry, flaunting feathers, frills and furbelows, big bows, and loose-flying, parti-colored ribbons can be seen on Montgomery and Kearney streets than on any two fashionable promenades I have traversed. A " '49-er " tells me, as I have PUBLIC BUILDINGS. 297 heard before, that the female aristocracy of San Francisco con- sists largely of those who came out there twenty or twenty-five years ago, when women were scarce, as servant girls, waiters and the like, and married men who grew suddenly rich in the wonderful changes of those times. The extravagance of dress in " Frisco " has long been a sub- ject of remark ; and it is probable that wealth and fashion out- run taste and cultivation in a community, which in twenty years rose like another Venice, from the salt-marsh and sand- hill to unmeasured opulence. The suddenly rich usually spend their- money in the way that will make most display ; and if we cannot altogether commend their taste, we are pleased to find with it in California a kindness of heart which has been equally lavish in hospitality and institutions of charity. A Protestant Orphan Asylum was erected in 1854, at a cost of $30,000, and has received many additions since. The Catholic Orphan Asylum, with school building annexed, cost $100,000, and contains three times as many children as the Protestant, the Catholic being in a decided majority over any other sect. They have ten churches in the city. Next come the Methodists with nine, the Presbyterians with six, and two or three each of all others, including Jewish, Universalist, Unitarian and Chi- nese, if we may dignify the two "joss houses" of the latter by the name. The beauty of Sunday afternoon tempted us to use that day for a visit to the Cliff House, the great sea-side resort. It lies on the opposite, or western, side of the peninsula, about four miles from Montgomery Street/ There are many ways of reach- ing it, of which the ultra fashionable is to pay about three times as much for a hack as the same would cost in Cincinnati; but the popular and democratic mode, adopted by us, is to take the street cars to Lone Mountain, whence a line of hacks runs carrying passengers at the moderate price of " six bits there and back." Lone Mountain, the city cemetery, stands beyond the limits of the city proper, but various homestead associations have built up a line of villages all the way across the point. Whirling along through sandhills, on which I observed a plenti- 298 THE SEA-LIONS. fill supply of two old Utah acquaintances, sagebrush and grease- wood, a sudden turn to the left gave a free outlook towards the west ; there I took my first view of the Pacific, and in a few minutes more was upon the seaward porch of the Cliff House. The day was calm and almost cloudless; the sight westward free even to the meeting of sea and sky ; the blue vault, and the soft air of the Pacific, were over and around us ; to the right the Golden Gate opened into the bay ; while below us and far down the coast the white surf was breaking upon the shore, with that sublime music which has been the delight and the despair of poets since the poluphloisboio of Homer. The house stands upon a projecting rock, some forty feet above the waves, which beat incessantly upon the jagged points below, and at times even dash their light spray into the faces of those upon the seaward porch. Apparently a hundred yards out, really three times as far, stands the cluster of rocks which are the resort of the sea-lions. They were there in numbers, not playing in the waves as sometimes, but lying in groups upon the top of the rocks, "sunning themselves," one might say; their deep, hollow bark mingling with the roar of the surf. A lone rock, a little farther out, is covered in the same way with gulls, visitors not being allowed to fire at either. Below the Cliff House a road, cut into the rock and walled on the side next the ocean, leads down to a sandy beach below, where the hills give back from the shore. A long salt marsh, easily forded, is shut off from the ocean by a sand " spit/' on which is a firm and excellent drive, even to the edge of the surf. Taken altogether, this may be called the Long Branch of the West. As the afternoon drew on, while we watched the gambols of the sea-lions, which had aroused to unusual activity, the air suddenly grew dim, the rocks appeared to recede, the view of the ocean was shut off, and a dense bank of fog came rolling in- land, while long lines of mist spread over the hills and went creeping through the hollows towards the city. By 4 P. M. the breeze was coming in strong from the ocean ; the air, which 299 300 DAILY CHANGES. three hours before was quite warm, grew uncomfortably chilly, and the crowd turned towards town. Reaching Montgomery Street we found it dark with fog and mist, and a damp cold night set in where the morning had been so bright and warm. This sea-breeze, which comes every afternoon, -bringing more or less fog, gives San Francisco what might be called a singular uniformity of variety. There is no change of temperature during the night, or if any, it turns warmer. Of the eight days I spent there, in October, 1859, three were somewhat rainy, the rest beautifully clear and mild. It was warmer then than I found it in August; but between January and June there is no perceptible difference. A day's ramble about San Francisco in August I find to be a miniature copy of the seasons, except that no snow falls to re- present the hard winter of the East. We rise at 7 A. M. to a balmy early spring morning; if very hardy, even a visitor can go without a summer overcoat, but to stand around the streets I find it more pleasant to wear mine. The rising sun scatters the light, fleecy clouds, and shines out with some fervor, and by 10 A. M. I take off my overcoat, for a mild summer has set in. This continues with beautiful steadiness till 2 or 3 P.M.; then the thermometer falls about five degrees very suddenly, as the afternoon fog comes rolling over the city. November continues from 4 till 7 P. M., at which time regular winter sets in. It is, in reality, only eight or ten degrees colder than it was at noon, but the change makes it seem to me like December. I button tight my overcoat, slap my fingers vigorously, and exercise till I get acclimated ; then take a hearty dinner, and two cups of hot coffee, put on my muffler, and go out for an evening to look at the " Barbary Coast." This consists of some twenty squares along Dupont and ad- joining streets, from Stockton to Post and Sacramento, inhabited exclusively by low foreigners, petty thieves, Chinese and pros- titutes. Our party of three, accompanied by a friend on the special police, go first, of course, to the Chinese Theatre. A long, low room, all the walls garnished, or rather daubed, with gorgeous Chinese scenes, all without perspective, and lighted HO I 302 THE <> CELESTIAL" DRAMA. by a variety of colored lanterns the whole crowded with Celes- tials, and noisome with the smoky fumes of some weed I can'f recognize, is not particularly inviting. Yet here we sit an hour, mostly studying the audience, but occasionally turning an eye on the monotonous play. From the lively pantomime and the explanations of our guide, I make out that it represents some marvelous incidents in the career of Kip Sah, or some other old humbug, whose name and monarchy were great in China about sixty thousand years since. I may not have the date quite cor- rect, as Celestial history consists of the annals of a series of dynasties, evolving civilization and philosophy through suc- cessive eras of such magnitude that a variation of twenty thou- sand years, more or less, is regarded as a trifling discrepancy. The musicians sit upon the stage directly behind the actors, who enter and retire always by the wings ; and the dying groans of Hip Sail, who expires in a fit just after having triumphed over all his enemies and beheaded fifty thousand prisoners, are drowned by the monotonous droning of something like a tin drum and two three-stringed instruments, about as musical as a hog with his nose under a gate, but not half as expressive. A placard on the wall is rendered by our interpreter, as an assurance to the Celestial public that this magnificent play is produced here exactly as it was two thousand years ago in Pekin. In the back of the stage is a number of pegs, on which hang swords, masks, enormous wigs, robes, baskets and a variety of household articles. When the actor has had his say in front, he walks quietly to the rear of the stage, takes off his "fixings" and hangs them up till his time comes to "go on " again. It is needless to add that the illusion is somewhat marred by this proceeding. There were no women on the stage, and I am told that none ever appear there. Half a dozen or so were in the audience, huddled together in the most obscure corner. We find the Chinese quarter settled so thickly that it seems scarcely possible human beings could exist so, and cannot repress a feeling of fear as we plunge into the dark alleys lined by little cubby-holes alive with yellow women. But our guide 303 304 THE "DANGEROUS CLASSES." assures us we are always safe here; "though," he adds, "I can't give you any such promise two squares from here among the whites." Nevertheless, we went and inspected the white quarter. Such things have been described too often ; and if one has read a desciption of the "hard quarter" of one city, he knows enough about all. For there is a singular monotony about misery and sin everywhere, and the "poor devil" of San Francisco does not differ materially from the same indi- vidual in New York. Poverty is a misfortune anywhere; in a great city it is very near a crime. And with the really vicious who crowd the haunts of the " Barbary Coast," are many whose only fault is poverty. For a brief glance at the better-class dance-house, the low-class " den," and the " flash theatre," I can only refer the reader to the illustrations. But far above the denizens of the " Barbary Coast," there is still a large class who live by pandering to vicious tastes, and a much larger class whose only amusements are of the "flash" and "display" order. The wants of all these are met by half a dozen " melodeons," the most brilliant of which is the "Bella Union," where it may be said, ballet girls iwdress most extravagantly of any place in America, and where the worship of the calf padded, not golden prevails to such an extent that Moses would have fairly pulverized the stone tables, had he witnessed it. The upper part of San Francisco is full of geographical sur- prises, as the plat is the result of an awkward attempt to build, upon a collection of knolls, hills and miniature mountains, a city on the exact plan of level Philadelphia, resulting, as we might expect, in laborious and irregular attempts at uniformity. The city is built upon the northern end of a peninsula twenty-five miles long, between the bay and ocean ; city and county consti- tute but one municipality. The point of the peninsula is about four miles wide, formed of a series of sandy hills, with inter- vening valleys and slopes; upon these, or rather upon the inner eastern side, is the city. For several squares, from the bay the plat is quite level, tolerably so in the valleys ; but the 20 305 306 SHAKY REAL ESTATE. place grew so much faster than was expected that it has every- where " bulged in" to the hills in a rather awkward manner. The city now occupies an area about double that of fifteen years ago; nearly all of the level tract is devoted to business, and many of the highest hills are appropriated for palatial mansions. But many dwellings, which in front are level with one street, have a back yard terminating in a sheer descent of fifty feet or more; and proceeding along a level street one is surprised, on looking across an open square, to see a palatial mansion away upon a side hill, or stuck upon a rock, with galleries winding along the almost perpendicular sides. With this uneven surface and rather sandy soil, splendid facilities exist for keeping the city clean, and it is noticeably so, except in a few places near the bay. Another compensation for the hills is the fact that they, with the attempts of engineers^ have caused a strangely picturesque and interesting city. Of San Francisco it may certainly be said that it has a character and development peculiarly its own ; it is no pale copy of New York or Chicago, as the latter is of the former, but sui generis, to be loved and studied for its own municipal individu- ality, in which it probably excels any other city in America. The first San Francisco was built almost entirely of wood, and vanished one day in a sweeping fire. The second was built largely of wood, or in a rather fragile manner with more solid materials; the frequent fires finally cured the first fault, and the earthquakes frightened them out of the second. Seis- mology the new science ought to have many enthusiastic students in San Francisco, for if any man can discover how the earthquakes may be accurately foretold, his fortune is made. Ordinary shocks which would be historic in the East, are but the talk of an hour there; and in one year there were eleven slwkes. The " Earth-sustaining Ennosigaios," of whom Homer tells us, must certainly stand uneasily under "Frisco." Many ingenious plans have been suggested to avoid the dangers therefrom, and tall houses are now constructed with a com- plex set of "stringers" through them. Only eight miles away, just across the bay, the beautiful GOAT ISLAND. 307 THE FIRST SAN FRANCISCO DESTROYED. little City of Oakland rarely has even a shiver; and from its location many think it ought to have been the great city. It is now the Brooklyn to the commercial emporium. But between the two, a little northward, lies Goat Island, long the point of dread to the San Franciscans. The Central Pacific Company were moving Congress to grant them the Island for a terminus to their road ; and it was believed in San Francisco that their intention was to connect it with the main land, transfer all their business to that side, and thus build up a great rival. This was the one subject on which few San Franciscans could talk coolly, and their public meetings upon the matter were anything but models of decorum. Oratory and literature on the Pacific coast tend decidedly to the florid ; and this feature is most developed in San Francisco. 308 CALIFORNIA LITERATURE. 309 Foreign critics have maintained that certain characteristics be- long distinctively to American humor, such as broad exaggeration and recklessness; and these features, with an excess of coloring, appear peculiarly in California literature. In the last developed poet, Joaquin Miller, these features are most marked. On the Coast, his "Kit Carson's Hide," is most criticised, and his "Ifles of the Amazons," most praised. But I have never been a l)] fVom want of poetical taste, perhaps to admire his poetry as do the critics of the Co ist. To me it appears and the criti- cism applies to most Pacific Coast poetry to partake somehow of the soft, sensuous and deceiving nature of the climate: all rich description, florid language, without point, moral, or conclusion ; sweet, intoxicating, anil confusing, but not strengthening. A com- pleted poem may well be compared with one of the old Spanish gardens of California a bewildering maze of colors, lily white, or staring red and yellow, intermingled without plan or order, and yielding neither fruit nor odor. But authorities differ: one enthusiastic Pacific Coast journal likens Miller, in his gorgeous word-painting, to Byron ; to which a disgusted cotem- porary replies, that "he resembles Byron as a little nigger does a black night." California, particularly San Francisco, had a few celebrated women at the time of our visit. Frances Rose Mackinley (Mrs. or Miss, I don't know probably not important), had shocked the moral and astonished the others, by reaffirming the doctrines of Vickie Bloodhull, with a fine Pacific Coast flavor a sort of rich and sensuous description, which almost made them entertaining by removing part of their original grossness. Her book was to be found, occasionally ', away down at the bottom of young men's trunks, to be slipped from hand to hand among tie " fast," and read by stealth ; and even a few of the venerable patres conscripti held up one hand in horror at her disorganiz- ing doctrines, while the other went down into the breeches pocket for a dollar wherewith to buy the volume. But as soon as the sensation of novelty was past, Rose sank to her appropriate place. The moral world, whether of Nevr York or San Francisco, need have no fears of such disorganizes. They serve, rather, as does the convenient drunkard to the 310 EXCITING LIFE. 311 itinerant temperance lecturer, as a frightful example. When human nature has so changed that a man will toil as hard to support another man's children as his own ; when he is totally indifferent whether his wife's little flock are all his own, or claim different fathers ; when a young man takes a brevet-wife for a life-companion as willingly as a maiden ; and, above all, when unchanging nature herself ceases to stamp upon the face of vir- gin innocence that indescribable charm which all men recognize and honor, but none can portray then we may expect " free love " to become the social condition. Until then, personal purity in woman will be as much sought for by man as it is commanded by Heaven and approved by the teaching of nature. San Francisco has a fair proportion of the moral and in- telligent, though, of course, the traces of the moral storm and wrecks of her early years are still to be seen. The future Cali- fornians will probably be the most inventive race in the world ; for only the most resolute settled the country at first, only the most skilful succeeded, and their situation was such as to make invention and contrivance a necessity. Still more will this re- sult from a mixture of races; that state of facts which has made the American what he is, exists tenfold more in California. But there is too much intensity in social life yet, and too much fluc- tuation in business. The tendency to suicide and insanity on the Pacific Coast was for many years amazing. Life is too ex- citing; there are too many revulsions. One must do business on too large a scale; make much or lose much. The unsettled state of society, also, in early years broke up many families and caused much domestic unhappiness. Broken down men either fought the battle against fate with a desperate recklessness, till body and brain were alike crazed, or yielded to misfortune and sank dejected, became morbid and lost self-respect. Of the foreign elements introduced into San Francisco, ten times my space would be required to treat properly. During my first visit, the anti-Chinese excitement was at its hight; at my second, it had sensibly moderated, and at my last I scarcely heard them alluded to. For a time they ceased to be a " prob- lem." However, on second thoughts, " John Chinaman " is entitled to a chapter by himself. CHAPTER XVII. Popular nonsense about the Chinese The bugbear Chinaman The romantic Chinaman The real article. His history, art, music arid drama Objections to them considered Do they cheapen labor? Will they overrun the country? Do they degrade labor? Their condition MiSvsionary work Sacramento system Rev. O. Gibson Better specimens Yellow Chinese Mrs. Laisun and daughters Chinese students Hope for the race. 3 1 // O come at once to the point, I feel no anxiety about "John Chinaman/' either as a political problem, 'a dis- ;>> turbing social power, or a source of injury to the laboring classes. The talk about his doing this, that and the other terrible thing on the Pacific coast is three- fourths of it political demagoguery, and half of the other fourth, pure nonsense. Nor, on the other hand, can I find in him that remarkable virtue and sterling honesty, or that indus- try and ingenuity with which his apologists have credited him. Such ideas are but the natural reaction of a generous mind, enthusiastic to deft-nd an oppressed race against a cowardly and brutal class, who maltreat them for some fancied injury. 'No California gentleman or lady ever abuses a Chinaman." " Twain " never spoke a truer word. But there is in California, as elsewhere, a considerable class, many of whom have them- selves but lately sought an asylum in America, whose worst instincts are excited against a race differing so widely from them- selves ; and demagogues stoop to pander to this feeling. Hence a world of declamation about the horrors of Chinese invasion. Honorable mention should be made of a few exceptions. Hon. Goo. C. Gorham was not afraid to raise his voice publicly in defense of the oppressed, though by so doing he lost the support 313 314 HALF-CIVILIZATION. of the masses, and was remanded to private life by an over- whelming majority. Our wild man G. F. Train, also did a good thing in his public utterances in San Francisco; and I often heard the remark there, that he had said what no other man in America could have said and lived. Still the abuse of Chinamen continues, though more and more rarely. Then come the apologists and claim for "John" a score of virtues which he does not possess. He is, they say, the cleanest, most temperate, faithful, and honest of all domestic servants. All this, as it is in defense of the oppressed, is very noble, very generous, almost praiseworthy. It has but one fault: it is not true. "John" is simply a half civilized heathen, with an odd mixture of tolerably good and very bad qualities, and in a fear- ful minority, which alone would prevent his being of one-tenth the consequence attributed to him. "John" has a civilization which., is, sui generis, perfect as far as it goes. But a little examination shows there is a singular and radical defect in everything he does: he is an admirable painter, but knows noth- ing of perspective; he draws rapidly from a copy, but can rarely design ; he imitates like a monkey, but cannot invent; he has a wonderful memory for details, and follows the bad copy just as faithfully as the good. His music is perfect as to time, but has no element of melody; while the third division, dynamics, makes the only variety. His acting is faultless as to plot, incident and action ; but it is acting only by which he conveys the impression of feeling. The voice, that wonderful instrument by which every shade of emotion may be wafted from the speaker's mind to the hearer's soul, is utterly without variation : the dying groans of the expiring hero, the battle cry of the bold and bloody Rip Sah, the love songs of Kam Pou, and the passionate breathings of his mistress are all delivered in one screaming falsetto. The stranger who drops into their theatre on Jackson Street for one evening, does not fully observe this, as he knows nothing of the idea expressed ; but let him attend often enough to catch the sense from the pantomime, or better, take a native to explain the 315 316 SAMENESS OF DEVELOPMENT. progress of the play, and he will see that the want of harmony between sound and sentiment, when not shocking, is too ludi- crous for description. If "John" has any conception whatever of melody, as distinct from mere racket, I can find no evidences of it. The same one-thing-lacking appears in all branches of their culture. Their literature is but repetitions and combinations of that of their ancestors ; their history all reads alike, as if each century had taken pains to repeat all the doings of the century preceding; and their fine arts present an endless array of dragons, griffins, Boodhs, flving monsters, and spike-tailed devils with pagoda-shaped hats. To suggest that the poets or orators of to-day have improved upon those of two thousand years ago, would be an insult to a Chinese scholar. To say that they are inferior would scarcely be less an insult; but might be forgiven as a delicate compliment to the ancestors whom the Chinese worship. Of course there was a time when the Chinese mind waa inventive ; but it was many centuries since. About two thousand years ago the race, which had progressed for twelve-hundred years, probably reached the climax of their cranial capacity and stopped. Since then they have stood still or, some think, have begun to retrograde. They number perhaps 100,000 on the Pacific coast. What then are the objections to them ? 1. They work cheap, and so throw white men out of employment. In the first place, it is evident at a glance that less than one- fifth of them come into competition with white labor. The rest are doin'g work which white men would not do at all. In the swamp and tide-water lands, in working old placers abandoned by white miners, in silk culture, and in cheap laundries, are found one-half of the Chinese where white men would not take the labor. Of the other half, many are house and hotel servants, and others work in gangs on the railroads; while a very few are manufacturers. But do they work cheap? Only in a local sense. It is cheap in California, but would not be in the East. When the gang was brought to North Adams, Massachusetts, two or three "CHEAP LABOR." 317 CHINESE MERCHANT ON POST STREET. years ago, we heard much of the dreaded invasion; but I have not observed that the experiment has been repeated. Thirty-five dollars per month is not cheap in the East, though it is in California; and few Chinese will work for less. Besides, as soon as they learn the ways of the country and a little of the language, there is not the least doubt but they will ask all their labor is worth, and a little more. There are two sides to this discussion of cheap labor. There is also cheap production. There is a buying as well as a selling side. If a host of Chinese should come and make our shoes at half the price now charged, twenty thousand people would be thrown out of employment. But forty million people would be able to buy shoes a great deal cheaper. In rice culture, in the tule, swamp and tide lands, 318 "A CHINESE INVASION." where white men will not work; in silk culture and in working "poor placers," California needs and can employ a quarter of a million Chinamen without displacing a single white. And the results would double the wealth of the State, lessen taxation one half, increase the demand for skilled white laborers, and make profitable places for five times as many as are now sitting about the cities complaining of dull times, and cursing the "hay then Chinee." The argument on this " cheap-labor question " has a comic resemblance to that of the Yankee who was sued for the value of a kettle, borrowed and broken. His answer in court had three counts: first, he never had the kettle; second, it was broken when he got it ; third, it was whole when he returned it. Similarly, but with more truth, of the Chinese: first, more cheap labor will not hurt California; and, second, the Chinese will not cheapen labor to any appreciable extent. 2. Bid they will overrun the country ! They have been corning for a quarter of a century and only number a hundred thousand. At this rate they would, at the end of a thousand years, be in as great a minority as now ; for we get twice or thrice their whole number from Europe every year. Of course, their immigration is liable to increase. But if all the emigrant ships running to all the ports in the Union should go into the Chinese-carrying trade, they could only bring over a quarter of a million a year. It would take them a hun- dred and sixty years to reach our present numbers, even if we stood still. Can we not Americanize and Christianize as fast as they can immigrate? In the light of plain figures, "the oncoming millions of Asia," with which California orators threaten us, appear rather as a violent figure of speech than an imminent fact. 3. They will degrade labor! If there is anything I particularly enjoy, it is to hear a lily- handed office-seeker discourse on the " dignity of labor." I have been reading the Bible somewhat of late, and learn therefrom that labor, like death, was put upon man as a curse instead of a blessing ; and I observe that his natural instinct leads him to "DEGRADING LAROR." 319 put off the one as long, and have as little to do with the other, as possible. Also, that those men who go around as the " workingman's friends," getting up " Labor-reform Associa- tions " and talking so eloquently about the "dignity of labor," are the ones who have managed to do the least of it. Hence, in California, I was not at all surprised to see that all the anti- Chinese orators regularly employed a house full of Chinese ser- vants. Enquiring of one such why this was so, he frankly re- plied, " We can't help ourselves ; other servants ask wages we can't afford to pay, and arc offensive and uncertain besides." A very good excuse; but did our forefathers and foremothers so compromise with their principles when they refused British tea? If these fellows were in earnest, they would heave the Chinese servants overboard, as those others did the tea, and do their own work. Why are our speakers poloquent, and our newspapers full of glow r ing paragraphs, about the " dignity of labor ?" Is it because there is, after all, a sort of doubt in the minds of thousands about it ? Of course, labor is dignified and honorable; but why not take it for granted, in a country like this, and cease to make such a rumpus about it? We shout and hurrah over the simple proposition so much, that we make the secret doubt apparent. The Chinese will " degrade labor " just so far as the laborer, by his own acts, consents that it shall be degraded, and no farther. The social condition of the California, particularly the San Francisco, Chinese is unqualifiedly bad. They are herded to- gether in narrow streets and alleys, in crowded tenement houses, living almost like brutes, and, in a Christian country, with the morals of heathen. Of course, this presents no just standard by which to judge of their condition at home. That they want to do much better is clearly proved by the fact that as fast as they are able they do improve, live cleanly and comfortably, and with a tolerable degree of morality. A Post Street merchant is not an unpleasant gentleman to associate with, by any means; and the style of his apartment and dress shows considerable taste. Chan Laisun, reported to be worth a million or so, does not look particularly handsome at his best, the more so as he insists 320 CHAN LAISUN. CHAN LAISUN. on sitting for his portrait in his wash-basin hat and puffed sleeves; but he is a thoroughly honest dealer for all that, and if he promises you so much tea, sampan or pacli-tong, on a given day, you are just as sure of it as if you had a written contract. Such specimens show that the national mind really seeks for something better than is to be seen on Dupont Street. We cannot afford to let the race go altogether uncared for morally; and Christian ideas have taken a good practical direc- tion in the matter. The mission work is already wonderful in its practical results, considering the small force, and sublime in its possibilities. The first effort at teaching was by three ladies of the Sixth Street Methodist Church, Sacramento: Mrs. Curly* Mrs. Heacock and Mrs. Sweetland names which deserve a place in history. They established the first Chinese school in July, 1866, and others were following when, in August, 1868, Rev. O. Gibson was sent to that special work by the Methodist- EDUCATING " JOHN." 321 Episcopal Mission Board. This gentleman had spent ten years in China as a missionary, and finding the Sacramento schools flourishing and the system good, adopted it entire and made it general. There were, in 1870, seven schools in San Francisco, one in Oakland, one in Santa Clara, one in San Jose, one in Stockton, two in Sacramento, the original one with forty scholars, one in Marys vale, one in Grass Valley and three in Oregon, at Salem and Portland. The largest had a hundred and fifty scholars on the list, and two others a hundred each ; the average of the others about thirty. In all, a thousand Chinese were under instruction, with an average regular attendance of five hundred. The number has no doubt largely increased since my estimate was made. They learn English letters and spelling rapidly, but cannot pronounce the r or the th. By invitation of Rev. O. Gibson I attended the Teachers' Meeting called to discuss two points: How best to teach English ; and, How far to teach Christianity at the start. It was concluded to first teach our language, social practices and customs ; then, religion specifically. Chinese religion is a strange study : a queer, cold, uninviting, chilly and repellant theology. In conversations with the mis- sionary, interpeters, and two Chinese merchants of my acquaint- ance, I was convinced that the race would give it up, if a more vital and cheerful belief were offered in its stead. Boodhism is the religion of profound sorrow of deep, deep, hopeless, and unutterable gloom. There is no Mediator, no atone- ment, no forgiveness, no redeeming love : all is to be suffered out, labored out, struggled over, agonized through ; and fallen man, if forgiven at last, is only forgiven in complete negation. Heaven is not a positive state; only an escape from hell : it is not happi- ness, but merely the negation of misery. In its genius is nothing bright or joyous; nothing inspiring in its theology. It is, simply, sin leads to suffering, to be atoned for by ages of misery. Its public ceremonies have their funny side, too ; but only to the onlooking Fanqui (" White Devil," or "Scoffer"). Whether "John" be a skeptic or believer, the ceremony awakens no mirth in his mind. 21 Mother. Aged 13. Aged 16. MRS. LAISUN AND DAUGHTERS. 322 BOODHISM. 323 There are really three forms of opinion in China, but they can hardly be denominated so many religions : Confucianism, Boodhism, and Taouism. The first is rather a system of philo- sophy, a sort of addendum to their religion, as nearly all China- men believe to some extent in Confucius. It treats of the "Five Relations" and duties dependent thereon : 1st, Rulers and Ruled, 2d, Parent and Child, 3d, Husband and Wife, 4th, Brothers, and 5th, Friends. The instructions are very minute, even telling one how to walk when visiting a friend. Some adopt Confucianism so far as to practically disbelieve the rest ; in short, become infidels. Some of these in California are quite well acquainted with the New Testament, and consider its principles quite good in themselves ; but as drawing the line too close, and quite too high and sublime for mortals. But they have no idea of the Atonement; it seems nearly impossible for even the most intelligent to form any conception of it. "Dead Works "are the only foundation they build upon : even if a man should, from to-day henceforth, do exactly right, he must be put through one or more of the chambers of hell to pay him for what he has already done. Boodhism, their religion proper, is a system of idolatry introduced fro-m India many centuries ago. It deifies the remarkable dead. Its grand idea is, to attain to a state of perfect repose soul and body utterly without emotion this is perfect bliss and highest good. From their description, it would be to us perfect nonentity. Hence the general statement that "Annihilation is the Boodhist Heaven;" still that does not seem to be their precise idea. It is still perfect consciousness, but without any of the ideas or emotions which, in this state, result from consciousness. Faithful devotees are to become Boodhs, though the original Boodh was the Creator. Men are to become inferior Boodhs by absorbing the spirit of Boodh. One year of his equals twenty-five million common years. In this they beat the Mormons, who only make "one year of the Lord " equal to a thousand common years. Taouism (Tah-oo-ism) is a system of spiritual philosophy, filling all creation with an infinity of spirits. Just above the heads of mortals is the region of the gods. This sect have per- 324 SPIRITUALISM. CHINESE STUDENTS NOW AT SPRINGFIELD, MASS. formed all the wonders of modern Spiritualism for five hundred years; and probably to as little purpose. Its founder's name was Low Chee, literally translated, " old boy ; " and according to the tradition he was eighty years old the day he was born. The last seen of him he was flying away westward on a blue cow. Whether another " old boy " of whom we have heard was the founder of our Spiritualism, I leave believers to determine; but I have my suspicions. All three, in forms and ceremonies, mingle till it is difficult to distinguish. So grand a system of theology, with all its ad- juncts and minor points of faith, fixed as tending to a certain end and able to impress a whole people, seems to have required in its origin as much intense thought and creative power of imagination as our own system. The greatest difficulty of the Chinese question may be briefly stated '.families do not immigrate. Few women come, and nearly all of these few for the vilest purposes. Girls of only twelve or thirteen years are brought over, sometimes kidnapped, no doubt, and " thrown upon the town ; " such may be seen in every alley in Chinatown, frequently accosting the passing white man in words which it is a shame even to hear. I am reliably in- formed that there are not in America five hundred reputable CHINESE SCHOLARS. 325 women of the race. Of the pure or yellow Chinese, there are but few men, and only a dozen women. Mrs. Laisun and her daughters are specimens of the best class of Chinese ladies. Already there is quite a class of Chinese and half-blood chil- dren native to the Pacific Coast, who speak English fluently and look decidedly American. Many are being well educated, and there are more Chinese now in our schools than is generally imagined. Ah Wing graduated from Yale eight years ago with high honors, and the lads now in school at Springfield, Mass., are evidently of superior talents. Perhaps there is more hope for " John " than appeared in the setting out. These few strag- glers from the four hundred millions of China did not come here by the wish of their own Government ; still less at the desire of either our Government or people. Why then did they come ? Is it not reasonable to suppose that a Higher Power is bring- ing a few millions of that people here to learn our civilization and religion, and carry Christianity and its attendant blessings to their own country ? If so, how have we, the superior and Christian race, fulfilled our part of the scheme ? X A HIGH CASTE MANDARIN. CHAPTER XVIII. MINES AND MINING. A prospect Outline of mining region The Cotton woods How I came there Mormon anti-mining sermons The dry summer Unhealthfulness of Salt Lake City I goto the mountains "Prospectors" We hunt a mine Mode of silver mining Different in gold mining One chance in twenty-five thousand for an " Emma " or " Comstock " " Struck a horse " Over to Big Cotton- wood Fire in the mountains Promise of war in Utah False alarm Off for Bingham Chicago fire Thence to East Canon I invest And come out minus. PROSPECT CAMP, WASATCH MOUNTAINS, U. T., September 25, 1871. AM sitting at the door of a frame and canvas cabin, ten feet by twelve ; as near as I can determine, a thousand feet below the highest point in the Wasatch Range, seven thousand above Salt Lake, and eleven thousand higher than the level of the sea. We have thawed a little ice from our water buckets this morning, and taken a hot breakfast ; my companions are off down the mountain side, picking at " indica- tions," and mapping out the "run of the country rock," and at 10 A. M. I find my fingers warm and pliant enough for the pencil. A party of prospectors from Uintah, working their toilsome way through the mountains to Camp Floyd, have just halted to drink and gossip. The men look haggard, and ragged with toil and exposure, while the horses' breath steams up, as in an eastern winter, and their manes and tails still show traces of the frost of last night. Four rivers head within five miles of me. To the south the rugged cliffs fall off abruptly to a deep cafion, from which the Timpanogos or Provo flows out to Utah Lake ; a little farther west is the American Fork, and far down the valley a faint green and blue haze marks the location of Provo City ; beyond it a faint cloudy whiteness proves to be 326 HEAD OF FIVE RIVERS. 327 Utah Lake ; while the West Mountains (Oquirrh) are yet hidden in the morning haze. The cliff behind me shuts off the view- down the other rivers. If the reader will take a map of Utah, and from the Colorado follow up its main western affluent, the Uintah, he will find it heading in a range of peaks very near the center of this Terri- tory. Then begin two hundred miles west, on the Jordan, and follow up its main affluents, Mill Creek and the jCottonwoods ; they will be found to head in the same peaks. Go off from the latter a hundred miles north to the Weber, and trace its head to the same range. Then a hundred miles southwest to Utah Lake, and thence following up American and Tim- panogos Rivers, you will fi n d their sources very near the others, and just below where I am sitting. In and around these peaks, on the west side particularly, will be found the oldest and best developed sil- ver mines of Utah. The season is at best but five months long; snow lies upon the flats till June and falls in September. The outlook is upon horrid peaks and gloomy defiles, while the slopes above the timber line are envel- oped half the time in chilling damps, and the other half swept by furious winds. Farther down, groves of timber produce a climate which, to one going from here, seems almost elysian, and are dotted thickly with the cabins of miners, who do endure the location somehow, and work their claims three-fourths of the AT "BROWN AND SLOPER'S. 328 MINING AND PROPHECY. year. Take it at the best, it is a hard, hard life. But there is silver here no longer any doubt on that point and a commu- nity of active and enduring Gentiles is springing into life upon the very tops of these cold and forbidding mountains. But how did I get here ? Behind waits a brief narration, for I have followed the advice of Horace to epic poets, to plunge in medias res freely trans- lated, " into the middle of things." After a lengthy stay in California, and journeyings not set down in this chronicle, I returned to Salt Lake City to find all my friends wild on silver mines. Everybody was talking about " feet/' "prospects," "indications," "specimens," "assays "and "divi- dends;" and I soon caught the same disease. There were two or three thousand Gentiles in the city speculating in mines and miners', five thousand more in the mountains hunting for mines, and perhaps two thousand actually working mines. All was con- fined to the Gentiles as yet, and by that beautiful spirit of contradiction which prevails in Utah, the priesthood were ser- monizing against mines and anathematizing every body who took stock in them. Three months after they were investing heavily. Now they claim that " the Lord " revealed the existence of these mines to Brigham, but told him they must not be worked till " in His own good time He uncovered them." Capital after- thought. Mormonism is the handiest religion in the world for an argument. If " the brethren" prosper, it is the blessing of the Lord on the faithful ; if they fail and suffer, " The judgments of the Lord begin at the* house of the Lord." If an "apostate" suffers, it is at once pronounced "a judgment ;" if he prosper, "the devil takes care of his own." It is a sure thing either way " heads, I win ; tails, you lose." The Mormons now propose to become a mining people. It was the notable "dry season of 1871," and Salt Lake City soon grew intolerable to me. The atmosphere was very un- healthy. Fifty-five persons had died in three weeks, in a population of fourteen thousand. Two-thirds of the people were complaining of something. ROUTE TO THE MINES. 329 I had come from California in the best of health, and in one week was prostrated with nervousness and indigestion. Such a season had not been known in Salt Lake since the notable " famine year." In view of these facts, I took stage for the hills. The evening before the clouds were lowering darkly over the Wasatch, and I waked to see her peaks glistening with the first snow of the season. But delay would not mend the matter; I was soon seated in a "jerky," and in three hours reached the mouth of Little Cotton wood Cafion, sixteen miles southeast of the city. The " Equinoctial storm" (liable, by the way, to occur some time between July and November,) had fully set in, and seemed to move towards the mountain at an even pace with the coach. In these enclosed basins clouds rise from the lakes and marshes and float away, without shedding their moisture, to the mountains ; there they are checked and fall in rain, causing the mountain sides to be covered with dense timber, while the valleys are always bare. The ten-mile route of rocky uphill to Central City, center of the mining region, is toilsome and appears dangerous. A damp, numbing wind swept down the canon, growing colder every mile, till overcoats and gloves failed to secure warmth ; while above and around us everywhere the peaks glistened with snow, seeming by imagination to add to the cold, and by the middle of the afternoon we saw the trees on the slopes gray white with rime, and knew that we had invaded the domain of winter. All was not peace in Central City. The night of my arrival was signalized by a general free fight, in which some twenty shots were fired, one of which struck in an upper room of our hotel. The impression goes out that miners are a quarrelsome set. Exactly the reverse is the fact; they are exceptionally quiet and peaceful. But they are careless and free with money; their mode of life engenders a love of gaming, and following close upon them, about all mining towns, is a " float " of gamblers, strikers, demi-reps and dancing girls. A camp is always con- sidered prosperous where they are plenty, and Central had a surplus. I took a two days' rest there to get accustomed to the mountain air; then took a mule ride to the foot of the cliff, 330 LITTLE PLEASANTRIES OF A MINING CAMP. which is beyond the reach of any vehicle. Another day's rest qualified me for the last climb, and next morning I left Bay view Lake, a beautiful mountain tarn walled in by blue limestone some sixteen hundred feet below the camp of my friends, known here as Brown & Sloper's Camp. " Prospect" does not refer to the fine view, as romantic readers may imagine; it means simply a camp of prospectors. And who are prospectors? They are a strange, romantic race of treasure hunters, scattered all over this mountain country. They are never at rest; hunting for lodes, developing and selling out; in a poor camp longing for a good one, in a good one longing for a better, and if perchance they "strike it rich/' SCIENCE AND BUSINESS. 331 nine times out often they sell quickly, spend the money lavishly, and are off to prospect again. The man who has prospected a few years rarely settles into a regular miner; though the latter often prospects to find his own claim before working it. Of course they are a peculiar race; of course they are superstitious about luck, have strange theories about lode-formation, preju- dices about the "run of the rock/ 7 and undoubted faith in their own future, and all expect soon or late to discover and develop a "Comstock" or an " Emma.' 7 How many of my readers ever saw a prospect for silver, or could trace a vein from surface indications, "crop/ 7 "float/ 7 etc.? For silver mining in the United States is a new thing, and your returned Californians, who may have spent half a lifetime in placer gold diggings, would know nothing therefrom of silver mining. Miners read the Scripture thus: " Surely there is a vein for silver, and a place for the gold where they find it.' 7 By this they mean that silver generally (not always) runs in lodes, defined ledges, layers in wall rock; but gold is "where you find it 77 in placer fiats, beds of wash gravel, " pay dirt/ 7 eddies in shallow streams with natural "cleats 77 in the bed-rock, and in the dry flumes of extinct rivers. Silver mines that is, real mines have a defined seam; their extent can be measured, their richness esti- mated, and the time required to get out the ore and its value per ton ; the stock is put upon the market, quoted and sold as legitimately as corn or wheat. Gold discovery is often an accident, creating an "excitement; 77 silver mining is an enduring industry, growing slowly through many years except in the rare cases of chloride flats, horn-silver, etc., as at White Pine lasting ten or twenty or hundreds of years, according to whether the discovery proves to be a "chamber/ 7 "pocket/' or "de- posit/ 7 or a " true fissure vein." Come with me, then, and let us in imagination follow our " prospectors/ 7 now a thousand feet below me, and from their present action appearing to have " struck something 77 half-way down the cliff, where the limestone formation changes suddenly to slate and quartzite. This change is an important matter to us here ; for in looking for a vein of silver we are guided by 332 A COMPARISON. PROSPECTING PARTY IN UTAH. a system of la\vs. There are many exceptions, but the laws are almost invariable on the negative side; we can tell positively where silver is not, but can not always tell where it is. First, of course, we look for evidence of volcanic action. We would not expect to find silver in any quantity in a low valley or level country, for it is one of the heaviest metals, and must be forced in some way to the surface. We start up the mountains, but in the hills near their base, the rock is covered with heavy deposits of soil, and silver may be there, but it is hard to deter- mine. We want to get up to the region of " geologic inter- ruptions," where the strata are heaved upon edge and overlap each other. If a jelly cake of six or eight layers be taken to represent the earth's crust, from granite up through quartzite, plate and limestone to the soil, then strike the cake underneath, knock it up into ridges and layers standing nearly perpendicular, the bottom one in places overlapping the top one, and the jelly slowly settling back except where it is caught and confined by crevice or wall of harder material, and you will have a tolerable " FLOAT." 333 map of a mining region : the surface denuded to a bare skeleton of the original mountain, the backbone of the range where the ledges are laid open. But another element enters into this calculation the heat which was active in the formation of the lodes; so the silver and lead thrown up by the primal convulsion, either burst their way through solid rock, and formed lodes thousands of feet in length, or lacking force, the fluid turned aside to existing crevices, or "blew out" through hollow chambers, which so often mis- lead the miner. To each variety of these side affairs a specific and descriptive name is given, whence all the strange terms in mining parlance: " true lodes, fissure-veins, pinches, pockets, deposits, chambers, blow-outs, chimneys, Jumerols, dips, spurs, angles, variations and sinuosities." But few of any of these, however, reach the surface to guide us; even where lodes "crop out," the top rock is rarely of the same nature as that in the vein. Having found evidences of volcanic action, as we "pros- pect" up the mountains, the first thing we look for is "float." This consists of mineral broken off from " croppings," or thrown out or washed out from fissures. It is of almost infinite varieties ; in general any piece of detached rock, big or little, " carrying indications of galena," is "float." Abundance of "float" on our line shows that the lode is somewhere. But where? The majority of prospectors say it must be uphill from the "float;" but a respectable minority maintain that it may be downhill; and I suspect they are right, as the hills may have changed their level since the "float" was deposited, or it may have been carried by other means than the common wear of the elements. So we must " trace." We are often assisted by mineral stain, particularly where water exudes from the rock. Copper stain is generally green, and may or may not exist with silver ; iron stain is red, and seldom exists with silver; lead stain is of various shades, all easily known, and lead is never found without some silver. The "Pittsburg" mine in American Fork was developed by digging merely from a deep lead stain ; but they had other fine indica- tions, particularly that the formation changed there from slate 334 THE CHANCES. to limestone. "Between the runs of country rock" is the best place to look for a vein ; next to both walls being granite, a 'ifootwali" of slate or porphyry, and a hanging wall of other rock is to be preferred. From reasons given above, we are more apt to find our lode continuous if it is between two formations. At the " Pitteburg" stain they dug and struck a rich vein of carbonate ore in ten feet. Along that line between those two formations a hundred locations now extend for two miles. Our mineral stain, then, is encouraging, but by no means assures us of a good lode; for that we must dig. When we have found the "float" thick enough to suit us ; when there is the right stain on the rock ; when we are sure of the strata being right, then we must dig. Do we find a faint vein going down, though no thicker than a knife-blade? Do we encounter silica, ochre, or small brittle chunks of galena, and do we find a wall with clay selvage? Then we dig on until other indications warn us we might as well stop and save our money. We may be fooled at last. It may be a trifling crevice, formed by infiltration from some larger vein; it may be a "chimney" from some lode ten thousand feet away through solid rock, and it may be any one of the fifty other disappointments. Of all "prospects" struck, one in five becomes a location ; one location in five is pushed to some depth. Of those so pushed, one in ten pays something more than expenses, and become real mines, and of real mines one in a hundred develops intp an "Emma" or a "Comstock." Logical reduction: The "prospectors" must strike, locate and develop twenty-five thousand times before he realizes his big expectations. For every dollar taken out of mines, eighty cents are spent; but that leaves a dollar and eighty cents in the country. Let us therefore encourage mining. Under the general fact that lodes are formed by volcanic action are many minor theories, each camp having a sort of science of its own, as there is a wide difference "in the indi- cations" of any two camps. The following, for instance, I find to be universal in Cotton wood : In places far removed from the origin of the ore, the primal impetus was barely sufficient to force the ore to a certain hight; there meeting with obstructions, " A HOUSE." 335 the fluid column turned into crevices already existing. These natural fissures are generally nearly horizontal. Hence, in fol- lowing down the first fissure struck, if it gradually changes from the horizontal to the perpendicular, this is taken as an indication that one is nearing the original source of the ore, getting towards where it first started, and had force enough to burst straight upward through the solid rock. But, during this primal convulsion, immense masses of limestone, quartzite, porphyry, granite and other hard rocks fell back into the liquid ore; and these now present sudden interruptions in even the most regular veins. Indeed, some theorists maintain that unless these " wedges" had fallen in, there would have been no lode, as the walls would have settled together, completely closing the fissure. But, of course, the opening is not perfectly regular; and a little calculation will show, I think, that there is not one chance in a thousand of the whole mountain side settling back exactly as it separated, so that the bulge on one side would strike the hollow on the other whence it came, and unless it did so, there would not be a complete closing. Such an interruption is known among miners as a "horse/' and generally a small portion of the vein (or lode) .can still be traced around or under it. So, when a miner following his shaft finds it suddenly stopped by a" wall of dead rock," (without metal), it may be from either of three causes : the obstruction may be a " horse," from a foot to five rods thick ; his supposed lode may be a mere " pocket," ending then and there ; or he may still be only in one of the " side fissures," which has taken a sudden turn, "pinching out" for a few rods, or " doubling back on the ledge." In such cases science seems to be at fault ; and though of the highest importance to the practical miner, no two agree as to the mean- ing of the "indications." The miner's only recourse is to pick and blast, onward or downward, until he finds something, or con- vinces himself there is nothing. Sometimes, again, the miner starts with a vein a foot or more wide, expecting to reach the main lode very soon ; but finds it narrowing rapidly to an inch in width ; then it suddenly "chambers" to some size, then "pinches" to the thickness of a 336 SUMMIT OF BALD PEAK. knife blade, or sinks to a mere stain on the wall rock, and so on "pinching" and "pocketing" alternately towards the interior. My friends in the " Kentucky" followed such a " pinching" vein for a hundred feet, when it terminated in a " chamber " about the size of a barrel and full of rich ore ; and that was the last of that vein. The vein of the celebrated "Emma" was followed nearly two hundred feet before they struck ''good pay-rock." From Bayview I came down to more temperate regions, and inspected all the mines south of Central City, seriatim. At noon of the last day we were at the "Peruvian," and four thousand feet above us towered the top of Bald Peak. It was stated by the miners, that no visitor had ever reached it the first day, which excited our ambition, and we determined on the attempt. Striking directly up the bare mountain side, which inclines in the upper part at least sixty degrees, we struggled on for three hours, to the highest point on the Wasatch Range 12,000 feet above the level of the sea. A breath of relief and a long look around the horizon were succeeded by astonishment and awe, which held us long in subdued silence. A hundred miles to the north-east, Medicine Butte rose in plain view; a hundred miles south appeared the peaks of Iron Mountain and Mount Nebo ; as far to the east, the slopes above Uintah River ; while all the northern and southern shores of Great Salt Lake could be traced as easily as upon a map : one comprehensive view of thirty thousand square miles of moun- tain, valley and gorge, fringed by clouds below our level and lighted up by the declining sun. Salt Lake City was hidden from our sight by the Twin Peaks ; but above that place the whole of Jordan Valley lay in plain view, with the river down the center like an irregular band of silver. The air was unusually clear, as is common just after the first autumnal storm, and we could scarcely have found a more favorable day for the view in the entire year. The descent was much faster than the ascent had been, though, in proportion to time, much more wearisome; but we reached our cabin by dark, and soon after slept the sleep of the just and the weary. The two days following, I visited the mines on tne northern PRESENT CONDITION. OVER TO BIG COTTONWOOD. 22 side. From thirty to forty tons of ore daily were leaving the cafion, good for an average profit of a hundred and fifty dollars per ton. The quantity was increasing rapidly, and still continues to increase. Everything else has changed wondrously. Min- ers and Gentiles have taken possession of the region. At the mouth of the canon stands the beautiful village of Emmaville, inhabited by miners and their families; a mile above it is Granite- ville, erected entirely by the business about Colonel David BuePs great smelt- ing works, and further up in the mining regions are Alta and Central City, containing together some six hundred inhabitants. 338 A DAY OF CLIMBING. Big Cottonwood lies just north of Little Cottonwood, sepa- rated by a rocky ridge, barely passable at two or three places ; and the last day I was on the northern side, the air in that direction seemed to grow more hazy than usual. Looking northward, we saw the whole sky of a peculiar ash and copper color, and old mountaineers shook their heads ominously, and said : " The fire is out in Big Cotton wood." From where I stood it was not more than eight miles in a direct line, to the noted lake at the head of Big Cottonwood, where the Mormons celebrate the 24th of July "Anniversary Day ;" but it was im- possible to reach it along the cliffs, and we must descend into Little Cottonwood, and pass over another " divide," to what is known as Silver Fork, opening into the other canon. Next morning the mountain tops were shrouded in smoke, and I spent the day in Little Cottonwood, hearing reports from the other side. About 4 P. M. a great white column shot into the sky for thousands of feet, apparently just over the "divide," then swaying back and forth settled into the shape of an immense cone, and we knew to a certainty that the wind was "down the caiion," and conse- quently the fire nearing the town and smelting works. It took me all the next day to pass the "divide,^ for the lowest point on the ridge is three thousand five hundred feet above Central, and the descent still greater on the northern side. If the reader has ever run up a steep pair of stairs, let hifii imagine two hundred such in succession, varied with jutting rocks and boulders, and that in an atmosphere so light that dyspnosa results from the slightest exertion, and he will have a faint idea of this climb. It is amusing to notice new comers and watch its effect upon them. Some men get used to the rarefied air in a few days; others labor in breathing for weeks or months, and still others never gain in breathing capacity. Stranger still, it is not the stoutest men always who take most easily to the hills. The best mountaineer in this camp is just my size, (one hundred and twenty-five pounds,) and of very slender limbs, without an ounce of fat, but he has large hands and feet, and a chest like a gorilla. When I reached that side the fire was still a mile above, but, AN AWFUL SIGHT. 339 moving slowly on the town. When night fell the scene was indescribably grand. From the summit of Granite Mountain, dividing the heads of Big and Little Cottonwoods, down through the lake region and " Mill Caflon," to the tops of Uintah Hills, for eight miles in a semicircle around and above us, the view was bounded by great swaying sheets of flame. The sky to the zenith was a bright blood red, and down to the west a gleaming waxy yellow; while almost over us Honeycomb Peak, where the timber had burned to a coal, and which was divided from us by a large rocky gorge, stood out detached and glowing red like a volcano outlined against the sky. Morning came, and with it detachments of miners from neighboring camps, working their way through the lower defiles, to fell timber and " burn against the fire." The town is in a grove of quaking asp, and was in no great danger ; but across Cottonwood Creek, where the Smelting Works stand, the growth is mountain pine, which burns green or dry. The whole capon was so full of smoke that the sun could barely be discerned, and the pyrotechnics of the night had given place to a deathlike gloom. From the creek to the mountain summit south was a roaring mass of flames, when at noon the wind suddenly changed, and for twenty-four hours blew almost a hurricane up the cafion. The timber had been felled for two hundred yards around the works; it was now set on fire and the great business enterprise of this camp was saved. After the day of wind came rain, then snow, and next morning the latter, four inches deep, was melting slowly into black mud. A week in Big Cottonwood convinced me there was a great deal to learn about mining, and I was about to start on a vigor- ous campaign against the hills, when the semi-weekly mail arrived from the city bringing news. Judge McKean's Court had reached a decisive point, and matters looked warlike. Two letters I received spoilt my appetite for " prospecting. 7 ' The first, from a gentleman in the Review (Gentile paper) office, contained this : " Matters look squally here, you bet. The co-op, store bought a thousand muskets at the Government sale, and they 340 A 'HUGE SCARE. are all in the hands of the ' brethren/ They say they ar drilling every night. For three nights we kept a lookout expecting the office to be attacked. Fifty or a hundred mei marched up one night and stood in front of it, but made n< sign. It is known that Brigharn is indicted, and a few of th Gentiles are nervous. If signs don't deceive me, there will b< work for warriors; so come down in time." The other letter was in a sort of nervous-hystericky, Italiai hand, the gist of it running thus : " We are so glad you are up in Cotton wood, where every body's Gentile. Mr. S. says they will kill all the Gentiles aw Apostates first thing. Do you really think there is much danger' I know there is some. Ma says she a'nt afraid of the Mormons but all the miners will come in, and they will fight right in th( streets, and rob everybody. O, dear, I never was out of Utal: in my life, and a'nt it dreadful if we all get killed right here ' Don't come down a Sunday ; go to American Fork, or go awaj down to Star District. Of course they'll kill you first one." Of course, I answered by taking the earliest conveyance, al 6 next morning, for the city, well knowing, though there mighl be some excitement, there was no more danger of a genera) fight than there is to-day in New York. The down-hill of six- teen miles to the valley, which requires half a day going up, we made in a little over two hours, and thence traversing the "bench "and hill behind the penitentiary, came in full view of the city, just as the morning sun rose above the Wasatch, its bright beams reflecting beautifully from the freshly-fallen snow on the summit. Below us lay the city, calm and peaceful as on a Puritan Sabbath. Rain had fallen since my departure ; the dust was laid and the air clear, cool and stimulating. The streams were again running among the checkered squares, map- ped out before us, and lacing all the green plats with bright and flowing borders. There were no signs of war there. The excitement was measurably over, but as the nation had never really asserted its full authority in Utah before, we can scarcely blame the Gentiles for thinking such unwonted action must produce war. The most ridiculous rumors had agitated the city. BRIGHAM AN INFIDEL. 341 The Mormon papers and speakers had exhausted their resources depicting what might be the result " if the people should be goaded beyond forbearance," taking precious good care all the time not to directly threaten resistance; for matters looked as if the Federal authorities meant "business." All day Sunday rumors thickened. Many ladies came and anxiously inquired of my hostess (an Eng- lish woman who has been here since ? 49) " if she really thought there was any danger," to which she replied, with a contemptuous sniff, " No, no. I've been through forty such excitements as this. There won't be a drop o' blood spilt. Brigham's got too much sense." There she touched the root of the matter- The whole position turned on this question, Is Brigham an im- postor or a fanatic? If the former, he will never raise his finger for "this people " to take up arms, and they are too well under control to fight before he does raise it. An impostor is governed by the ordinary rules which influence men in war and business, but a fanatic never stops to count noses. He dashes in, regardless of odds, with " God's on our side ; one shall chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight." And should this be Brigham's caliber, he could have had every one of us massacred in a day. Although he and his people should suffer for it afterward, that would be small comfort to us, the decapitated. But I knew that Brigham was not a fanatic, and, consequently, there was no danger. Like all new comers, I once was disposed to credit Brigham with being honest in his religion. But I was long ago convinced, by most undoubted proofs, that he has no faith in it whatever. He is simply a philosophic infidel, believing, as he has substantially said, that he had " as good a right as Christ, or Mohammed, or any other man, to set up a new religion." So none of the old Gentile residents or officials were a particle disturbed. But new comers were nervous. The wives of Governor Woods and Frank Kenyon, proprietor of the Review, went on a long-contemplated visit to California, and when the report reached me it ran that " all the Gentile ladies in the upper part of town were leaving; that the Governor had sent away his family, for he knew there would be trouble." A day or two after, repeated 342 I GO TO BINGHAM. dispatches came back from the East of the bloody doings in Salt Lake and the flight of the Gentiles, all of which read amusingly enough there when the scare was over. On Sun- day night two hundred soldiers arrived, and a day or two after as many more ; but the Mormon papers had passed from the extreme of incendiarism to the extreme of deprecating all ex- citement. They had only hinted before what might be; they now took special pains to declare in the plainest words that " there was no excitement among the people ; there would be no resistance to law ; everything would go peaceably to a just conclusion. God and the Supreme Court would reverse all this action,", etc. Brigham was formally arrested on Tuesday, and Daniel H. Wells on Wednesday, and both gave bonds to appear the next week. The comical feature of the whole affair was the perfect celerity with which all the Mormon leaders backed square down from their old positions, and, after all their threats, never hinted at resistance ; and, particularly, the ease with which they were able to convince the fanatical people that it was all for the best. The excitement was over; the Saints had concluded to trust in " God and the Supreme Court/' and there was no " work for warriors " or war correspondents either. The " nervous- hystericky Italian hand " resumed its beautiful regularity on pink-tinted " acceptances," and, after a few days, I struck out again for the mountains, this time going to Bingham Canon. The mouth of Bingham is twenty-four miles southwest of Salt Lake City, and thence the caiion opens directly across the Oquirrh, or West Mountains. The aboriginal name means " Lost Mountains," from the fact, probably, that this range is detached, terminating abruptly on the north at the shore of Salt Lake. The characteristic of Bingham is immense bodies of low-grade ore. The West Jordan Mine, which is accounted the oldest in Utah, is simply a vast hill of " black galena" ore enough to employ a hundred men for fifty years, but yielding only fifty dollars a ton in silver. It was " located " September 17, 1863, and among the fifty names signed to the By-laws and District Organization appear those of General P. E. Connor, GENERAL P. E. CONNOR. 343 IN THE WEST JORDAN MINE. and \Yilliam Hickman, in queer proximity, considering their present relative conditions. General Connor was then in com- mand of this military district, and with that restless energy which distinguishes him, was exploring the whole country, with Hickman for a guide, marking out military roads, establishing closer relations with such Indians as were friendly, and fighting those that were not. His soldiers, all from Nevada and Cali- fornia, put in their spare time prospecting, and established several districts now famous. But Bingham was the only one which held out. No mines were then found that would pay without railroad transportation. The bullion turned out averaged ninety-eight and a half per cent, of lead and one and a half 344 OPHIR DISTRICT. per cent, of silver to the ton ; and they had no refining and separating works. Freight across the Plains was twenty-five cents per pound, and lead in the States was worth ten cents. The result was twenty-five into ten "goes no times " and fifteen cents over the wrong way. Now ten thousand miners are at work in Utah, and her developed mines are worth twenty-five million dollars! Verdict: The Union Pacific fecit. On the morning of October 10th, as I was starting up Mark- ham Gulch, a friend arrived from the city with the news, " They say there is a big fire in Chicago." Next night I returned ; Chicago was in ashes ; a mass meeting was called, and Bingham, with a population of eight hundred, at once raised $500 for the sufferers. No late event illustrates like that fire how closely the civilized world is being drawn together by the ties of commerce and religion. Every part of the great body feels a local to be a general ill, and hastens to alleviate. Let us cease to look backward for the better day. It is before us. This day has more of light and humanity than any that have gone before, and steel and steam are the true motors for the " golden age." West of the Oquirrh lies Rush Valley ; at its northeast corner is Stockton Mining District ; at the southeast East Caiion breaks abruptly into the mountains, bordered by two districts ; while west of it are Columbia and Cedar Mountain Districts. I went over to East Canon, and, with headquarters at Ophir City, put in two weeks diligently studying the formation. I had taken the contract of writing an u exhaustive report" on the mines of Utah for the Review Gentile Journal of Salt Lake City and at the end of a month could talk learnedly of "shafts, tunnels, drifting, sinking, going down on the lode, chlorides, bromides, galena and bed-rock, footwalls and hanging walls." Then I read reports of mining experts, and became confused. I traveled another month, took accounts of the miners and studied the rocks; and at the end of that time came to the conclusion that one man knows about as much what is in the ground, out of sight, as another. I may have been wrong in this conclusion. If so, I am willing to be forgiven. TEETER S MINE. 345 But I was as wild as anybody by this time, and determined to invest a little. One N. C. Teeter had developed a " location" he called the " Ida Elmore," till he reached pay-rock, and con- cluded it was worth a quarter of a million dollars. As we sat in his cabin on Mineral Hill of evenings, he deeply lamented his inability to go East and sell it; and "supposed he should have to take $50,000 for it, as he could not sell for more than one-fifth of its value in Utah." Meanwhile he would prospect " for any man who would pay for grub, powder, fuse, sharpen- ing tools and assays, sharing even in all that was struck." On such an arrange- ment we agreed, taking in Mr. Edward Nason as equal partner. I advanced $200 on written con- tract, and went on with my tra- vels ; and we soon had three "loca- tions recorded" which promised well. I went to other d istricts, and the next I heard of Teeter he was in Penn- sylvania "gone home to get mar- ried ; would re- turn early in the spring." He had sold all his claims in East Gallon, the magnificent " Ida El more" included, for $300, and with his dividend of my money thought this the best chance to get home. Six months after I heard from him : " He had not intended to defraud me had expected to come back had been sick was working on a bridge at two dollars a day and ON LION HILL OPHIR DISTRICT. 346 WHERE MY POSSESSIONS LIE. expected thereby to raise money enough to marry on." To such a plight came the owner of " a $250,000 mine." Nason stuck to the claims honestly; did work enough to hold them, under the District laws, and I am still the happy owner of an " undivided, one-third interest" in three claims of eight hundred feet each on Mineral Hill ; and an errant prospector whom I met last November, tells me that a weatherbeaten stake in an abandoned neighborhood, above a hole in the ground, still bears this : NOTICE. " November 20th, 1871. " We, the undersigned, claim eight hundred (800) feet on this ledge, lode or vein, of mineral-bearing rock counting each way from this notice with all its dips, spurs and angles. Work done according to the By-Laws of Ophir District. The same known and recorded as the Ad Valorem Lode. " J. H. BEADLE, 200 feet. " E. G. NASON, 200 feet, " N. C. TEETER, 200 feet. " DISCOVERY, 200 feet." I have not heard a word from " my mines " or " resident partner" for six months, and my conclusion therefore is, "No dividends declared." Mining districts abound with " bilks," and the experienced tell me I got off cheap. I have known miners to pick up a piece of rich ore from an old mine, hammer it into a crevice in the side of a shaft, and when a visitor came pick it out as a "specimen" of the new mine. "Salting a claim" after the old mode is too well known, and a score of new dodges are invented. "Top-rock" is generally what the visitor sees most of, and he is told, " Of course it gets richer as you go down." This may or may not be the case. In some ores disintegration by ele- mental action takes away all but the " pay-rock," and that on the surface is the only part that is rich. But the mines of Utah are too great for their development to be retarded by such tricks. The growth of this interest has been steady, healthful and rapid; and with improved transportation and machinery, a hundred mines now unworked will prove remunerative. My attempt as mining reporter was scarcely a success, praise I CEASE MINING. 34' and blame provoking equal censure, and I retired with the annexed "valedictory" in the columns of the Review: " This is my last on Utah mines. The business has proved to me a rather thankless and unprofitable one. Without much knowledge of the subject, I started out to gather information as far as possible from disinterested sources. I could not praise all mines; I could not praise some without an implied com- parison with others; the neglect to praise was a slight, the comparison was considered odious. Being human, I have una- voidably made some mistakes. Every line I have written has subjected me to harsh censure ; every statement has gained me an enemy ; every paragraph has lost me a friend. My stock on hand is not large enough to stand so ruinous a drain. For the mines I praised, I am accused of having received pay. Had I received it, I might stand the swearing. To get the curses and miss the cash is a ruinous business. That there are many good mines I know ; but the time has not come to do them, or the others, justice. Until it does come, excuse me. BEADLE." VERTICAL SECTION OF A QTJAKTZ MINE. CHAPTER XIX. A CHANGE OF BASE. A hard winter The last rain Eastward A merry party The great Blockade On the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad Southwestern Missouri Among the Cherokees Spring roads Up into Kansas Meet C. G. DuBruler, Esq., and return Down to Muscogee. [INTER "pinched in" on mining operations in Utah, and I seized the occasion to visit the East. Coming down from the mountains to Salt Lake City, I found that heavy snows had fallen over eight hundred miles of the Union Pacific; there had been two days 7 delay of the trains, and five hundred people were in the city waiting to start. There was a vast amount of discussion, and no little grumbling at such a delay. But a few, who claimed extra knowledge of the climate, thus oracularly pronounced : "If the winter proves unusually severe, the road may be blocked a week at a time," which provoked a chorus of dissent from expectant passengers. Little they knew what a " hard winter" meant. The travelers held frequent conferences, and the general con- clusion was, " We will wait till one or two trains have run through on time, then take the next. With these women and children we don't want to stop an hour on the road." But eight single gentlemen, myself included, determined to take the first train and risk it. We waited through the day at Ogden, leaving that place at night instead of morning, and ran through to Omaha without losing an hour. Being out of the regular time we were delayed there half a day, then made time to New York losing twenty-four hours on the entire trip. We left Salt Lake on Saturday morning, and sat down to an eight o'clock breakfast at the Astor House the next Friday morning. 348 JOLLITY Y RAIL. 349 It was the jolliest trip of the age. Eight gentlemen in one Pullman Palace Car from " Zion" to Gotham : Messrs. Ship- man and Sherman, merchants of New York city ; Mr. Fisher, an elderly retired merchant of Philadelphia ; Hon. Audley Coote, an English gentleman returning from Australia; Mr. Rice, a middle-aged Bostonian, coming home from a ten years' residence in the ports of China ; the writer, and a foreigner with unpronounceable name, who joked in four languages and swore in a dozen more with graceful fluency. Anticipating a blockade, we had laid in "supplies/' Rolling along, twenty-five miles per hour, through the rugged gorges of the Wasatch, over the barren plains of Wyoming, between the lofty snow-banks of the Black Hills, out upon the high plains and down the long five hundred mile incline to the Missouri, then through fertile Iowa and the Northern States, by night and by day we made the car a rolling palace of gayety : without were storm and darkness, sleet and snow rattling against the windows; within song and laughter, cigars, "spirituals" and genial society. We repre- sented all parts of the world, and each knew just what the others wanted to hear. It was indeed a trip long to be remembered by all the parties, and as the genial Englishman and I took our farewell "smile," just before he went on the steamer, I thought after all there was something in the High Joint Commission, and all this talk about "our common language" and "common Shakspeare, Milton," and all that. One more train ran through on time, then another \veek's blockade took place ; and most of the five hundred we left win- tered with the Mormons. A few trains got through from one to eight days behind time, and then the " great blockade of 1872" began. Of its horrors I know only by report. I had reached the eastern side of the mountains, and when the time came to return there was no use making the attempt. But when I passed over the road eight months after, the effects were still to be seen in the debris of wrecked cars at various points. The moral to be drawn from it was, that Rocky Mountain winters are very variable and uncertain. " Late falls and late springs " is the formula of old residents 350 SNOW BLOCK AT>J58. in the mountains; and it is popularly added, that every third winter is very hard, every seventh winter terribly and excep- tionally hard, while every seventeenth winter kills everything that is caught out, man or beast. Deducting the exaggeration of exactness due to the popular and world-wide notions about the odd and mystic numbers, three, seven and seventeen, it is still a fact that at certain intervals, occurring with an approach to regularity, there are long periods of cold or unusual falls of rain through the Rocky Mountains. My first winter in Utah was so mild that work on the Union and Cen- tral Pacifies was not suspended a day. The next two winters were only a little more severe ; then came the terribly hard season of 1871- '72. We may look for long and deep snows as often as every third winter; and many of them as bad as that which caused the great blockade ; but with the snow sheds since con- structed, and other pre- cautions, we may reas- onably expect no more blockades. When I had been three months in the East the blockade was but partly raised, business did not prom- ise well in Utah, and there was great interest in the proposed Thirty-fifth Parallel Railroad. San Francisco and St Louis had shaken hands over it, and guaranteed thirty million dollars, and sanguine Cincinnatians believed the road was to be built right away. Under these circumstances I accepted a new ONE LANGUAGE TWO "SMILES. WESTERN RATES OF FARE. 351 mission : to inspect that line, or as much of it as possible, from St. Louis to San Diego. On the morning of March 21st a bitter cold day I left St. Louis by way of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, and ran all day through the poorest country I ever saw east of the Ameri- can Desert. The general direction of the road is west-southwest; on the one side the streams flow eastward into the Mississippi, and on the other northward into the Missouri ; and for the entire distance this road seems to wind about so as to keep exactly on the "divide" between these headwaters, on hard, barren ridges. Its present terminus is at Vinita, some forty miles into the Indian Territory, and three hundred and sixty-five from St. Louis, for which distance each passenger pays the moderate price (for the West) of eighteen dollars and fifty cents. Nothing surprises Eastern pilgrims so much, and I may add so painfully, as the steady increase of prices as they go west- ward. The traveler from New York to San Francisco finds a regularly increasing tariff, at the rate of one or two cents per mile, at each change of cars. On the New York' Central he pays two cents per mile; on the Michigan Central three cents; from Chicago westward four cents, with liberal discount for through tickets, and through Iowa five cents. On crossing the Missouri River he takes a big jump and pays seven cents per mile on the Union Pacific, and at Ogden changes to the Central Pacific at ten cents per mile (currency) thence to San Francisco. If he grumbles he is told : " It's the custom of the country ; everything is high out here," etc. ; at least that's all the satis- faction I ever got. Stage fare increases at even a greater ratio : five cents in the East, ten in Iowa and Nebraska, and twenty in the Territories. Provisions also increase in price, but in much smaller ratio. To travel long out West a man must be, in the local phrase, " well heeled." This road, if I may judge from the country, ought to charge fifty cents per mile, for surely there can be no way trade worth naming. We had a bright enough day for the trip, but saw every- where evidences of an unusually hard winter and late spring. No swelling buds, no birds, no shade of green ; but heavy 352 SOUTHWESTERN MISSOURI. smoke from the few dwellings, and along the streams ice in plenty. The country seemed to get poorer every mile. The soil was white or yellow, the timber scrubby, and the few houses of most ancient " double-log " pattern ; in the sheds between the rooms, or under the projecting roofs, were the old style wooden pins, hung full of gears and "varmint" skins, among which played or reposed lank dogs and dirty, towheaded children. Occasionally a switch-tail sorrel horse, about half size, and better framed than filled in, languidly moved out of the way of the train : or the hazel brush opened to view a black and sandy spotted hog, about four feet long and four inches thick, with legs like an elk, and nose like a bowsprit. I did not see a single fat specimen, brute or human. The few towns were indescribable no streets, no regularity, no paint, no style and at each stop the train was surrounded by shiftless crowds of gaunt, long-haired men, yellow, short-haired women, and no-colored children the old folks often with cob pipes, the men with grizzled beards, streaked with tobacco juice, and the women with high-backed combs which looked like sections of a flax scutchell. Toward Rolla the country grew a little better, and a few of the local aristocracy came aboard. Their hair was cut short and covered with close, slick caps, stuck on one side of the head. They were clad in stout riding suits, with heavy jangling spurs, and carried heavy riding whips. Their clothes were "trimmed with ruchings" of horsehairs; their boots smelt of horse, they looked all horse, and their talk was of the horse, horsey. At Rolla we found a good eating-house and a pretty fair town, but soon after entered a worse country than ever, too poor even to produce timber, and this continued to near Springfield, which we reached soon after dark. There we stopped for the night, " to catch the express train in the morning" the conduc- tor said, though that struck me as a rather queer way to catch anything. That seems to be the Southern Missouri style, how- ever. Old Springfield is two miles or more from the railroad, but at the depot has sprung up a new, modern, and decidedly tasty town, with a first-class hotel of the new Southern style. LIFE AND TASTE. 353 In the morning we were astonished to find the ground covered with three inches of snow, and more coining, " the Ekynoxual stawm," the landlord said, and for aught I know, he may be correct. " What are the productions of this region ? " I asked a citi- zen at breakfast. " Oh, cawn, minis, sweet taters, and stock. Not as much cawn as afo' the wah, but mo' stock. Things changed 'round so since the wah. Been better for some places, wuss fo' others. Lots o' our people kep a fussin after they come hoam. Then about three yeahs ago the wusst ones went off to Arkansaw and the Injun Nation, and new eemigrants tuck their place. ,But these new fellows settled all in spots, and the places wher' they settled has gone ahead, ye see, and the rest of the country's gone back." Springfield and Holla are the only places where I have observed any signs of " new eemigrants." The train started at 7.30 and soon took us out of the Springfield oasis into a worse country, if possible, than we had yet traversed. Wearied of the sight, I concluded to read, and the train boy brought his stock of books, which struck me as so good an index of the taste of most of his customers on this road that I made out a list : " Confession of Hildebrand, the Outlaw, Murderer and Guer- rilla ; " " Confession and Trial of RulofF, the Learned Mur- derer ; " " Life and Death of James Fisk ; " " The Coral Lady ; " " Mysteries of New York ; " " Confession of Horn, a Wife Murderer;" "Ginger Snaps;" "Habits of Good Society;" " Jolly Joker," and two of Charles Reade's works. Such is the mental aliment of the average traveling public here. The country continued barren till we neared the edge of the Indian Territory. Then we got upon a down grade in a narrow but pretty valley, which widened rapidly towards Grand River. We crossed a narrow strip of woodland belonging to the Seneca Indians, then came out upon a rich prairie clothed with beautiful groves and bordered with fine timber, in the country of the Cherokees. An hour's run through the " Nation " brought us to Vinita. 23 354 RAILROAD LINES. The terminus of the Atlantic and Pacific is only a mile beyond, and here it is crossed by the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Rail- road, running due south. By the treaty of 1866, two railroads were to be allowed to run through the Indian Territory, and by Government charter this priviledge was granted to the two roads which reached the border first. The Leavenworth, Law- rence and Galveston road and the Kansas and Fort Scott road both started for it, but were distanced by the Missouri, Kansas and Texas ; hence both of them terminate at the border. The Atlantic and Pacific reached it first from the East, early in 1871, was soon after completed to Yinita and stopped, " waiting the action of Congress/' the people say. The Missouri, Kansas and Texas was running to Canadian River, seventy miles south of Vinita, whence stages ran through Texas to El Paso, in Mexico, and to Fort Sill, in the western part of the Territory. The railroad is to continue on to the gulf, or tap the Texas Central. At Vinita is the junction of two long lines in a new country, with good soil, climate and timber, and we should naturally expect to see a place. In Kansas or Nebraska we should see a city of life and activity, lots selling at from one hundred to two thousand dollars, dwellings and stores going up on every hand, one or two live journals blowing the place as the "future metro- polis of the boundless West, the last great chance for profitable investment," etc., and a dozen streets lively with the rattle of active commerce. Here, we do see nothing. We feel the dead calm of stagnation ; we breathe the atmosphere of laziness. There is one tolerable hotel, one stone store, and two frame ones, kept respectively by a Cherokee and a Delaware ; and, besides the railroad employes, there is a population of perhaps a hundred a few good men, more shiftless whites, average Indians and suspicious-looking half-breeds. New comers soon get disgusted and leave. The railroads own the adjacent land, and in September, 1871, laid off a town, and had a sale of lots. They ranged from $80 to $200. Februry '72 the same lots sold at from $15 to $60. The trade of the country was next to nothing. Cattle were " MIXED." 355 the only export, and the money received for them was all that came into the country. Nowhere is there a surplus of grain raised, and along the border there is considerable import of staples from Missouri and Arkansas. This portion of the Cherokee country is but little settled. Most of that tribe live on Grand River, extending a continuous line of settlements down to Tahlequah, their capital, seventy miles from Yinita. My first Sabbath in the " Nation " was bright and clear, with a shade of green upon the prairies, and all the indications of advancing spring; and being informed that there was u an Injin school-house with preaching som 7 ers three miles down on Cabin Creek," I started to hunt it. Before I was a mile on my way, the wind rose with surprising suddenness and blew almost a hurricane for the rest of the day. This is the most windy part of the West I have yet visited, and I suppose it is for that reason I always find the Indians living in the timber along the creeks. Nobody could tell me what route to take, so I called at the first house, where I was directed to the next by the occupant, who announced himself as a "White Cherokee." " Is your neighbor an Indian ? " I asked. "Well, he has an Injin family." " And the next man ? " "Well, he's sorter white, but he's married to a Shawnee girl. Next house thar lives a White Cherokee, but that man over thar knows most about the country. Better ask him." I went as directed to a pretentious frame house, the nicest I had yet seen in the " Nation," where I found a family of nine children and young people, of just nine different shades of color, from pure white, with blue eyes and red hair, to almost pure Indian. I found the owner very communicative and rather intelli- gent. His first wife, he informed me, was half Shawnee, from Canada, and her first husband was a full-blood Cherokee. Hence the three children of that union were nearly full-blood. By this woman he had four children, only quarter-blood, but differing very much in shade. He then married an Irish 356 "REVERSION" AND "SURVIVAL." MY CHEROKEE FRIENDS. (blonde) woman ; they had two children, one a clear-skinned, freckled, blue-eyed Celt, the other dark enough to pass for a " White Cherokee." " It's singular how it will come back in this country," he explained. "I've known 'em to have regular Injun children after two generations of nearly white, and children of pure white people born here are often very dark. I know two White Cherokees, married, that you couldn't tell either of 'em from a regular white person, and they've a whole family of nearly full-bloods. Old Injuns say it comes back on 'era sometimes after people have done forgot they had any Injun blood in 'em." This statement is confirmed by all the " White Cherokees" I have talked with on the subject THE CONGKEGATION. 357 A mile farther on I was overtaken by g Mr. Parks and family, and accepted a ride with them to the church. Like the more intelligent citizens of the " Nation," he was quite communicative, and, learning my business, insisted on my spending the day, after church, at his house. He was a native of East Tennessee, his father a white man, and his mother a half Cherokee, who refused to come with the main body of the tribe in the spring of 1839. He fought through the war on the Southern side, then came out and claimed his citizenship in the "Nation/ 7 to which he was admitted by the Supreme Court (or Principal Chiefs), after proving his ancestry. He showed not the slightest trace of Indian blood, but his little boy looked like a half-breed. His youngest daughter had the rolling black eye and sad expression of the Cherokee, with a fair skin ; while the older ones, misses of eighteen or twenty, were both fair and beautiful. Both were dressed very richly, with black silk dresses and mantillas. Rich dresses were numerous at church, particularly of corn-color silk, this and black and red being the prevailing colors. Many of these people were quite wealthy before the war, and remnants of their wealth remain in costly shawls and jewelry, which seem oddly out of place amid the general poverty. The place of worship was a rude log school-house, perhaps twenty-five feet square, the cracks covered with clapboards, and the congregation consisted of fifty-two persons not a full- blooded Indian among them. Most of that color live east of Grand River, and Cabin Creek is considered rather a community of half-bloods. The school teacher, with whom I conversed after service, was as white a woman as I ever saw, with blue eyes and light brown hair ; yet she is considered a Cherokee, and traces her ancestry from pure bloods. Rev. Mr. Valentine, who preached to us, is also considered " a citizen of the Nation," and, though of pure white blood, was born and reared among the Cherokees. Just as, before the war, we called every man a " nigger " who had the faintest trace of negro blood, though it were but a sixteenth, so here all are called Cherokees who have a drop of Cherokee 358 "WHITE CHEROKEES." blood. The phrase " White Cherokee" is generally applied to those of less than half Indian blood. One may travel for days in the Territory, and never see a full-blood. Nevertheless they are still in the majority, as shown by the census. But they live away from the main lines of travel, and generally in the timber along the streams. I heard much of the jealousy between the pure and the mixed bloods, but saw no evidences of it. The popular idea is that the Indian is being rapidly exterminated, which is incorrect as regards the civilized tribes. Absorbed would be a better word. It is true, that the pure bloods are certainly not increasing, perhaps slightly decreasing; but the amount of Indian blood remains, if it does not increase. It is by constant intermarriage with whites, that the pure stock lessens in number. Among the "White Cherokees" are some very curious people: pure white to all appearance, but still called Chero- kees, and with no recollection of any ancestry outside of the tribe. Some of them are supposed to be descendants of mis- sionaries, who settled in the tribe five or six generations ago; and some of white captives taken in their first wars with our race, or of children stolen in North Carolina early in the eighteenth century. The services were conducted in the order of the Baptist Church, to which sect the minister belongs, as do a majority of the Cherokee Christians. The Moravians, Methodists, and Episcopalians number many converts among the other Nations, and some among the Cherokees, while the Presby- terians are quite numerous among the Delawares and Shaw- nees, and farther west. The Indians seem to be naturally prone to fatalism, and their theology, even when Christian, is of a singularly cold and melan- choly character; not so bad, however, as that of the California Chinese, which is the most gloomy, chilling, and repellant of all ethnic religions, but enough like it to point to a kinship of race. The Senecas alone of all the tribes in this vicinity, (they live just east of Grand River,) retain their aboriginal heathenism. Sacri- fices, incantations, and a separate priesthood are still maintained, OK-LA-HO-MA. 359 and once a year they burn a certain number of dogs to propitiate the spirit of evil. That entire tribe numbers but ninety persons, and my host informed me that when last he visited them, they had only one child in the tribe. Their decay has been rapid. All the more intelligent admit the steady decay of the pure bloods, and, though there is a slight increase at present in the Cherokee Nation at large, yet in the pure bloods there is a decrease. I have only given, thus far, a few points gleaned from my con- versation with the " White Cherokees," but our talk at dinner assumed a more personal and political turn. Mr. Parks had invited some of the older citizens to dine with us, and, as at a Sunday dinner in the country districts of Ohio, politics came up for discussion. " What will you do with us?" was the gist of the first ques- tion. " Will the Government give half our lands to railroads, and let the whites come in on us to try for the other half?" " The Government will not establish a Territory here and throw it open to white settlers, unless the Indians are willing ; but why are you not willing, if you can have a farm secured first to each citizen of the Nation ? " "Because our more ignorant people and full-bloods can't live with the Yankees settled all among them. Some tell us we can't hold our land in common the way we do. Why can't we? If we can't, then let it be allotted, so much to each family, and the rest common pasturage. These full-blooded Cherokees are the most simple minded, honest people in the world. They don't know anything about trading or scheming with white folks. But you know it is the nature of white people to be grasping. Let them settle here and they would take all advan- tage in trades, and the Indians could not live here." The principal talker, an aged " White Cherokee," continued at some length and in good language to argue against the "Bill to establish the Terrritory of Oklahoma," of which he produced a copy and read extracts. He related with increasing pathos, the principal facts in the history of the Cherokees: their first general war with the whites, many years before the Revolution ; their removal to the hill country of Georgia, Carolina and Ala- 360 INDIAN POLITICS. bama ; their second move to Arkansas and a band to Texas ; their expulsion from all other places and settlement here. As he progressed a growing sadness showed on every face. He concluded, and an oppressive silence settled upon the company, so profound that I could feel the reproach which seemed thus cast upon my Nation. The melancholy gravity natural to the Cherokee countenance seemed to deepen to the intensity of a fixed despair; young and old had the same solemn quiet, and even the rosy little girl bowed her head almost to the table? and her sweet sad face seemed shadowed with the wrongs of three generations of her race. To a question about the wishes of the full bloods, the speaker replied: u Well, the full bloods won't take any vigorous action. They are an indifferent sort of people. They just say, Let it alone. If the United States is a mind to break all treaties and all agreements, and break us up and destroy us, they'll do it any- how. They can do it, and we arn't able to stop it. General Jackson swore by his Maker that this land should be ours ' while grass grew and water run,' and if they're a mind to break that, why they'll have to do it, that's all. That's the way the full bloods talk about it, sir. They won't do anything at all about it, just wait for it as if it was a storm or a streak of lightning.''" From this and other conversation I found there were three distinct parties among the Cherokees : First the Territorial party : in favor of Oklahoma and white immigration, after setting apart, in fee simple, a considerable farm to each Indian. Second the Ockmulkee Constitution party : in favor of sectionizing the land, giving each Indian his farm and the two railroads their grant, keeping all the rest in common as it is now, and uniting all the tribes under one government of their own (the Ockmulkee Constitution), with American citizenship and local courts ; but no territorial arrangement and no white settlement. Third The party in favor of the present condition. On further examination I found that the first party was very UP TO KANSAS. 361 small among all the tribes or rather Nations and that the mem- bers of it were regarded as traitors to their race ; that the third party had as yet a large majority of the whole people, but that the Ockmulkee Constitution promised most for the Indians, and had the support of their most able men. After four days in the " Nation," I changed my mind and concluded to go northward, and do my railroad traveling while early spring was giving way to settled weather ; for I found March the worst period to travel afoot or on horseback through the country. The sloughs are full, the streams are swollen, and the prairie roads muddy, though fast drying under the warm winds. About April 15th the delightful season begins in that section, for the period our Ohio poets celebrate as May lasts there from April till the middle or last of May. So I took the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Road northward for a brief trip into Southern Kansas. From Vinita it is but thirty miles to the Kansas border. The country along the way bears the same general character as below gently rolling and moderately fertile prairies, with clear but somewhat sluggish streams, and occasional clumps of rather inferior timber. Near the road, in a small grove, a cabin was pointed out to me where the once noted Perry Fuller spent a winter in company with the " White Cherokee," Boudinot. Fuller had been engaged in some questionable transactions with the Indian ring, and had his reasons for wishing to live somewhat secluojed for a while. Accordingly he and Boudinot stocked this cabin plentifully with the Democratic necessaries of life, and spent a few months very agreeably there, the place being then comparatively unknown, and visited by none but their particular friends. " White Cherokees" tell me there are many " tricks that are dark" being operated all along the border even to this day. The Territory swarms with United States Marshals and deputies, but white residents insinuate that nobody is arrested who cares to avoid it and is pecuniarily able to do so. As we near the edge of Kansas a sudden and surprising change occurs. From east to west appears an even line, with fence nearly all the way on the south side an unbroken 362 SOUTHERN KANSAS. prairie, on the north farms, orchards, nice dwellings and every evidence of civilization. If on Fourth Street, Cincinnati, the north side should remain as it is and the south side utterly vanish, leaving an unbroken plain as far as the eye could reach, the change would scarcely be more striking. There is no gentle, almost imperceptible fading away from cultivation to wilderness ; it is a sudden jump from civilization to nature's wildness, a sight every hour presenting powerful arguments in favor of the white settlement policy for the "Nation." It is an argument the Kansians appreciate, and once over the border I found the popular view of the Indian question wonderfully changed. There is no casuistry in the Kansian view. They take the high ground that that land was put there to be fenced, broke, culti- vated and improved ; and if the Cherokees will not do it, rf why, d n 'em, the Government ought to let them have it that will do it." In my tour through Southern Kansas I everywhere observed, as I neared the Indian border, the hostility to that people steadily increasing. In Allen and the counties north, it took the form merely of a mild and rational objection to the neigh- borhood of such a people. A little further south, a stern oppo- sition to showing any more favor to the race ; and along the border, an intense, almost fanatical hostility, and an expressed desire to " exterminate every red devil of 'em." The borderer has no faith whatever in Grant's policy, or any other policy looking toward the civilization of the Indian. He is an enthu- siastic believer in the theory of " doomed races." Old Presbyterians who had lived upon the border here for ten or fifteen years, told me they had never seen a Christian Indian, had never had a reliable account of one; that they were convinced the natives were a reprobate race, and there never was one soundly and truly converted. The testimony of other denominations was about the same. The Kansian view con- tinues : Why should the Indian be fed, housed and clothed at our expense, and at the same time be allowed to roam over an empire, keeping white men out of the best portion of the public domain ? Why not make them citizens, with the same rights KANSAS VS. THE INDIAN. 363 to take and hold a given piece of land as other citizens ? The answer, of course, is that when that thing is done the Indian's day is also done; he can never stand in competition with his white neighbor, and will pass away. The reply comes back : If the Indian cannot stand on his own personal merit, or with any native strength, then he has no right to stand at all ; he must go sooner or later anyhow, and the cheapest and most merciful way is the best. The neighborhood of the savage is an aggravation, and the virtuous Kansian is indignant because the occasional Indian will steal, and will not be chaste and temperate. The pivotal point of much of this talk is the Indian Territory, which the Kansian thinks by far the richest and most desirable of all the sections yet within the disposition of the Government. The people of Kansas have seen altogether too much of that region to rest in peace. They have traversed it in the purchase of stock; they have driven cattle through it from Texas; they have pursued thieves into it, and the universal testimony, as given to me, is, " the finest country, sir, God ever made." On that country every young Kansian has his eye fixed. Young men living on the border already have their quarter-sections picked out in the Nation, ready to jump at a moment's notice, rush over and take possession. People easily believe what they wish, and hence the universal opinion in Southern Kansas is that the Indian Territory will be sectionized and thrown open to settlement in three years at the farthest. Should such action be taken by Congress, then all former excitements in our Western settlement would be as nothing compared to the "rush" which would take place. At least half a million people, from Kansas to Pennsylvania, are waiting for some such chance; for, be it remembered, the good land still at the disposal of our Government is pretty nearly exhausted. Southwestern Kansas and the Indian Territory are the last I know of in this direc- tion. East of the mountains the limits of pioneering are rapidly narrowing, and men will not settle in the interior valleys, be- tween the Black Hills and the Sierras, and irrigate little patches, until every other chance is exhausted. Religious fanaticism 364 OCKMULKEE OR OCKLAHOMA. alone induced the Mormons to colonize the interior while so much good land remained east of the mountains. Here is a region containing more good land unoccupied than the culti- vatible area of Indiana. Let Congress pass an enabling act for that Territory, and in three months these roads leading southward from Kansas City and Lawrence would double their business ; in six months it would quadruple. Throw open the Territory next January, and it would be ready for admission as a State by January, 1875. There is unoccupied land for a hundred thousand homesteads. Settle it with white men, and the lands of South- ern Kansas would nearly double in value. During the process of settlement, they would have a ready market at their doors for all kinds of provisions at high prices. A troublesome border question would be settled, and several border towns would take a new lease of life from the consequent trade. All the public lines through Missouri and Arkansas would largely increase their business, and Texas and Louisiana would share in the benefits. It will be seen that many powerful interests would unite even now in furtherance of the scheme, so many that Congress would probably resist but feebly. All the dele- gations in the Senate and House from Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas would be enthusiastic in its favor, and other border States would join from natural sympa- thy. All these railroad interests press strongly in the same direction. Thus the proposition would start in Congress, with a powerful party, and despite what Eastern members may think of the inherent merits of the scheme, or of natural justice toward the Indian, I am led to think that the Kansians antici- pate rightly, and that the Territory will be open to settlement before 1875. These arguments are ever present to Congress- men and lobbyists, while the protest of the Indians yearly sounds more feeble ; and unless the Indian nations can be per- suaded to adopt Ockmulkee, they may soon be compelled to accept Ocklahoma. A little west of the railroad, where the beautiful Arkansas Valley widens southward into the Territory, hundreds are NEUTRAL STRIP. 365 squatted on the border, only waiting to rush over and take possession of public lands they have already marked out for themselves. I think they are mistaken as to the amount of good land they will have to select from. Of course, if the Territory is thrown open, a liberal allotment will be made for each family of Indians, who will have the first pick ; and they will choose all the land lying along the streams, the best and best timbered. The railroads will next secure liberal grants, and the general settler will find his choice limited. On the border we first enter the " neutral strip," a large tongue of land commencing on the southwestern cor- ner, with a width of four or five miles, and gradually narrowing westward, in the shape of a long wedge, be- tween the State and the " Nation." It was caused by some error of the surveyors at the time the Cherokees ceded their Kansas lands. It is settled, but not yet surveyed, and belongs unquestionably to the State which exercises jurisdiction "MOSS AGATES." over it. Leaving the "strip," we enter the town ("city," they call it,) of Chetopa, a lively community of some two thousand people, the southern line of the city being also the original State line. I rest here a day, and find the place red hot with the excite- ment of an approaching municipal election. The "Anti-Cor- ruptionists " (i. e., those out of office,) are holding meetings 366 LOCAL POLITICS. day and night, and have developed evidence of " astounding frauds." The " Corruptionists," (those who have run the city for the past two years,) point to " magnificent public works." The names of Tweed, Hall and Connolly are taken in vain every hour of the day, as bases of infamous comparison ; and the last issue of the Chetopa Advance shows, by actual figures, that "Mayor Fox and his guilty coadjutors have wronged the city out of the enormous sum of ten thousand dollars." [Five exclamation points.] All the frauds in New York and Cin- cinnati are as nothing compared to this! A general meeting of the friends of reform, a few evenings before, was invaded by the " Corruptionists," a row occurred, pistols were freely dis- played, and speakers were driven off the stand. The night of my stay J. W. Homer, editor of the Advance, was assaulted upon the street by a friend of Mayor Fox, and appeared at our table next morning with a beautiful set of " moss agates " (as we say in Utah), wearing them, however, upon his eyes instead of his shirt. It appeared as if " Bleeding Kansas" was about to bleed again in the cause of municipal reform. This is the age of investiga- tion, and the Reformers of Chetopa had begun vigorously, hav- ing, besides their own municipal affairs, lodged indictments against most of the Senators and public men of the State. The ordinary rule of criminal law appears to have been reversed, and Kansas Senators are held to be guilty until they prove themselves innocent. I made a flying visit to Lawrence, where I had the good fortune to meet Mr. C. G. De Bruler of the Cincinnati Times- Chronicle (now of the Evansville Journal), on the same mission as myself; and together we returned to the Indian country the first week in April. The "growing season" seemed fairly set in in Southern Kansas, fast tinging the prairies with a rich shade of green, and farmers everywhere were busy with the spring crops. We stopped for twenty- four hours at Parsons, the terminus of the Sedalia Division of the M. K. & T., and, we are positively in- formed, "the future metropolis of Southern Kansas," "railroad MUSCOGEE. 367 center/' etc. For particulars see land circulars, and the columns of the Parsons Sun. We ran thence down the M. K. & T., passed Chetopa just at dark, and by midnight were ninety miles from the border at the new town of Muscogee, then the ter- minus of the passenger division, though the road was com- pleted to Canadian River. I opened my eyes next morning upon a long, straggling, miserable railroad town, the exact image of a Union Pacific " city," in the last stages of decay. Some two hundred yards from the railroad a single street extended for nearly a quarter of a mile; the buildings were rude shanties, frame and canvas tents and log cabins, open to the wind, which blew a hurricane for the thirty-six hours I was there. If Mr. Lo, " the poor Indian," does in fact "see God in the clouds and hear Him in the wind" as the poet tells us, he has a simple and benign creed which gives him an audible and ever-present deity in this country, for the wind is constant and of a character to pre- vent forgetful ness. The weather is mild and pleasant enough, but walking against the wind is very laborious, and the howl- ing so constant as to make conversation difficult inside a tent. I have observed in my travels that windy countries are gener- ally healthful, but a different report is given here. They say bilious diseases of all kinds'prevail, and complain particularly of fever, ague and pneumonia. We ate in the "Pioneer boarding car/ 7 and slept in another car attached ; five of them being placed on a side track, anchored down and converted into a pretty good hotel. Here and about the depot were the citizens employed on the road. Of the town proper, a majority of the citizens were negroes, with them a few whites of doubtful " rep./' and perhaps a dozen Indians. The negroes were formerly slaves to the Indians, but slavery here was never severe, and they are little more their own masters than before. They earned a precarious subsistence, the women by washing and the men by teaming and chopping, and were all sunk deep, deep in poverty and ignorance. All day the wenches were strolling about in groups, bareheaded, barefooted, half naked, stupid-looking, ragged and 368 MUSCOKEE. destitute. Here, as at Vinita, I saw no farms, no signs of cul- tivation. The Indians live off the railroad, in the timber, and along the streams. On the road is no enterprise, no improve- ment, no trade of account that I can see. Three grocery stores, a tobacco shop and a few meat markets completed the town. The rest were cabins, filled with greasy wenches and lounging bucks. Around the town, far as the eye can reach, extend fertile prairies of a rich green, rivaling Ohio meadows in May, while five miles northeast a heavy line of timber marks the course of the Arkansas. Muscokee, or, if spelled as pronounced, Mooskokee, is the aboriginal name for the tribe we call Creeks, and having decided to thoroughly inspect these Indian sovereignties, and their relations to each other and the General Government, we begin with these. CHAPTEK XX. MUSCOKEE. Desperadoes Laxity of Government Out to the Agency Stirring up a rattler "A free nigger settlement" Creek History Tallahassee Mission Delight- ful experiences Creek education System of government Back to Muscogee Reckless shooting State of the region. RAD. COLLINS is on a big spree, ain't he?" " You bet he's a chargin'." "Killed anybody yet?" " No, only had one fuss. Him and two other Chero- kees went into the car last night with cocked six- shooters, and scared some Eastern fellers dirned near to death." "Mind the time he shot that ar marshal?" " I reckon ! killed him right in front of this car. Shot at him twice afore. Fetched him dead that time. Then come in next day and give himself up. Tuck him down to Fort Smith, and turned him loose in a little while. Lord, that Court don't amount to nothin'. Anybody 'at's got money can git away thar." " Marshal's got a good thing, though." " I see you ; best place to make money in the United States. These Deputies are the biggest rascals in the country. That Court is a disgrace to the American people, and '11 ruin us here yet." Such is a small part of the conversation we heard our second morning at the table of the dining-car in Muscogee. It was anything but encouraging to a man of peaceful proclivities. A few days after, I had my first view of this somewhat notorious Bradley Collins. I was sitting in the tent of an old Cherokee woman in Muscogee, listening to her account of the expulsion 24 369 370 "BRAD. COLLINS.' AMUSEMENTS AT MUSCOGEE. from the " old Nation in Geawgey," when shots were heard not far off, and an athletic, rosy-featured young man came running by the tent door with a pistol in his hand. The old woman merely said, " Bradley's got his shooter ; there's a fuss some'ers," and went out for a look. It proved to be nothing but some freedmen practicing on a stray hog, a wanderer from the Creek farms, which they brought down after a dozen shots! Collins walked back with a marked air of disappointment, muttering: " If I couldn't hit a hog first shot, I'd throw away my pistol ;" and the old lady entertained me with his history, which has since been more than verified by others. He is nearly white, an outcast from the Cherokee Nation, a smuggler of whisky, a desperado, and a dead shot. It is said that he has been known CHEROKEE ROUGHS. 371 to throw a pistol in the air, causing it to make half a dozen turns, catch it as it fell, bring it instantly to a level, and strike an apple at thirty paces. He is reported "so quick on trigger," that all the other "shootists" in the country have an awe of him. He is known to have killed three men, and was then under bond of one thousand dollars to appear at the May term of the Federal Court in Fort Smith, for shooting at a United States Marshal with intent to kill. Many excuse him in the case where he actually killed a Marshal, as it was a private quarrel, in which both had sworn to " shoot on sight." Asso- ciated with him were a dozen or more young " White Cherokees," who were suspected of being robbers, and known to be drunk- ards and gamblers. A dozen such men can do the cause of Cherokee independence and nationality more harm than all the Rosses arid Downings and their able compeers can do it good. But we must take all we hear on the railroad with this impor- tant qualification : It is the interest and policy of these railroads to belittle the Cherokee government, and make its officers appear as inefficient, and its few criminals as desperate and dangerous, as possible. And the roads themselves have added a vast amount of evidence in favor of their indictments against the Indian governments. The records are simply horrible. During the few weeks that the terminus and stage offices were at Muscogee and Gibson, sixteen murders were committed at these two places, and in a very short time five more were killed at the next terminus. One man was shot all to pieces just \n front of the dining-car at Muscogee, and another had his throat cut at night, almost in the middle of the town. It is true, strangers, travelers and outsiders are rarely if ever troubled. These murders are upon their own class, and new-comers who are weak enough to mix in, drink and gamble with them. But a few days before our arrival a Texan reached Canadian Station with the proceeds of a cattle sale. He met these fellows at night, was seen at 10 o'clock with them, drunk and generous with his money ; a few days after his body was washed ashore some miles down the Canadian. And yet I am assured, and I believe it, a man with a legitimate business, and who will let 372 START FOB THE AGENCY. whisky alone, can travel through this country as safely as ir Cincinnati. The better class of Cherokees regard these railroad towns with perfect horror, and are never seen about them These young desperadoes are permitted to enter the Creel? nation, but not the Choctaw. The latter complain that the Creeks can only execute their law with their own people. Th( Cherokees, when one of their young men begins to lounge aboul the railroad towns, give him up as an outcast, or consider him the same as dead. Off the road, in their country, all was peace and quiet; on the road, gambling, rioting and death. The night "Brick" Pomeroy reached Muscogee three men were shot dead. Brick walked from the train to the dining- car, and spent the night; walked thence to the earliest morning train and left the Territory. The railroad men tell rather amusing stories of the way he "saw the country." After two days at this lively town, we concluded we had better see the Creeks at home, and started afoot for the Agency, traveling over a beautiful, rich prairie, gently rolling, rising from the river into long ridges, which occasionally terminated in sharp bluffs, crowned with pretty groves. The prospect was delightful by nature, and was not a little enlivened by scattered herds of cattle cropping the rich green herbage. In the balmy air, and with the fair prospect before us, we had quite forgotten the sort of country we were in, when a sight of some gliding creature in the road brought us to a halt, and on the instant a sudden whir-r-r-h-r-a-a-h and a sharp hiss caused the two Bohemians to execute a double step backward, which would have done credit to a stage gymnast. While we stood in doubtful expectation (fifty feet off), the reptile curled his shining folds into a circle about the width of a peck measure, and raised a head which said as plain as words, "Noli me tangere." He was of a pale purple color, with beautifully flow- ered spots of steel gray running in spirals from head to tail, which, as he moved in the bright sunshine, glistened in a manner that would have been beautiful in anything but a rattle- snake. We knew him by his popular description, for the prin- cipal amusement of the old settlers had been to tell us what QUEER CREA TUBES. 373 kind of "insects" we should encounter in the country, assuring us, " on the honor of a man, sir," that their ordinary jump was twenty feet, and their bite certain death. I remembered, how- ever, enough of my boyhood experience in the " breaks" of the Wabash to know that a rattlesnake could only jump his length, and that we were reasonably safe at fifty feet. So we took observations, and being satisfied that his serpentship had a pre- emption right (there wasn't a stick or stone in a mile), we took a wide detour and trav- eled on. We sat down by a stream to rest, and out of the dead grass there crawled, or rather wab- bled, a something which we could not classify. It was about the size and color of a small Easter egg, with a pleas- ing variety of legs and bristles, and appeared to walk sideways and backward with ease. It might be a tarantula, and it might not; we did not know. We went away from there also. We were study- ing Indians this time, and not natural his- tory. Two hours brisk walking brought us into a settled and partly cultivated country, a region of rude log cabins and gaunt farm stock, where black faces peered at us through the cracks of " worm fences," and occasional " free nigger " patches showed something like civilization. A colored girl replied in answer to our queries, " Agency over thar," and a mile further brought us to a beautiful grove, in which was an irregular square of RAISING A NATIVE. 374 BLACK CREEKS. log cabins, including some three or four acres. We saw no signs of Government buildings, and but one neat, commodious house. There we were directed to a double-log building, cor- responding to those of the poorest farmers in Indiana, some distance from the square in a field, and that we found to be the Agency. Here we were welcomed by Major J. G. Yore and his assistant, Mr. A. S. Purinton, who have charge of the place during the absence at Washington -of the Agent, Major Lyon. Major Vore has been in this country, and among the Indians of Texas and New Mexico, for twenty-seven years, and is a walking encyclopedia of aboriginal history. To him we are indebted for many courtesies and facilities in obtaining informa- tion. This settlement has the general appearance of an abandoned camp-meeting ground in the backwoods of Ohio, and is in- habited almost entirely by negroes, who have literally invaded the Agency. A continuous line of settlements and farms, or rather "patches/' extends ten miles along the Arkansas, with a population of about a thousand negroes and perhaps a hundred Creeks. The soil in this vicinity is of inexhaustible fertility. I walked through fields of lately planted corn, and in the patches of thriving vegetables, and noted everywhere a loose and active soil, as black, as rich, and as easily cultivated as any part of the Wabash " bottoms." None but the poorest and lowest of the Creeks will live among these freedmen, and on this beautiful and fertile tract, capable of producing in amazing quantities all the fruits and grains of the temperate zone, a thousand or two of these creatures live in dirt, ignorance and abject poverty, barely one remove from actual starvation. To go from this " free-nigger settlement" to a town of pure Creeks, as I did, seems like emerging from barbarism to enlightenment, for my opinion of the Creeks has been considerably raised since I have seen them at home. The appearance and conversation of the pure Creeks above all, the practical results they are able to show are calculated to give one high hopes of the race, and of the results of the present policy. They are quite different in appearance from the Cherokees stouter, but not so elegant; CREEK HISTORY. 375 AT THE CREEK AGENCY. shorter, broader, and rather darker; without the high cheek bones and solemn gravity of the others, and with a more cheerful and kindly expression. The white traders say they are more industrious than the Cherokees, but less intelligent. The history of the Muscokee or Creek nation is like an aboriginal romance. There is a consistency, directness and air of history about their traditions, which is seldom found in sav- age histories. They begin at a period many generations before the coming of* the whites. They then occupied a region far west of the Mississippi somewhere in Northern Texas, they think from which they slowly moved eastward as a nation of predatory warriors. After crossing the Arkansas, they heard of a people north of them leading the same life, speaking the 376 CREEK HISTORY. same language and using the same medicines and war-whoop. Embassadors were sent, the two tribes met, and, though their kinship could not be traced, they formally united, and, ever since, the two divisions have been known as Upper and Lower Creeks. The combined tribes moved eastward and attacked a nation afterward known as the Alabarnas, then living on the western bank of the Mississippi. After a long and bloody contest the Alabamas Avere driven northward, and the Muscokees took pos- session of their towns. Many years after, they heard of the Alabamas, went after them and again defeated them, the latter this time crossing the Mississippi and settling somewhere between that and the Ohio. The next generation of Creeks renewed the war, crossed the Mississippi and again drove the Alabamas, who traveled a whole season toward the south, and settled in what is now probably the State of Mississippi. The Creeks also turned toward the south, and in the next generation .again -came upon the Alabamas, and destroyed all but a remnant, who fled eastward and settled in a valley in the present State of Alabama. Learning that their hereditary enemies were again upon the move, they sent a deputation and sued for peace. The Creeks had from time immemorial pursued a policy of absorption similar to that of the ancient Romans. When they met a strange people, the first move was war. If the attacked fought desperately and were only conquered after a long struggle, the victors pronounced them worthy to be Muscokees, and adopted the remnant into their tribe. They now adopted the Alabamas, \vho maintain a separate race and language in the Creek Nation to this day. They slowly moved eastward, and there for the first time came into conflict with the Cherokees, who dominated the entire hill country of Southeast Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and Northern Georgia and Alabama. A long and bloody war followed. The Cherokees on their own ground, among the mountains, invariably defeated the Muscokees, and were defeated when they ventured into the country of the latter. The Creeks could neither conquer nor absorb the Cherokees, so a lasting peace THE CREEK TROUBLES. 377 was made, which has never been broken ; they agreed to be "friends and brothers for ever," and to the Cherokee was granted the right of "elder brother in council." This seniority is acknowledged in general council now. The various tribes are considered as ranking in a peculiar order of relationship. The Delaware is considered the grandfather of all ; the Creeks, Chickasaws, and some other southern tribes, as younger brother to the Cherokee, while the Choctaw is considered " the son of a younger brother." What became of his father the old Creeks were unable to inform me. From this point the historical account of the Creeks, as con- nected with the whites, begins. Traders penetrating their country from Pensacola named it, from the number of streams, the Creek Country, and gave the Muscokee Nation the title of Creek Confederacy. In the war of 1812 a portion joined the British, most of whom were driven away from the tribe into Florida. For many years all the dissatisfied or turbulent ran away and joined these exiles, to whom the Creeks gave the name of Seminole (Say-mee-no-lay), meaning " wild," or " out- cast." The whites, meanwhile, crowded upon the Creeks, who assigned most of their land by the treaty of 1832, and had the remainder allotted in farms, one to each male Indian. The most outrageous frauds were then perpetrated upon these indi- vidual holders, who had expressed their wish to cultivate the land and live after the manner of the whites. Transferring Agents were appointed by the Government to see that no Indian parted with the title to his land through ignorance, as they always refused to sell or do more than lease. But the swindlers employed half-breeds or renegade Indians to personate the actual owner and sign the deeds before the Agent. Hundreds of men had their lands sold who knew nothing of the trans- action until called upon to give possession to some third party who had purchased of the swindler. The buyers called upon the Government to put them in possession of their lands; part of the Creeks rose in revolt, the militia was called out and a general war threatened. Some of the men thus dispossessed were brought to this country in chains. Many Creeks volun- 378 ON THE ARKANSAS. teered to help put down the troubles, believing that justice would be done. But in most cases it was not, and old citi- zens of the Nation now have title to Alabama lands and legal proof that they have never sold them. The entire tribe then agreed to sell, but were removed before they had time to do so, and some lands there are yet unsold to which the Indian title is acknowledged good. A considerable tract which had been set apart " for orphans of the Creek Nation too young to make selection/ 7 had been covered by white squatters ; but the Government paid them for it, and the money was invested as "Indian Trust Funds." A few Creeks arrived here in 1825; the main body came in 1836 and 1837. About the year 1807 a small band had gone to Texas, and were so harassed by the Texan Government that in 1840 and 1842 they came here. A small portion still remain in Florida and Alabama, whom the Creek Nation are negotiat- ing with, to induce them to remove here. So much by way of history, from the records and accounts of old Creeks at the Agency. But we had not seen the best part of the Nation, and determined on a visit to Tallahassee Mission School a sort of college of the Muscokees. It is situated a few miles north of the Arkansas, on the high point between that stream and the Verdigris, and leaving the Agency at 3 p. M. on Saturday, we struck down the hill and into the forest which skirts the Arkansas. The river was nearly a mile wide, but all, except a channel of some three hundred yards in width, was quite shallow, and the whole stream running thickly with red mud. No one was in sight where the trail struck the river, but on the opposite shore we made out something which might be a ferry-flat ; so the two correspondents jointly lifted up their voices and shouted, " Hallo oo ! the boat ! " for about the space of half an hour. One man appeared, took his seat in the boat and seemed to go to sleep. We shouted another space, and two more men took the boat, which one of them poled across. Meanwhile the sky was suddenly overcast with clouds, and by the time we were conducted by the ferryman to a small hut in the thicket, a furious thunderstorm broke upon us. The two OVER THE RIVER. 379 negroes walked on to the settlement without regard to the rain, and left us with the Creek ferryman, who, we learn, had spent all his life there, and yet could not speak a word of English ! A bright Creek negro soon arrived, and the two carried on a sort of conversation in subdued gutturals, which Mr. DeBruler decided was a discussion in regard to the approaching Cincin- nati Convention, but it was all Creek to me. The negro in- formed us that lie was a Creek slave a afoh de wah ; run away and went off den, which I larnt Ingliss, sah."- So he acted as interpreter, and in an hour of severe exertion we succeeded in extracting half a dozen remarks from the determinedly reticent Creek. The storm pas- sed, and we were set a-cross the river, for which Charon the Silent demanded "pahly-hok- kohlen hoonunvy pahly osten " rendered by our colored linguist to mean " twenty cents a man forty cents all." This we disbursed, and footed it across the bottom over a road rendered very toilsome by the rain. At dark, splashed and weary, we reached the Mission, which is beautifully situated in an open grove, appear- ing to us a very haven of rest fitting emblem of the faith and hope which planted it in this wilderness. From the scamper- ing of little Creeks in the twilight, we judged our arrival had created something of a sensation, and afterward learned the children had mistaken us for new preachers, often looked for. A CREEK CHARON. 380 AT THE MISSION. Such a mistake is excusable in Indian children. We were cordially received and entertained by the Superintendent, Rev. W. S. Robertson, and family, which consists of himself and wife, two daughters, accomplished young ladies, and two small boys. Five of the oldest teachers had left within .a few months, and Mr. Graham and lady were to leave in a few days, leaving the entire care of the Mission to Mr. Robertson and family. These changes were caused by differences as .to management, both among the Creeks and the teachers ; and sad as such a result is, it was much to be feared that the institution would close with that year. The building is a hundred and twenty-five feet long, with three stories ; the lower for dining halls and residences for teachers, the middle for recitation rooms, the upper for sleeping apartments. Complete separation of the sexes is the rule ; they do not even recite together, and never meet, except at meals and in the presence of the teachers. There is room, and the contract is made with the Creek Nation, for forty boys and forty girls; but only seventy scholars were present, ten having been lately expelled for violation of the rules. The building appears very old and dilapidated. It was erected in 1848, but badly damag.ed during the war, having been used part of the time as a hospital, and afterwards for a stable. The Mission was set in working order by 1849, and did more than any other agency towards the rapid advancement of the Creeks for the ten years before the war. It was founded by the agents of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, who made an equitable contract with the Legislature and Supreme Court of the Creek Nation. The Nation appropriated one-third of the cost, the United States Government one-third, and the Presbyterian Board one-third. The Board selects the teachers and pays their salaries, and attends generally to the intellectual and moral department of the school; the Creeks pay the expenses and attend to the material wants. For some years past they have appropriated six thousand dollars per year, but it has proved insufficient. The Nation chooses five Trus- tees who, in conjunction with the Superintendent of Public DISCIPLINE OF THE SCHOOL. 381 Instruction for the Nation, manage all the affairs of the institu- tion, and select from each of the forty Creek towns one boy and girl as scholars. Many of those who graduated here before the war are now the chief men of the Nation, and three of its five Trustees were once scholars in the Mission. The rules adopted by these Trustees are quite rigid; in particular, I venture to suggest that the provision forbidding the sexes to recite to- gether, or meet in common literary exercises, is exceptionally .severe, and according to my obervation in the Western States, impolitic. Incalculable have been the advantages of this Mission to the Creeks. Every year it sends out a graduating class, who scat- ter through the Nation, building up local schools, inciting a spirit of improvement, and rapidly elevating the intellectual tone of the people. I cannot repress a feeling of sadness at the thought that it may soon cease to exist. For twenty-three years ever since 1849, with the exception of the war period Mr. Robertson and his devoted -family have labored for the good of these people. He begins to see rich fruits on every hand. His former scholars are guiding the councils of the Creek Nation, teaching in her schools, and laboring at Wash- ington City to avert the ruin threatened by the acts of a few traitors. And should this Mission have to appeal to its denom- inational friends in the States, I ask for them a favorable hear- ing; and surely no enlightened Presbyterian but must feel a pride in this fountain of light in what so lately was all dark- ness, or hesitate to extend aid to the work of these brethren who have made themselves voluntary exiles "for Christ's sake." Supper was called soon after our arrival; we took "visitors' chairs," and watched with much interest the orderly incoming of seventy young Creeks, of every age from eight to twenty-two. Nearly all were pure bloods, and the whole scene was a revela- tion to me. I had seen the savage painted Indian, and the miserable vagabond on the white frontier; but the civilized, scholarly Indian boy and girl presented a new sight. Supper over, a chapter was read and the school united in prayers and 382 LANGUAGES. AT THE MISSION. a devotional hymn. Then we were invited to hear classes, who volunteered an evening recitation for our benefit. Their natural talent is surprising, particularly in drawing and figures. Every Creek boy seems to know the law of outline by instinct. As the aiFair assumed a rather social turn, the lads exhibited several beautiful specimens of their skfll. The class in denom- inate numbers, lads of fifteen or sixteen, particularly excelled in rapid calculation. At reading they are not so apt. Few of them speak English on arrival ; they must be taught it. Thus they have the labor of acquiring one language before their edu- cation fairly begins. The Creeks have absorbed many tribes in their wars, and no less than five distinct races maintain sepa- rate towns and languages at this time. These are the Uchees, A CREEK SOCIABLE. 383 Natchees, Hitchitees, Alabamas and Creeks proper, all repre- sented in this school. A Uchee or Alabama can no more understand Creek than he can English ; he learns that lan- guage here by association with other boys, and thus he must acquire two tongues in the Mission. Think of an Ohio boy having to learn two languages before his education proper be- gins. When the institution first started, this difficulty was much greater; now all the older scholars speaking English or Creek indifferently, the beginners pick it up rapidly. Like the com- mon school system of our own people, this school tends to break down tribal prejudice and make the people homogeneous. Tw.o Uchee boys, of the reading class, conversed awhile in that language at my request. It is entirely devoid of labials ; for five minutes they touched the lips together but once. It also rarely requires the dentals; and thus to a Uchee it is almost impossible to distinguish between b and jp, d and t, or a and e. This inability produces most ludicrous results in spell- ing. Pronouncing the words to be spelled orally, the teacher cannot possibly determine in the quick sound whether the spell- ing is correct or not, that is, with Uchee beginners. But when they come to write it on the slate bat becomes p-e-t, hat h-e-d, bad b-e-t, and so on. Two bright Alabama boys were introduced who rejoiced in the names of Tecumseh Tiger, and Commodore Mclntosh, and gave us illustrations of their native tongue, though both spoke English fluently. Noting some sounds I thought similar to the Greek, I asked the boys to observe some poetry I would recite, and see if they recognized any of the words, or any sound. I then repeated the first ten lines of the Iliad, and the boys promptly pronounced it Cherokee! They had heard the lan- guage often, they said, but did not understand it. On being told it was Greek, and being unable to distinguish between the G and (7, they replied, " No Creek ; must be Cherokee." My attempt at comparative philology was not a success. Mean- while many of the girls had sent in a request" to see their brothers and cousins." They were admitted as well as a num- ber of boys, and we had a regular Creek sociable. Some of the 384 CREEK SONGS. scholars retain their Muscokee names, others adopt the English ones of a friend or teacher, and still others simply translate the Muscokee name into English. Of the last class, I was intro- duced to Thomas Deer, Eli Tiger, Nancy Postoak and Susan Berryhill. The Creeks are lively and affectionate, and yet their original language does not contain a single term of endearment ! What a rascally poor language to make love in. Many have lately been literally translated from the English. I wish the reader could hear the rendering of the word " sweet-heart." Each of these words is long in the Creek, and combine literally but reversed, making it " heart-sweet," about eight syllables in all. Think of murmuring such a jawbreaker into a maiden's ear by moonlight. Mrs. Robertson and her daughters speak the Creek fluently, and represent it as difficult to learn. Its grammatical structure is perfect. Never did I spend a more delightful Sabbath than this at the Mission. The Sunday-school was worth coming a thousand miles to witness. Seventy Creeks, bright lads and really hand- some girls, mingled their clear voices in sacred songs, led by Miss A. A. Robertson, with a finely toned organ, alternating Creek and English songs. All sang in the Creek, but not more than half in the English. Our alphabet has been adapted to the Creek by Mr. Robertson and an interpreter, and a series of books printed. On this plan the Creek hymn book is composed. All our familiar tunes are there set to Ceeek words, in a rather free translation of the original. My musical talent is small, but I felt all the enthusiasm of the occasion when the whole school (seventy sweet voices mingled) took up the air: "Shall we gather at the river, where bright angels' feet have trod." The words in Creek look anything but beautiful. Here they are, first verse: BEAUTIFUL BIVEB. Uerakkon teheceyvr haks Cesvs em estolke fullan Cesvs liket a fihnet os Hoyayvket fihnet os. KO-COK-NE EM-BOPE. 385 CHORUS Moraos mon teheceyvres Uerakko herusen escherusen Mekusapvlken etohkv liket Fulleye munkv tares. Cis pronounced as ch in child, eas i in pin, v as short u; y between two vowels unites with the preceding one to form a diphthong, and with the latter is pronounced as y ; a is pronounced ah as in father, and all other letters as in English. Our interest pleased 1 , -, Mllil.'-Ni'l.!':, ) if !! ', (; the young Mnscokees so much that they be- stowed honorary Creek names on both of us. Mr. De Bruler, at their request, gave specimens of short-hand writing, using those words in ex- planation; for this he was named Ko-cok-ne Ein-bo-pe,\iter'd\\y trans- lated, "Shorthandle." The recitations would average well in a white school, but the effect of the singing, above all the novelty of the situa- tion, left me with little of the critical spirit. And one hundred years " SHORTHANDLE." ago the ancestors of these children were offering fruits to the sun, and stroking their faces to the moon, propitiating the spirit of evil with bloody sacrifices, dressing in skins,, scalping their enemies, and waging merciless war from the borders of the Tennessee to the banks of Bayou Sara. Can the Indian be civilized? In view of the rapid progress of the Creek Nation since the miserable policy of cheating was abandoned and the Christian policy 25 386 DISTINGUISHED CREEKS. adopted, may not the humanitarians vary the question, and with confidence ask: Can not the Indian be civilized, and Chris- tianized too? After two delightful days at the Mission, we continued our wanderings in the Creek country with an improved opinion of the people. When we learned of the Indians from white men and freed men, or at the railroad towns we were discouraged ; when we visited them at their homes, we thought their condi- tion more hopeful. We have met but two of their leading men : Chicota, their principal chief, and John M. Moore, of the late delegation to Washington, The Creek country is in the form of an irregular triangle, making a long point eastward, and lying between the Arkansas and Main Canadian rivers, and extends westward nearly to longitude 97. From east to west its greatest length is one hundred miles, and its western border, which is the only boun- dary forming a right line, measures about the same. Taking into account the winding of the rivers I estimate its area at six thousand square miles ; the authorities at 3,700,000 acres. Of this area about one-third is barren, or comparatively so, consist- ing of spurs from the west mountains and sand ridges. The remainder is for the most part exceedingly well watered and fertile. The population consists of ten thousand Creeks and four thousand freedmen, a proportion slightly over two to the square mile, making this by far the most populous of any part of the Indian Territory. It is considerably more than twice as thickly settled as the Choctaw country, and nearly three times that of the Cherokee ; but the long western strip of the latter greatly reduces its average. On this soil we see every kind of vegetable in rapid growth, and increasing quantities of stock, thriving on the natural productions of the earth ; while almost every Creek dwelling is the center of a beautiful grove of fruit trees, at this delightful season green with springing leaves or white and red with peach and apple blossoms, and redolent with the sweet scents of advancing spring. But when winter destroys this natural beauty, I suspect the scene is dreary, for little has AN INDIAN REPUBLIC. 387 yet been done in the shrubbery line, and neat as most of the log-houses are, they would look bare and mean alone. The government of the Creek Nation is republican in form, but with our notions we should call it an elective monarchy. For though nominally any one may be elected to the highest office, yet really they seem to be confined to a few families. The entire "Constitution and laws" are printed in a small pamphlet, which would make about ten pages of this volume. The Crimi- rial Code, definitions and all, consists of seven sections of from three to five lines each, covering two-thirds of one page. The law-making power is vested in a House of Kings and a House of Warriors: the members of each are elected for four years, by general vote of all the male Creeks over eighteen years of age. Each of the forty towns sends one member to the House of Kings; each town one to the House of Warriors, and an additional member for each two hundred citizens. The Kings elect their own President, the Warriors their own Speaker-in-Council ; each house elects its own interpreter, and all speeches made in English are forthwith rendered aloud into Creek, and vice versa. The records are kept in English. The Executive of the Nation is styled the Principal Chief, his Vice the Second Chief; they also are elected for four years each, and thus the entire Government is liable to a complete change at each election. The judiciary begins with the High Court, which consists of five persons, chosen by the Council, for four years. They have original jurisdiction in all cases involving over one hundred dollars, and appellate jurisdiction from lower courts in criminal matters. The Nation is divided into six districts, in each of which a judge is elected by the qualified voters ; they have jurisdiction of all cases involving sums under one hundred dollars, and local criminal jurisdiction. Of course, with such a brief and simple Criminal Code, there is much k*ft to the discretion of the Judge, and as far as a white man can see, he seems to have almost absolute power. The death penalty is often inflicted. Each district elects a " light horse company," consisting of one lieutenant and four privates; these act as sheriff and deputies under orders of the District Courts, and are 388 SEVERE LAWS. subject to a general call From the principal chief to execute the mandates of the High Court, or suppress extensive disorders. In hundreds of instances these light-horse companies and the Dis- trict Judge simply make the law as they go, calling Court on each particular case, following the statute if there is one, and if not, assigning such penalty as in their judgment fits the case. The laws are singularly plain and unambiguous. No space is wasted in definitions, it being taken for granted, apparently, that everybody knows the meaning of such terms as " steal " and " murder." Section 4 of the Criminal Code reads : " Be it enacted, That should any person or persons be guilty of rape, he shall for the first offence receive fifty lashes ; for the second offence he shall suffer death." This crime is now very rare, or, the Creeks tell me, entirely unknown. I should say it was entirely unneces- sary. The Creek women are of good average repute for chastity, but the freedwomen are quite the reverse, and with them asso- ciate a few of the baser sort of Creek girls. Section 5 reads: " Be it enacted, That should any person or persons be guilty of stealing, for the first offence lie shall receive fifty lashes; for the second offence one hundred lashes, and for the third offence he shall suffer death/' This penalty is by shooting, irrespective of the amount stolen, and is often inflicted. Women who attempt or assist at infanticide or abortion, receive publicly fifty lashes on the bare back. This crime, formerly common, is now almost or quite unknown. A healthy pride of increase and nationality has taken root in the Nation, and before the war the Creeks were increasing about as fast as white communities of the same size. Their progress from 1850 to 1861 was un- precedented. All their rude shanties or wigwams disappeared and were replaced by neat and comfortable frame and log houses ; their old wooden plows were discarded, and most of them became good farmers. They were rich in fruit and hogs. The war came and ruined them. Only within the past four years have they again been sensibly improving. The Nation now has thirty-one common schools, mostly taught by native teachers, and three High Schools or Missions. These last are INDIAN DOCTORING. 389 managed respectively by the Baptist, Presbyterian, and Metho- dist Church South. .Something over a thousand Creeks belong to these three churches, and the majority of the Nation attend church more or less. But the natural tendency of their minds is towards a kind of fatalism. Such and such things are des- tined for each individual, but may sometimes be averted by certain rites or duties performed. They use white men's medi- cines for all ills except the bites of poisonous reptiles and insects. For these they rely entirely on Indian conjurors, who never fail to effect a cure. This is a singu- lar statement, but the testimony is uniform; there is not a dissenting statement from white, black or red. The country abounds in rat- ~"^S' : tlesnakes ; many men of undoubted intelligence and without supersti- tion, have been bitten; some have shown me the marks, and de- scribed the cure. When I ask how they explain, this, the answer gener- ally is: "I don't explain it; I don't believe in conjuration; I only know the cure is cer- tain." The conjuror uses no medicine but a small leaf of tobacco or other plant, which he holds upon his tongue while pronouncing the charm. He applies it then to the bite, pressing it smartly with the ball of his thumb, and in less than twenty-four hours the patient is entirely well. Such is the experience detailed to me by three nearly white and very intelligent men. CURING SNAKE-BITE. 390 "STUPID SANDS." Simple as is the form of government, the Nation did not succeed in establishing it without a rebellion and period of reconstruction. I have spoken of the old and main division of the Nation into Upper and Lower Greeks. Under the old aboriginal system each of these was entitled to a chief and minor officers ; there were civil chiefs and war chiefs, and a vast multitude of offices, three or four times as many as at present. This continued with various modifications until 1867, when the Constitution was adopted. Two-thirds of the old dignitaries had to go out of office, and those who failed of election under the new system were properly disgusted. Among them was an arch-plotter, named Ok-ta-ha-sars-ha-go, literally translated "Stupid Sands." He raised a company of several hundred, appeared at the Council Ground on Inauguration Day, and declared in favor of the old system, announcing his intention to break up the new Council by force. The Chief elect, Chicota, sent away the women and children, put the town in a state of defence, and called out his supporters, who soon considerably outnumbered the others. Sands then appealed to the freed men on questions of loyalty, but they failed to respond. His party dwindled away without a fight, and Major Lyon, Creek Agent, succeeded in reconciling most to the new Government. Sands then began to intrigue at Washington, and appealed to the people at home, but was overwhelmingly defeated in 1871, Chicota being re-elected. Sands died while we were in the Nation, his death being hastened, the people said, by disap- pointment. Just west of the Creeks lie the Seminoles, who are at this time in great distress, for the following reasons : The main body " were induced to leave Florida," and settle here, soon after the Creeks came. The latter acknowledged the old kinship, and a t'lose friendship was established. By treaty of 1866 the Creeks ceded all the western part of their country to the United States, " upon which to locate other Indians." The Seminoles at once Bold all their first reservation to the United States, at fifteen cents an acre, and bought two hundred thousand acres of these " ceded lands," next to the Creek line, at fifty cents an acre. SEMIKOLE TROUBLES. 391 OK-TA-HA-SARS-HA-GO. This money, by the way, goes into the Creek trust funds. The Surveyor came to run the line, and being threatened by a band of Kioways, merely took the word of an old trader for it, and set up posts at the termini by guess. The Seminoles settled there and have improved industriously for six years. Lately the Interior Department has had the line correctly located, and it shows the entire Seminole tract to be within the country of the Creeks. They are utterly without land or homes, and their labor for six years goes to the Creeks. They wanted to be near the Creeks their language is the same but maintain their nationality. So they ask the Government to give them other lands to an equal amount, just outside the Creeks. A small band of the latter are still in Alabama and Florida, 392 PROGRESS AND HOPE. and the Nation is moving to bring them out. The people of the Alabama, Cowassartee, and Boluxshee towns (of the Creek Nation) tell us that they have a large number of relatives and friends now wandering in Southern Texas. These are the last of a detachment who were part of the " Old Nation " east of the Mississippi. They left there between 1807 and 1812, when the Nation first came into contact with the whites, and moving by successive stages westward, settled between the Sabine and Naches Rivers, then a part of Mexico. In 1839 they were forcibly expelled from there by the new Republic of Texas, They started hither; a few reached this Nation, more settled among the Choctaws, and about five hundred, totally destitute of horses and provisions, were obliged to remain in Texas. Since then they have been outcasts and vagabonds, driven to and fro among the whites, always longing to reach this section, but never able to come. The Creeks have kept up regular communication with them for years, and now propose to petition Congress to bring them here. The main body has now been here thirty-five years, in which time they have totally aban- doned idolatry, become good stock raisers and tolerably good farmers; half educated one generation, and made arrangements to fully educate the next, become eminently peaceable and a little more than self-sustaining. Can we not afford to leave this section to them one generation longer at least until we have settled and improved all the waste places of the two States and the Territory north of it? At noon of a bright April day we return to the railroad at Muscogee, to find matters worse than ever. As we sit down to dinner in the boarding-car, a half-blood Creek, crazy with smuggled whisky, is galloping up and down the row, brand- ishing a huge revolver, and threatening death to all opponents. At one moment he rides his horse into a shop, emerges the next, and gallops upon a group of wenches, who scatter with a chorus of screams. A file of soldiers from a detachment on the road appear on the scene, arrest and disarm him, and the town returns to its normal condition of listlessness and idle chatter. Severe penalties are prescribed against selling whisky in the SMUGGLING WHISKY. 393 Territory, and that which is smuggled in is the vilest compound known to the trade, familiarly called " tarantula juice/' from the most deadly insect in the country. A few traders make this smuggling a regular business, the partner in Kansas ship- ping whisky to the partner here in cases marked " eggs," " tobacco," etc. An old acquaintance of mine in Chetopa told me, merely as a matter of news, that he followed the business a year before being detected. He was then arrested and taken to Fort Smith, Arkansas, Federal Court headquarters for this country ; he brought his case to trial at once, " before the evi- dence could accumulate," and got off with a loss of four hun- dred dollars fine and costs. He returned at once to Chetopa and engaged again in the business, without the loss of a week's time. Being better posted and more wary, he run the business six months longer without being suspected, and retired respect- ably, with large profits. A small company of soldiers is stationed here, under com- mand of a Lieutenant, and others at various points in the Ter- ritory; and all of them look even more listless and uninterest- ing than soldiers generally on the plains, which is saying quite enough. Officers are abundant enough all over the Territory, but I have met no one who could give me any clear informa- tion about the condition of civil government. Says an old Southern physician, who has lived here ten years : "The fact is, there is no government actually, but lots of trials. If both parties are Indians that is, have * head rights' in the Nation it's tried by Indians under their laws; if cither's a white man, it's tried at Fort Smith, and that's just no trial. There is no collision of governments, for the Federal authorities don't care a d n about the country. My protection and government is in these stone walls, a shot-gun and six-shooter. If these Creeks was not just the most quiet, peaceable people on earth, a decent man couldn't live here. These infernal white scalawags would ruin the country. Yes, sir; there's plenty of law and lots o' trials, but no government." Here, as about Vinita, we hear much of the proposed Terri- tory and reform of the land tenure. This last, it is evident, 394 WHITE INHABITANTS. ought to be changed ; for thousands of white men, who would strictly respect the right of property in an individual Indian, cannot but feel a longing to "take up" some of that held by the Indians in common. The Cherokees, for instance, own in common six million acres, more than one-fourth the area of Indiana, while there are but sixteen thousand of them. Any citizen of the Nation can fence as much land as he wishes, and it is then his, to all practical intents, while he occupies it, and he can quit-claim or sell his improve- ments. But he has no fee simple, and, if aban- doned, the soil falls back to the common- alty again. But the Cherokees have a law that no man can fence within a quarter of a mile of another's fence; there must be that much common of pasturage be- tween them. The Creeks allow inclosures without this common strip, thus causing the entire coun- try to be shut up in some few places. White men can only reside in the "Nation" by marriage and adoption, by a "permit" to trade, or as employes. This last privilege is shamefully abused. Men go once a year to some Indian, make a contract to work a year for him, take out papers to that effect, and roam the country till that time the next year. The Chero- kees require an indorsement of the candidate by seven citizens, and a certificate of character from his last residence, before adopting him as a citizen. "Permits" to trade, from the Fede- A PERMIT. 395 ral authorities, are subject to the usual influences of chicane and favoritism ; and from all these causes it results that very many, if not a majority, of the whites resident in the Ter- ritory are poor, drifting scalawags, or down-right villains. These vagrant whites render the country generally unsafe, and still worse, demoralize the negroes and the Indians. PRE-EMPTOR'S CABIN. CHAPTER XXI. OKLAHOMA. Railroads The Thirty-fifth* Parallel Route Down to the Canadian In the Choctaw Nation Tandy Walker, Esq. Secretary Delano visits the Territory- Tramp to Fort Gibson " White Cherokees " again An Indian feud At Widow Skrimshee's " Pikes," on the animal migration Tahlequah Chero- kee documents Curious records History of the Nation Summary of th Indian Territory. WO railroads traverse the Indian Territory: the Missouri, Kansas and Texas, from north to south, averaging forty miles from the eastern border; and the Atlantic and Pacific, from east to west, about as fur from the northern border. The A. and P. still languishes, being completed no farther than Vinita; but is a road of con- siderable pretensions. Its nominal terminus is on the Pacific Coast. The "thirty-fifth parallel" road and the entire line has been surveyed through the Indian Territory and New Mexico, and now its agents speak of San Diego, California, as the real terminus. We are assured " there is no snow on the line at any season of the year," meaning, I suppose, none to do any hurt, which I am quite prepared to believe. But I am not yet prepared to judge between it and the better known (at present better supported) El Paso route. The M. K. and T. runs from Sedalia, Missouri;' to Fort Scott, Kansas; thence, south west ward to Parsons, wherg'it joins the other branch running southeast from Emporia. The two form a complete Y at Parsons; the lower stem continues nearly straight south through the Indian Territory, and is being extended to connect with the Texas Central, and so form a con- tinuous line to the Gulf. We were off* from Muscoee at 7 o'clock A. M. to see the CANADIAN RIVER. 397 remaining forty miles of road completed, then a little south of the main Canadian. The country traversed is Creek, of the same general character as that heretofore described the low lands very rich, and the higher knolls and ridges too light and sandy, "quick " for pasturage and producing an early growth of grass, but too thin for cultivation. We cross Little Canadian or North Fork, within a mile of the Methodist Mission, which is reported in a flourishing condition, but we lacked time to visit it. Two miles down the river is situated North Fork town, an important Creek village. We hear that a white man has just been mortally wounded in an affray there, all the parties being railroad followers. Between the two Canadians the piece of road is some seven miles long, and midway thereon was then the nominal terminus and the station for the El Paso Stage and Mail Line. We pause here an hour. Dusty and travel worn pilgrims are coming in from all points in Western Texas, and spruce, clean looking people from civilization, starting out on long and toilsome journeys through the sandy plains between here and the Rio Grande. Thence to Main Canadian we traverse a dense forest; all the point between the two rivers is heavily timbered, and choked with underbrush. The main stream is now wide and rapid, apparently thick with red mud and sand; but after standing a few minutes, it is sweet enough to the taste, and close examination shows the stream to be tolerably clear, the red showing through the water from the bottom. The bridge here was finished several months before, and about the time the track was laid the southern abutment gave way. It was found that the stone used, from a neighboring quarry, was entirely unfit, falling to pieces in the water; and the entire pier had to be rebuilt. We went over on the first locomotive which erased ; hitherto construction cars had been shoved across singly by hand. After our passage the engine brought over a very heavy train loaded with iron, and the bridge was then officially pronounced safe. We had observed, with a slight uneasiness, that Brad. Collins and his party came down on our train, and it was generally 398 TANDY WALKER. LIVELY TIMES ON THE CANADIAN. known that they had a cargo of smuggled whisky in the bag- gage-car. At the town on the river they met a dozen more of their sort ; the whisky was opened and passed, and when we returned from viewing the bridge three of them w r ere galloping about town, brandishing pistols, and yelling like demons. My companion took a brief look, and suggested, "This is a devilish queer place : let's get out of it." This suited my humor ad- mirably ; so we crossed into the Choctaw country, and spent the day. Two miles through the heavy forest brought us to a beautiful farm, tilled and improved as well as the average in Ohio, which we found to be the residence of Tandy Walker, Esq., Choctaw, and nephew of ex-Governor Walker, of that Nation. Mr. Walker occupies a rather pretentious "double CHOCTAW NATION. 399 log-house," built in the Southern style, with open porch or passage between. Here we took dinner, and found him a gentleman of unusual intelligence and enterprise. He tells us he is the only Choctaw in the district who is in favor of section- izing and admitting white immigration ; and there are not prob- ably a hundred in the Nation who favor it. He was once a leading man, but is now almost ostracized for his vote and opinions. He has five white men in his employ; and, like the Logan who "had none to mourn/' he is "pointed at as the friend of the whites." By the laws of these Nations, white men can reside here by being employed by a legal citizen, in which case the citizen is responsible for their misdemeanors; or he can pay a license and take out a "permit" for his white employe's, and the Nation takes the responsibility. The Choc- taws and Chickasaws, though marked on the map in separate divisions, are now united. They have one agent and one gov- ernment, and the citizens have equal rights in the whole country, which is known officially as the Choctaw Nation. This Nation is bounded on the south by Red River, and on the north by the Main Canadian and Arkansas, both running nearly eastward. Its east and west boundaries are right lines, being the border of Arkansas and longitude 98. Thus its length is exactly two hundred miles, and its width from north to south will average a little more than half as much, being varied by the windings of the rivers, giving a total area of nearly twenty-one thousand square miles, or two-thirds the size of Indiana. All the southern third of this area is of great average fertility, as reported by all visitors, consisting of the rich valley of Red River and its many tributaries. In the center, particularly toward the west, are many mountain spurs and sand ridges ; while the immediate neighborhood of the Canadian and Arkansas is very fertile, but yields soon to high, rolling prairie, valuable only for pasturage. This country, equal to two or three New England States, and of greater average fertility, has a population of 22,000; fertile land equal to one-third of Indiana, with the population of an average county. Of its people, 16,000 are Choctaws and 6000 Chick- 400 CHOCTAW JUSTICE. AT TANDY WALKER'S. asaws. Both are stated to be increasing in numbers as fast as would a white community without immigration. The white men we meet here maintain that the Choctaws are much more advanced in civilization than the Creeks, and what I saw con- firms it. They enforce their laws much better, particularly in cases where whites or half-breeds are concerned. With their sporadic population, timber increases yearly, game is abundant and cheap, common pasturage is plenty, and cattle are grown at a cost of from three to eight dollars per head. The Choctaws were immensely wealthy before the war. Single herders numbered their cattle by thousands. The aver- age wealth was twice as great as that of any purely agricultural community in Indiana, and golden ornaments of every sort SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR. 401 were profusely displayed on horses, carriages, and the Indians' persons. The amount of fine clothes and jewelry sold by traders here at that time seems incredible. The war swept them clean ; literally broke up and ruined them, leaving abso- lutely nothing but the land. Before the war Mr. Walker was accounted a millionaire. He began again, in 1865, with fifty dollars and one saddle-mule. He was ahead of his neighbors only in this : his fifty dollars were in greenbacks, theirs were in Confederate notes. Those who "went south" were even worse ruined than those who " took the Federal side." Some, it is said, died of grief and despair, on returning home in 1865. But most went resolutely to work, and are once more prosper- ing. But many years will be required for those vast herds of cattle to be renewed. This neighborhood has every sign of a prosperous community of civilized farmers. On the: whole, I rather like the Choctaws. While we were " locating tracks " through the Choctaw Nation, the Secretary of the Interior and his party came to inspect the railroad, remaining one night at the Canadian. Being in the interior, we failed to see them ; but on our return found the community jolly over the party's rich experience. The day they reached the end of the M. K. and T. track, a man was seized at 4 P. M., near the cars, by four robbers, and relieved of eighty dollars in gold, and that night one was shot dead within a hundred yards of their sleeping car. Mr. Wood- ard, Superintendent of the road, accompanied the party, and was rather lively in his jokes upon the employes for complain- ing of these ruffians and asserting there was danger on the road. That night one of the party was taken sick, and Mr. W. started out to look for a doctor.* By mistake he poked his head into the tent of a gambler, named Callahan, who happened to be a little out of humor. He thrust a six-shooter into Mr. Wood- ard's face, and exclaimed rather pointedly : " Air ye lookin' for rne? I'm ready if y'are." Of course such intention was promptly disclaimed, and the Superintendent made good time off the ground. The Secretary was considerably stirred up, and issued some 26 402 A REBELLIOUS TEXAN. stringent order against " intruders in the Indian country." A lieutenant was sent to the terminus with a squad of cavalry under orders to notify the "intruders," and shoot all who re- fused to leave within twenty-four hours. All the railroac business had been moved from Muscogee to Canadian River and all the roughs who were able had followed. On the afternoon of a rather sultry day my companion and ] left the abandoned town and struck out afoot northeastward foi Fort Gibson. Three miles out brought us to the old Texar road, original wagon road and cattle trail from Western Texaf to Kansas City and Leavenworth. Here we were overtaken by a grizzly, weatherbeaten old Texan, with a light load foi Baxter Springs, Kansas, who politely asked us to ride. As w< dropped valises in the wagon, he asked, with what soundec like an eager tone: "Got any whisky in them?" " No," was the answer, with expressed regrets. " Ef ye had, ye'd walk, you bet ; wouldn't have you get in here with one pint of whisky for five hundred dollars ! " This radical temperance platform in this latitude excited oui astonishment, and we called for an explanation. He gave ii thus : "A burnt child dreads the fire. One pint, yes, one dram o' whisky 'd cost me this hull load. These Deputy Marshals d n the thievin' rascals, I say they'll search y'r wagon an} minnit, and if they find one drop, away goes the hull load tc Fort Smith, and cl n the haight of it d'y ever see again. One trip a nice lookin' chap enough asked me to ride. He got in, and pretty soon pulled a flask. ' Drink,' says he. 'After you, 3 says I. Well, in less 'n ten minutes comes the marshals and grabbed us. If they find a drop even on a man as is ridin 3 with you, they take everything, and nary dollar do you ever git. Why, that feller was in with 'em, of course. They seize everything they can git a pretence for, and then divide. There won't anybody but a scamp or a rough take such an office as Deputy Marshal in this country. They're all on the make, and in with these roughs. That's what I say." I would fain hope the old man was mistaken in his general ARKANSAS FERRY. 403 estimate of Federal officers in this Territory, but there is too much evidence of this nature to permit me to believe the charge entirely false. That most outrageous frauds have been perpe- trated by these fellows I cannot doubt ; I can only say that the people generally, both white and red, credit a few of the mar- shals with honesty and official probity. Three miles with our slightly rebellious Texan friend brought us to the Arkansas River, and to a steam ferry-boat, which caused in me unbounded astonishment. I could scarcely have believed there was such a thing in this country. But, indeed, this was a very important road before the railroad came, and here, at the mouth of Grand River, is the head of navigation on the Arkansas. Steamers run up the Grand River, which has back-water from the Arkansas, three miles or more, and land at Fort Gibson. By a series of dams and locks, like those on Green River, Kentucky, I am convinced the Arkansas could have slack-water navigation a hundred miles or more above this. The waters of Grand River and those of the Arkansas show like two broad bands, one misty blue and the other dirty red and yellow, in the main channel as far as we can see below their junction. The residents tell us the two streams, the clear and the muddy, fun side by side for nearly twenty miles, when a series of riffles and sharp turns mingles them freely in a fluid of pale orange tint. We landed below the mouth of Grand River and walked some three miles across a rich bottom, containing many nice and well-cultivated farms, the homes of Cherokees. The ferry landing is the joint property of two "White Cherokee" widows, who rent it for forty-five hundred dollars per year. Not a bad thing for gentle savages. Their neat white frame cottages, and those of their neighbors, embowered in white blossoming fruit trees, and surrounded by handsome grain fields, look like any- thing but the homes of a barbarous people. Arrived at Gibson, we find quarters at the inevitable "double log-house" hotel, with open porch, veranda and multitudinous additions, kept, and well kept, too, by an old Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a "White Cherokee" wife. Our host, Mr. 404 FORT GIBSON. Kerr, is a noted man in the Nation, and has been here ever since 1833. Before that he was a hunter and trapper in the Rocky Mountains, and has camped many a night on the spot where Salt Lake City now stands. He was full of questions about that region, and called to mind a dozen landmarks I had seen, where, in his time, was an unsettled wilderness, and where he then thought gold and silver would some day be developed. Here we rested till afternoon of the next day, visiting, in the meantime, Mr. Cunningham, Judge Vann and Hon. A. Rattling Gourd, prominent men of the Cherokee Nation. We found the town disturbed and the intelligent Cherokees in deep distress. For bad news had just reached them, news of an event that to their minds seemed to threaten civil war and consequent de- struction to Cherokee nationality. As we heard the story at Gibson, it ran that a Cherokee Court, while in session trying a man for murder, had been attacked by enemies of the prisoner, led on by white men, and that ten or a dozen were killed on each side. This had happened in Going Snake District, north of Tahlequah, so we determined to push on to the latter place and learn the official report. Fort Gibson takes its name from the former military post here, disestablished soon after the war. Most of the buildings remain in tolerably good order, and all are occupied for various business purposes. The town has half a dozen nice frame and brick houses, and some fifty neat log houses, probably three hundred inhabitants, two good hotels, and an air of enterprise. It is the entrepot of a large agricultural district, and the location of a Cherokee Court, and Secretary Delano has decided that a term of the United States District Court shall be held there for the Indian Territory, instead of at Fort Smith, Arkansas. This would be a most important reform. Business, which has hith- erto tended toward the eastern border, will now set toward the railroad, and it is best for white, black and red to have the Court which takes cognizance of inter-race difficulties, in the center of the country. The distance to Tahlequah is twenty-two miles, which we must divide in two journeys. " Better stop at Widow Skrim- A HOT WALK. 405 sheets over night ; got a good house and a white son-in-law ; 'taint but fifteen miles there," said our new friends. So, valise on shoulder, we started for the Widow's, through a beautiful and well-improved country for the first six miles. The log houses here are superior in style to those in most new countries, being high, neatly squared at the corners, and well shingled. There are few frames. The improvements are much finer than among the Creeks, and about equal to those of the Choctaws. From rolling prairie we de- scended into a broad valley with heavy tim- ber. From the open and windy plain to this grove was like going from pleasant April to sultry July. Our val- ises seemed to weigh a hundred each ; our clothing dripped with sweat, and we were soon exhausted by fa- tigue. We turned aside to the residence of a " White Cherokee," the usual double log with porch between, lay pros- trate in the passage, smoked a pipe of his "home raisin'," and "interviewed" him as to the situation. He had been a Union Cherokee; took a hundred men out of here by night in the fall of '61 ; went North and became a Captain ; came back after the war, found his house and fences burned and all his stock run off some to Kansas, some to Texas. " Was rich afo' the war ; derned poor now, but gittin' started again. Hated the loss of his sheep wuss'n anything else fine bloods couldn't get others like 'em. FOREST SCENE. 406 "SKRIMSHEE." Common sheep, what the Kansas folks didn't steal, tuck the scab and died. Was in favor of Ockmulkee Constitution, op- posed to Oklahoma. Did not see what white men wanted here, with so much good land up north yet. Reckoned they was like spoiled children always wanted a thing ten times as bad if they knowed they oughtn't to have it," etc. We traveled on in the cool of the evening, and at dark reached Skrimshee's completely fagged out. We found the widow a dark Cherokee, social and intelligent, with a handsome half-blood daughter, married to a white man. With a pleasing Southern accent she related her experience in the " old Nation in Geaugey," and removal here. Her memory ran back to a time when a few of the Cherokees still practiced some heathen rites; but the tribe was always rather advanced in some respects. For a hundred years they have cultivated corn and tobacco, and occupied well built log houses. She inquired with great interest of Hon. James Ashley, who stopped at her house when on his special mission here; and if the honorable gentleman should read this volume, he is hereby assured of Mrs. Skrirnshee's con- tinued high regard. Morning showed this to be a place of great natural beauty. A gentle slope toward a clear stream is covered by fine timber; behind the house rises a beautiful mound, and at the foot of the slope is an immense spring of cold, clear water. At some distant day this will be a place of fashionable resort. Near the spring, which is enlarged to a rod square in the solid rock, were encamped a number of families en route from Texas to Missouri. The young man of the house, who had lived there five years, assured us there was a considerable number who moved once a year, raising one crop in Missouri and the next in Texas, dodging the tax-gatherer, trading along the way a little and living many weeks on the road. Some of them he knew by sight who had passed three or four times. As the wagons rolled out I scraped acquaintance with the chief man of the outfit, our entire conversation being just this : Myself" Moving back, eh ? " He " No, by G d, a movin' right straight ahead/' I felt that I had obtained some information, and forbore. WE 11EACH TAHLEQUAII. 407 AT WIDOW SKRIMSHEE'S. We reached Tahlequah at noon, passing for the last two miles through a rich open country, in which is the Orphan Asylum and School. This institution will compare favorably with similar ones in the States. Tahlequah is in the edge of a beauti- ful grove, and is a fair average town of perhaps five hundred inhabitants. The Capitol is about of the same architectural rank as the best High School buildings of Cincinnati. Built of brick, in a perfect square, three stories high, with a cupola, it is rather smaller than the State House at Indianapolis, but much prettier and better built. We are directed to the hotel kept by Mrs. Thomson, rather light Cherokee, widow of a white physician, and, as we near her house, the clear notes of a well-toned piano are born to our 408 WILLIAM BOUDINOT. ears, and the familiar music of the "Cornflower Waltz 7 ' strikes us with a strange mixture of the odd and pleasing. It is a day of merriment with the " White Cherokees," for Mrs. Thomson's youngest daughter was married yesterday to a white young man, son of an old missionary, and we arrived in the middle of the " infair." The bride is the prettiest girl I have yet seen in the Nation. Her one-fourth Cherokee blood makes her an olive brunette, to be voted as of rare beauty anywhere. The musician we heard proved to be William Boudinot, a rather noted citizen, editor of the Cherokee Advocate, brother of the Elias Boudinot who has been active at Washington in pushing forward the Oklahoma Bill. William is earnestly opposed to that measure, and to white immigration, but ad- vocates the Ockmulkee Constitution and allotment of land that each Cherokee may hold his own share in fee simple. A few of the more intelligent agree with him, but the mass of the Nation are equally opposed to both plans. They are suspicious of all changes. To them sectionizing and allotment look only like cautious schemes to admit more white men; they are ignorant alike of the minor points in Ockmulkee and Okla- homa,* and alike distrust both. The Advocate is the official and national organ of the Cherokee Nation, and is a handsome, well edited sheet. The Choctaws have a small paper called the Vindicator. These are the only journals published in the Territories. Here we receive the official account from Judge Sixkiller and the Sheriff of Going Snake District, of the late terrible riot there ; also, the account of the other side, published in an Arkansas paper. It appears, from both accounts, that the prisoner Proctor, some time ago, shot at a white man, missed him and killed his wife, a Cherokee woman. As to the murder, both parties being Cherokees, the United States Court left that to the Nation ; but a warrant was issued against Proctor for shooting at the white man " with intent to kill." Of course the greater crime took precedence, and the Cherokee Court pro- ceeded to trial. It was whispered about that Proctor would be * A Cherokee compound word signifying " The State of Red Men. 1 * A CHEROKEE FEUD. 409 cleared, and the friends of the woman gathered, expressing their determination, to kill him as soon as released. The Courts, fearing an attack, had a strong guard. Meanwhile United States Marshal Owens came with a warrant to arrest Proctor as soon as the Cherokee Court should discharge him, and most unwisely yielded to the clamors of the party hostile to the prisoner, took them as his posse and started for the Courthouse. As he neared the door, a nephew of the murdered woman sprang in before him and pointed a gun at the prisoner. The latter knocked it down, when it was discharged into the floor. The guards then fired upon the attacking party, and a general battle ensued. The leader of the attack and Marshal Owens were mortally wounded, and seven of the outside party shot dead. Judge Alberti, the prisoner's counsel, was killed in his chair, as were two of the jurymen. Several more inside were wounded, including the Judge, Sixkiller, and the prisoner. The total loss is set down at eleven killed and eighteen wounded, two of them mortally. This terrible affair was one of sad im- port to the Cherokees. Their Courts had usually run with so little difficulty that the slanders of their enemies had died for lack of any basis in fact. This occurrence, they feared, would be heralded over the country and at Washington as an act of resistance to law, and be made a powerful argument against their independence. We had a delightful rest of three days at the capital of the Cherokoes. The town reminds me of the better class of country villages in the interior of Indiana not quite so well built, per- haps, but beautiful, with flower gardens, orchards, and culti- vated grass plats. The place is rich in historic interest. For twenty years all books, papers, and documents having relation to these people have been collected ; and what with excursions, talks with the young people, and reading Indian literature, we had a season of novel enjoyment. The Cherokees represent the best history and the hope of the Indian race, as regards civiliza- tion, justice from the whites, and a future. If they are a fail- ure, the race is doomed. They have been an organized Nation, with Constitution, elected 410 CHEROKEE LAW. FIGHT AT GOING SNAKE COURT HOUSE. officers, and written laws, for seventy years ; and their published records are of the most intense interest. The first printed law I find is dated Broom's Town (in Georgia), llth Sept., 1808, and reads : RESOLVED by the Chiefs and Warriors in a National Council Assembled: . . . When any person or persons which may or shall be charged with stealing a horse, and upon conviction by one or two witnesses, he, she, or they, shall be punished with one hundred stripes on the bare back, and the punishment to be in propor- tion for stealing property of less value ; and should the accused person or per- sons raise up with arms in his or their hands, as guns, axes, spears and knives, in opposition to the regulating company, or should they kill him or them, the blood of him or them shall not be required of any of the persons belonging to the regulators from the clan the person so killed belonged to. Accepted : BLACK Fox, Principal Chief. PATHKILLER, Second Chief. TOOCHALAB. CHAS. HICKS, Sec'y to Council. "RINGS." 411 A number of acts following bear the signatures of "Turtle-at- home, Speaker of Council/' and Ehnautaunaueh. The gram- mar is often bad, but the meaning clear and explicit, and the punishments prescribed very severe. An address, issued May 6, 1817, sets forth that "Fifty-four towns and villages have convened in order to deliberate on the situation of our Nation;" and ends by proposing a "Set of Rules," or new Constitution, of six articles, " as a form for the future government of our Nation." The Constitution would cover about two pages of this work, and appears to have been unanimously adopted. The new government had been in oper- ation but a few years before it was troubled by " rings," and a huge Credit Mobilier scheme, darkly hinted at in an act passed October 30, 1819, beginning thus : Whereas, The Big Rattling Gourd, William Grimit, Betsey Broom, the Dark, Daniel Griffin and Mrs. Lesley have made certain promises, &c. : Be it noiv, therefore, known, The above persons are the only legal proprietors and a privileged company to establish a turnpike, leading from Widow Fools', at the forks of Hightower and Oastinallah, to the first creek east of John Field's, known by the name Where- Vann-was-shot, etc. An " investigation " resulted, of course, but it proved that no member of the House of Chiefs or House of Warriors had any stock in the turnpike. The next act divides the fifty-four towns into eight judicial districts, naming a council house for each ; and full provisions were subsequently made for light-horse companies, to serve as a posse, under command of the sheriffs. From such feeble be- ginnings the organization of government appears to have pro- ceeded much as among other people until 1825, when the grand agitation began for the removal of the Cherokees. Fifty acts or more appear, relating to encouraging missionaries, establish- ing schools, preventing the woods being set on fire, the return of estrays, etc ; then most of the laws refer to their dealings with the whites. A more complete Constitution was adopted in 1827; and, in 1829, an official paper established, edited by Elias Boudinot and Stephen Foreman, and known as the Cherokee Phoenix. Meanwhile part of the tribe had removed to Arkansas Territory ; and their laws, " Entered by request of 412 CHEROKEE ARCHIVES. the old Chief, John Jolly," and signed by Walter Webber, Black Fox, Too-cho-wuh, and Spring Frog wonder if he was in that Credit Mobilier? are bound up with the rest. The Eastern and Western Cherokees reunited in their present country in 1839, and the "Act of Union" is signed by James Brown, Te-ke-chu-las-kee, George Guess (Se-quo-yah), Jesse Bushyhead, Lewis Ross, Tobacco Will, Thomas Candy, Young Wolf, Ah-sto-la-ta and some others. At the conclusion is this endorsement : "The foregoing instrument was read, considered, and ap- proved by us, this 23d day of August, 1839 : Major Pullum, Young Elders, Deer Track, Young Puppy (!), Turtle Fields, July, The Eagle, The Crying Buffalo, and a great number of respectable old settlers and late emigrants too numerous to be copied." A new and much more elaborate Constitution was adopted, and among the names of the legislators appear O-kan-sto-tah Logan, Young Wolf, Bark Flute (probably a musical orator), Oo-la-yo-a, and Soft Shell Turtle. Thence the acts continue with an odd mixture of the ludicrous and severe; but when we come to their history as connected with the whites and the Government, the record ceases to be amusing. Far back of the time when white men met them, the tradi- tions of the Cherokees are so well connected and consistent that they deserve the name of history. Between five hundred and a thousand years ago the aborigines of Western North Carolina found themselves crowded upon by a superior race moving southward along the eastern base of the Blue Ridge, a branch of the great Waupanuckee, to whom the whites gave the name of Lenni-Lennape, or Delawares. By their account the Powhatanese, the race of Pocahontas and Opechancanough and other noted tribes, are part of the same stock. After a brief period of warfare they established them- selves in an irregular square consisting of Western North Caro- lina, East Tennessee, and Northern Georgia and Alabama, and were considered as "the younger sons of the Delawares." Some twenty years before our Revolution, occurred their first general CAROLINA WAR. 413 GEN. MARION IN THE CHEROKEE COUNTRY. war with the whites. The Carolines raised a force of twelve hundred militia, who, joined by a large force of British regu- lars, marched into the Cherokee country. In this army were two militia lieutenants, since known to fame, as Major Peter Horry and General Francis Marion. The Cherokees took position at a mountain pass, and Marion commanded the scout- ing party sent to explore it. He was surprised and nearly all his command destroyed. A desperate battle then ensued, in which the Cherokees were finally defeated with great slaughter. The army entered their country, burned their towns and cut down all their corn, then just in the roasting-ear state. Major Horry tells with surprise of their superior dwellings and style of cultivation, far in advance of any other Indians. 414 CHEROKEE EXODUS. The irregular wars which followed were terminated by the treaty of Hopewell in 1785, made with the American Confede- ration, the first treaty of which the Cherokees have any account. They adopted the arms, household and agricultural implements of the whites, took some steps in civilization, and have ever since striven to live at peace with us. This was followed by the treaty of Holston in 1791, the treaty of Philadelphia in 1794, and that of Tellico in 1798, all made with the United States, and each containing words expressly recognizing the Cherokees as " a separate and independent Nation, with power as a body politic, and to be dealt with as one Nation deals with another." This express recognition has been repeated in nineteen successive treaties, and judicially determined in their favor by the Supreme Court of the United States. In the year 1794, letters patent issued for the Cherokee lands, bearing the signature of George Washington. All these solemn agreements were broken at once, in 1802, by the "compact between the State of Georgia and the United States," a compact to which the Cherokees were neither a party nor advised thereof. They were simply its helpless victims. They were told then, as now, that they must civilize; and then, as now, they were striving to progress, already had much of their land under cultivation, lived in houses, welcomed teachers and missionaries, and had schools, workshops and newspapers. In the administration of Jefferson, the States in which they lived began an agitation for their removal ; it increased to a popular frenzy under Jackson, and ended by a new treaty under Van Buren. Then took place the world-renowned " Cherokee Dis- cussion." It created schism in the State Legislatures, it fur- nished eloquence in Congrsss, and gave point to party warfare; the mild but persistent energy of the Cherokees, their diplo- matic ability and shrewdness, above all the evident justice of their cause, made them world-renowned; the sympathetic heart of Whittier has overflowed in rhythmic plaints for their wrongs, and the story of their fortitude was embellished by the genius of Halleck. Triumphant before every legal tribunal, up to the Supreme INDIAN TERRITORY ORGANIZED. 415 Court, they yielded at last to the threats of superior power. But the whole country had become interested in them, to an extent which we can now scarce realize. It was the question of the hour. The files of papers of tlrat period are full of refer- ence to them. The States from which they moved, and every department of the National Government united in most solemn and repeated pledges to the Cherokees, if they would consent to remove, of a country which should be theirs and theirs only forever, pledges of protection from war, trespass and intru- sion, of local and self-government, and of the unquestioned ownership of their new lands by a fee simple title, under letters patent, signed by the President. The Cherokees became divided on the subject of removal ; part agreed to go, and another pledge of protection was made to the few who desired to remain. This division was recognized by the Government in two treaties of 1817 and 1819. President Monroe's message in 1825, recommended the setting apart of a country for those "semi-civilized races for their occu- pancy forever," and Jackson renewed the proposition in 1829. Thus called upon by the Indians' "Great Father/' Congress passed, on the 28th of May, 1830, the act setting aside this Territory, with the most solemn guarantees. One clause reads : " It shall and may be lawful for the President solemnly to assure the tribe or Nation with which the exchange is made that the United States will forever secure and guarantee to them, their heirs or successors, the country so exchanged with them, and if they prefer it, the United States will cause a patent to be made and executed to them for the same ; provided, always, that such lands shall revert to the United States if the Indians become extinct or abandon the same." Under this the most of the Cherokees agreed to, and did, remove. Tradition tells us that as the main body of several thousand took up their line of march for the river on which they embarked, sad and silent, they moved with a quiet dignity the whites have often called sullenness, disdaining to show the grief which rent their bosoms; but when they reached the nights from which a last look could be had of their most beautiful valley, the oldest woman of 416 LAMENT OF THE EXILES. THE LAST CRY OF THE CHEROKEE. the tribe turned her face to the east, uttered one heart-piercing shriek, and fell dead to the ground. Then every warrior's eye became a fountain of tears, and from every part of the line the women united in a wailing chorus that sounded for miles along the stream a long, mournful, monotonous howl. It was the last despairing wail of an exiled race. The few who remained endeavored to sell their improved farms and go in better condition. But they were harassed in the same manner as the Creeks, of which I have heretofore spoken, and lost their lands in spite of their care. But the people were moved to sympathy. The Government tried to atone for this, and ceded them lands here, acre for acre with those they had left. Another treaty was made with all the WEALTHY CHEROKEES. 417 solemn forms, and with renewed promises, attested by every department of Government, and double-secured by a patent for their lands. Bear in mind, this is not an "Indian title," so called, not a title by occupancy, not a " squatter's right ;" but a patent of the United States, specially provided for by act of Con- gress, bearing the name of the President, adorned by the broad seal of the National Government, twice pronounced perfect by the Supreme Court, and since fully recognized in eight solemn treaties ! Could title to land be more perfect ? The next treaty, that of New Echota, in 1835, renews all previous pledges, and the treaty of 1846 repeats almost the exact language of the act of May 1830, ending with the same words : " Such land shall revert to the United States if the Indians become extinct or abandon the same." Under these last three words the land robbers now seek to enter. They maintain that when the chief men and part of the Nation went into the rebellion in 1861, they did, by that act, "abandon the same" lands, that they became forfeit to the United States, and that there is now nothing but the savage Indian's title of occu- pancy, which we may abolish at pleasure. But the Cherokees seem to have been at last convinced that this country was to be theirs forever. They went to work, gradually learned the ways of civilization, welcomed teachers, established schools, and opened farms; by 1840 they were already considered prosperous ; they lived in greater comfort, and consequently their numbers began to increase. By 1850 they were considered a wealthy people. The new generation numbered many who had fine educa- tions, and their progress thence to 1860 was astonishingly rapid. 3?heir average wealth was greater than that of any community in the West. Single herders owned cattle to the value of a hundred thousand dollars. In this mild climate and upon these rich prairies cattle multiplied rapidly. There was soon no land " running to waste," for all was utilized as pasture. Many white men sought citizenship or married Cherokee girls, and were adopted, and the advance of the Nation was healthful, natural and rapid. Such wealth, with the lingerings of a wild 27 418 EUINED IN THE WAR. taste, resulted in a semi-barbaric splendor which excited the astonishment or envy of white visitors. Their trade became of vast importance. Cattle came out, and carriages, pianos, fine horses and accoutrements and golden ornaments went in. Re- turned traders of 1860 speak with astonishment of gaudy displays at their public gatherings, of their rich caparisons and golden tassels, and of wealth which showed ostentatiously in gold dol- lars worn by the dozen as buttons. Ten years more of such progress and a generation of Cherokees would have risen to invite white immigration by successive degrees, and to assist their more tardy Indian brethren in progress. Such was the scene in the spring of 1861. In 1865 the Nation was an almost uninhabited waste. Their cattle had been driven by tens of thousands into Kansas, Arkansas and Texas. Men are now living in opulence in the former State who made their money out of Cherokee cattle, " confiscated" during the war. Their surplus was gone, they were on the verge of starvation, and had neither seed nor stock to start them again. .The Southern Cherokees came back, and the Northern ones met them ; they made up their quarrel, sadly gathered up the little remnant they had left, and went to work again. But before they had recovered anything they were startled at having it announced that their lands were forfeited on account of their rebellion. Unlike the Southern rebels, they were to suffer confiscation ; " corruption of blood and forfeiture," which the Constitution forbids against an individual, the bor- derers claimed should be the rule against the Nation, and general distress and uncertainty prevailed through the period of reconstruction. These matters were finally settled, or supposed to be settled, by the "General Treaty of 1866," the twentieth and last treaty between our Government and the Cherokee Nation. They gave up much ; surrendered all claim to their Kansas lands, and ceded their land west of meridian 96, "for other Indians to be settled upon/' reducing their former terri- tory from fourteen to seven million acres. But they still had the best part of it, and received in return for the rest new guarantees, reaffirming all before the war as to title. By this CHEROKEE TITLE. 419 treaty the Government waived all rights, if it had any, to take advantage of their rebellion. By the twenty -sixth article thereof, "The United States guarantee to the people of the Cherokee Nation the quiet and peaceable possession of their country against domestic feuds and insurrections, or the hostil- ities of other tribes. . . . They shall also be protected against intrusion from all citizens of the United States who may attempt to settle on their lands or reside in their country." In return they grant the right of way to two railroads. Such is a brief account of our dealings with these people, and of the tenure by which they hold their lands, compiled from public documents, and in view of the present move against the title, I would ask in all seriousness : is there a farmer in Ohio who has a clearer, more legal or better supported title to his farm than they? a title twice especially provided for by Con- gress, twice supported by Presidential patent, twice confirmed by the Supreme Court, gained by the cession of lands held in severalty, and recognized by a dozen treaties ! The Govern- ment can do anything. For it to crush this feeble Nation would be like the chivalry of a giant trampling upon an infant. Granting for argument's sake that they do allow much of their country to go to waste, still it is unquestionably theirs, in fee simple, and we could hardly advocate the right of taking an Ohio farm from the owner because he did not till it well. But the statement is not true. Nearly all of their country was util- ized before the war, and will be again ere many years. They are unquestionably progressing in civilization quite as fast as we could reasonably expect. Have we not broken faith with them often enough ? Can we not afford to try the experiment of honest dealing with one generation of Cherokees ? April 26th, 1872. I am ready to leave the Indian Territory and go westward to Santa Fe, but first let me "sum up" en Oklahoma. I have now traveled a month among the Nations, some two hundred miles by rail and the same through the country afoot and on horseback. I have seen the Indians at home and on their farms, have attended their churches and visited their 420 THE SITUATION. schools, have talked by their hearths and slept in their cabins, " eaten of their salt and warmed at their fires." My general impression is one of the most agreeable disappointment. I have seen so much more of progress, of improvement and educa- tion, than I had been led to expect, that from a doubting in- difference I have attained to an earnest belief in their capacity and willingness for a perfect civilization. And if my con- clusions should sometimes read like an argument for the Indians here rather than a simple statement of facts, I will not deny that my sympathies are powerfully enlisted for these people, and I would willingly do them a kindness if my humble pen could accomplish it in a portrayal of their case. Here are sixty thousand red men who are neither hunters nor root diggers; they are agriculturists, herdsmen and mechanics. They long ago advanced from the savage to the barbarous state, when they first met the whites ; since then they have advanced from the barbarous to the half-civilized and civilized, and in another generation we may reasonable hope to see them civilized and enlightened. This Territory contains the hope, the stay, the glory of our aboriginal race. If these can not be civilized, the race is doomed. With more than ordinary interest, there- fore, I have studied their condition. I am now returned to where the prejudice is strong against them ; I hear them cursed every hour of the day, and from my window, at this moment, can look out upon an angry company of (( intruders," just ex- pelled by the military from the Osage lands in the Arkansas Valley. As briefly as possible, I propose to sum up my general observations, and the reason why these Indians are en- titled to the continued protection of the Government. The Indian Territory extends westward from the border of Arkansas to longitude 100, which geographers roughly assume as the eastern border of the American Desert ; and northward from Red River to latitude 37, the southern boundary of Kansas; a region with the same general climate as Tennessee and northern Mississippi. The exact area, including the wind- ings of Red River, is not officially ascertained, but is estimated approximately at forty-six million acres, or about seventy-one NOT A HEALTHFUL REGION. 421 thousand square miles, two and a third times the size of In- diana. Of this entire area one-third may be safely set down as totally barren and worthless, consisting of the San Bois, Wichita and Boston mountains and spurs, and various high sand ridges between the streams. One-third more is of only average value for grazing purposes, and the remaining third is fine agricultural land. This last consists of the long valleys of the Arkansas and two Canadians and their tributaries; of the valley of Red River and Grand River, and adjacent country. Along the eastern border again is another stretch of barren ridge and flinty hills. Most of the good land is very fertile, consisting of low-lying valleys, receiving the wash of higher lands ; but there is very little of what is called " bottom/' or overflow land. The climate can not be considered healthful ; in fact, from my own observation, I should call it very un- healthful. At the Creek Agency I had an attack of ague, for the first time in many years, and saw many other cases. Sick- ness is quite prevalent among the workmen on the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Road, and contractors informed me that last summer one-half of their force was disabled by malarial diseases. The Indians, being acclimated, are more fortunate ; but any considerable removals among them are followed by great sickness. Typhoid pneumonia, in particular, has been endemic the past winter on the Arkansas; and Mr. Robertson, the Presbyterian missionary and teacher, assured me that in his acquaintance on that river (new settlers up north) "one in every eighteen died since the fall of the leaves." This was strictly confirmed by physicians at Vinita and Muscogee. Indeed, it is evident on the surface, along the railroad, that the country cannot be healthful. There are no springs, and none of the evanescent towns have endured long enough to dig wells; slough and river water were used exclusively there, and it was not till I was twenty miles away among the Cherokees that I got a single draught of spring water. The full-bloods live in the timber, along the streams, and frequently have tolerably good .springs ; but everywhere on the prairie the water used is from sloughs, or very shallow wells. 422 " HON. RATTLING GOURD." CHEROKEE LEGISLATURE. This is a territory only in a geographical sense; it has no territorial government like that of Utah or Montana. It was not organized, but "set apart" by Act of Congress, of May 28, 1830, and contains three well organized governments, besides minor ones in embryo. These three governments Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw are republican in form, retaining, how- ever, the Indian titles, though applied to corresponding Federal officials. Some Indians have adopted or inherited European names ; others have simply translated their native title into English, and still others have retained it complete. Hence, among their public men we find Ok-ta-ha-sars-ha-jo, William Boudi not Esq., Hon. A. Rattling Gourd, Judge Black haw Sixkiller, Governor Walker, Judge Going Snake and Black GOVERNMENT. 423 Fox, Legislators, and Turtle-at-home, Speaker in Council. One of the most intelligent Cherokees I met was known as Beavers-grandmother. The delicate self-flattery thus implied doubtless is, that as the beaver is the wisest of animals, the beaver's grandmother must be exceedingly wise. All these governments are carried on very cheaply ; the highest salary paid is seven hundred dollars. Only three get over four hun- dred. The Cherokee Nation pays one literary pension three hundred dollars a year to the widow of Sequoyah. For most of the minor judicial positions, the honor is considered sufficient reward. The Cherokee Government was organized in a semi- republican form, as early as 1805. Over these various little Republics extend what might be called the Federal Protectorate. The entire territory is attached to the Western District of Arkansas, with Federal Court at Fort Smith. Thither are taken all criminal cases in which either party is a white man, not a citizen, and civil cases where any white man is a party in interest. The boundaries of the two jurisdictions seem accurately enough defined, but still there are frequent conflicts of authority, the Cherokees being naturally a little jealous of the authority of their courts, and the United States Marshals emphatically "on the make." I am sorry to say that the report I had of them from both white and red was, with a few honorable exceptions, unquali- fiedly bad. The location of a Federal Court at Fort Gibson, near the center of the Indian country, is a decided improve- ment. Of the territory, the Cherokees occupy the northeast quarter, their country running to a point southeastward between the Arkansas River and State line. The Choctaws have all the country between Canadian and Red Rivers, while the Creeks run partly in between the other two, in a long point eastward. Scattered among these or on their borders, in little divisions no larger than a township, are various minor tribes, remnants of decayed races from the North and East, such as the Quawpaws and Senecas in the northeast corner of the Cherokees, and the Wyandottes, Delawares and Shawnees, who by contract have 424 ENUMERATION. bought a "general head right" in that Nation, sunk their tribal individuality, and become Cherokee citizens. On lands just west of each Nation, ceded for that purpose, several new tribes are lately settled, making twenty tribes and fragments of tribes in all. I estimate their numbers respectively as follows, from their vote, census, and recorded " head rights" at the agencies, assigning each to the proper Nation : CHEROKEE NATION. Full bloods 8,000 Mixed 4,000 Freedmen 1,500 Whites married in or adopted., * 500 Delawares 900 Shawnees 700 Wyandottes 400 Quawpaws, 200 Senecas ... 100 Total Cherokee Nation 16,300 To which should be added some 2000 Cherokees now in North Carolina, who are desirous of settling here, and for whose removal the Nation is making provision, bringing the whole number up to about 18,000. I do not here include those new tribes west of 96, not yet formally incorporated. CREEK NATION. Full Bloods 9,000 Whites and mixed bloods 1,000 Freedmen 4,000 Seminoles 2,000 Total Creek citizens 16,000 CHOCTAW NATION. Pure Choctaws 10,000 Mixed 4,000 Whites 1,000 Chickasaws 5,000 Freedmen 2,000 Total Choctaw citizens 22,000 EDUCATION. 425 MINOR TRIBES. Osages, west of 96 3,000 Kaws, west of 96 600 Unassigned, perhaps 3,400 Total minor tribes, 7,000 Grand total, 63,000 The Choctaws and Cherokees have the greatest number of intelligent men, but the Creeks are just now doing the most for the rising generation. They have three Mission High Schools, under control respect- ively of the Baptist, Methodist and Presby- terian Churches, and thirty -one common schools, mostly taught by native teachers. The Cherokees have sixty common schools a n d one college that near Tahlequah. The Choc- taws have fifty common schools, and those among other tribes bring the whole number up to one hundred and sixty one to every four hundred of the popula- tion, a most gratifying average. The teachers I saw among the Creeks and Cherokees appeared to me reasonably well qualified for their positions, but they have one serious obstacle in the language. In full blood settle- ments the child of ten learns to read in English at school, and talks the native language at home; and distasteful as such a statement may be to their national pride, I think they can not be quite certain of their progress or standing until they agree to AN OSAGE CHIEF. 426 THE LAND TENURE. give up the old language and bring the English into general use. Many Cherokees who can talk English will not, and there seems to be a prejudice against those of their people who speak it exclusively. The Creeks appear to be a peculiarly docile and teachable people, accepting readily the suggestions of white teachers. Teachers and missionaries are welcomed everywhere; the mode of living will compare favorably with the Southwestern States, and it appears to me that there is a security for life and property equal to any other Territory, and a foundation for a really prosperous and powerful State. The present weakness of these people at once their greatest drawback and the temptation to outsiders as it seems to me, is their imperfect land tenure. The land is held in common by the whole tribe, but whatever area any citizen incloses with a lawful fence is his while he occupies it. He may be said to own the improvements, but not the land. Nothing is absolutely a fixture. Anything may be removed at the owner's will ; hence there is practically no real estate, no conservative landed inter- est the only true foundation for a progressive society and a stable civil structure. The herder, hunter or explorer, from Kansas or Texas, rides through a beautiful tract, and when he asks who owns it the only answer is, "the Injuns it's Injun land ;" that is, in his estimation, nobody's land, if he can by force or fraud get a foothold. If he were told that it was the property of John Johnnycake or William Beaverdam, or any other individual, with a patent title on which he could sue and be sued, the case would be very different to him. A strong party, therefore, is rising up, agitating for this reform. This is the distinctive feature of the Ocmulkee Constitution, which commands the support of the best men of the three Na- tions, and looks to a union of all the tribes under one govern- ment. It should receive every legal encouragement from Con- gress. But the common people are suspicious of this move; to them sectionizing looks like an entering wedge for some scheme for dividing up their lands among railroad corporations and white immigrants. And where shall we look for the real power which gives impetus to the movements lately inaugurated RAILROAD GRANTS. 427 looking to a Territorial Government, and the opening of this country to a general immigration ? By the treaty of 1866 all the Nations agreed to yield the right of way, with three hun- dred feet along the track, to two railroads, through the country. The roads which reached the border first were the Missouri, Kansas and Texas, running southward, and the Atlantic and Pacific westward. Look at the charter of the first road and you will find one clause to the effect that the road is to receive every section designated by odd numbers for ten miles on each side of the track total of sixty-four hundred acres a mile with these words conditional : " Provided said lands become a part of the public lands of the United States." The moment the Oklahoma Bill becomes a law they do become " public lands/' and the railroad title attaches at once ! To the Atlantic and Pacific road, with its Van Buren branch, the grant, with the same condition appended, is twenty sections to the mile. Be- sides these, two other roads are pressing their claims for con- tingent grants with fair hope of success. The present area of the Cherokee country, exclusive of lands ceded for "other Indians to locate," is about 4,500,000 acres. The Missouri, Kansas and Texas railroad runs through this for eighty miles; the Atlantic and Pacific railroad will rim about the same distance. Considering, then, onjy the roads actually being built, this gives them at least 1,500,000 acres I The Oklahoma Bill, seventeenth section says : " The Secretary of the Interior shall cause the lands in said Territory to be surveyed, and from and after such survey the Indian title shall be deemed and held to be forever extinguished, and the lands to be public lands of the United States, subject to all grants and pledges heretofore made by ads of Congress." Is it difficult to see where the motive power, and the "sinews of war," come from ? But the territorial bill specially provides that each Indian shall have a hundred and sixty acres. Let us see, then, where the white settler would come in. There are at least sixteen thousand Cherokecs entitled to " head rights," and two thousand more who can and will claim them by com- ing here. This takes up 2,880,000 acres. Besides, there are at TUB 428 LET THEM ALONE. reserved school lands and some grants to mission stations. Add these up with the railroad grants, and you will find there is not quite land enough in the Cherokee country to fill the bill. To call it a bill in the interest of white immigrants is nonsense. In the Choctaw country there would be a small surplus none in the Creek. Besides, in the Cherokee Nation the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad runs right down the Grand and Arkansas Valleys, through the very best land, but in the Choctaw Nation it crosses the fine valleys at right angles, leav- ing a little more surplus. Where, then, in the northern part, would the white settler come in ? He could buy of the railroad at, perhaps, five dollars or more per acre. Shall the Govern- ment revoke a fee simple deed and cover itself with ignominy, not to benefit white immigrants, but to pile up mountainous fortunes for a few corporations? The first fee simple patent to the Cherokees bears the honored name of George Washington. Their patent for this country, for which they traded other lands held in fee simple lands sold by the Government for five times what it paid the Indians was signed by Martin Van Buren, and it cannot be that their successor of to-day will sanction such an act of gross injustice and bad faith, so contradictory to his own wise and humane Indian policy, which Ijas given him not the least of his great claims to historic immortality. There are a score of reasons why a little more time should be given the Indians, and why we should not now throw open this country to general settlement. In the first place, we have solemnly agreed not to do it, which is reason enough for any honorable man. Secondly, there is no present necessity for it. There are countless millions of acres lying idle in every State and Territory north of it, untouched by the cultivator, and even unoccupied by the herdsman. There is more unused land in Kansas to-day than in the Indian Territory. There is room in Nebraska for half a million farmers. There is a tract in Dakota about the size of Indiana, yet unappropriated, with a climate suitable for Northern people, and a most prolific soil. When these are filled, and our population really begins to feel IT WILL NOT PAY. 429 crowded, it will be time enough to trouble the Indians ; and long before that time these people will themselves vote to open the country, become like other borderers, and ask for immigra- tion to help develop it. But with Kansas on one side and Texas on the other, with as much or more good land, it appears to me as if thousands are half crazy to rush into the Indian country, just because it is forbidden. If these fellows who have been harassing the Osages, and running across the border here and back for the past two years, had put in the same labor almost anyVhere in Nebraska, they would have each owned a fine farm by this time. In the third place, to sectionize the country and throw it open on the present plan, would do the white borderer little or no good. The railroads, of course, get the first grab; their land is already secured, and in the case of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas road, it would take the very heart of the country. Then the Indians, according to their custom of living, would take all the fine timbered land along the streams, and what would be left? Any prospective immigrant can figure for himself from the statistics given, and he will find that less than one-fifth of the good land would remain to select from. A few men would secure fine farms unquestionably, but for every such one twenty would be disappointed. Several thousand young men in Kansas are fooling themselves badly about this country. There is not so much good land here as they imagine. And unquestionably, the climate is unhealthful for Northern people. Nor is it for the interest of Kansas as a State to have this country opened now. Her Senators should oppose it strenuously. If there were half the amount of good land they imagine, Southern Kansas would lose twenty thousand of her people at once by having it opened. It is not now a waste as regards them. Before the war, it was their great region of cattle trade and supply, and ere long it will be again. At present we have a National use for the Indian Territory. Our true policy is to secure these people in their homes, and make them our agents to deal with the wild tribes on the plains. Much has been done already, and more will be, to set the race 430 ABORIGINAL HACKS. forward in civilization. Half civilized and barbarous races are slowly being reached through the medium of their more advanced brethren. The Nations here are already moving in the matter, and a little assistance only is needed to enable them to reach and negotiate with all the wild tribes of Northern Texas and New Mexico. I am hopeful enough to believe that with a proper policy all the tribes in the same latitude, except possibly the Apaches, might eventually be made citizens of this Territory. The treatment and fate of aboriginal races has varied greatly under different governments. The Romans absorbed and Romanized when possible; otherwise, they removed and relocated them. When the Teutonic race overran Western Europe, the Celtic aboriginals mostly disappeared ; but, in certain districts, from special local causes, or from a more humane policy on the part of the conquerors, remnants survived ; and in portions of Scotland, the Erse districts of Ireland, in Wales, Brittany and Celtiberia, are flourishing communities to this day, little islands of Celts in an ocean of Teutons. We alone have had no fixed policy looking toward the saving and reclamation of any part of the native race. Writers, statesmen, and theorists have made haste to assume that they were a " doomed race/ 7 and the Gov- ernment has followed the exact policy to practicalize that theory. We have sent them our worst men and most destructive prac- tices, and have systematically broken faith whenever it seemed profitable to do so. Here only has a policy, something near sensible and just been pursued, and the results are not discour- aging. Let it be improved and extended, and we may reason- ably hope the Indians of all the Southern Territories may be gathered here; that an aboriginal community of two hundred thousand may grow into a high civilization; and in due time we may have a real native American State, a progressive and pros- perous State of Oklahoma. CHAPTER XXII. AROUND AND ABOUT TO SANTA FE. No thoroughfare from Indian Territory Northward through Kansas On the ^Plains at Last The Ride over the Kansas Pacific Ellsworth, and its Former Felicities In the Buffalo Country The " Big Pasture " of America Arrival at Denver " Them's my Sentiments " The Country from Denver to Santa Fe A case of Delirium Tremens. > 6) x-, ^ Y original intention was thwarted before I left the Indian Territory ; for there was no route thence westward to Santa Fe. I went some distance west of the Arkansas, *$jl\ 6 but there were no inhabitants for two hundred miles from the Creek border. Then Kioways and Arapahoes dom- inated all the country for six hundred miles farther, before one could reach the Mexican settlements. We might have gone by stage from the Canadian River to Fort Sill, in the southwestern corner of the Territory ; but from there to Santa Fe we must have depended on the chance of a Government train, which might go in one month or one year. Farther south a regular line of stages runs from the end of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad to Fort Concho, Texas, connecting there with another line to El Paso, on the Rio Grande ; but at that season we preferred a more northern route. Accordingly we turned northward from the western part of the Cherokee country, reach- ing the Kansas border at Parker, terminus of the Lawrence, Leavenworth and Galveston Railroad. The country south of there, which will be traversed by the Atlantic and Pacific, is of the same general character with that I have described about Vinita, consisting of gently rolling prairie, with occasional strips of not very good timber and low bottoms, the latter quite rich and the prairie of average fertility. One tolerably barren ridge 431 432 ON THE BORDER. is found, and then the land improves westward again toward the Arkansas. A stage company now run daily coaches along the State line from Chetopa to the Arkansas River ; and where two years ago they ran at will over the prairie, they are now confined three- fourths of the way to narrow lanes, fences and improved farms multiplying in every direction. The land seemed to improve vastly in quality as we got into Montgomery County, as we were there upon the fine fertile slope leading down to the Ver- digris. Parker is only the nominal terminus of the Lawrence, Leavenworth and Galveston road, and looked distressingly dull in spring. About a quarter section of cattle-yards and " shoots " extend around the depot, and over into the Indian country. The town and railroad company have purchased the right of herding for fifteen miles over the line. At the season of live stock exchange the place is exceedingly lively. The citizens were just then in a state of extreme disgust at the railroad company, averring that the corporation had agreed to make this the terminus town, with all the advantages thereunto belonging. Afterward they made the real terminus at Coffeyville, three miles above, and now a dummy engine merely backs one car down to Parker on a switch. Two fine hotels are shut up, and one third-class hasherie de Kansaise poisons the unfortunates like us, who wander in from the south. Coffeyville is only a little better satisfied. The old town happened to be just three-quarters of a mile away from where the company concluded to put the terminus, and already New CofFeyville has grown into a lively business town of a thousand or more people. The three cities, in a line of three miles, are moving for a consolidation. Meanwhile the railroad has pro- jected and built a branch from Cherry vale, twenty miles north, out west to Independence, the county seat, and that is now freely spoken of as the real terminus. It reminds me slightly of some matters I have known on the Union Pacific Rail- road. Four years before, there were some twenty farms located in Montgomery County, and one post-office. The county, in 1872, ON THE KANSAS PACIFIC. 433 cast a vote of 3000, from which, according to the general ratio in Kansas, they argued a population of 12,000 ; and there is not a valuable quarter section of land in the county without a family or a claimant on it. The first man to settle in the county was a fearfully black and greasy negro, who lives just out of Coifeyville, on his original claim, and when interviewed on the rapid growth around him is too much overcome to give a con- nected account. Visitors tell me that along the State-line Road, westward, to the Arkansas, every quarter section has an occu- pant ; that Cowley, the new county on that river, is about full ; and that the stream of emigration has turned a little, and is now flowing up the Arkansas and to the northwest. Thence northward to Kansas City, stopping at various places on the road, the Kansians thus summed up the changes since we left : " Fine chance o' corn planted an' doin' well splendid prospect for fruit peaches sure of a whalin' crop ; but wheat don't look well. In fact that crop aVt a certain thing yet in Southern Kansas. Garden spot o' the world, sir, no doubt of it ; but wheat h'ain't made a sure thing yet." At midnight of May 2d, we left the State Line (of Missouri) for the long ride across the plains. The hour is inconvenient, but this is the only through train. One train leaves in the morning, thus enabling the traveller to see Eastern Kansas by daylight ; but it stops at Brookville, some distance west of the capital, and waits for the midnight train, when both finish the route together. This is done to pass through the buifalo and In- dian country in the daytime. The Kansas Pacific is now an old road (for the West), its business and facilities increasing steadily, and in healthy proportion with the development of the western interior. Its running rate is a very little less than that of the Union Pacific, but in all other respects, whether of smoothness, comfort, or elegant appliances, it seems to me to fully equal the former road. Before noon of our first day out I see no signs of a different country from that on the eastern border; timber is plenty along the streams, the soil appears rich, and a continuous line of farms borders the road. We are in the valley of the Kaw or 28 434 ON THE BORDER. Kansas, until nearly noon ; then leave it for the Smoky Hill Valley, after crossing Republican, Big Blue and Solomon's Fork. All these "rivers" furnish about enough water to make a stream like the Miami at a moderate stage. But they have wide and fertile valleys, carrying the limit of cultivable land at least a hundred miles west of its border on the upland, away from the streams. May 3. Daylight found us near Junction City, the last point of connection with any Eastern road. From that point, the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas runs southwest, and down the Xeosho Valley, to Parsons, in Southern Kansas. The railroad system of Kansas may be said to develop north and south from the Kansas Pacific as a main stem. The Mis- souri River and Fort Scott road traversing the eastern tier of counties, the L. L. & G., the second tier, and the M. K. & T., diagonally from the fourth to the first tier, the northern coun- ties having a very similar system ; it will be seen that the rail- roads in Kansas are disposed to the best possible advantage. It is a question if the assembled wisdom of railroad men through- out the Union could have devised a plan to build the same number of miles of road, and have them more judiciously dis- tributed. There is not a town or considerable farming district within a hundred miles of the eastern border, from which one cannot reach St. Louis within forty-eight hours or less. We find the country pretty well settled for fifty miles west of Junc- tion City, with every appearance of natural fertility ; prairies of rich green, considerable bodies of timber, and a black, loose soil wherever the sod is turned. We take breakfast at Ells- worth a good one, too. When I was out here in October, 1867, Ellsworth was the terminus of the road also the ter- minus of something like a hundred or two of human lives. "Shall we have a man for breakfast?" was the morning salutation ; and rarely was it answered in the negative. Ells- worth was the hardest of all hard towns which flourished for a day at the end of the railroad. Mr. J. H, Runkle, then Prose- cutor for the District, informed me, that for ninety-three days, there was at least one homicide a day in the town or vicinity. DIED IN THEIR BOOTS/ 435 And yet in Ellsworth, as in Cheyenne in its wicked days, in Lam- in ie, or any other border town, a man who had a legitimate busi- ness, and did not drink or gamble, was as safe, for the most part, as in New York. Few take interest enough in the " Statistics of Crime " to inquire what becomes of those who are known as " roughs" on these Western roads. With very rare exceptions they die young, and die by violence. A new supply is being constantly created, or the class would soon become extinct. From facts within my own observation, I deduce the rule, that the average life of the Western " rough," after he becomes known and established as a "rough," is only four years! Where are " Wild Bill," and "Jack Slade," and "Long teve," "Tom Smith," of Bear River, "Dad Cunning- ham," and their compeers so noted only five years since? And where will be "Wild Bill," and " Tiger Bill," " Brad. Collins," and most of their con- fr&res, in five years more ? In the company of the noted financier, who invented the purase, "Where the woodbine twineth;" or, it will be said "MAN FOR BREAKFAST." in Western dialect, "They died in their Boots." Ellsworth is quiet enough now. It has settled into a good, old-fashioned country town, of perhaps a thousand people, extensively engaged in the cattle trade. We are rapidly running out of civilization, but occasional farms continue to about the two hundredth and fiftieth mile- post (from State Line), then disappear ; and evidences multiply rapidly that we are on the " plains." The whole country, how- ever, is of a beautiful green, and the grass appears as good as farther east. 436 THE GREAT PASTURE. Our route this afternoon and to-night is through the " Big Pasture" of America. It extends from latitude 52, in British America, to Texas, and has an average width of 250 miles, spreading eastward from the base of the Rocky Mountains. Say in round numbers, 1200 by 250 miles, and we have an area of 300,000 square miles, set apart by nature forever, as our great national park and pasture. Not one-twentieth of this area can be settled and cultivated under any mode of farming now known in America. It is too high and dry, and the nights are cool enough to insure some frost nearly every month in the year. At the same time it produces the sweetest and most nutritious of grasses. More range is required here than in eastern pastures for the same number of stock, for the grass does not renew itself the same season, as it does there; but still here is room for the development of incalculable -wealth in flocks and herds. If the reader will take a board, four times as long as it is wide, lay it north and south, and tilt it a very little towards the east, then score it from east to west with a number of furrows, he will have a tolerable map or miniature copy of what is called the " plains." The western border, the high plateau near the mountains, has an average elevation of 5000 feet ; thence eastward the general slope will average ten feet to the mile ; so, by the time we reach the settled portions of Kansas and Ne- braska, we are but 1000 feet or so above sea-level. Going westward you are going uphill and nearer mountains and deserts; consequently into a dryer and colder country, and finally into a region fit for nothing but pasturage. But the notion once indus- triously circulated, that cattle could be wintered here without feeding, is now abandoned. Last winter pretty effectually set it at rest. We hurry on, and soon after noon enter the buffalo country. We see but a few live ones, for it is too early for their great move northward ; but whole catacombs of the dead. For twenty miles in one place, the sight is awful. Whole herds died here during the heavy snow of last winter. As far as the eye can reach, or as a good field-glass can sweep the horizon, they lie at THE BISON. 437 IN THE BUFFALO COUNTRY. intervals of eight or ten rods apart, and in every stage of decay. Some appear just as they fell, almost entirely preserved mum- mified as it were by the dry air. Others have shrunk to small compass with the hide still entire, and others by far the larger number are picked and licked to clean white skeletons by the wolves. The sight is sad, and sickening. About the stations the skins are piled in great heaps to dry for market, not so bad to the sight as the other, but worse to the smell. This region of dead buffaloes extends from first to last, some eighty miles, traversing which we saw many thousand of their carcasses. The first live specimen was a straggler, which the locomotive started out of a circular hollow. He continued on the full run as long as we could see him an ungainly beast. The cry of " buffalo " was followed by a general rush of " Pilgrims" to the windows ; next came an antelope, then prairie dogs, and our palace car company resembled rather a district school at a menagerie than anything else. We were soon in the buffalo country proper, and occasionally saw small groups of them at a 438 DENVER. distance feeding. The heat had grown oppressive, the country looked dry, and the grass had completely changed. Verdure, as farther east, was rarely seen ; the growth was butfalo grass and gama grass, short and wiry, but very sweet and nutritious. Darkness comes over us, still fifty miles from the border of Colorado. May 4th. We reach Denver at 7.20 A. M., and hasten to the Broadwell House, where we are beset by newsboys with the cry: "Here's your Rocky Mountain News latest from Cincinnati Horace Greeley for President." This was news to us, for pas- sengers across the plains lose one day's dispatches en route. The usual political discussions enlivened the breakfast room. Eastern arrivals were much excited about it, but the Denverites appeared quite indifferent. Colorado cannot vote for President, although she has made three several and earnest attempts to " take her place," etc. (The quotation is so old everybody can finish it.) In fact, Congress did admit her once, but Andrew Johnson vetoed her, creating a fearful mortality of incipient Congressmen and State officials. Byers' Rocky Mountain News (the paper is scarcely heard of as dissociated with Byers) is the institution of Colorado. It has survived fires, floods, Indian blockades and Federal patronage, and survives to tell us every morning at breakfast all of note that has transpired in any part of the world down to the mid- night preceding. It is, indeed, a monument of enterprise, whereby no disparagement whatever is meant for other journals here. It is one of the "curiosities of literature" with me, how these mountain towns can support the papers they do. Here is Denver, with ten thousand people, and three dailies. The Ter- ritory has six dailies, and some weeklies, with fifty or sixty thousand people. Little Corinne, Utah, with some fifteen hun- dred people, has kept up a vigorous daily for two years and a half. " It's a wonder how they do it, but they do." May 5th. I find myself totally mistaken as to the location of Denver. I had always heard it was in the mountains, and supposed we ran across one chain before reaching here, and into a sort of basin. On the contrary, Denver is " on the plains,'* :" ifl 440 MOUNTAIN TOWNS. GRAY'S PEAK COLORADO. eighteen or twenty miles east of the mountains, though they extend half way around it on the south, leaving it in a broad valley, sloping toward the north. Take half of a wagon-wheel ; imagine each of the spokes a pass, leading up southwest or northwest, through the mountains to some mining region, and you will have a tolerable idea of Denver and its tributaries. From this place as a center, first- class turnpikes lead up to Georgetown, Central City, Black- hawk, Boulder, and a dozen mountain towns of less note; and narrow-guage railroads are being constructed to the most im- portant. Denver has a beautiful location on the slope at the junction of Cherry Creek and the Platte River. Both are mere rivulets now, but they occasionally get up in a way that's rather fright- ful. In 1864 a freshet took away nearly all.of the town as it then stood, and the people afterwards built a little farther up the slope. The city is an agreeable surprise to me. I had heard so often and so long, in Salt Lake City, that that was the only really beautiful city in the mountains, that it had become a part of my creed, as a man will sometimes absorb without question what he hears reiterated for years. But now I incline to think INTELLIGENT DENVEKITES. 441 I should prefer Denver, on the score of beauty alone. The advantage of Salt Lake City is that it is twice as old, and its shade trees, shrubbery and the like have had more time to grow. But here we find bright irrigating streams, fine gardens, shade trees, grass plats and many fine residences. In the last respect this far exceeds Salt Lake. But the noticeable point of difference is in churches, school-houses and daily papers. In the two former Denver will compare favorably with any Eastern city of its size, and in papers exceed most of them. A hundred little matters illustrate, in a marked degree, the difference be- tween this progressive, homogeneous people and that of the Mormon Capital. At the Post Office, of an evening, one finds almost the population of an average Western city, and has to "take his turn" after long waiting. At Salt Lake I never saw a crowd at the delivery large enough to be troublesome. From the best data at hand, I think this office gives out three times as much mail as that at Salt Lake. Here are a people who read and write, think and question, deliberate, examine and come to a conclusion : there a people who open their mouths and swallow what the shepherd gives them ; obey their Bishop like good children ; believe the whole outside world to be doomed, and, therefore, don't want to write to, or hear from them. May 6th. Three days at Denver convinced me that it was quite a place. But why should a journalist, looking for new fields, stop long at Denver? Is not its history and marvelous growth written in chronicles of every Western rambler for the past ten years ? And have not Greeley, Richardson, Bowles, McClure and a score of lesser lights, exhausted the resources of the dictionary, in trying to tell the simple truth about its present greatness and certain future? I can only adopt the plan of the conveniently pfous young man, who wrote an elaborate prayer, posted it at the head of his bed, and when ready to turn in, pointed at it and said : " Lord, those are my sentiments ! " Now, therefore, read again all that the above worthies have said in praise of Denver, and "Those are my sentiments." I must cut short my stay in Denver, and all on account of the weather, which is said to be heating up very fast down 442 TROUBLE AHEAD. GEORGETOWN COLORADO. where I am going. Bat when I go to inquire about route and expenses, though I thought I knew something about high tariffs in the West, the intelligence nearly takes my breath. The distance is four hundred and fifteen miles, ninety of which we go by rail, the rest by stage. Fare by rail ten cents per mile, by stage twenty cents : total to Sante Fe, seventy-four dollars, with a dollar a meal on the road. Moral : Don't go to Sante Fe, unless you have important business. From what I hear the rates are still higher to where I wish to go in Arizona, with the comfort added, however, that in all probability I can- not get there at all, as three drivers have just lately been killed by the Indians. Different parties are organizing with a view of going through the center of Arizona and New Mexico, from Sante Fe to Fort Prescott ; but all I consult here shake their heads doubtfully on the subject. However, I have generally observed in travel- ing that dangers lessen as one draws near them ; so I will go down and hear what the " Greasers " say on the matter. " 7 TIS SAD TO PART. 443 May 7th. At 7.30 A. M. I boarded the cars of the narrow gauge Denver and Rio Grande R. R. familiarly known here as the " Narrow Gouge" in delicate satire on its rates of fare. Ten cents a mile does look a little steep for a railroad, but con- sider, that before this was built the tariff was twenty cents a mile by stage ; that the road is not assisted by grants or subsidies ; that the amount of travel is too small as yet to pay expenses, and that the question is, whether you are willing to pay half stage fare for the luxury of a car, or go back to the old style. I only wish I could go all the way to Santa Fe by such car- riage, for I do dread the three hundred and twenty-five miles of staging. At the last moment, Mr. De Bruler decided not to accom- pany me ; principally because I did not know exactly where I was going myself. That the thirty-fifth parallel road ran through northern Arizona we guessed from the map ; but whether through the Apache Country, and whether safe or the reverse we could not learn ; nor whether I could go through at all. So my journalistic companion shook my hand warmly, and with empressement thus pronounced : " Go, Beadle ; in the interests of science, and for the honor of the profession. You can risk the savages; old bachelors don't amount to much anyhow. But I I have a family." It was too touching ; I dashed the saline globules from my cheeks, and scooted for the depot. He wan- dered briefly in Colorado, then returned to the bosom of his family and the editorial columns of the Cincinnati Times and Chronicle; thence he has transferred his brains to the sanc- tum of the Evansville Journal, where he flourishes like a green- bay horse. I return to my journal. "We journey at a sobre passo gait of ten or fifteen miles an J^our, southward and up the Platte Val- ley, which has the appearance of an old, settled and cultivated country. The farm-houses appear to me in much better style, and the system of irrigation more scientific than in Utah. Farmers are plowing, and the spring crops are coming forward finely. Colorado wheat promises well this year. It is con- sidered settled here that it is the best wheat in tne world. In 444 SHEEP REGION. Denver, Colorado flour is $14.00 per barrel, while " State flour" is only $10.00. About 10 A. M., we leave the Platte and follow up a small stream to the " Divide." Here we are in the lumber region, as shown by the immense stacks of the same about the depots. Singularly enough, near the " Di- vide," on both sides are considerable fields cultivated without irrigation, there being sufficient rain when one draws near the summit and the timber! The timber causes the rain, or the rain produces the timber, or the mountains are the cai&e of both ; or some other sufficient cause accounts for all three, I don't know which. If this theory is not scientifically correct, Quien sabe ? As soon as we pass the summit and get on the head -waters of the Fontaine Que Bouille, we see on all the slopes immense herds of cattle and sheep. At Colorado Springs lives one man who has 13,000 sheep in this region ; and I am reliably in- formed there are 150,000 head of stock in the system of val- leys opening out on this stream. The country is evidently one of the best in the world for sheep. It is high, dry, cool in summer, and not very cold in winter, with just moisture enough to produce good grass. For about fifty miles we traverse a beautiful grazing region. At the Springs we stop an hour for dinner. Here is one of the coming towns of Colorado, having a fine fertile valley, immense grazing area, and the noted chemical springs already a great place of fashionable resort. I am most agreeably surprised by southern Colorado. There is very little desert, and except the bare mountains it appears to me a country of great natural richness. The valleys are very fertile, and most of the slopes furnish good pasturage. The railroad terminates at little Buttes, ninety miles from Denver ; and there we take the stage. Nineteen passengers go on to Pueblo, which we reach some time after dark, and all stop there except Captain H. H. Humphreys, of the Fifteenth United States Infantry, his wife, his servant, and the subscriber. I am the only through passenger, the others go to Fort Union, New Mexico, and we travel together some forty hours. A night ride in a coach is not a subject for poetry. Ours is as com- fortable as the average. PLEASANT SCHOOLING. 445 May 8th. We breakfast at Cocharas, an old style Mexican hacienda, in a beautiful circular valley, seventy miles from Little Buttes. I am still fresh as at starting, and make havoc among the wheaten-cakes, fried eggs and chopped and stewed mutton, which, with coffee, constitute our breakfast: called here, however, tortillas, huevos, came and cafe respectively. A plump and pretty senorita sits by, and gives me my first lesson in Spanish, with a pleasing variety of smiles and graceful gestures. She is a most persistent teacher, and will not rest till I have learnt the name of everything at and on the table, beginning with myself! I am un Americano, also un caballero, she ventures to hope, with a pleas- ing smile, that makes me perfectly willing to be anything she wants me to ; and when neither of these, I am simply un hombre, "a man." The knife I eat with is uno cuchillo, as FIRST LESSON IN SPANISH. she writes it in my book ; but by some lingual gymnastics they pronounce it coo-chee-o. My chair is una cilia (see-a), my head is cabeza (cah-bayza), and she wonders I have not mal de cabeza from a night's ride en el car- roza ; my eyes are los ojos (o-hose), the table is la mesa (may-sa), and she hopes we may part amigos. " 'T is pleasant to be schooled in a strange tongue By female lips and eyes ; that is, I mean, When both the teacher and the taught are young, As was the case at times where I have been." We are off for another day's ride, with the celebrated "Fat Jack " for driver. Ten years before " Fat Jack " lived on Dayton Street, Cincinnati, and might have traveled as the "Original living Skeleton." Some unnameable and wasting disease had reduced him to less than ninety pounds weight. He started West, began to improve, reached New Mexico, and went to driving stage, and now weighs two hundred ! He is five feet four inches high, and four feet two inches around the 446 PASSAGE OF THE RATON. waist. My essay at Spanish amused him, and he told me, when I reached Santa Fe, to procure at once una diccionaria dormiente " a sleeping dictionary ; " but as he accompanied the remark with a fearful facial contortion, and a poke in my side that nearly dislocated a rib, I take it he meant a joke, though I cannot imagine where the point is. The morning air is quite cool, but the afternoon warm and pleasant. The scenery is grand. To our right are the Spanish Peaks, in front Fisher's Peak, of the Eaton Mountains ; both glistening white with snow. The last named looks as if it were about five miles distant. It is fifteen miles in a straight line measured by the U. S. Engineers from the hotel in Trinidad, at the base of the mountains ; and we are yet four miles from Trinidad. We reach that place, the last town in Colorado, at 4 P. M., rest an hour, take supper and change to a small, stout uncomfortable coach, in which to make the passage of the Raton. We reach the summit just at dark, and have a fearful run down the southern side. Fortunately we cannot see the danger, if there is any ; and have nothing to do but bounce about in the dark inside the coach, butt each other's heads, shift ballast to suit the pitching of the coach, and enjoy ourselves generally. About midnight the jolting ceases, and the gentler motion in- dicates that we have come out into a smooth valley and on to a good natural road. We compose ourselves, hang to the straps and get two or three hours tolerable sleep. May 9th. About 3 o'clock this morning, we are roused by the driver with notice that an important bridge has been washed away, leaving only a foot-log, on which the passengers cross while the coach makes a circuit of some miles. Our party of four were soon on the banks of the stream, and, by the light of a lamp, saw a fearful gorge, crossed by one narrow log, while fifteen feet below ran a stream strong enough to wash us out of sight in ten seconds. Three sets of passengers had already crossed on that little foot-log, round and slippery as it was, but none of us would venture on it. While the driver threw the lamp glare on the log, and our party stood huddled together gazing into the awful chasm, like a lot of departed sinners upon ON THE CIMARRON. 447 the River Styx, I noticed that the banks were not too steep for descent, and so climbed down by the aid of rocks and bushes, to the water's edge. The other male passenger soon followed, and we found enough of the ruins to construct a half floating bridge. An hour's labor, with the driver kneeling on the log above to light us to our work, made a bridge on which the ladies succeeded in being helped across with fewer screams than could have been expected. A short walk brought us to the next station, where the coach overtook us in an hour. Daylight finds us at Maxwell's Ranche, or Cimarron City, at the crossing of Cimarron River a hundred and seventy miles from where we took stage, and still a hundred and fifty-five miles from Santa Fe. The night has told heavily on us, and we begin to lose interest in external things. The two ladies complain of their heads ; the captain and I are principally con- cerned about our stomachs. All this morning the wind blew a small hurricane, and after noon we had a chilly rain to complete our misery. We break- fast at Maxwell's, the center of an old Mexican grant of several hundred thousand acres, for many years the property of a noted mountaineer by the name of Maxwell. The grant contains fifty or sixty sections of the finest land in New Mexico, several good locations for water-power, and one rich gold mine. Max- well has lately sold it to an English company, who are bring- ing in machinery to work the gold mine, and propose to im- prove the entire grant. An hour's rest and a pint of hot coffee restored my intellec- tual balance somewhat ; and I entered upon the third day of staging with more vigor than I had expected. At Fort Union my three companions got out, and a young German got in to go to Santa Fe. We had traveled the last twelve hours in a southeast direction, leaving the main chain of mountains some distance to the west, and crossing the Rayado, Ocate and other tributaries of the Canadian. The old trail runs southwest from Huerfano to Fort Garland, crossing over to the headquarters of the Rio Grande ; but the stage road con- tinues on this line to Las Vegas, before turning westward. Las 448 ENTERING SANTA FE. Vegas is a little south of Santa Fe, on the extreme headwaters of the Pecos River. That city, which we reached at dark, dates away back to the first Spanish invasion, and has a population of three or four thousand. There we took on three United States officers, and the Right Reverend John B. Lamye, Bishop of Santa Fe, who exerted himself to cheer up the heavy hours of the night, as our coach labored through the mountain passes down to Santa Fe River. The cold was intense, and by the morning light we saw that a heavy snow had fallen. May 10th. The fourth day out, and I begin to be oblivious : my head pitches forward and back in involuntary "cat-naps" of a minute each, and I* long for port. After four hours riding down hill, by 10 o'clock in the morning the snow had disap- peared ; once more nature asserted herself, and I was really feeling bright again when we came in sight of Santa Fe. In all my travels I never remember being so disappointed. One might pass within two miles of the city and miss it. It is not in the Rio Grande Valley, as I had supposed, but at least twenty miles from that river, quite in a hollow; and appears a miserable, low, flat collection of mud huts. Whole squares are walled in with stones, mud and adobes; then the width of a house roofed around the square on the inside ; partition walls are built, passages cut through, and a score of dwellings in one group are complete. As the coach rolls through the narrow, ugly streets, it looks more like driving through a dirt cut in some excavation than the streets of a city. As we near the center of town these squares seem more compact; holes appear to have been cut through, making shut alleys or narrow streets, and other openings show the interior of these mud-walled squares to be a sort of stamping ground in common, for pigs, chickens, jackasses, children, ugly old women, and " Greasers." Reaching the plaza, things look a little better. There at least is a patch of green, a tract grown up in alfalfa or Spanish clover. We stop at the Exchange, the only hotel in the city for white men, or rather Americans, the other distinction, though- perfectly accurate, not being well relished here. The Exchange is a one-story square, like all the rest ; but across the middle IN A FIX. 449 of the square is a line of buildings containing the dining-room and kitchen, and dividing the stable yard and poultry run from the open court for human use. An arched way between the kitchen and dining-room connects the fyvo courts ; on the human side women and children take their recreations, and men of quiet or literary tastes can sit and read ; while the stable side is sacred to dog-fights, cock-fights, wrestling matches, pitching Mexican dollars, and other exclusively manly pursuits. The people of Santa Fe evidently do not take in their philosophy the statement that " Man was made to mourn/' At the Exchange I left the coach, feeling almost comfortable; but no sooner did I touch the pavement than the earth com- menced such a rocking that I walked only in circles and ellipses, traveling at least two rods in advancing ten feet. I shivered with cold, and my head and face were scorched with heat. I was desperately sea-sick. Grasping the casing I got in at the door, and felt my way to the lounge near the stove, for, though it was bright sunshine, the weather was cold. I sank on the lounge and in five seconds was oblivious. In two hours I awoke with the delirium tremens. Seriously, though I had not tasted liquor for months, I had all the premonitory symptoms of that terrible disease. The figures on the wall scowled at me; the illuminated Saint over the mantel looked sick at rny prospects; and a great grinning demon, top-ornament to an old Spanish wall-sweep clock, seemed to snap his fingers and wriggle with delight at my misery. I had sense enough left to know I should lose my senses if this thing continued long, so I took to the street again. But there everything was un- settled. The distant mountains wabbled, the houses were turn- ing topsy-turvy, "Greasers" grinning and rolling apparently in every direction, while the serioritas seemed to go sideways or on their heads, waltzing along the narrow streets in most im- moral attitudes. Worst of all was a horrible feeling about my stomach, as if millions of insects were crawling from there up to my head ; and a sensation of pitching backward and forward, feeling as if my head were unscrewed, loose, and liable at any moment to be jerked off. 29 450 DELIRIUM TREMENS. I was put to bed and a doctor sent for. The old Mexican M. D. (I should say these words in his case stood for " miserable devil ") came, felt my pulse, temples and feet, grunted professionally, and made his diagnosis in these words : "Caraja! Tres dies y noches en carroza ! Mai de cabeza y desar- reglio de los nervios!" I as- sented, and he gave me twenty drops of laudanum as a starter, followed every hour or so by belladonna, hyosciamus, et oL At dark I went to sleep, slept eleven hours without waking, and next day was all right. Moral : Don't try to go eighty hours with only nine hours' sleep, if you have a sensitive nervous systeui; for if you do, you are likely to make the acquaintance of "the man with the poker " without the fun of the preparatory sprees. I was "in port" for a while, after going fourteen hundred miles around the three sides of an immense parallelogram to come on the thirty-fifth parallel line again, to wit : from Indian Territory to Kansas City north, thence to Denver west, and thence to Santa Fe south. CARAJA ! LOS NERVIOS p> CHAPTER XXIII. SANTA FE DE SAN FRANCISCO. First impressions Location of the city U. S. officials Learning Spanish The j?cu7e Valse da Spachio Mexican Law Religion Children Dark vs. white races Mexican transportation Historical Remarkable journey of De Vaca and his companions Expedition of Coronado "The seven cities of Cibola" ! " The American occupation " Query. ANTA FE DE SAN FRANCISCO so the old Span- iards named it is a high old city : seven thousand feet high, and two hundred and fifty years old. A dry, hard, worn out, and most uninviting place, too, it ap- pears to me ; but any place with water, shade and beds is a haven to me since my stage trip from Colorado. That was an experience I hope never to repeat ; for, if I have so long a trip hereafter, I shall divide it into sections ot a hundred miles or so each. Santa Fe has been a city inhabited by white men for two hundred and fifty years ; and nobody knows how long before by Pueblo Indians, one of their old cities, or the ruins of it, being partly on the same site. In the latitude of Memphis, it has a summer climate cooler than that of Canada, and that of 1872 was an exceptionally cold spring. Except from 10 o'clock till 4, fires were agreeable in the hotel, and heavy bedclothes were in order with me. A suit of summer clothing is rarely seen in Santa Fe. There are not ten days in the year when they are really needed. The winters are mild and dry ; snow rarely falls, and the range of the thermometer is about equal to that of Washington City. The city is in the narrow valley of Santa Fe River, on a gentle slope, seven thousand five hundred feet above sea-level. Just northeast of the city^ though thirty miles 451 452 BAD LOCATION- SIDE OF PLAZA SANTA FE. distant, "Old Baldy," a mountain peak, rises 'five thousand feet higher, its summit covered with snow ten months in the year. The climate is claimed to be the finest in America, and unques- tionably it is the most even and least liable to sudden changes ; but to me it seemed a little too cool in May. All this was a surprise, as I had somehow got the idea Santa Fe was in a hot climate. For incipient pulmonary complaints it is the best obtainable; those in advanced stages of consumption die very suddenly here. The town is totally unlike what I expected. It is poor and meanly built of one-story mud huts, the whole place covering perhaps eighty acres. It is in a narrow side valley, completely out of the range of any through line of railroad ; the Thirty-fifth Parallel road must run some distance south of it, and I question very much if either of the roads from Colorado will touch it. "DRY!" 453 In fact, any road to reach Santa Fe must really run past it, and then turn back up the side valley to come at it. The streets and walls are inexpressibly dreary ; the dwellings low, flat and uninviting. I don't think there are twenty two- story houses in the city. The residences of some of the officials display a little taste ; two or three of the merchants have houses with pretty surroundings, and Bishop Lamye has a place which would almost be considered pretty in Ohio. I saw perhaps a dozen gardens ; all the rest of the view is bare, gray and dried mud color. As I stood of an evening on the hill above town, and looked on the mean and dirty streets, filled with donkeys carrying hay and wood in Mexican fashion, and saw the gangs of natives swarming among their mud walls, and the lifeless looking women squatted in the open courts, I could but ask : Is this the Santa Fe of which I have heard and read since childhood? The place where the Missouri traders used to go, in those long caravans which furnished subjects of brilliant illustrations in our story books ; where they sold millions in goods and brought back riches beyond estimate ? If this is the place, it has sadly changed. There are not fifty houses there that would be allowed to stand a day in Cincinnati. They say they have a population of six thousand, but I don't see where they put them. Perhaps these mysterious hollow squares, with so many dark holes and corners, are more densely populated than I imagine possible. And yet here are old withered Mexi- cans, native to the place, whose fathers and grandfathers were born, lived .and died in this valley; for Santa Fe was a noted Spanish city one hundred years before our John Cleves Symmes crossed the Ohio. Yes, Santa Fe has one merit it is rich in historic interest. The number of whites not of Spanish origin is estimated at five hundred. At the last election three hundred non-Mexican whites voted, and as there are some twenty families with many boarders and servants, the total number is put as stated. Of these the officials and their families constitute the first division. Until I made their acquaintance I felt somewhat lost, for after novelty wears off, Santa Fe is but a dull place. 454 OFFICIALS. Governor Marsh Giddings, appointed from Michigan, entered upon his duties in August, 1871. I found him a most pleasant gentleman, though the "opposition " are just now attacking him fiercely for his activity in the movement for a State organi- zation. United States District Attorney T. B. Catron is from Mis- souri, and a fluent speaker, both in English and Spanish. Hon. Henry Wetter was then Secretary, though another has suc- ceeded. Joseph G. Palen, Chief Justice, also came in for a heavy share of abuse from the opposition. Associate Justice Hezekiah S. Johnson is a resident of Albuquerque. The other Justice's place was vacant, Judge Bristol, of Minnesota, having been appointed but not yet entered the Territory. The other offices are filled by Mexicans, and it is a source of wonder to me that there is so little conflict of jurisdiction here, with all these differences of race and religion. New Mexico is politically the most quiet of all the Territories, and instead of the ever- recurring religious squabbles of Utah, or the internecine strifes of Dakota, these people seem always satisfied with what the officials do, if it is within a hundred degrees of right. They consider a Governor as only one remove below the Deity ; or, rather two removes, the Virgin Mary coming next, and the Governor being about on the same degree with St. Peter. To one like myself, accustomed to the studied contempt, or lordly indifference, or good-natured and irreverent bonhommie, with which Territorial Governors are regarded, respectively in Utah, Colorado and Dakota, it was something amusing to witness old, gray-headed men, with hat removed, bowing low to Governor Giddings, and to hear the seiloras direct their chil- dren as he passed, "No hable uste tanto. El Gobernador!" All these people, no matter of what rank, are excessively polite. General Gordon Granger, commanding this department, re- sides here, and with the officers on duty, adds not a little to the American society. Attached to headquarters is one of the finest bands I ever listened to, which plays in the plaza every after- noon, furnishing the Santa Fe public with a splendid musical "HAY BAILE." 455 entertainment, and with all these helps, life after a few days did not seem to me quite so insupportable as at first. Next to the officials come the merchants, nearly all of whom are Jews. There are ten extensive firms here, and last year a million dollars worth of goods were sold. Besides these, there are clerks, agents of two stage companies, two hotel keepers, and perhaps fifty "floaters," making up the American popula- tion. I was pleased to meet there Major Nash, formerly of Cincinnati, but now chief commissary of this department, who took me in and did me good. But my acquaintance in Santa Fe was of quite a miscellane- ous character "from the duke to the dustman." I took a Spanish teacher (male), and the third day of my studies "inter- viewed" him thus: " Hay baile esta noche, Scnor ! " " Sij Senor, qmere uste avenir ? Habra Senoritas bonitas" " Eso quisiera yo." The result of this attempt at Castilian was a visit to that evening's baile (by-lay) , or Mexican dance. Americans impro- perly call them fandangoes, applying the name of one kind of dance to the whole proceeding as if one should call an Ameri- can ball a " schottische." They are the national amusement. All new-comers of importance are welcomed with a public ball, and all public enterprises are inaugurated and ended by the same. Scene: A long room, wide enough for one cotillion and long enough for half a dozen ; a raised platform for a first-class string band, and a chair at the other end for la maestra (femin- ine) of ceremonies, with seats ranged against the wall for fifty or a hundred spectators. The Mexican girls are exceedingly graceful, with very small hands and feet and most enchanting voices ; but their features are not handsome, being dark, in the first place, besides having an indescribable something which I imagine I can see in all dark races, and which, for want of a term, I call dormant tigerishness. As dancers they cannot be excelled. They never have the set "called," as in the States, dancing being too much a lifetime affair with them something 456 DANCES. AT THE BAILE. they learn as soon as they can walk. Their cotillions an* very complicated. The common waltz, about the same as ours, is known as the Valse Redondo. But the National dance the one which shows the Mexican woman to the best advantage is the Valse de Spachio, which might be translated "slow waltz." The music is slow and seemingly mournful, but the elegant movement cannot be described. The first figure might be called a " waltzing cotillion/ 7 ending with two lines, each senorita opposite her partner. Thence she advances toward him with a score of graceful gestures bowing, sinking, rising, extending hands and again clasping them and retreating, wav- ing scarf or handkerchief, and all in perfect time and without faulty or ungraceful motion. At length, and apparently fol- PUBLIC BALLS. 457 lowing the motion of the "head lady," the couples come rapidly together, and, as the music breaks suddenly into a lively air, are whirled to all parts of the room in quick gallopade. This again subsides, and they waltz back into a sort of hollow square, from which each lady in turn issues and makes the circuit of the sett in slow waltz, tantalizing different cavaliers with feint and retreat. It looks childish on paper, but is enchanting to witness. There seems to be no distinction at these public balls on the score of character. The social indifference on that subject would astonish most Americans. If the Stantons, Anthonys, etc., are really in earnest in the statement that " woman should have no wo se stigma than a man for sexual sins," they would certainly be gratified here, for the disgrace is, at least, as great to one sex as the other. Indeed, I think the general judgment for marital unfaithfulness is much more severe on a man than a woman. The young Americans bring their mistresses to the baile with the same indifference the Mexicans do their sweet- hearts. These " girls " are scrupulously polite, and so unlike the same class in the States, that it can only be accounted for from the fact that they see no disgrace whatever in their mode of life, and feel no sort of social degradation. One witnesses no drunkenness, no obscene word or gesture, nothing to offend ; and the uniform testimony of the American youths is, that they are the most faithful, kind and affectionate women of that class in the world. Without chastity, they still possess all the other distinctive virtues of the sex. The force of an improving public opinion has, in the last five years, caused many marriages between such couples, and the civil, or old Roman law, prevailing here, legitimates all their issue, no matter how old at the time of marriage. Speaking of law, the Mexicans cling tenaciously to all their old customs in the administration of justice. They stipulated for this at the American occupation, and General Kearney, by proclamation, continued all their judicial officers with the same code. So the matter grew into a prescription which can not be changed ; and as the givil or canon law was in force in all 458 PARENTAL LAW IN NEW MEXICO. Spanish America, it is the common law of New Mexico to-day. Under it the power of parents is practically almost without limits no matter what age their offspring may be. A son who lives with his mother is subject to her orders always, and the alcalde in rural districts is occasionally called upon by a woman whose " boy " of twenty-five or thirty has rebelled. In such cases the alcalde goes with his constable, arrests the " boy," puts a riata into the hands of the mother and bids her lay on until the youth roars for mercy. Sometimes a scnorita living with an American is whipped by her mother for some want of atten- tion or proper conduct toward herself or the mari, and though he protests, the mother asserts her right. They even claim that if a father chose to kill his child, the law would allow it; but I am certain no test case could arise, as in general these people seem to me the kindest and most indulgent of parents to their small children. It is impossible to convey in English an adequate idea of the long drawn-out and musical endearatives and diminutives in which their language abounds : Povrita mia, muy bonita, dulce Huanita, mucha preciosa mucha-chita, (" My poor little one, dearest one, my sweet little John, most precious little girl"). This climate is said to be the best in the world for childhood, and their children are peculiarly bright and lively, but not handsome, unless for those who admire dark beauty, which I do not. After wandering for hours among the narrow streets and adobe squares, when I got into the officials' part of the town, the few little American children looked like little angels, with their clear blue eyes, soft light hair, and clear Saxon complexion. Did you ever, as you looked upon a dark face in the street, think for a moment what it would be to spend your whole life among people of that color? Until I made a long journey without sight of a white man I could not appreciate the condi- tion of missionaries and captives among dark races, I thought only of the physical evils of their lot. But what a wearing grief it must in time come to be never to look upon a fair face; never to press the soft brown tresses, or feel the touch of a pink baby hand ; never to trace the blue veins of a Saxon fore- "PRETTY SQUAWS." 459 head, or hear the sweet music of childish English. Keep a man among Mexicans or Chinese a few years, and I think -he would fall in love with the first white lady he saw. " Pretty squaws " we often hear of, and I have seen some of those called so ; but it was a beauty only in the sense of phy- sical proportion. Barbarous people are never really beautiful ; and where women are freest, there most beauty is found. Our ladies are the queens of beauty throughout the world ; and after due inspection of a dozen races I conclude : Let others take what course they may, but give me an American woman or give me death. Such blessings at home are like air and sunlight, so common that we never think how much of our daily life they make ; but it seems to me- if I had lived a few years exclusively with Mexicans or Chinese, I would walk a hundred miles to see and talk with a few Saxon children, such as are seen in thousands upon our streets. Yes, we may occasionally feel that the claims of civilization bear heavily on us ; but it is philosophically as well as poetically true : " Better fifty years of Europe Than a cycle of Cathay." I got on famously with my Spanish. My partial friends used to tell me that I had " a head for languages," and I am confident Spanish can be learned by any one in less than half the time required for French or German. Consider these points in its favor : no nasals, no gutturals, no silent letter (except, perhaps, the initial A), no sibilants, except those we have in English, and a uniform sound in every combination. I thought it best to learn enough for ordinary purposes before attempting to go through Arizona. But, strange to say, there are men who have been among them ten years and do not understand the language. Language has a strange similarity to music in that respect. Some of the most acute and intelligent men can not distinguish a tune, and could not by any possibility acquire a foreign tongue. Some funny mistakes occur in consequence. An Irishman lately established a wayside hotel near Albuquer- que, and was often "done out of a day's board" by impecunious 460 AN ENRAGED IRISHMAN. Mexicans, until he became suspicious. One day there arrived a doubtful looking " Greaser," who saluted with, " Como ustay, Senor f " (How do you do ?) " You've come to stay, have you?" says Pat % " We'll see about that. Got any money to pay your board ? " " No intenday, Senor." (I don't understand.) " You don't intend to pay ! D n you, git out o' this," and he kicked the unfortunate Mexican into the street. A Federal official came to Santa Fe with half a dozen as- sorted phrases, which he thought sufficient to carry him through ordinary business. Entering a restaurant he did not know what to call for. At length he saw on the wall a rude picture of a dove, representing the Holy Spirit, such as is common in Catholic countries, which he took to be a sign for some game fowl, and asked : " Como se llama eso ? " (Whajt is that?) " Un Espiritu Santo, Senor" (A Holy Spirit, sir,) replied the waiter. " Da me dos Espiritus Santos muy cursos" (Give me two Holy Spirits well done,) requested the official, to the great horror of the devout Mexican. The people are so polite that one rarely knows if he has made a mistake. They compliment every step of progress, and if one pronounces within a hundred degrees of right, exclaim : " Muy bueno y Senor, muy claro Castilliano." Take them all in all, they are a strangely polite, lazy, hospit- able, lascivious, kind, careless and no account race. Their total lack of enterprise shows in the most ludicrous ways, but most in their style of transporting everything on the backs of asses. I saw but one Mexican wagon in the citv, and that had broken down. About the streets are seen droves of jackasses of a very small breed, some with bundles of hay or straw strapped on their backs, others with stove wood stacked up on each side, reaching from the ground to a foot above the back and tied on with raw hide a regular perambulating wood-yard. Occasionally one loses his balance or trips, and goes over on his back. Then he can not get up until unloaded. I saw one get down in the Santa Fe river; and having enjoyed the cool bath and freedom from his burden, he refused to rise AN OVERBURDENED DONKEY. 461 when unloaded. A withered old senora was belaboring him with a musical accompaniment of " caramba ! por Dios ! va maladitto!" and adjuring all the saints in the Litany, ending with a vigorous thwack on his head and a direct appeal to Saint Anastasia, who is supposed to have a peculiar power over refrac- tory mules. But the heterodox beast shook his long ears lazily, and exhibited a most Protestant contempt for the whole saintly outfit. As I passed on she had called to her assistance a nwtehacho, who was spearing the donkey along the back-bone with a ferule-cane with some promise of success. All the timber from the mountains is brought into the city by this method, and one often sees a drove of donkeys, each with a heavy joist on each pannier, projecting ten feet beyond his head and dragging on the ground behind him. One morning I noticed a miserable little burro, no bigger than a good-sized ram, staggering under an entire bedstead, piled up and strapped together on his back ; and another with an immense trunk strapped " cut-angular " from his left hip to his right shoulder. They are the wealth of the poorer class, and when the house- hold donkey dies a Mexican family goes into bankruptcy. But to an antiquarian and I have that taste a little too strong for a brief chronicler Santa Fe is a most delightful place. All sorts of valuable documents, bearing on the early history of the West, are in the archives, and I only regretted that my time for digging among them was so short. Here, for instance, is the official report of Don Francisco Vasquez Coro- nado, who left the city of Mexico three hundred and thirty years ago, with a commission from the Viceroy Mendoza, and a large body of troops, to find and conquer " The country of Cibola, and the Seven Cities." He traversed Southern Cali- fornia, Arizona, New Mexico and Northwestern Texas; gave the mountain peaks and rivers the names they bear to-day, and added to the Spanish Empire an area twelve times the size of Ohio eighty years before the Pilgrims sailed from Holland. And here is the original journal and narrative of Castenada, a private soldier with Coronado, who accompanied that army in its movements for five years. Also, the autobiography of Yaca, 462 HISTORY. a companion of Narvaez, who was wrecked from the former's fleet of boats, on the coast of Texas, and passed from tribe to tribe all the way thence to the Colorado, escaping at the end of ten years to the city of Mexico. And these are not romances, but for the most part veritable history, as well authenticated as the history of Massachusetts. Here is, indeed, a delightful field for the antiquarian. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was the first white man who stood upon the soil of New Mexico, or, as he called it, Tierra de Cibolas. This Vaca was a Spanish gentleman of high rank, native of Jerez de la Frontera, grandson of the Pedro de Vaca, who made the conquest of the Canary Isles. At Pena Blanca, New Mexico, now lives a gentleman by the name of Don Tomas Cabeza de Vaca, who is the tenth in the direct line of descent from Alvar Nunez. The latter is described as having, the most hand- some and manly figure of all the Spanish officers, and is spoken of in the poetry of that period as the " Illustrious Warrior." His narrative, though supported by his solemn affidavit, made for a Judge in Spain, is disfigured by most improbable stories, and utterly incredible accounts of cures performed merely by means of prayer and " laying on of hands." These features have caused the eminent historian, Bancroft, to reject the whole as containing too much error to be of any value; but as his descriptions of the country exactly coincide with our present knowledge, and a large part of his account is attested by other witnesses, we may safely assume the possible part as in the main correct. In company with the unfortunate Pamphilo de Narvaez, he sailed from San Lucar, Spain, on the 17th of June, 1527, and landed in Florida the ensuing April. Every schoolboy is fami- liar with the sufferings and fate of that expedition. The pri- vate journal of Vaca begins on the 4th of the next September, at which time the Spaniards determined to construct boats, and attempt to reach their countrymen's settlements in Mexico. Nails, saws, and axes were manufactured from their stirrups and other iron equipments. Vaca made a pair of bellows of deer skin. A Greek named Teodora, pitched the boats with resin, which he manufactured from the pine trees, and while at SPANIARDS AS PHYSICIANS. 463 work they lived upon their horses, of which they made the skins into water bottles. They embarked on the 22d of September, and skirted the coast of Louisiana. A violent storm scattered the fleet, and on the 6th of November, Vaca's boat was cast upon the shore, on one of the low, sandy islands lining that coast. They were treated with great kindness by the Indians, and after partly recovering their strength, repaired their boat, and again embarked, but were thrown back upon the same island. After long delay they again repaired their boat, but, attempting to embark, it was swamped in the surf. Despair now took possession of all but Vaca, Dorantes, Castello and the Greek ; they determined to start for Mexico by land. Many of the others died of grief and exposure ; the Indians became hostile, and left them without food, and in a short time out of eighty Avho had been cast ashore (another boat also had been wrecked), but fifteen remained alive. Still the four above named cheered their companions with the hope of escape, and all started westward, believing that the Spanish settlement of Panuco was not far distant. Of Narvaez and the others driven out to sea with him by the storm, nothing more was ever heard. Vaca named this island Malhado, (misfortune,) and gives a particular account of the customs of the Indians there, which agrees very well with later accounts. The Indians made the Spaniards act as physicians, and having no medical knowledge, their practice was, says Vaca, " to bless the sick, breathe upon them, and recite a Paternoster or Ave Maria, praying with all earnestness to God, our Lord, that he would give them health and influence us to do them some good." He adds, that in every instance the patient recovered, after which their treatment by the Indians much improved. In the spring of 1529 they determined to escape, but before the time set Vaca fell sick. The others, now thirteen in num- ber, started without him, and he remained with the Indians in that neighborhood nearly five years, or until some time in the year 1533. He went without clothing and conformed to the condition of the Indians. Having got to another tribe he gave up the profession of a physician, and adopted that of a peddler, 464 VACA BECOMES A SLAVE AND ESCAPES. rightly judging this would better enable him to travel from tribe to tribe. Sometimes he was well treated, and sometimes for long periods made a slave. But in all that time he never succeeded in getting more than two hundred miles from Mal- hado, and could hear nothing of his companions or of Panuco. At length he was joined by another Spaniard named Ovieda, who had been left by the main party, and 'together they started westward in company with some Indian peddlers. Yaca relates that they crossed four large rivers, then made a long stay at a bay, which is supposed to have been the bay of Espiritu Santo. There came to them some Indians he calls Quevenes, who stated that "a few leagues beyond there were three men white like themselves, all that was left of a large party, slaves to a tribe who treated them with great cruelty." At this Ovieda became frightened, turned back and was never heard of afterward. Vaca went secretly and hung about the camp of the other tribe, until by the merest chance he met Andres Dorantes. They " mutually returned thanks to God," and in a short time Vaca was united with the other two captives, Castillo and Estevanico, a Barbary negro. These were the last of the thirteen who had left Yaca six years before. Yaca became a slave, and the four captives spent almost a year in devising a plan of escape. They got from tribe to tribe far into the interior, and at length be- came slaves to a people who " lived where there were many cattle/' of which Yaca says : " Cattle come as far as this. I have seen and eaten of their meat. They are about the size of those in Spain, but with small horns like those in Morocco, and long hair, flocky like the Merino sheep. They come as far as the coast of Florida (Texas ?) in a range from the North over four hundred leagues. The people kill them for food, and thus many skins are scattered through the country." These, of course, were the buffalo. Of all the four hundred Spaniards who had started for the conquest of Florida, but three remained alive, Yaca, Dorantes and Castillo, and with them the negro, Estevanico. They traveled many weeks toward the northwest, stopping some time on a river which was " breast high." From Yaca's description "THE TOWN OF HEARTS." 465 the place has been identified on the Canadian, some distance down in the Indian Territory. From there they turned west- ward, and after traversing much of what Vaca calls the "cow country," they came to a desert. They crossed this desert and some mountains, and came to " a people of fixed habitations." These people were very kind. " They went in a state of nature, except the old, who dressed in skins. The season was unusually dry. Rain had not fallen for two years, so they begged the white men to ' tell the sky to rain/ and also to pray for it. which last request was complied with." From there the Span- iards went straight west, and found the "same kinds of peoples, in fixed habitations, and dwelling between high mountains," for a hundred leagues. The women, though, were better treated and better dressed. They also wore shoes. "When a woman bore a child, she brought it to the Spaniards to receive their blessing." They must have been at this period among the Pueblos, or a people who greatly resembled them. The Spaniards spoke six Indian tongues, but these people understood none of them, and their communication was entirely by signs. They continued towards the west till they reached a place Vaca calls "The town of Hearts," because the Indians "gave to Dorantes many hundred split hearts of wild game." One day's travel west of that they saw an Indian " with the buckle of a sword belt and the nail of a horseshoe," at which they were delighted, as those things indicated the neighborhood of Span- iards. Vaca says of that region, " It is in the entrance of many provinces toward the South Sea. There is no maize on that coast, but the people eat straw and fish. They are a melan- choly and emaciated people." They had evidently got among the degraded aborigines of California. The Indians stated that a few days before their arrival " certain men, who wore beards like themselves and came from heaven, had come as far as that river; that they had lances and swords, and had killed two of their people, after which they had gone to the sea and returned homeward to where the sun sets." Convinced that they were near their countrymen, they pressed rapidly southward, passing 30 466 VACA REACHES THE CITY OF MEXICO. through territory abounding in good land and beautiful streams; but the natives everywhere had fled to the mountains for fear of the Spaniards, who had made an expedition from Mexico. As they advanced, they saw repeated indications of their countrymen, and at length " came upon four Spanish horse- men." Strangely enough, Yaca indulges in no particular description of his feelings on the occasion. He merely asked the horsemen to take him to their commander, Diego de Alcaraz, of whom he requested " a certificate of the day, month and year of his arrival among them, and the manner in which he .came." Alcaraz explained that he himself was lost, and did not know which way to turn. He sent them forward with a small party, and after a long and distressing march they reached the town of Culiacan, in the present Mexican State of Sinaloa, where they were received with unbounded astonish- ment. The Governor of that province sent them to Compos- tella, a hundred leagues further. From there they were everywhere received with public demonstrations, great crowds of people flocking to see them, on the road to the City of Mexico, which they reached a on the day before the vespers of St. James," in 1536. They were received with great honors by the Viceroy, and Castillo and Esteranico remained in Mexico. The next spring Vaca and Dorantes went to Vera Cruz, and shipped for Spain, and after many vicissitudes reached the harbor of Lisbon, August 9, 1537. Vaca was pre- sented at court, and married a noble Spanish lady. The Emperor conferred upon him the Government of Paraguay, with the title of Adalantado. But his constitution seems to have been enfeebled, and his life had completely unfitted him for public business. He soon returned to Spain and settled, in the enjoyment of a handsome pension, at Seville, where he died. At Seville he wrote his narrative, of which many manu- script copies were made, some still remaining in the archives of the Narvaez family. Nearly two hundred years after it was translated and published at Paris, of which translation the above is a summary. I am told also, that an English trans- lation or abbreviation has been published in Washington, by ANOTHER EXPEDITION TO NEW MEXICO. 467 Mr. Buckingham Smith. It would certainly be an exceed- ingly popular work, having all the interest of the most exciting romance, and the value of authentic history. Many of Vaca's descriptions are as exact as could be written to-day. At that time, 1530-40, all the country north and east of the Rio Grande was called by the Spaniards Cibola. In Mexico this is, by common consent, the word for buffalo, but in the Spanish lexicons it is translated, "A quadruped called the Mexican bull." The next expedition into New Mexico was by an army under the command of Don Francisco Vasquez Coronado, appointed by the Viceroy of Mexico, in search of " The Seven Cities." The Spaniards had heard of these cities as so rich in precious metals, that the household implements of the people were of gold and silver, and their currency pearls and other precious stones. The army, numbering at least seven or eight hundred, was largely composed of young Spanish cavaliers, who were as enthusiastic as our own " Pike's Peakers," and announced in Mexico that " neither they nor their families would ever have need of more gold than they should bring back from the Seven Cities." But just before this, a friar named Niza had pene- trated some distance into Arizona to convert the natives, and only returned when his last companion was killed. Coronado set out on his march in January, 1541. With him was one Castaneda, a sort of Spanish Xenophon, a scholar, private soldier and adventurer, who has left a full account of the trip. They marched from the town of Culiacan northward to the Gila River, which they crossed near the present Casas Grandes. The Indians seem to have been rather too sharp for the Span- iards, as each successive tribe assured the latter that they were themselves very poor, " but about a hundred leagues farther on they would find the golden cities they were in search of." They did find seven cities in fact several different nations, each with seven cities; but the 'largest only contained a few hundred inhabitants, and none of the gold they were in search of. Soon after crossing the Gila, they found the whole country mountainous and barren. Of one town Castaneda says: "This 468 WANDERINGS. Chilticale, built of red earth, was evidently the work of a civil- ized people who had come from a distance. . . . The large house seemed to have served for a fortress, and had evidently been destroyed by the present inhabitants, who compose the most barbarous nation yet found in these regions." They con- tinued their march to the northeast, meeting with a disagreeable variety of mountains, deserts and wild Indians, at length reach- ing a place which, from their description, is thought to be the present Zuni town. It is farther conceded by those who have examined the subject, that the "Seven Cities of Cibola," if they ever had an existence, were in the valley of the De Chaco, where are now the ruins of seven great towns. The army marched on to the province they called Cibola, where they found several well built towns, and but little gold or silver. There they spent the win- ter, and in the spring marched on eastward. They fell in with an Indian they called "the Turk," on account of his resemblance to that people, and he piloted them entirely through the moun- tains, out on to the plains, and to the country of the buf- falo. They wintered, the second year, in the Rio Grande country. There all the Indians still directed them a "few hun- dred leagues to the east," and told them Quivira was the rich country they were in search of. So they marched for Quivira, and, after a whole year in the buffalo country, made their final pause on a large river, now believed to have been the PUEBLO AT PRAYER. SANTA FE FOUNDED. 469 Arkansas. Castaneda's description of that country will answer very well at the present day. Coronado then determined to return, and against the wishes of the entire army, they set out for New Spain, which they reached some five years after leaving it. Coronado was deprived of all his offices, and went to Spain in disgrace. Castaneda applies to him a phrase which is literally translated into modern slang, " out o' luck." Forty years passed away, and two friars came into New Mexico with a religious company, all of whom were put to death by the Indians. Another expedition was undertaken by Antonio de Espejo, with a small force, which explored the val- ley of the Rio Grande, and returned to Mexico without loss. He is credited with having founded Santa Fe, in or about the year 1580. Next came Don Juan de Onati in 1591, with an army and a considerable band of colonists, and succeeded in establishing some settlements about the close of that century. He left a voluminous report, portions of which have been copied, r,s well as his private journal, and translated into English. The original was in the Secretary's office in Santa Fe, and not long after the American occupation was stolen and has never been recovered. About a wagon load of Spanish manuscripts are in the Librarian's office. Seventy years after the settlement the Pueblos rebelled and drove out the Spaniards, and the province was recovered by Governor Otermin and General Vargas, after a bloody war. Then follows a list of some forty Spanish and Mexican Governors, Captains, Generals and political chiefs, who ruled New Mexico a hundred and forty-six years, ending with Don Manuel Armijo in 1846, who collected a large army to meet the Americans, and, like the noted " King of France," marched out to the canon commanding the country, and then marched back again, abandoning the province without firing a shot. Whether these people are bettered by an American occupation, I have my doubts. That they have not progressed for a century and a half is self evident. They could not possibly have been more ignorant, superstitious and unenterprising than they are now. 470 POPULATION. "Since the occupation," meaning since the the Americans annexed the country, is a phrase continually heard in New Mexico, in much the same way as "Since the war," in the South: a general era from which to date " All times, all seasons, and their change ; " as then the modern history of the Territory may be said to have begun. Twenty-two years passed, each exactly like the others ; then carne a better class of Americans, and soon began to agitate for the adoption of a State Government. Nearly all the Federal officials and most of the genie fina, or leading families, were in favor of it; the air was full of arguments on the subject, and the figures in its favor were recited unto me daily. The population, exclusive of Pueblos, is 92,000, which makes the Territory appear on the census roll to have lost 2000 since 1860. This was caused by Colorado taking four counties, con- taining 12,000 people, and Arizona a strip containing 8000; so the area which was New Mexico in 1860, has really gained 18,000 in population. The census rolls make no distinction between American and Mexican, but from the best data obtain- able, the former are thought to number fully 6000, and are just now increasing rapidly. This leaves of all shades of Spanish 86,000 from pure Castilian to the darkest "Greaser." Of those nominally Americans, over half are Jews, Hungari- ans, Frenchmen, and Germans, all naturalized citizens, however. Have we here, then, the elements of a progressive American State? The leading men of both races maintain that we have, and the Constitution now before Congress was submitted to the people last June, and adopted by a large majority. The Democrats have heretofore opposed it, but now are divided on the question. The most intelligent Mexicans are Republicans, and most of the rest follow their lead with but little question. They are the most easily managed people in America. The Constitution presented is almost identical with the new one of Illinois, except the voting clause, with some features added from Nevada. If put in operation, this will be the cheapest WEALTH OF THE COUNTRY. 471 State Government in the Union. The highest salary paid is fifteen hundred dollars, and under the Alcalde system each town is practically a law unto itself. At the outside, and making the highest allowance for extra legislative expenses, the State can be run for $20,000 a year more than the Terri- tory expends on its own account. The assessed value of property in the Territory is thirty-two million dollars, and the rate of taxation will thus be as low, or lower, than in Massa- chusetts. We may sum up the population of New Mexico thus : Americans 6,000 Mexicans - 86,000 Citizen Indians (Pueblos) 10,000 Wild Indians (perhaps) 20,000 Total 122,000 The common people are incredibly poor. If a late peon, now free, has a dollar, he neither labors nor thinks till it is gone. Twenty-five cents of it buys flour, twenty-five goes for dulcex for the senora, another twenty-five pays for absolution, and the rest buys a lottery ticket. No matter if his ticket draw a blank a hundred times in succession, " may be some time I win" is to him sufficient answer. A few families own all the wealth of the country. Even they have their wealth mostly in flocks and herds, and immense as it is, it brings them but few of the luxuries of life. If this Territory is admitted now as a State, it ought to be called the State of Pobritta (" Little Poverty"). Each of these wealthy families has from five hundred to two thousand dependents, some of whom were their peons before that system was abolished, and continue to yield obedience by nature and habit. If a State, this would be a most complete " rotten borough " the worst " carpet-bag " State in the Union. Fifteen families with ease would rule the State the Chaves, Gallegos, Delgados, Senas, Garcias, Pereas, Oteros, Quintanas, and a few others. These families have three-fourths of the wealth of the Territory, and all the influence. The poor Mexi- cans do anything they are told ; in fact, don't know how to do 472 RELIGIONS. otherwise than as they are told. These families, in combination with half a dozen priests, and a dozen or more Americans, would divide the home offices between them, and send whom- soever they pleased to Congress. If an American is " in with the noble families," he is a made man. It would be an emi- nently peaceable State, however ; the Government need antici- pate no trouble or need of reconstruction. They are very friendly to an American, seeming to regard him as actually a superior. The Mexican women almost look upon a white man as a sort of little divinity. Religion seems to interpose not the slightest objection. A Protestant can get office as easily as a Catholic, if not more so. The Americans, of course, are Pro- testants, but for the most part like A. Ward's showman partner: "Gentlemen, these are my sentiments; but if they don't suit you, they kin be changed." Father Hays, a most genial, humorous and intelligent Irish priest, gave me an amusing account of a young Virginian who lately arrived there, and coolly proposed to the Father to become a Catholic, if the latter would introduce him into the better class of families. He stated that he intended to settle hi the country, and wished to marry a Mexican lady with some property. The State of New Mexico would be a quiet one, if not pro- gressive. The country unquestionably abounds in natural wealth, and after two railroads get there, and fifty thousand Americans, it will be the richest of all the new States. There is little or no provision for public schools. The Convent School in Santa Fe is good, and nearly all the Americans patronize it. The Episcopalians and Presbyterians have a small school. The Catholic Bishop, G. B. Lamy, came to Cincinnati twenty-seven years ago, and in the diocese of the present Archbishop Purcell was ordained, and ministered some time in Covington, Ken- tucky. He went to New Mexico twenty-two years ago, and is the best posted man in all matters relating to the nature of the country, climate, soil and mineral wealth that I met. The French and Irish superior priests in the city are first-class men; the native priests in the country are very uncertain. Bishop NOMENCLATURE. 473 Lamy tells me that the Pueblos are among the best practical Christians in New Mexico. I hope it is so, for I must travel among them soon. He has devoted a lifetime to the reforma- tion of the Church throughout the Territory, and still there is vast room for improvement. Of all the native priests only two, I am informed, escaped being silenced. As they were in race neither Spanish nor Indian, so they were in faith neither Catholic nor Aztec; their religion sat loosely upon them, and they lived to all intents like the rest of the population. Each one kept his senorita, and though the children took the mother's name, the paternity was well known. Queerest of all, and most dearly showing the singular " faith without knowledge" of these people, are the proper names. Jesus, Maria, Mariano and Jose (Joseph) are favorites, the second and third common to both sexes. A prominent citizen of Santa Fe is Don Jesus Vigil. His parents probably intended him for a " watchful Christian." Fortunately for sensitive American ears, it is pro- nounced Haysoos Veheel. Irreverent as it may appear in me to write it, there is a well-known citizen whose name is Jesus A. Christ de Vaca (Haysoos Antonio Kreest day Bvahca). But the Spanish Americans generally are brilliant in nomen- clature. The full name of a cow-herd sounds like the title of a grandee. Americans who settle in the country very often either translate their own names, or give them a Castilian term- ination. By such process Mr. Meadows becomes Seilor Las Vegas ; John Boggs, Seiior Juan de Palos ; and Jim Gibbons flowers out as Don Santiago de Gibbonoise. An Irishman from Denver settled near El Paso, married a wealthy Mexican lady and lives in style ; his original name, Tim. Murphy, is long since forgotten, and he signs his bank checks as Timotheus Murfando. Sometimes, among the genie fina, the marriage contract speci- fies that the sons take both names (united by "and"), from some principles of the law as to entailed estates. Thus Don Jose Vigil y Alarid is the son of a lady of the Alarid family married to Senor Vigil. In like manner my young friends in- sisted that my rough Saxon patronymic did not suit the soft Castilian, and I became Don Juan de Bidello. 474 AZTEC EUIXS. Their religion strikes me as a vile parody on Mother Church, and some of their ceremonies are so ridiculous that to describe them would be, as Dogberry says, " flat burglary." They have a set of fellows known as Penitentes, or in French Flagellants, who on stated occasions walk about the streets in processions, naked from the waist upward, and thrashing themselves with bunches of a thorny shrub native to the country. They often leave the ground behind them streaked with blood, and a few days after my arrival one died at Tecolote, northeast of Santa Fe, from exhaustion and loss of blood. Be was buried at night under the church, and the authorities could not even learn the name of the wretch- ed fanatic. On three sides of the city are ruins of ancient pueblos (Aztec or Toltec, it is not certain), which were evidently great and prosper- ous. But they have long since fallen to ruins, and besides the broken pieces of pottery of most curious workman- ship, all that remains of these cities are the two old houses on the road to San Miguel. The arrangement of these houses, and the few relics and rude drawings preserved, show that the occu- pants adored the rising sun, and had substantially the religion of the Montezumas. They cooked vegetables by the use of smooth white stones, which were heated in a small furnace. The food was put in a vessel containing water, into which they threw these heated stones, frequently changing them to keep the water boiling. Most interesting of all the people of New Mexico, are the Pueblos, or citizen Indians, the last of the ancient civilized A MEXICAN DRAY. PUEBLOS OR CITIZEN INDIANS. 475 aborigines, who number eight or ten thousand in the entire Territory. Heretofore, they have not been considered citizens ; but the question was raised, and by the last Supreme Court decided in their favor, and henceforth they are voters. They are eminently civil and honest, and in every respect as civilized and progressive as the Mexicans. Indeed, it is the uniform testimony of travelers and American residents, that they are the most trustworthy of all the people of New Mexico. From what I see of them about the streets of Santa Fe, they seem to have more of the commercial character, and to be much more active traders than other Mexicans. But they still dress in the ancient costume, which is neither Indian nor Spanish, but a sort of mixture, with pantaloons somewhat in the Turkish style, and when in full dress with a profusion of red and yellow. They inhabit twenty-six villages, principally in the Valley of the Rio Grande, the most important of which, is San Juan, thirty miles northwest of Santa Fe. They live totally distinct from the surrounding Mexicans, each village having its own govern- ment, and no bond of union between them ; but all live in the greatest harmony with their neighbors. Each village has a Governor, a cacique or justice, a fiscal or constable, and a "council of wise men/' Besides these civil officers there is also a war captain, who attends to military affairs. A few hundred acres of land belong to each pueblo (the word means " village"), which is parceled out for cultivation to the various families according to their size. They are more indus- trious than the Mexicans, and have abundance of wholesome food. They live almost exclusively on beans, mutton, and corn meal, their lands producing the vegetables in great quantities. Their herds are extensive, and consist of the small, hardy breed of sheep. They were long ago forced to adopt the Catholic faith, but have mingled it strangely with their old religion, as some of them seem to regard God and the sun as the same. Sabianism would appear to be the natural religion of all races aboriginal to a dry, healthful climate, with clear air and much bright weather, as we find to have been the case in Chaldee, Persia, and Mexico. They pray upon the flat roofs of their 476 CUSTOMS, DRESS, ETC " CARAMBA I YA MALADITTO." houses at sunrise and sunset, and no one can certainly tell whether they are praying to the sun or the Catholic Deity, as they are very reticent about their religious belief. A pueblo consists of one large square, with windows, but no doors, the entrance being on the roof and reached by an outside ladder. They dress mostly in woolen of their own manufacture. The women are very stout and muscular, and the men well formed and tolerably good looking, with mild, open countenances. They speak the Spanish with eloquence and fluency, but learn Eng- lish with difficulty. Anciently they composed four distinct Nations, namely : The Piros, Teguas, Queres, and Tagnos ; but are now merged in one, and, according to their own account, not one-tenth as numerous as before the conquest. Who are they ? is the puzzling question. They did not learn their civilization from the Spaniards, that is certain ; but were found by the latter almost as far advanced as to-day. Cas- taneda says the Pueblos came with a nation from the northwest, and their own tradition is that they are Montezumas Indians. Against this, however, Baron Humboldt contended that the Aztec language differed essentially from that of the Pueblos, and Castaneda further says that they were unknown to the peo- ple of Mexico until Cabeza de Vaca and his companions brought OBJECTS OF INTEREST. 477 information of them. The late Albert Gallatin took great interest in this question, and after careful examination pro- nounced the Pueblos to be of Toltec origin. A still more inter- esting question to me is, what of their old civilization was it spontaneous, as in Egypt and the Orient, or did they derive it from some foreign source, from some Asiatic immigration? Unfortunately, we are here out of the domain of obtainable facts, and remitted to vague theories and more or less probable guesses as to the "Mound-builders," and the "Tartars in America," whom the California Chinese aver to have been sent hither by Kublai Kahn in the twelfth century. Bishop Lamy is of opinion that the Pueblos are actually Indians, with a civilization peculiarly their own, and pronounces them the best practical Christians in New Mexico. Among so many objects of interest Santa Fe assumed new beauties in my eyes, and I could almost forgive the natives for presuming to exist. They style the location "the western base of the Rocky Chain," but to me it seems not the base, but half or two-thirds of the way up the mountain. The valley of the Santa Fe River is nowhere more than a mile or two wide, the river itself about a rod wide and six inches deep, and on both sides of it the city extends in tolerably regular squares. About one-tenth the amount of rain falls in a year as in Ohio. The river is diverted from its main channel into acecquias, one for each street, and all the crops are watered regularly, though by an awkward and unscientific method of irrigation. Daily I studied the routes through Arizona, and each day brought fresh tales of disaster. First came a Mexican from El Paso, whose two companions were killed by Indians on the edge of the Jornada del Muerto; and next a butcher from the western border, whose Mexican herders were killed and all his stock run off by the Mescalero Apaches. And while he was yet speaking came another messenger and said that nine pros- pectors, who left by the northern route, went too far south, fell into an ambuscade, and " their scalps now ornament the lodges of Collyer's pets." We next receive Arizona papers with the information that 478 PERILS OF TRAVELERS. the Eastern coach was attacked near Tucson, and the driver and messenger killed ; and that the Western coach was robbed beyond Fort Yuma by Mexican ladrones, and the station-keeper and one messenger murdered. The white population of Arizona is 9600, and they average a loss of twenty per month by Apaches and Mexicans about half the ordinary mortality of an army. All things considered, I concluded to try the northern route. A soldier was about to start for Fort Wingate with a wagon-load of provisions ; and General Myers, Quartermaster, kindly gave me passage with him. From Wingate I thought to catch some kind of an expedition to Prescott. There were stretches of fifty miles on that line without grass or water, but there are no hostile Indians, which perfectly suited the writer. By waiting a month I could have gone to the Little Colorado with a party of engineers ; but life is too short to stay a whole month in Santa Fe. CHAPTER XXIV. "GREASERDOM." Off from Santa Fe La Bajada Rio .Grande Valley The Pueblo de San Do- mingo Mexican farms Albuquerque Crossing the Rio Grande On the Desert Rio Puerco El Rito " Town of the . Lake " Cubero McCarty'a Ranche Murder by the Navajoes Agua Azul The extinct volcano Summit of the Sierra Madre At Wingate My soldier comes to grief. WELVE days I abode in Santa Fe, and my summing up is about like that of the sailor who had agreed to write to his friends of the manners and customs of the people he visited : when shipwrecked on the coast of Patagonia he wrote, " These people have no manners, and their customs are disgusting." No, I am wrong there : they have a surplus of manners; it is in morals there is a de- ficit. The Territory contains about eighty thousand native Mexicans, divisible into three classes : the gente fina, or noble bloods, of whom there are about fifteen families; the respect- able middle classes, who may possibly amount to two thousand in all ; and the "Greasers," who make up about ninety-five per cent, of the whole. Taking out fifteen families, it is my solemn conviction that the property of all the other Mexicans in the Territory will not average fifty dollars apiece. I thought, be- fore this trip, that Utah was the poorest part of America ; but the Mormons roll in wealth compared to the New Mexicans. As to morals, which is the worse, polygamy or promiscuous concubinage ? That is a great moral question which I am not competent to decide. People who have lived among them many years confidently assert that there are some, in fact a number, of virtuous people among the natives. I hope it is so. Let us take it for granted, and dismiss the subject. At 11 A. M. of May 22d, I took my seat on a freight wagon 479 480 EEMINISCENCES OF SANTA FE. and rolled out of the new Mexican capital. Crossing the Rio de Santa Fc, we left the valley and struck across the mesa in a southwest direction, the city behind us appearing to sink slowly into the earth. Looking back upon it, this noted town ap- peared to my eye exactly like a collection of old brick yards. It is my invariable custom to say something good of a town on departing, if I can possibly think of a good thing to say ; but I am puzzled what to say for Santa Fe. Verily my stay there left the worst impressions I ever had of any city in the West. The few Americans there I liked, but as for the natives, if there is hope for them, morally or intellectually, I have failed to see the signs. That the city has no commercial future is, to my mind, self-evident. I find it difficult to convey on paper the exact reasons, but if one could stand on the mesa a few miles southwest, he would see it at a glance: the mountains extend around it in a semicircle, putting out north and south of it almost to the Rio Grande, and all practicable passes for railroads completely flank it. Either the Atlantic and Pacific, or the Denver and Rio Grande would have to go forty or more miles beyond it, then bend around the points of the mountain cres- cent and run back and up a rise of two thousand feet or more to reach it. The site, moreover, is five hundred feet higher than the highest point on the surveyed line of the Atlantic and Pacific. It was an important place in the old days of freighting from the Missouri border, because it was on the first level and fertile piece of ground the trains could reach after getting through the mountain passes ; but it can never be a railroad center. It may some day have a branch road, but even that I consider very doubtful. My only companion from Santa Fe to Fort Wingate was Frank Hamilton, of the 8th U. S. Cavalry, stationed at that post. Frank had been detailed to come to Santa Fe on mili- tary business, and had improved the occasion by getting glori- ously drunk, in which condition he remained most of the time he was at Santa Fe, and was barely sober enough to know the road when we started. The average regular soldier will take his tod as often as he can get the chance. LA BAJADA. 481 SOUTHWEST FROM SANTA FE. Instead of goicg westward down the Santa Fe, we turn south- west, rising by successive " benches " to a vast barren table land. We pass in the afternoon one Mexican hamlet, looking like a collection of half a dozen "green" brick yards, dry, hard, dusty and desolate. Crossing the high mesa, level as the sea, we approach an irregular line of rocks, rising like turrets ten or twenty feet above the plain, which we find to be a sort of natural battlement along the edge of the " big hill." Reaching the cliff we see, at an angle of forty-five degrees below us, in a narrow valley, the town of La Bajada. Down the face of this frightful hill the road winds in a series of zigzags, bounded in. the worst places by rocky walls, descending fifteen hundred feet in three-quarters of a mile. La Bajada is the stereotyped New Mexican town a collection of mud huts, among which one or two whitewashed domos indicate the residences of persons of the genie fina (hen-ta fee-nah\ or as they themselves style it, of the sangre azul (blue blood). The town has a hotel, consisting of a 31 482 HOTEL Iff LA BAJADA. quadrangle of rooms around an open square, which contains some flowers, two shade trees, benches and wash-stands. The rooms have floors of wood, instead of dirt; the walls are white- washed ; two mirrors and a buffalo-skin lounge adorn the sit- ting-room, and generally the place almost ranks as respectable. Two bright-eyed, graceful, copper-colored senoritas bring me a supper of coffee, side meat, eggs, and tortillas de mais, and entertain me with a voluminous account in musical Spanish of their personal recollections of the place. I have learned enough of the language to be able to say "ah," "yes" and "no" at nearly the right place, and that is the most required to keep a Mexican woman social. My companion, jolly drunk, was barely able to get his team into the corral, when he fell back into the wagon asleep, and, as he was the cook of our outfit, I was obliged to stay overnight at the hotel. Except the two houses mentioned, the whole town is of a uniform dull clay color, walls of mud, fences of mud, door and window casings of mud- colored wood, roofs of slightly sloping poles, covered with earth two or three feet thick, floors of native earth beaten hard, and nowhere a patch of grass to -relieve the wearied eye. No words can convey to an Ohio man the utter dreariness of an average New Mexican town. I was curious to know the meaning of the name, for it was the first Mexican town I had seen which was not named after some saint or angel. They have the saintliest names and the most unsaintly looking towns of any people I know. The words mean " The Descent," and are pronounced altogether Lavvahadda. We left La Bajada in the coolness of the morning, for we had got down to a warm climate, and descended a gentle slope to the valley of the Rio Grande. The river was as great a disap- pointment as most of the towns had been : broad, swift and muddy, navigable for scows and flats only, and at this season too thick to swim in. The rise had spoiled the usual crossing place, and we must travel down the river two days to Albuquer- que. We left the Indian pueblo of Santo Domingo some three hundred yards to our right, but while the driver jogged along at A TALK WITH A PUEBLO. 483 a sobre passo gait of two miles per hour, I left the wagon for a look at the curious town. The houses differ but little from those of the Mexicans: a few have doors, but to most the entrance is on top, and reached by a ladder or rude adobe stair- way at the corner. I saw but few men, most of them being in the fields at work, as these Pueblos are a very industrious race. Unlike all other Indians J have seen, they might with some truth be called red, their complexion being almost rosy, at least a bright mahogany color. Why our aborigines were first called " red men " I can't imagine, for the only tribe, except these, I ever saw, with even an approach to red in their faces, were the Chippewas, of Northern Minnesota. One man of unusual intelligence ac- companied me three miles on my road. He gave his name as Anto- nio Gomez, and we car- ried on a lively conver- sation, as well as men can who have but four or five hundred words in common, that being about the extent of my Spanish. He described their mode of irrigation and stock-tending, and gathering some of what he called "flares amarillos del chaparral" (yellow flowers of the large greasewood), he gave me to understand that they made of them a strong tea which was good for " mujeres, muchachas, mulas, cabaUos y todos los otros," (women, children, mules, horses and every other thing). But to my main question: " Pasar quantos anos vienen los Pue- blos aquit" (since how many years first came your people here ?) he laughed, a little contemptuously I thought, and then replied: " Quien sabe f Quisas doce quinientos! " (Who knows ? Perhaps a dozen times five hundred !) From the frequent use of this word, quinientos, I was led to conclude that the Pueblos estimated by PUEBLO CACIQUE. 484 DECREASE OF THE PUEBLOS. five hundreds instead of thousands; but the whites best ac- quainted with them tell me that they are rarely able to count beyond a hundred, and generally reckon only by tens. Any number beyond a hundred is "infinity" or "eternity," and vaguely expressed by the word quinientos. Three miles brought us down into a beautiful vega, contain- ing some two miles square of rich, natural meadow on which the Pueblos had several hundred head of horses and mules. My companion pointed out with some pride his own manada of sixty mules and mares, attended by his three boys, and urged me to stop at his rancheria and take dinner. But ap- pearances were not inviting, so I plead no tiempo, and hurried on after the team, Antonio leaving me with a friendly grasp and, "Addio, Senor,pasa buenas dies." (May you pass good days.) A little farther on we drove within a quarter of a mile of the river, where almost the whole village of Pueblos were hauling a rude seine. They held up some good-sized fish, shouting the price; but on my declining, waved me off with, " Buena Jornada, Sefior /" (A good journey, sir.) The slow but steady decrease of the Pueblos is attributed by different persons to many different causes. I think it is largely owing to the system of intermarriage pursued in each pueblo ("village"). The authorities have assigned to each a sort of reservation, generally six miles square, as they are scattered in every part of the Territory and mingled among the Mexican towns. This makes of each one an isolated community sepa- rated by many miles of Mexican country from any other pue- blo, and left to its own population exclusively for society. The Indians of one know little or nothing of those of another. Many of them number no more than two or three hundred inhabitants each, and in this small number the same families have married back and forward for hundreds of years till every member of the community is some akin to every other member. Degeneration and decay are the inevitable results. To speak bluntly, the stock needs a new graft. This "marrying in and in" is a Spanish custom, also, and the Mexicans, who cannot plead necessity, consider such marriages rather preferable. A WIFE'S RELATIONS. 485 Young Americans who take Mexican wives sometimes discover this fact in a rather ludicrous manner. In the small towns every- body seems to be some akin, and relationship is a great thing with the Mexicans, calling of course for extensive hospitality. So the newly made wife brings up a gang approximating to hundreds, and introduces the husband to her primer o, and her segundo and her tercero (first, second and third cousins), till he is frantic at the thought that he has married the whole infernal community. Santo Domingo is the point where the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad as at present surveyed is to reach the Rio Grande, greatly to the disappoint- ment of Albuquerque. The road crosses the mountain and enters this valley along the Galis- teo River. Instead of crossing the Rio Grande Valley at right angles, as had been expected, the road will enter at Santo Domingo, and thence run south through Albuquer- que to Isletta, some four- teen miles further south, and there cross the river. The charter is so worded as to give the road other lands in the Territory in lieu of those already occupied along its line; and the Register estimates its total grant in New Mexico at eleven million acres, or one-seventh of the Territory. But he adds this comfort: "Real estate in New Mexico has in- creased in value more than eleven million dollars in the last twenty-four hours, owing to the definite location of this road MY RELATIONS, SIB." 486 APPEARANCE OF THE COUNTBY. and it would be difficult to estimate the benefit that will result to the Territory from its completion." We pass the little pueblo of San Felipe, and from this vega rise on to another desert for ten miles the same eye- weary ing panorama of dry sand, dark gray rock and treeless, grassless mesa, the whole uninhabited and uninhabitable. About 3 P. M., we descend to another oasis of two or three square miles, where we spend the night at the town of Algodonas. All that I had previously seen of unsightly Mexican towns is eclipsed by this straggling row of unburnt brick kilns, walls, fences, houses, fields and corrals of dried rnud. My companion had fortunately got sober enough to cook our dinner (or supper rather) while I hunted for some additions to our fare, which consisted of army bread, pork, coffee and potatoes. I found three luxuries for sale : vino de pais, (native wine,) eggs and goafs milk. My soldier took the milk by choice, but I confined myself to the eggs and wine with the regular fare. After supper I ran about town till I found one intelligent citizen, who gave me much information about the country, in a mixture of French and Spanish. " When will the Thirty-fifth parallel road be built ? " and "Will New Mexico be admitted soon as a State?" were the questions on which he earnestly desired information. He set forth the arguments for a State Government at great length. The strongest in his estimation seemed to be, " The rich (los ricos) are all in favor of it." As they must pay the expense, he thought they should have whatever they wanted. We were off at six next morning, and a few miles from Algo- donas entered the great oasis of Albuquerque, the largest body of fertile land in New Mexico. For nearly a hun- dred miles, with slight breaks, extends the fertile valley of the Rio Grande, varying from two to eight miles wide. In this portion an acecquia, taken out of the river above, runs along the bluffs, from which side ditches, one every furlong or oftener, convey the water among the fields. There we see ridges of dirt thrown up, dividing each field into little squares, of some five rods each, to hold the water. The labor of irrigating .seems to me much greater than in Utah. In places the careless CULTIVATION. 487 ALGODONAS. natives have allowed the ditches to break and overflow the road for hundreds of yards, irrigating it into a bed of mud, which the teamster, borrowing a term from theology, pro- nounced a work of super-irrigation. In comparison with the Btcrile mesas we had crossed, this fertile strip seemed a very Eden. Wheat, which at Santa Fe was just high enough to give a faint tinge of green, was here a foot high, rank and thrifty. We were twenty-two hundred feet lower than that city, and in a climate at least ten degrees warmer. Not more than one-fifth of the whole area of New Mexico is fit for culti- vation. Even of that so fit, not more than half lies in a posi- tion to be irrigated, with the present system. But that which is fertile is exceedingly so. The Valley of the Rio Grande here is as productive as the Valley of the Nile ; and most of 488 DESCRIPTIVE. the mountains and highlands are of some value for pasturage. For five miles before reaching Albuquerque, our road is through a highly cultivated country, containing some vineyards and many shade trees, forming an agreeable contrast with the rest of the country. In most of these towns one sees no shade trees, no rills of sparkling water coursing the streets, as in Utah and Colorado. The Mexicans only care to live ; they have little or no conception of beauty. One might almost say that the valley of the Rio Grande is New Mexico, just as that of the Nile is Egypt; for outside of it nine-tenths of the country is either totally barren or fit only for pasturage. All the important towns are in that valley or in some tributary thereto, and one may ride from El Paso to Taos through a tolerable continuous line of settlements, while to cross the country from east to west, he will often travel for days together over barren mesas, without sight of a dwelling. At noon of a broiling day we turned westward across the valley, finding a delightful place of rest in the only grove I had seen, towards what appeared from a distance as another array of "green" brick yards; but which is located on the map as Albuquerque. Among the little farms near the city the in- habitants were repairing their fences, as usual just before the summer drought. A box-frame, some two feet square and a foot deep, with no bottom, was placed upon the ground and fil- led with tough mud mingled with a little grass ; then the frame being lifted, left a section of the wall in place to be hardened and whitened (a little) by the sun. Successive blocks were stacked on each other till the fence was four or five feet high. Such a mud-wall, with the ditch by it from which the dirt was taken, is the only fence you will see in days of travel on the Kio Grande. Albuquerque is the coming town of New Mexico, if it has a coming town, which I am much inclined to doubt. Here the Atlantic and Pacific road will bisect a community of one hun- dred thousand people, who will purchase yearly ten or twenty million dollars worth of goods ; asd the general trade of the country will double in a few years after the road is built. But A REST ON THE JOURNEY. 489 ALBUQUERQUE CATHEDRAL. an American can not live here as a farmer now ; as in Utah, he can not compete with the natives. They can live too cheap. The city is some two hundred years old and contains nearly two thousand inhabitants. Here is the finest church in New Mexico that is, a stately pile of adobes, with two lofty whitewashed towers. This is said to be a more moral town than Santa Fe. Bernalillo, a few miles up the river, is the prettiest town in the valley and the residence of the wealthiest man in New Mexico, Don Jose Leandro Perea, whose wealth is estimated at two million dollars. That town and Albuquerque have some pre- tensions and are almost equal to country towns in Indiana. The wealthy families have whitewashed houses, stone window sills, pine floors, sometimes carpets, and live perhaps as well as ordinary farmers in Ohio. Most of the people were peons until the American occupation, and though nominally free are nearly as much subject to the will of los rieos as ever. My soldier concluded to stop here till Sunday "to rest the mules," assuring me by so doing we could reach "Wingate in four days more, though we had one desert and two mountainous ridges to cross. Most of the way we will be on, or near, the exact line of the Atlantic and Pacific. 490 JUNE RISE OF THE RIO GRANDE. Friday afternoon and Saturday I rested, wrote and rambled in the queer, flat old city, calling also on the padre, who is usually the most intelligent man in a Mexican town. All the acting padres are now French or Irish ; the native Mexican priests have been retired, whether on half-pay or not I did not learn. The padre gave me many facts : that the oasis of Albu- querque was some eighty miles long, and averaged four miles wide, and that it was now two hundred and fifty years since the Spanish Duke of Albuquerque encamped on this spot, though the city is not so old. His family title in full was Don Al- phonso Herrera Ponto Delgado de Albuquerque. I asked the padre " what was his front name," but he did not seem to know. His descendants now belong to the genie fina, that is to say, the first families before mentioned (F. F. N. M.), people who have the sangre azul in their veins. We smile at the solemn humbug of these people, who are so exclusive on ac- count of what somebody did two or three centuries ago ; but it is really matter of curious thought that there were considerable cities and Spanish temples in New Mexico before any of our pioneers had crossed the Alleghanies. The vicinity is pretty well cultivated, but the people are very poor, pious and contented. A palacio of dried mud, a meal of corn and pimiento, and a slip of corn-shuck filled with tobacco and rolled into a cigarette, is the Light of a "Greaser's 7 ' ambition. On the 26th, we left Albuquerque, just as the Sunday amuse- ments began. They usually have splendid cathedral services in the morning, a dog-tussle about noon, and a cock-fight later in the day. In the evening, if reflective, the " Greaser" smokes cigarettes and meditates ; if sentimental, he goes court- ing. My soldier was sober again, by chance, and eager to start, while I felt refreshed, and ready for the desert. The " June rise " of the Eio Grande (El Rio they call it there "The River") had come on a week or two earlier than common, and a vast bayou covered two-thirds of the "bottom" between the city and the main channel. In this we encoun- tered dangerous whirls and jump-offs, the wagon often plunging "ABOUT so HIGH." 491 in up to the bed, and two or three times the little lead mules were obliged to swim a rod or so. When we reached the narrow strip of high ground near the river, the whole popula- tion of the string-town opposite were collected on the bank, on their way to the Cathedral and other Sabbath amusements. Half a dozen families were laboring across in their own skiffs, while the main ferry flat was loaded to the guards. The women, in gay robes and black rebosos, were laughing, shout- ing and singing, while the men screamed, swore and shouted directions all at once to the four boatmen, and the flat drifted in circles down the swift current. Fortunately, the actual channel is not more than two hundred yards wide, and the flat only descended half a mile in making the passage. A boat load of Mexicans on the way to church can make more noise than two circus shows. Having passed the main current, the ferrymen jumped overboard, and, wading up to their armpits, with tow ropes on shoulder, hauled the flat to shore. This trifling incident is a beautiful illustration of the Mexican style of doing everything. Once landed, the male passengers took to the bayou without a thought for their summer pantaloons ; but the women, being gaily dressed for church, dropped upon the grass, snatched off their under clothing, raised their dresses " about so high," and waded to town with the utmost nonchalance, laughing, chatter- ing, and singing hymns to the Virgin ! Here and there was seen a youth of unusual filial piety, carrying his mother astride his shoulders ; but most of the women encountered the difficul- ties of the way with a hardihood fully equal to that of the men. Two hours of Mexican awkwardness set us across, and we left the west bank for the sand hills just as the great bell of the adobe Cathedral was calling these copper-colored Christians to morning mass. The western hills looked bad enough from the town, and more than kept their promise. One mile across the valley brought us to the first mesa, not more than fifty feet above the river, and covered for four or five miles with a toler- able growth of greasewood, cactus and bunch-grass, indicating some fertility. Then we entered upon another gradual ascent 492 THIRST. ABOUT SO HIGH.' of some three miles, and were fairly on the desert miles on miles of sand, gravel, rock and hard, bare earth. The heat was most intense, and till late in the afternoon but little air was stirring. At 2 P. M., having gained the highest point of the day's route, we were forced to stop a while to catch a little of what air was going. Loosing the harness from the mules, the driver and myself took refuge under the wagon the only chance for shade. The sky above us was molten brass, the angry sun glared upon a blistering white plain near us, which rolled away in successive ranges of yellow hills, without a patch of green, save far to the east, where a faint tinge marked the course of the Rio Grande. Oh, to be on its green banks once more ! To us it seemed more to be desired than Abana and Pharpar, or all the rivers of Judea and Damascus. The place we occupied seemed sacred to the genius of drought and desolation. The driver, with the usual improvidence of the regular soldier, had secured but one canteen, which was ex- hausted by noon, though the water was almost simmering. He suggested bacon rind to mitigate thirst, and though directly contrary to what I had expected, it proved quite effica- cious. Paring all the meat off, and scraping the outside, we placed small portions of the clean rind in our mouths, where vigorous chewing soon created moisture enough to give a sensi- ble relief. Soldiers in this Territory tell me they have gon< WATER FOUND. 493 two days without water, and avoided any serious suffering by this simple expedient. A piece of silver, or small splinter of mountain pine, held in the mouth and rolled about with the tongue, is often used for the same purpose. In an hour the evening wind rose, and we moved on. At 5 P. M., we reached a down grade, and saw on the western horizon a straggling line of dwarf pines, indicating the course of the Puerco. Our mules showed new life, gave a grateful whinny, and broke into a trot. Fortunately we found some water still in the channel, though fast sinking. Three weeks ago the Rio Puerco (Spanish for " Hog River ") was a torrent; one week more, and it will be a resaca (" dry channel "). It runs but two months in the year ; at other times, travelers must hunt along the dry channel till they find a brackish pool, or dig in the river bed. The water looked exactly like dirty milk, and its temperature was about 70 ; but it was grateful enough to us. The driver drank two quart cups of it in ten minutes, and the poor animals crowded down the only accessible place, and shoved each other into the stream in their eagerness to get at the dirty fluid. Fortunately the dirt which gives color to the water is so fine, that one cannot feel it grit in his teeth, and aside from the earthy taste, the water is not disagreeable. The immediate valley of the Puerco what we Hoosiers would call the " bottom " is about two miles wide, and has every sign of great natural fertility. The soil is black, and as loose as any part of the Wabash " bottoms ; " water alone is lacking. In early March the mountain snows send down a flood of water, and the whole valley is covered with green grass, which endures till near the 1st of May. Then all moisture disappears except the river channel ; the plain changes from green to striped, from striped to yellow, and from yellow to velvet, and finally dirty brown. The grass, dead ripe, drops its seed in the deep cracks produced by the sun's heat, and is blown out by the roots, and the whole plain becomes a bed of black dust, seamed occasionally by cracks in which a good- sized child might be lost. Ten years before, the Mexicans attempted to settle it ; built a dam. to retain the spring freshet, 494 and constructed half a dozen adobe houses near the road. But, on account of their usual awkwardness, their dam was destroyed by the first freshet, their acequia was dry the 1st of June just when they needed it the impractical " Greasers" gently com- plained to Nuestra Madre de dolores, and abandoned the settle- ment. We spread our blankets in one of their abandoned domoSj and passed a comfortable night. The head of the Puerco, it is said, is only a few hundred yards from the main head of the San Juan, a perennial stream, and a canal to irri- gate this entire valley could be constructed for ten thousand dollars. The fertility of these valleys, when irrigated, is won- derful, and the reclamation of the hundred or more sections on the Puerco for the above sum would be very cheap. From the "Hog River " we have twenty-six miles more of desert, totally destitute of water ; hence we turn out at 2 P. M., and are on the road by moonlight. All that which yesterday looked so drear is enchantingly lovely by the clear light of a New Mexican night sky, and the turbid Puerco now seems like a current of molten silver. There is but one place in which it can be crossed, the channel being some twenty-five feet deep and not more than fifty wide at the top of the bank. It had fallen six inches during the night, leaving but three feet of water (a, rod or two wide), from which my companion inferred that it would be totally dry in less than a week. Thence we rise again to another desert, and in ten miles reach the ancient border of the Navajoes, (or Navahoes, if spelled as pronounced,) a series of rugged gulches and narrow cafLons, bounded by perpendicular walls of yellow soapstone. They run from north to south, and form a break in the road something near a mile wide, evidently the bed of a long extinct river. Wash gravel and marine shells are heaped in fantastic piles by the wind. The deepest is known as Dead Man's Cafion, where are buried twenty whites massacred many years ago by the Navajoes. This tribe was long the terror of Northwestern New Mexico. They were slowly depopu- lating the outer Mexican settlements, when, in 1864, General W. H. Carleton organized his grand campaign, and reduced them to perfect submission. A party of them overtook us at the Rio DARWINIAN THEORY. 495 Grande, one chief and eleven warriors, who had been down to the Coraanche country on a stock stealing expedition, and at the caflon we learned that they had passed westward some hoars before us, having made the forty-four miles afoot in a little over one day. They got no horses and had some men wounded. Many apprehensions were expressed by the Mexicans that the tribe would soon go on the war path, as their crops were a total failure the previous year, and no appropriation having been made for this deficiency, they must steal or starve. By our early start we escaped the midday heat upon the desert, but the drying air produced strange effects. My nose, lips, and wrists, which blistered yesterday, peeled to-day, and I started to grow a new cuticle on those members. My nose was coloring like a new meerschaum, forming a very striking feature of my countenance. How convenient it would be, sometimes, if man could sprout new members in place of lost ones, as a lobster does his claw, or a bee its sting. But then we don't seriously need such a faculty, or we should have it. According to Dar- win, all that is necessary is to be placed in a condition where it is a sort of necessity, and cultivate the desire for it a few hun- dred or thousand generations, and the faculty will spontaneously develop. Beautiful theory ! From Dead Man's Caflon we ascend a gentle slope and travel some twelve miles through a wide pass, almost level, bounded north and south by abrupt mountain spurs, which show indica- tions of iron ore in great abundance. Thence down a gentle slope, where the earth is red with iron (sesquioxide), we enter a vast baked plain of barren clay, as hard as the sun's rays can make it. On the western side of the plain appears a slight depression of most inviting green, containing probably five sections of exceedingly fertile land. North, south and west of it rise mountain ridges, with hollows scantily clothed with grass, and just this side of the oasis on the baked plain for they can not afford to build on fertile soil stands the Mexican ham- let of El Rito (" Little River"). We had made our day's drive of twenty six miles by noon. Before leaving Santa Fe I had procured an enlarged map of New Mexico, which had numerous 496 EL mm streams located all through this country ; but in place of water, in three fourths of them, I found a channel of shifting sand, which had evidently been subjected to the action of water once, but whether one month or a thousand years ago, I could not determine. My entertaining companion, who had made at least three distinct remarks since leaving Albuquerque, here suggested that my map was made in February or March, when all these gulches do run great torrents of water. As he said this in per- fect innocence and good faith, it amounted to a pretty good thing for him to say. Of all the employments on top of ground I think private soldiering in this country most completely dries up the mental fluids. Some of these streams run as long as six weeks, and the rest of the year are dry beyond an Ohioan's conception. They call them here arroyos or resacas. El Rito is a strange, old, isolated Mexican town, away out on the edge of the desert, twenty-five miles from the nearest neigh- bor; and yet it is a century old, and has doubtless contained the same families perhaps forty in all during all that time. No church, no school, no papers, no books, or very few, to intro- duce a new idea; but family concerns, town concerns, the winter's rain and the spring rise ; the rare passage of a Govern- ment train, and the rarer visit of the itinerating padre to bap- tize the children and confess and absolve the elders, make up their little world of incidents. The oasis is plowed with a sharpened log, well seasoned and hewn into the shape of an Irish spade, and the crops tended with hoe and rake ; while the goats, sheep, and asses are pastured in the mountain hollows, and the hens live upon crickets and earth worms. If the family burro (donkey) does not die, if the goats do well, if the water is sufficient for enough of mais and chile Colorado, and the hens lay eggs enough to send off by the weekly peddler, and procure a little tobacco and flowered calico, then Quien quicre por mas? (Who cares for more?) In this little community of degenerate Spaniards A's children have married B's children, and vice versa, and in the next generation double-cousins married double-cousins, for a hundred and fifty years, till the wine of life has run down to the very lees and flows dull in RELATIONSHIP. 497 MEXICAN FARM HOUSE. sluggish veins for want of a vitalizing current of alien blood. Every person in the settlement is some akin to every other per- son in it ; and the miserable Spanish custom of " marrying in- and-in," which has destroyed the Hidalgoes of old Spain, is here made tenfold worse by necessity. In the whole Territory this custom prevails with best families, and the gente fina of New Mexico have paid a fearful price for that sangre azul of which they boast. El Rito might plead necessity for the custom, but inexorable nature does not accept such an excuse. Occasion- ally a benevolent American wanders this way, and if his stay be long enough, does something toward improving the race; and it is but simple justice to our countrymen to state the fact, that the residence of even one of them in a Mexican hamlet is pretty sure to be followed in the next generation by children of improved physique, with the light hair and Saxon features which mark the superior race. While the soldier secured his train in the public corral, I walked about the dry and flinty streets, contemplating the sore- eyed children, measly chickens and sick goats, reposing together on the shady side of the clay walls, with an eye of curious pity. 32 498 AN AMERICAN FROM TIPPERARY. The men and larger boys were at work in the public field, or tending flocks among the hills ; the women asleep, or sitting on the dirt floor smoking cheroots of corn shuck and tobacco, and the whole juvenile population looked to me like a miserable batch of rags, sore eyes, and sin. There was not a tree, a flower, or a spear of grass in the place. Those persons I spoke to were even too lazy to understand Spanish as I spoke it, anyhow. They only grunted, "No sabe" and point- ing to a rather superior adobe on the hill, remarked, "Alii, un Americano." Thither I went, and found an "American" indeed. His name was Ryan, and he was " from Tipperary, indade." However, he spoke English and Spanish fluently, and gave me much valuable information. He drifted in there six years ago, liked it, married a Mexican woman, had several Pueblo ser- vants and a flock of sheep, and was general advisor, advocate and scribe for the settlement. A 'delegation of Pueblos from the next town were at his house to complain of the Navajoes, who had been stealing their stock, and to seek redress. He took me to the public /oncfa, where I got a good supper of goat's milk, tortillas and eggs, and a clean room, and spent the evening quite pleasantly. The nights there are delightful ; a little too cool toward morning, perhaps, for comfortable sleeping in the open air, but with abundant blankets we did well. The entire mountain range southwest is said to be a mass of min- erals, coal, iron, and copper. It is a region of curiosities. In the next valley south is the largest one of the abandoned cities of whom ! Qiden sabe, is the universal answer of Mexican and Indian. Most of the houses there are of sawed stone. Three miles ahead, and on our road, is the noted Pueblo de Laguna, probably the best built of all the Montezumas towns. This pueblo, (" town of the lake,") is so called because in ancient times a vast causeway extended across the upper part of the valley, which was constructed by the Pueblos, to retain the winter floods for summer irrigation, creating a lake several miles in extent. The road from El Rito runs around in a regular U for seven miles to get up to the next higher valley ; HOUSES ON THE ROCKS. 499 but there is a rocky trail straight up through one of the moun- tain passes which reaches the town in three miles, and this I followed, gaining some two hours on the team by that and my early start. The sun was just rising as I entered the pueblo, and the inhabitants were mostly on the house-tops preparing their implements for the day's work. The town is situated upon the east end of an oval rock or mole, some two miles long, and rising gradually at each end to a hight of a hundred feet above the bordering plain. The top is comparatively level, and the sides fall off in a succession of abrupt benches, each a yard or so in width and hight, rendering the whole place a splendid natural fortification. On these rocks the Pueblos first built for protection, and are slow to change, though in the present lengthy peace some of them are beginning to build out on the farm. I had met the Cacique of this pueblo the day before at Kyan's, in El Rito, and been introduced to him. He is one of the most intelligent of the race; spoke Spanish fluently, and a little English. He treated me with rare courtesy, and by many cross-questionings, gestures and repetitions we managed to con- verse with interest. Unlike all other Pueblos I had met, he seemed to have some definite idea of the antiquity of his race and their origin. He gave me to understand that from the traces in Arizona and this Territory, they must have come originally from the west, and had always been at war with other Indians. Slowly repeating the few words of English he could command "All 'e times war; no times peace; all 'e times Pueblos 7 house on rock, no times on field " he swept his hand in great circles to indicate a vast and indefinite lapse of time. He then had recourse to many gestures and voluminous Span- ish, of which I understood but little, and that seem to imply that many hundred miles west of here I would find Pueblos " away up on steep rocks/' where they could only get up and down by ladders. Many of the houses have a second story, not more than half or one-third as extensive as the lower one ; and some few have a sort of tower, or third story, on top of the second. To this I several times signified a desire to ascend, but the Cacique either did not 500 RELIGION OF THE PUEBLOS. understand me, or did not see fit to grant my request. Unedu- cated and semi-barbarous people as they are, themselves destitute of the intelligent curiosity of the civilized man, can not under- stand the existence of it in him, and nearly always attribute its manifestation to some mean or possibly hostile motive. Gener- ally the Pueblos dislike to have white visitors; few of them are communicative to one who asks many questions, and, long as the Zuni branch of the race has been in contact with the whites, I am told there is very little positively known about them. Still less do they appreciate any religious motive; to them a people's religion is their property, just as their land or houses are, and a part of their customs, like their wars and dances. Hence, they at first distrust religious teachers or visitors more than any one else. For these reasons the accounts of mission- aries, especially their first accounts, among any barbarous people, must be received with great caution. It is nearly or quite impossible to make an Indian understand why any one should want him to give up his religion and adopt that of an- other ; he can not assign any probable motive for such solicitude, and invariably concludes there must be a swindle in it some- where. He will readily acknowledge that the white man's religion is true and good for the white man. And, of course, the Indian's religion is equally true and good for the Indian. There had been trouble in this pueblo lately on religious matters, though I could not fully understand the merits of the case. It seems that when the Spanish Jesuits "converted" these people, some two centuries ago, they found it impossible to eradicate entirely the Montezumas faith, and so made a com- promise. They gave them the Catholic religion, with its most impressive ceremonies, and permitted them to keep all their Montezumas customs which did not amount to actual idolatry. These consisted mostly of dances and feasts at stated times, which had more of a national than a religious significance. But since Governor Arny took charge of them an attempt has been made to convert them to Protestantism, and this has created difficulties among themselves. Since visiting that pueblo, I have learned there was a white man there teaching, though I did not see him. MATERIALS OF THE HOUSES. 501 To attempt their conversion to Protestantism in their present grade of intelligence seems to me rather premature : the bare suggestion of reasoning with such a people about the " real presence/' "immaculate conception," grace, free will and pre- destination, involves an exquisite absurdity. Morally, the Pueblos are doing well : the men are ten-fold more honest, and the women a hundred-fold more virtuous than are the Mexi- cans. This is not only my own observation, but the opinion of every one I have talked with who knew them. The houses of the pueblo are massive and solidly built of stone, cement and occasionally adobes ; it is better built than any of the Mexican towns I have seen, except, perhaps, Santa F e and Al buquerque. Struck by the appearance of the massive timbers used for joists in the Cacique's house, I asked how they were obtained, and was informed that they were brought with burros from the moun- tains ten miles distant. They could scarcely have been transported on the backs of these little don- keys ill the Mexican fash- ion, and as the Pueblos own no carts, I wonder how they brought them. The joists were large as ordinary house sills in the States, which I judged to be for the better support of the upper stories, as I noticed the walls of these in some instances not continuous with or resting on the walls below, but built directly across and over the rooms. The interior of the lower rooms was whitewashed and pleasantly neat, but in and about many of the houses was an unpleasant odor of green hides, which were hanging near, this being a general butchering time with them. Their windows are made of a material they call acquarra a kind of isinglass, I PUEBLO MAIDEN. 502 "MOUND BUILDERS." think, translucent but not transparent. It lights the interior nearly as well as glass. The Cacique spoke with some pride of the many cattle, sheep and goats owned by his town, and then broke out into bitter complaints of the Navajoes, who had lately stolen a dozen horses and ten cattle from them. The Pueblos have always been at peace with the whites, except the brief period of the rebellion against the Spaniards in 1680 '90, and from time im- memorial have had the same customs, and the same grade of civilization as now. They did not learn it from the Spaniards; they dwell in the same houses and use substantially the same implements as before the latter came the only change being* that in some cases they fasten timber with iron where they for- merly used seasoned wood. Their women are neat and modest. The children mostly go naked to the age often or twelve years, and are hardy and well formed. All ages and sexes have splendid teeth perfect rows of pearls. No one can tell the age of this town ; it was here when the Spaniards came, and has been here, the Indians say, ever since their grandfathers had any account. Some twenty miles south is the ancient Aztec city of Sobieta, which has been in ruins from the earliest historic times. Many of the houses were constructed of square stones, which even now show marks of the saw ; others of flat stones laid in mortar, and some apparently of timber and adobe, though but the merest outlines of these remain. All the towns show their people to have lived in a state of continual warfare. New Mexico is notable as being the only part of our country in which a civilization has been once estab- lished and completely overthrown. I might say twice estab- lished and the second time decayed, for it now seems to me that these New Mexicans must be far inferior to their Spanish an- cestors, and that they are still retrograding. Modern research Mas done much to clear up the mysteries of this region, and from more thorough exploration of Yucatan and South America we may yet learn the true history of the Aztecs and the " Mound Builders." The subject is full of interest, but it is a melancholy interest. It has about it much of that feeling which results from the contemplation of decay and ruin. There RELICS OF PAST AGES. 503 is an eloquence in decay, but it is a sad eloquence ; and growth has more of vital interest than decline, even as we gaze with more pleasure upon the robust boy than upon the decrepid old man. But I am powerfully impelled, as I look upon these relics of age, to ask : Is this the necessary fate of all peoples, all civilization ? Must all grow old, become effete, and wither and die like an individual, while genius, learning and progress take their flight to other lands?' And must we, too, cover our land with connecting lines of wire and rail, and build cities and temples, only that thousands of years hence another people may dig among our ruins, and wonderingly inquire of us and our works ? Even if our civilization survive, some day our Nation, our Government must pass its manhood, grow old, decay and perish perhaps in a sea of blood ! History teaches this as truth, and we can only sigh with the poet: " Yes, come it must, the day decreed by fates How my heart trembles while my tongue relates When thou, beloved State, thyself must bend, And see thy warriors fall, thy glories end." Something less than three hours had passed at the pueblo when our team moved on. The road runs partly over the east end of the rocky mole, on which the pueblo stands, and thence along its northern side, and we descended into a beautiful and fertile valley, some five miles long, the common property of the Pueblo. The place has a population of at least eight hundred, and the valley does not contain more than twelve sections of arable land ; but they cultivate it closely, and there being abun- dant water for irrigation, it produces amazingly. Wooden plows were running, breaking up the ground for late crops, arid on the adjoining hills I saw extensive herds of goats and sheep attended by young Pueblos. Crossing this oasis we entered another broad cafion, which we followed for some ten miles to the town of Cubero, somewhat better than the ordinary Mexican hamlet. It is built on a series of shelving rocks; some of the dwellings were of stone, nearly all had stone floors, and the place seemed literally bask- 504 PUEBLOS ON A SPREE. ing under the fierce rays of a New Mexican sun. There is no part of America which so exactly answers the best descriptions of Syria as western New Mexico. There are the same yellow and striped mountains, seamed and scarred as if blasted by a million years of storm and lightning; the same canons with perpendicular walls, and stifling with hot, stagnant air, and the same dry sands and white deserts and treeless, grassless mesas. And here and there, too, are fertile oases, where privileged na- ture seems to have exhausted the resources she denied to all the rest of the land ; rich valleys, that return a hundred-fold for the husbandman's seed, and over all a sky of dazzling purity, with moonlight at times so bright that one can read ordinary print. And here and there among the mountains, in the dryest and most unexpected places, springs bubble out and cool water drips over the rocks, and green, rank grass covers a plat of an acre or two with rare beauty, all the. more enchanting for the surround- ing desolation. At certain points, too, one finds square wells as large as an ordinary dwelling, cut, as it were, down into the solid rock, with a never-failing supply of water; and these be- come places of renown, historic spots, the boundaries of little nations or communities, council grounds and camping places of repute in every part of the country. But among these mountains New Mexico has what Syria has not: a supply of minerals that will bring the energy of the nation here and create a third civilization which Apache and Navajo can not destroy. As regards agriculture, the country West does not contain arable land enough to supply garden-sauce to an average population, such a population as will some day be at work among the mines. At Cubero \ve found another party of Pueblos on a general spree. One able-bodied "buck" was staggering along the street, while his wife followed close beating him in the back and head with the butt end of a wagon whip literally " taking him home;" while most of the Mexican population, those who were not asleep, were out laughing at the sport. Women's rights prevail extensively among the Pueblos. Thence we passed another low "divide," from which five miles brought us down into another oval valley and to"Mc- Carty's Ranche," where we stopped for the night. A LONELY WIDOW. 505 McCarty is a wandering Irishman, drifted into these moun- tains and settled, and married of course to a Mexican woman. I found her far superior to most of her race, speaking English fluently. As I sat in the shade of the house taking sketches of mountain and valley, I was surprised at the appearance of a beautiful little girl of two or three years, with soft golden hair and that beautiful English fairness and transparency of com- plexion which so soon attract the traveler among the dark races. I called her to me in English ; she came, but replied to my questions, 0, un hombre Americano, and ran away to the oppo- site side of the hacienda, where a young American lady ap- peared. I was amazed at seeing her in that place, and noted the singular deference with which all the Mexicans regarded her. Next morning, having learned that I was a journalist, she met me, and explained the fact of her being there. She was the daughter of an old United States army officer, and was married very young to a Scotchman named Dennis Landry. He was trading in western New Mexico, and she had accom- panied him thus far, when two months before he left Blue- water (Agua Azul) to return to McCarty's, and had never been seen since by whites. His wife employed the friendly Pueblos to hunt for traces of him, and they soon brought conclusive proof that he had been murdered by the Navajoes. Indeed, the individual who did the killing had since acknowledged the fact in Cubero. But there seems no convenient way to get at these cases, where an individual of a friendly tribe murders a white. The murderer simply goes to some other tribe, or be- becomes a " dog soldier," at large in the mountains ; the friendly tribe either deny his guilt entirely, or profess a willingness to give him up, if he can be caught. Mrs. Landry informed rne she had spent the last two months here, lonely enough, but still hoping to recover the remains of her husband, " for/ 7 she con- tinued, "why should I go to Santa Fe, or farther East? All places are equally lonesome now. I am as well here as there." Such tragedies occur everywhere on the border, and communi- ties necessarily become hardened and indifferent while individuals continue to suffer. 506 LAVA ROCK. The fertile valley in which McCarty's Ranche is situated, and which is to be traversed by the Thirty-fifth parallel road, gradu- ally narrows westward, and a gorge not more than two hundred yards wide opens into another valley. The last three miles of the former valley is mostly marsh, and thither the officers from Wingate often go to hunt ducks. At the west end rise the springs which water the valley. They boil out from under the rock half a dozen streams of cold, clear water. But a few rods from them the lava beds begin. As I walked over the plain, it looked as if the lava had just cooled. I could see all the little waves and ripples in its surface, and near the springs it had evidently overflowed in successive layers, each an inch or so thick, the lower cooling a little before the one above it was de- posited. In places these folded layers had been broken directly across, folded and contorted, leaving singular gaps and fissures, the sides of which appeared coated in places with lime or sul- phur, and in others by what looked like red sealing-wax turned to stone. Where contorted or twisted the lava rock presented precisely the same appearance as if one should lay down success- ive folds of tarred canvas till the pile was ten or twelve feet thick, and then roll the mass over and over and into long heaps. Some extensions of this twisted mass reached even to the edge of the springs, and I saw indications where it had overflowed into the pools; but most of the way across the valley one could trace the division between the lava and the original rock base on to which it had flowed as easily as with a daub of mud thrown upon the floor of a house. By a rise of perhaps ten feet we entered upon this mala pais, and soon came to where the lava was not in waves, but seemed to have cooled in a mass, presenting a granulated appearance, much like cooling sugar; and a little farther we found it light and frothy looking, as if a hot, foaming current had cooled to stone, porous and spongy like pumice-stone. A mile westward brought us out into the broader valley, and, looking backward, it seemed to me that the lava flow had been choked in the narrow pass about the time the supply was exhausted. Five miles over the level land brought us to another descent, leading down into another oval BUSHELS OF GRAIN. 507 plain ; and, running in a serpentine course across it, I saw a shining line which I judged to be water the irregular course of some mountain stream. But it soon appeared too dazzlingly bright, and we found it only a narrow, dry gulley, bottom and sides crusted with salt and alkali, painful to the eye and tortur- ing to the sense. A little water runs there in winter, just enough to bring down the alkali from the mountains. I can not account for the singular succession of valleys, or passes, like vast sunken river beds, on this route. For a hun- dred and twenty miles from Albuquerque, except at Dead Man's Canon and the moderate ridge just west of the Rio Grande, there is no rise of more than ten feet which is not gained by a grade gentle enough for a railroad. From the lava-beds, or mala pals, to Wingate, we are continually in this sunken chan- nel, which only widens to a great oval at Agua Azul; and soon after we strike the Puerco of the West, which furnishes the same succession of passes down to the Little Colorado. Nature has certainly given the railroad a wonderful way of passage here, whether she has furnished the natural wealth to make it profitable or not. Owing to these openings there is not a serious obstacle or even a difficult " cut " or " fill " for over two hun- dred miles west of the Rio Grande. From the plain of the mala pais we descend a little into Red Valley, about Agua Azul. It is walled in by fearfully abrupt mountains of black and red stone in an irregular circle, and is about five miles by three, containing at least eight sections of land of the utmost fertility. Near the bordering mountains the soil is red, giving name to the valley and the central butte, but lower down it is dark. Running water was found only at the southwest corner of the valley, and there M. Provencher first began to cultivate the soil, when he established the ranche four years before. The yield from this soil of volcanic origin was astonishing; wheat produced thirty-six bushels per acre ; corn thirty-eight fanegas (a fanega is 136 pounds), and oats grew to the hight of a man's head, yielding bounteously. But only one crop was raised ; then the dry season, which has lasted for three years in western New Mexico, set in ; the water failed, and it 508 VISIT TO THE OLD CRATER. is found that even that small stream could not be depended on more than one year in three. Could a certain supply of water be obtained, by artesian wells or otherwise, this little valley would support a community of two thousand people in affluence. Such is the productiveness of this soil, where it is productive at all. Though but one-tenth of the surface of New Mexico can be cultivated, that tenth would supply abundance for a million of people. Fortunately for me, though unfortunately for the soldier, I had plenty of time to examine this singular basin. For, about 3 o'clock next morning we were awakened by a terrible racket and barking of dogs, just in time to see that our mules had broken corral and were lighting out toward Wingate with a speed which showed there was no place like home to them. The soldier went in pursuit, and I visited the Red Butte and old crater therein. The butte is nearly two miles long and a mile wide, rising evenly from the plain on every side, and so abruptly, by a series of " benches " or narrow terraces, that it can only be ascended in two or three places ; and the dimensions on top are only one- fourth less than at the bottom. M. Provencher's theory is that the entire valley was the original crater, bounded only by the rocky battlements we see around the plain, and the size of the present crater of Kilauea. But when the volcano was nearly extinct, the internal fires having died out sufficiently for a solid crust to form over it, another, smaller crater formed inside, as a vent for the last eruptions, feeble compared with those preced- ing them. From the plain it looks as if the top of the butte were level, but having reached it, we find it to be only a rim, an exact pattern on a much reduced scale, apparently, of the rim of the main valley. Inside the rim falls off in abrupt cliffs, rugged knobs and jagged spurs, fifty feet or more, to a sort of bowl-shaped hollow. This looks as if it had been filled with coal, iron, wood, petroleum, lead, copper and scores of combustible minerals, and then the whole subjected to a blast furnace until nothing was left but debris and ashes. This is all I can compare it to, for we find in it the powdered, burnt DISTANT BELLS. 509 AGUA AZUL AND RED BTJTTE. and carbonized remains of nearly everything mineral. If I were scientific unfortunately for the subject I am not I could spend a week in the gulch of this butte; but as it is, I only en- counter scores of things which excite my curiosity, and which I have not science enough to explain. The evening breeze springs up as we sit upon the lowest "bench" of the butte, and sighs among the crags and crevices, producing imitations of the sound of distant bells. I have often heard travelers speak of these chimes heard upon moun- tains and table lands, but had never noticed them before. By a little effort of the imagination one can call up many an old familiar chime, though sounding dimly, as if many miles away. At midnight the soldier returned, hitched up at daylight, and in a steaming state of military wrath whipped his mules through the forty-three miles to Wingate by sundown. Twenty miles east of that post we passed the dividing summit of the Rocky Mountains, (or Sierra Madre; both names are used in- differently there). We reach the western slope through a long 510 A SOLDIER PUNISHED. pass, in many respects resembling the South Pass of the old California trail. It is simply a high, barren and sandy valley through the mountains, bounded on the north by almost per- pendicular sandstone cliffs from five hundred to a thousand feet in hight, and on the south by scantily timbered hills which rise one above another to the highest mountain peak. In the pass and neighboring hills rain is frequent; twenty miles east or west of it none falls for three or four months at a time. The Atlantic and Pacific railroad line is located through this pass, and the grade is so gentle that no difficulties are met with. For three hundred miles west of the Rio Grande, nature seems to have provided a series of valleys especially for a railroad. The real trouble is that the country has so little in it worth building a railroad for. It is a splendid country to travel through ; a miserably poor one to stop in to make a " stake." On the evening of May 31st, we drove into Wingate; my soldier " reported " and in precisely twenty minutes was a close prisoner in the guard house "held for trial." "Charge Unwarranted disposition of stores placed in his care." " Specification In this that the said Frank Hamilton, being entrusted with a team to transport one thousand pounds of potatoes from Santa Fe to this post, did unwarrantably dis- pose of three hundred pounds of the same on the way, etc., etc." He was found guilty of this, and more; and during my stay I was daily pained at sight of him "cleaning quarters" with a most uncomfortable bracelet attachment to his ankle. Take him for all in all, he was the most unfortunate traveling companion I ever had. Moral : Don't go for a regular soldier. Or, if you do, don't trade Government potatoes to Mexican women. CHAPTER XXV. AMONG THE NAVAJOES. At Fort Wingate Natural beauty Wealth of nature A region of curiosities The Zunis Their wonderful civilization Canon deChaco San Juan ruins On to Defiance Navajo history Their semi-civilization Their wars with the Spaniards American relations Major Brooks' negro Navajo War Sub- jugation and decline Their return and progress End of stay at Defiance Sounds of wrath from Santa Fe Apology An original "pome." IGHT days I remained at Fort Wingate, and enjoyed every moment of the time. On arrival I introduced myself as a journalist "surveying the line of the Thirty- fifth parallel road," and was most hospitably treated by the officers'. Having letters to Lieutenant S. W. Fountain, formerly of Pomeroy, Ohio, then Commissary of the post, he made me exceedingly comfortable at his quarters, and I messed with him and Captain A. B. Kauffmann, of the Eighth Cavalry. Lieutenant Fountain is of the same com- pany. I am also under many obligations to Lieutenant H. R. Brinkerhoff, formerly of Union County, Ohio. He assisted me to obtain much information of the surrounding country, and his estimable lady made my stay more like a renewal of " home society" than one would have thought possible in the wilder- ness. In my Western wanderings I have always found the United States Army officers gentlemen, pleasant, hospitable, and well posted on the country where they happen to be located. Besides these mentioned I enjoyed the pleasant ac- quaintance of Lieutenant D. R. Burnham, of Company H. Fif- teenth Infantry, and Dr. R. S. Vickery, Captain and Assistant- Surgeon in medical charge of the post, both Pennsylvanians. Fort Wingate, nearly two hundred miles west of Santa Fe, is a " four company post," but had then only three companies, viz : 511 512 FORT WINGATE. OFFICER'S QUARTERS FORT WIXGATE. Campany A, of the Fifteenth United States Infantry, and Com- panies E and K, of the Eighth United States Cavalry, about a hundred and fifty men in all. It is under command of Brevet- Colonel Wm. Redwood Price, Major of the Eighth Cavalry, but he being then at Tierra Amarilla, attending to the difficul- ties with the Utes there, the command devolved on Captain A. B. Kauffmann. The situation is beautiful, about twenty miles west of the dividing summit of the Rocky Mountains, directly at the head of the Rio Puerco of the West. Along this stream a sloping valley can be followed down to the Colorado Chiquite (" Little"), and down that to the main Colorado this post being thus on the " Pacific slope." Just south of the fort rises a rugged spur of the Sierra Madre, from which Bear Spring (or Ojo del Oso) sends out a cold, clear stream, sufficient to turn a mill wheel. MINERALS. 513 A branch is conducted by piping to the central portion of the fort, where a commodious bath-house has been erected by the soldiers for general use. Most of the water is drawn into an acecquia and conducted to the common field on the plain below, vyhere the companies have gardens sufficient to supply them with vegetables most of the season. When not used for irrigation all the water sinks before running two miles, owing to the singular formation of this region. The latitude is 35 28', the longitude 108 25' ( W. Greenwich), and the elevation 6600 feet above sea-level ; hence the climate is about the same as at Santa Fe that is to say, with pleasant or temperate days and nights cool enough for two good blankets. (I can always repre- sent temperature by bed-clothes better than by a thermometer.) I can not conceive a more delightful climate for the three sum- mer months. The atmosphere is singularly clear, and distance very deceptive. The country about is practically worthless for agriculture, with the exception of a few small valleys, and in them only the short-lived vegetables are produced. Corn will not ripen at all : wheat is generally cut off in the flower. The grazing is good, but an extensive range is required for one herd ; the grass only grows once in the season, and, like these mountain bunch-grasses generally, does not renew itself the same year. Every mineral known to science is found in these hills. Gypsum, salt, and iron are particularly abundant. A short dis- tance west of the fort is a whole mountain of gypsum, so to speak enough to bury an eastern county. Neither gold nor silver has been found in paying quantities. Precious stones of various kinds have been found near, particularly garnets and turquoises. Lieutenant H. R. BrinkerhofF has a large collec- tion of curious stones, picked up within a mile or two of the fort, among which, I think, are some of value. Magnetic stones, the size of one's fist, can be had by the bushel. Some of them, when thrown loosely upon the ground, will roll over toward each other till they gather in a group. All the hills are covered with timber, and in the larger canons is abundance of pine fit for lumber. The mountains north and east present the appearance of a succession of lofty cones, with 33 514 DROUGHTS. here and there an oval hill, of a mile or two in length, rising equally on every side, and with a flat mesa on top. The cliffs are mostly red sandstone, mingled at times with clayey rock perhaps it should be called yellow soap-stone. Down upon the plain the soil is the richest kind of "wash earth," composed of the detritus of the volcanic hills, with just enough of clay and decayed sandstone to give it the right consistency, with every element for plant growth except moisture. But such plains occupy less than one-fifth of the country. The climate is very dry and equable. One heavy rain fell while I was there, the first of any consequence for three years. The seasons in New Mexico generally since 1858 have been much drier than ever before. When I firstJieard of this "drought for the last three years" at Albu- querque, I thought it was merely a local fact ; but since then I have re- ceived the same testimony from every part of the Territory, and along the road found many abandoned ranches which had once been under good cul- tivation. The Pueblos at San Do- mingo and Laguna pointed out to me dry flats which they said had been lakes many years ago. Is Xew Mex- ico then gradually losing her supply of moisture and becoming more of a desert? The supposition is directly contrary to what we have been led to believe of all the Territories, except Utah. There it was considered a settled fact, before 1871, that the amount of rain was steadily and rapidly on the increase. It is evident that there has been unu- sual drought since 1858, but from that fact old residents draw directly opposite conclusions. Some assert that this country was once seasonable, with almost as much rain as Ohio ; and that the rain zone has gradually left it, and by slow degrees it DISTANT VIEW OF ZUNI. ZUNI. 515 is relapsing to a perfect desert. Others, that the original con- dition was continuous drought; that it never rained, in former times, between March and November; that some thirty years ago the.climate began to slowly change to one of more moisture, and that the last three years are only a partial and temporary return to the original condition. This last theory has some hard facts to meet. Here and there, all over the country, are to be found ruins of towns and acecquias where no water now runs at any season of the year. Only thirty miles southwest of Wingate, near the head of the Little Colorado (you will find the place marked on Johnson's map as " Zuni ruins "), is a val- ley some forty miles long, strewn from one end to the other with fragments of Zuni pottery and stone and adobe work, and yet there is no living water there now ; also, among the Moqui villages are found plains showing signs of having once been cultivated, on which water can not possibly be brought at present by any engineering skill. The evidences in this region certainly are that New Mexico once had a more rainy climate than at present. Wingate is the center of a region full of curiosities. Forty miles west is the great Zuni town, an enormous pueblo a ter- raced building of five stories containing a thousand half- civilized Indians. They have always been friendly to the whites, but showed great bravery in their wars with other Indians. They cultivate the ground with great skill, pro- ducing abundance of corn, wheat, beans and melons. Their wealth is in sheep and goats, blankets, beads and pottery. In this great human hive are carried on all the complicated con- cerns of an advanced condition of life: government, manufac- tures, art and religious rites. The officers from Wingate visit them often, and the engineers on the railroad line speak of them in the highest terms. Both sexes are strictly virtuous, any departure from- chastity being severely punished. They formerly had the art of writing, but appear to have lost it in their many mutations. They preserve one book, but the last man who could read it died many years ago, and the priests regard it merely as a holy relic. It consists 516 INHABITANTS. simply of a mass of finely dressed skins, bound on one side with thongs ; the leaves are thickly covered with characters and drawings in red, blue and green squares, diamonds, circles, ser- pents, eagles, plants, flying monsters and hideous human heads. One of their Caciques says it is the history of their race, and shows that they have moved fourteen times, this being their fifteenth place of settlement. No Spanish priest has ever been permitted to enter their town ; their religion appears to be a mixture of Spiritism and Sabianism. They are quite domestic in their tastes, and fond of pets. Turkeys and tame eagles abound among them, living about the terraces of the pueblo, and even in their dwellings. They are keen traders, and have most perfect command of their features. The few I saw had a uniformly sad, mild expression of the eye, but were quick in motion, well-made and rather graceful. Unfortu- nately I was compelled, for company's sake, to take a route north of Zuni ; and did not know its value to the explorer till I had passed westward. A hundred miles north of Wingate are the great ruins on the De Chaco river, supposed to be those of the "Seven Cities of'Cibola" (See-vo-la) ; and north of those, on the San Juan in Colorado, the ruins, as supposed, of Quivira, a fortified city of the Aztecs. One of the walls still stands, five hundred feet in length, with joinings as true and smooth as in any of our buildings. They were constructed STORY OF ZUNI. THE NAVAJOES. 517 of hard sandstone, and enclosed a city of at least ten thousand people. Farther west are the "Cliff cities" of Canon de Chelley, which I visited, and many others; and southeast are Sobieta and still more extensive ruins. At least a quarter, possibly half of a million people devoted to agriculture, once occupied the system of valleys opening upon the San Juan. They are gone long ago, and their places are occupied by the nomadic races : Utes, Navajoes and Apaches. The streams upon which they depended dried up, and cultivators necessarily yielded to hunters and shepherds; just as we find wandering Arabs encamped in the ruins of Baalbec and Palmyra, or barbarous nomads wandering over the once populous and fertile Baby- lonia. The dominant race of this section are the Navajoes, who roam over a country three hundred miles from east to west, and nearly two hundred from north to south. They are a most in- teresting race of barbarians, though savage in war and somewhat inclined to thieving. They and the Apaches have been at war from time immemorial. The Navajocs are splendid specimens of physical humanity the finest race of Indians I ever saw, except, perhaps, the Chippewas, of Northern Minnesota. These are the first Indians I have met who have not the stereotyped "Indian face" the face we have heard described so often, either overcast with a stern and melancholy gravity, or lively only with an uncertain mixture of cunning and ferocity. Their countenances are generally pleasing, even mild and benevolent. They have many young fellows whose faces show the born humorist. Wit, merriment and practical jokes enliven all their gatherings, and, quite contrary to our ideas of IndiaUfcharacter, they laugh loud and heartily at everything amusing. They are quite inquisitive, too, and seem vastly pleased to either see or hear something new. Both men and women work, and are quite industrious until they have accumulated a fair share of property; then they seem content to take things easy. In short, they are as much unlike the "stage Indian," and as much like a tribe of dark Caucasians as it is possible to conceive. 518 WEAVING. NAVAJO LOOM. Their handiwork is very ingenious. They make pottery like that of the Pueblos, from whom it is supposed they learned the art. Their blankets are the wonder of all who see them. They are woven by the squaws in a rude frame, and are so compact that water can be carried in them four or five hours before it begins to leak through. One woman was engaged near the Fort in weaving an unusually fine blanket for one of the officers, and though I watched the process for an hour at a time, cannot fully describe it. A large stout beam is fastened firmly to the joists of the hut, or to the limbs of a tree, as they often do all the weaving out doors. From this, by a leathern loop at each end, is suspended a "turn-stick/' about the size of one's wrist. A similar beam below is fastened in the ground or floor, and from it another "turn-stick" is suspended by loops. On the DURABLE BLANKETS. 519 two sticks the warp, or "chain," is stretched very tight, the two sets of strands crossing in the middle. This, with two loose sticks, dividing the " chain," and a curved board, looking like a barrel stave with the edges rounded, constitute the entire loom. The squaw sits before this with her balls of yarn for " filling" conveniently arranged, works them through the strands, and beats them firmly together with the loose board, running it in between the strands with singular dexterity. The woolen yarn for "filling" is made from their own sheep, generally, and is of three colors, black, white and red from native coloring. Running these together by turns, with nimble fingers the squaw brings out on the blanket squares, diamonds, circles and fanciful curves, and flowers of three colors, with a skill which is simply amazing. Two months are required to complete an ordinary blanket, five feet wide and eight long, which sells from fifteen to fifty dollars, according to the style of materials. A.t the Fort, officers who wish an unusually fine article, furnish both " chain " and " filling," but those entirely of Navajo make are very fine. One will outlast a lifetime; and though rolled in the mud, or daubed with grease for months or years, till every ves- tige of color seems gone, when washed with the soap-weed (mole eactus) the bright native colors come out as beautiful as ever. They also manufacture, with beads and silk threads ob- tained from the traders, very beautiful neck-ties, ribbons, garters, cuffs and other ornaments. More interesting to me than any of their handicraft, is the unwearying patience they display in all their work, and their zeal and quickness to learn in everything which may improve their condition. Surely such a people are capable of civilization. Officers and agents universally tell me that Navajoes work alongside of any employes they can get, and do full work. They dig ditches and make embankments with great skill, handling the spade as well as any Irishman. The most intelligent of them say it will be no use to import laborers here to work on the railroad ; they will learn how and do the work themselves. Fort Wingate was established in August, 1868, by the troops who came there that year with the Navajoes. It is nearly on 520 ZOOLOGICAL. the same site as old Fort Fauntleroy, afterward called Fort Lyou, which was hastily abandoned in 1862, when the Texans overran New Mexico. When this was built, old Fort Wingate, sixty miles southeast, was abandoned. The region has many wild animals. The antelope, black- tailed deer, black bear, big gray wolf, wild-cat, gray fox and beav y er are found by hunting in the mountains, while the coyote is altogether too common, and even in the fort my sleep was sometimes disturbed by its long-drawn and melancholy howl. But the game near the post has been greatly thinned out lately by the Navajoes, and the officers go out some distance to hunt. There must be myriads of some kind of insects, judging from the presence of insect-eating birds, such as the woodpecker (two varieties), fly-catcher, large raven, bluejay, blackbird, owl and hawk (several kinds), magpie, and Rocky Mountain bluebird. The officers tell me that during most of the season there are vast flocks of buzzards hovering constantly about the fort, but at this time they are off in the woods or cliffs hatching. It is rather curious there should be such an abundance of animal life in what appears to be such a barren country, and more particularly that there should be so many scavengers (buz- zards, etc.) in a dry and cool locality. It may be partially ex- plained by the fact that there is more timber about there than in the mountains generally, and in the timber probably more food for small birds, etc., than one would think from the appearance of the plain. On the 6th of June, Mr. Wm. Burgess, blacksmith for the Navajo Agency, at Fort Defiance, Arizona, reached Wingate from that post; and I concluded that was my best chance for company on another stage of my journey. The distance between the posts is just forty-five miles, as measured by Lieutenant BealFs odometer, in 1860; and Defiance is about three milea west of the Territorial line. This distance we rode easily in nine hours, stopping an hour at noon. There is water at but one point on the road, Stinking Springs, sometimes politely called Sheep Springs. Our mules drank of it, under protest, and with many sniffs and contortion* ROAD TO DEFIANCE. 521 of the lips; and I tasted it from curiosity. It appears like a solution of blue-dye, and tastes like white-oak bark. To some it is a dangerous cathartic, but to most a powerful astringent. We left Wingate with full canteens, and having a delightfully cool day, did not suffer from thirst. Our road wound about to nearly every point of the compass, bearing generally northwest; and here and there we encountered the Navajo trail, often crossing our road at right-angles and striking directly over the hills, thus lessening the distance at least a third. But it is safer for white men to follow the main road, the trail being in- distinguishable for a mile or two in places, on the bare sand rock or among the pinon thickets. Four miles from Wingate the valley makes a great U to the northward, and our road runs over the foothills for three miles; then enters the valley again, which there narrows to a mere pass. A vast dyke of hard trap-rock extends across the country from north to south, standing out above the sandstone like an artificial stone battle- ment ; runs out from each side of the valley in abrupt cause- ways, and leaves a rugged gap only a hundred yards wide. This opens into a broad and fertile valley, across which three miles bring us to the Rio Puerco of the West. The Puerco I crossed on the 26th of May runs southeast into the Rio Grande ; this one southwest into the Colorado Chiquito. We cross this Puerco, rise again into the northern foothills, and stop for noon in a pinon thicket. The A. and P. R. R. line follows on down the Puerco, running fifteen miles south of Defiance, and I have traveled directly along its line from El Rito. For the ninety miles, from the old volcano at Agua Azul to Defiance, the " country rock " is entirely of sandstone, or occa- sionally soapstone, if that be counted an exception. The solitary break in the formation is the large dyke of trap- rock. I saw not a particle of granite, slate, quartzite, or primary limestone consequently, no indications whatever of gold or silver leads. The general testimony of soldiers and explorers here is that the formation slowly changes toward the north, even to the San Juan River. There it is granite, and there, also, are valuable gold and silver mines. 522 DRYING UP. At the Puerco I left the line of the Atlantic and Pacific Rail- road. I might have followed it southeast to a point a little beyond the Zuni settlements, which is regarded as the northeast corner of the Apache country ; but just then I did not care to go farther in that direction. A fifty mile strip of Zunis and Navajoes is the least I cared to have between me and those in- teresting savages. I could hear enough about them at that distance. Twenty-five miles from Wingate we descend a gentle slope iftto " the Lakes ; " not bodies of water, as the name might im- ply, but an oval valley of great natural fertility, some five miles by three in extent. A few years ago it was overflowed in winter for a month or two; but in the general drying up which this country has suffered of late, it is perfectly dry all the year. I examined the soil with some curiosity, and found it exactly like that of our Wabash and Ohio " bottoms/' If the reader will imagine one of our most fertile tracts of black, rich, loam, plowed, then well rolled, and left for a few years without a drop of rain or dew, he will have an exact picture of one of these rich but un watered valleys. I easily kicked up the black, loose soil, which bore not a spear of grass, and yet had every element of abundant plant-life but the one thing, moisture. Three showers would cover it with a rich carpet of green ; water enough for irrigation would make it a blooming garden. Everywhere in this region we come upon dried lakes, dead springs and wells, and occasionally cross river beds which evidently once had a volume equal to that of the Miami. Marine and fresh-water shells are found by the wagon load in dry flumes, and near them piles of Pueblo pottery and broken adobes, where the only in- dication of moisture at present is found in a few sickly cotton- woods, annually growing less numerous. Twelve miles more of gently rolling hills and piiion groves bring us to the " Haystacks." These are a series of cones of yellow sandstone, something over a hundred feet high, and fifty feet wide at the base, running up to a sharp point. They stand upon an almost level plain, but half a mile away is a rooky ledge containing a vast natural bridge, arched gateway, and all "STARVE OR FIGHT." 523 the forms o rocky tower and battlement which can be imagined. Eight miles farther brought us to Defiance, situated at the foot of a low rocky range, and almost in the mouth of Canon Benito. Approaching the post across a sandy plain we first come to a dry river bed, with enough of stunted grass to show that water still runs there sometimes. Following up the stream we find first a pool of water, then a flock of sheep, then Indian farms, and occasionally a hogan, from which the Navajo squaws and children peep out at us with a sort of hungry curiosity. We cross a common field of a hundred acres or so, which the Nava- joes have thrown up into beds of two or three rods square for irrigation, and ride into the fort. O / The white population sally out nearly en masse with one cry, " Where's the mail ? Why the h 1 didn't you bring the mail ! " My companion explained that high water on the Rio Grande, or some other cause, had prevented any military express reach- ing Wingate from Sante Fe, and consequently there was no mail. The general disgust was painful to witness. " Here's a gentleman," said my companion, "just from there; may be he can tell you about Congress." Then all centered on the question : " How about the Indian Appropriation Bill ? Will they do anything about provision for these Navajoes? " I replied that to the best of my knowledge and belief, Congress had made no special provision for the Navajo Agency, and pending the present issue in National aifairs, probably would not. Then every man in the outpost looked as if all his rela- tions had just died insolvent. General assent was given to the remarks of one employe : " There'll be another Navajo war, and we'll all have to clear. These are the best Indians on the continent, willing to work, and don't want to fight. But, d n it, they can't starve to death right here. We've destroyed their living ; run off all the game and shut 'em up here, and their crops failed two years. If we were in their place, we'd fight. They must steal, 01 524 AGENCY MATTERS. starve, or fight, one o' the three. Ain't a man here in Govern- ment employ that's been paid a cent for twelve months. They'll give the Apaches sugar and coffee and flour, because they're a murderin' and robbin', and won't give these men anything be- cause they've been peaceable for eight years, and these fellows know it, too. Well, they'll be another Navajo war, that's what they'll be." Defiance is only nominally a fort. There is no military post, no soldiers, and only twenty whites all told four American ladies, one Mexican and fifteen Americans, all employ es of the agency. Mr. James H. Miller, Agent of the Navajoes, was absent on an expedition to the San Juan country, and his place supplied by Mr. Thomas V. Keams, the clerk. The other officials and employes were : J. Miller, carpenter ; W. Burgess, blacksmith; J. Dunn, wagon master ; Perry H. Williams and Ezra Hoag, " on issue of rations ; " A. C. Damon, butcher, and Andrew Crothers, in charge of grain room. The religious and medical staff constitute an entirely separate department. The physician, Dr. J. Menaul, was also a minister, and held service every Sunday ; and his lady, Mrs. Menaul, was the teacher em- ployed for the Navajoes. John H. Van Order acted as interpreter from English into Spanish, and Jesus Alviso from Spanish into Navajo, both employed by the Government and both necessary to a perfect intercourse. Nearly all the employes understood a little Navajo, but not enough to interpret. As I had to travel with them for some weeks, I set in most industriously to learn the language, and at the end of half a day's hard work had mastered two words, viz. : "Ah tee chee " (" What is that ? "), and " loot chsin " (" money"). It is the most difficult of all American tongues, and the more complex portions of it have never been learned by white men. I give in the two words above the nearest possible sound in English letters, but no alphabet of civilized men can represent the Navajo language. It combines the worst features of the French, German and Chinese; it is extremely nasal, extremely guttural, and abounds in sibilants and triple consonants. A word of three syllable! begins very high in the nose, and ends very deep in the throat, NAVAJO LANGUAGE. 525 NAVAJO BOY. with a sharp hiss on the middle syllable. In the three letters, c h Sj I have designated a sound which no American can pro- duce exactly, but near enough for a Navajo to recognize it. Accepting the theory of the French Academy as to the "origin of language," I should say this language was nearly in its original form, certainly not more than one or two thousand years old ; and that it originated directly from imitations of the animals, particularly the owl, the snake, and the coyote. Mr. B. M. Thomas, post farmer, constitutes a department by himself, appointed by the Indian Bureau ; and the Navajoes are laboring zealously under his instructions. In the ecclesiastical division of the Indian tribes, this region fell to the Presby- terians, and their Board recommends these officers. Mr. Lionel Ayers fills the position of Post Trader, appointed neither by Church nor State, but vouched for by the agent, and licensed 526 STARTLING NEWS. by the Secretary of War. The agent and farmer had their wives here, the physician his wife and sister, bringing up the population of this strange isolated community to a total of twenty whites sixteen men and four ladies : all interesting as occupants of the last outpost, on my route, of civilization. From here my companions for a dreary four hundred miles were to be Moquis and Navajoes. As it was but seventy miles to the De Chaco ruins, I was making ready to visit them with Navajo guides, when the news of an unlocked for tragedy reached us, and threw the little community into a state of consternation. We were seated at breakfast the morning of the 13th, when one of the party which had gone to San Juan arrived, com- pletely exhausted, and announced that Agent Miller had been murdered, and all their horses stolen but one; that he had started immediately with that, and the rest of the party were coming afoot. Next day the others arrived, quite worn out, having walked a hundred miles in three days, carrying their baggage. Their account is as follows : The party, consisting of Agent Miller, B. M. Thomas, (Agency Farmer,) John Ayers and the Interpreter, Jesus Alviso, left Defiance on the 4th of June, to inspect the San Juan Valley, with a view of locating the Navajo Agency there. The examination was most satisfac- tory, as they found one fertile and beautiful valley near the river, capable of being irrigated by a single acecquia, and suffi- cient to support the whole tribe. At the same time, three others left the settlements on a prospecting tour, reached San Juan one day after the Agent's party, and were camped twelve miles from them on the bluff. Neither party dreamed of danger from the Utes, as that tribe had been at peace many years ; and, though they annoyed the Navajoes greatly, had not molested white men. On the morning of the llth, just at dawn, Miller's companions were awakened by the report of a gun and whistling of an arrow, both evidently fired within half a dozen rods of them. They sprang to their feet, and saw two Utes run into the brush ; ten minutes after they saw them emerge from the opposite side of the thicket, and ride up the MURDER OF AGENT MILLER. 527 bluff, driving the company's horses before them. They did not know, at first sight, that the Utes were hostile, or that they had fired at them. John Ayers spoke to Miller, who did not reply ; he then shoved him with his foot, still he did not wake. They pulled off his blanket, and found him dead. The Ute's bullet had entered the top of his head and passed down behind his right eye, without disarranging his clothing in the. slightest. His feet were crossed, and hands folded exactly as when he went to sleep; his eyes were closed, and lips slightly parted into a faint smile, as if from a pleasant dream all showed beyond doubt that he had passed from sleep to death without a struggle or a sigh. Thus died James H. Miller, a true Christian, faithful official, and a brave man. He was a native of Huntington County, Pennsylvania, enlisted in the Fifty-fifth Pennsylvania Volun- teers, and served three years and four months, most of the time as Lieutenant in Company H. He was appointed Agent of the Navajoes, in December, 1870, entered on his duties soon after, and in the midst of discouragement. The annuity for the previous year was exhausted ; the crops had partially failed, and in 1871 the failure was total. On the verge of starvation, the Navajoes were still kept in tolerable order by his exertions, until the next annuity arrived ; and he was carrying out more extended plans for their benefit at the time of his death. He was a devout Presbyterian, and an earnest supporter of what is technically called "the humanitarian Indian policy." The race lost an active friend by his death. The grief of the Nava- joes was profound and unaffected. His companions and the mining party buried him near where he was killed. His wife and infant son were at Defiance, but started to the States in a few days with the military express. A general Ute war was apprehended, and all thoughts of an expedition in that direction were abandoned. I wandered about the Navajo country, gathering curious stones, and study- ing the "lay of the country;" but mostly amused myself by taking notes of the Indians. Their condition was worse than ever before. The last grain in the Agency storehouse was 528 HARD TIMES. issued to them on the 14th, and most of them looked lean and hungry enough. They began on their horses and sheep, having decided to eat their old horses and wethers first, saving the ewes and goats to the last ; for these are more hardy, and besides, their milk is an important item. As long as there was grain, we purchased goat's milk of them, paying in grain ; and I found it very palatable and nutritious. But I did not relish the flesh, finding it rather rank and stringy. I did not taste horse-flesh, though in my visits to some of the more distant hoganSy I found them gnawing away at what looked suspi- ciously like equine shanks. The white men who have eaten it say it is very nourishing, but I am too old now to overcome my early prejudices. The Agency employes had not been paid for a year, and as they have to buy their own provisions, things looked blue for them. When I first arrived, they were faring sumptuously on coffee, bacon, bread, potatoes, and goat's milk; but one by one, our luxuries vanished, and for the last three days we lived on Navajo bread, coffee, and "commissary butter," straight. In all their troubles the Navajoes are lively, cheerful and looking for better times. To see ten thousand people able and willing to do almost any kind of work, with natural talents of no mean order, and most anxious to improve, to see such a people shut up on this barren plateau, and kept out of that part of their country in which they could live, literally perishing without a chance to help themselves, was enough to sadden even a hard heart. What would a community of ten thousand whites do in such a case ? Who, if anybody, is to blame, I do not know. The melancholy facts I sa\v. But Congress did not adjourn without passing the Indian Appropriation Bill, and soon the Superintendent at Santa Fe sent them grain enough to last till a new crop came in. There was rejoicing in the hogans in consequence. The Xavajoes are the original Romans of New Mexico and Arizona. For two hundred years they carried on almost continual war with the Spaniards, disdaining all offers of peace or alliance, and proving upon the valley of the Rio Grande. At length each separate THE NAVAJO WAR. 529 Mexican settlement adopted the plan of buying off its nearest Navajo neighbors, paying tribute to one band to guard them against the rest. This succeeded admirably until the American occupation ; then the " Greasers/ 7 emboldened by the idea that our army would protect them, refused the tribute; and the Navajoes descended in three bands, and swept several settle- ments clean of their stock. They committed their worst depredations all around, and within twenty miles of, the last division of Kearney and Doniphan's forces. A flaming proclamation of war was issued, and of the results the report of J. Madison Cutts, with the army, speaks thus cautiously : "The campaign against the Navajoes was accomplished in the dead of winter, without supplies or tents. He succeeded in forming a treaty with these troublesome Indians, represented as more warlike than the Mexicans, to whom they were a great source of dread and injury, on the 22d of November, 1846." The fact was, our army could not then afford to go to war with a brave and desperate race in such a country as the Navajoes occupied. Occasional difficulties took place until Fort Defiance was established, in 1850. Then there was peace for seven years. In 1857 a negro slave of Major Brooks, an officer stationed there, had a difficulty with a Navajo sub-chief. The friendly and compliant manners of the Indians had led the soldiers to consider them cowardly as well as peaceable. The negro passed the chief on the parade ground one day, and turning behind him, gave him a violent kick. The Navajo whirled about and let fly an arrow, which passed entirely through the negro, who fell dead. The Indian fled to the mountains ; the tribe refused to surrender him, and another war began, and lasted, with but slight intermission, until 1864. The National officers found it impossible to conquer the Navajoes except by destroying their stock. It is reported that over fifty thousand sheep were bayoneted. One little valley, a few miles from Defiance, is almost literally paved with the skeletons of sheep destroyed there to prevent the Navajoes from using them. 34 530 ABANDONED FIELDS. The Utes also drove away many thousands, and this tribe was completely beggared. But before they were entirely subju- gated, the Texan invasion of 1861-2 took place, compelling the abandonment of this post and Wiugate, and the Navajoes had things their own way again. In 1863 General W. H. Carleton led an army thither, com- pletely destroyed their means of subsistence, and induced the whole tribe to surrender. They had not a sheep left, and very few horses. Numbering ten thousand, they were taken in a body to the Fort Sumner reservation, where small-pox and en- demic fever preyed upon them, and one-eighth of the entire tribe perished. The venereal poison also was there introduced among them, which has destroyed many. In 1868 their great Chief, Barboncito, made such representations to General Sherman as induced him to consent to their return here. They went zealously to work, and in 1870 raised about half a crop. The seeds furnished by the department were unsuited to this high altitude, and most of their plants were cut off by the September frosts. In 1871, they planted extensively, worked hard, and had every prospect of an abundant crop, when, on the night of May 30, came a storm unprecedented in this region ; the ground was covered an inch thick with sleet, and every plant and young fruit tree frozen solid to the ground. The annuity goods and provisions of that year were soon exhausted, and theft or starva- tion was the only alternative. But the sheep given by the Government had increased 'rapidly, and are now numbered at thirty thousand in the tribe. Their horses are returned at twenty thousand. The difficulties in the way of improving their condition are many : they are a pastoral rather than an agricultural people ; their most fertile and extensive valley, on the San Juan, they can not now farm on account of the Utes, and many other valleys formerly productive are now barren on account of the four years' drought. Near where I crossed the Puerco is a beautiful valley from which, as Mr. Dunn informs me, when he was a soldier here, they hauled fifty wagon-loads of corn, and destroyed on the ground a hundred more. Now, no cultivation could raise a grain there. The Puerco at that THE NAVAJO DEVIL,. 531 point, in the dry season of 1858, had a current a rod wide and two feet deep ; now it looks as if water had never run there since the creation. The " big field," two miles south of Defiance, which produced seventy bushels of corn per acre five years ago, can not now be cultivated at all. A small river ran there, which is now totally dry. I am inclined to think that this country has wet and dry cycles, of ten years or more each. Neither snow nor rain enough has fallen within the last two years to make up the moisture of one of the wet months in former times. Mrs. Charity Menaul, the teacher, reports considerable pro- gress among the Navajocs under her charge. In my visits there and talks at the hoffans, I learned many interesting particulars of N a v a j o th eology , etc. Like most savage races, their religion is princi- pally superstition. Chin- day, the devil, is a more important personage in all their daily affairs than Whaillahay, the god. Like the Mor- mons, Shakers, and other white schismatics, they attribute everything they don't like in other people to the personal agency of the devil ; and about the only use of their god is to protect them from the devil. They have a tradition of a flood, but think that was caused by the devil damming the rivers. Their moral code is extremely vague : whatever is good for the tribe or band is in general right ; whatever is not pro bonopublico is wrong. Cow- ards, after death, will become coyotes; while braves will con- NAVAJO MATRON. 532 GRITTY BREAD. tinue men in a better country. Women will change to fish for awhile, and afterwards to something else. But they don't trouble themselves much about the next world. If they had plenty in this, they would consider themselves in luck. The luxuries of life are not obtainable at Defiance, some things we should call necessaries are rather scarce. Navajo flour is the only kind used. The first meal I was delighted to see our Indian servant bring in what I recognized as an old Yankee acquaintance "Graham biscuits;" though they looked rather more coarse and lumpy than the Eastern kind. The first mouthful I thought was half dirt; it " gritted" so on my teeth that I could not restrain an expression of disgust. At this my host, Mr. Keams, acting agent, apologized by saying that the " Navajoe grindstones were soft, and left rather more grit in the flour than he liked." A few meals soon reconciled me to this grit, and I arn convinced that Navajo flour makes the most wholesome bread in the world. The grinding is done by women,, who become quite skilful. The lower stone is some eighteen inches long, sloping a little from the worker. The upper stone is about six inches square. The woman lays a clean sheep-skin on the ground, sits on one side of it with the wheat by her, and the stones in front; then rakes the wheat up by a regular motion of the left hand running the small stone over the other with the right. The wheat rolling down as she grinds, is reduced to a fine pasty flour. For corn two or three women usually grind together, each one passing it to the next, who reduces it to a finer consistency. In their bright-colored garments, with long black hair swaying as they move their bodies back and forward, a group of them looks very picturesque, if not neat; while at work they sing a monotonous song, which sounds very much like our rural " Barbara Allen," in very slow time. For their own use they make of this pasty flour a very thin mixture, no thicker than starch, which they cook on hot stones. The fire is built in a small hole, on which is placed the flat stone, no more than an inch thick ; when sufficiently hot, the squaw thrusts her hand into the starchy solution, and rapidly draws a handful, which she spreads upon the stpue. In a half-minute it is cooked LANGUAGE AND CUSTOMS. 533 NAVAJOE "GRISTMILL. in the form of a thin brown wafer, no thicker than card board. Another follows, and another, until the cooked wafers form a layer some six inches thick. They then roll them up in shape con- venient to carry. Half a gallon of the thin paste of flour will make a roll the size of a half-bushel. That I have eaten has a rather insipid taste, from the want of salt or other seasoning; but it is very nutritious and strengthening. The bread they made of corn I find very palatable. Two bushels of wheat is a day's grinding for one squaw. They complain that the stone hereabout is very poor for grinding, wearing out in a few days, and leaving too much grit in the flour. Our bread was regu- larly prepared in a stove, and our Indian cook displayed some skill; besides, when accustomed to it, I found it very pala- table, and while using it my digestion was simply perfect. I spent many hours every day in the hogans of the Navajoes, trying, when they were in a teaching humor, to catch the peculiar click of their language. I soon acquired some fifty words, and began to see something like system in the language. Their social customs and adornments have a singular resem- blance to those of the Japanese. They treat their women as well as most white nations. Men do the out-door work, women that of the household. The latter are very communicative, humorous and mirthful, and nothing seemed to amuse them so much as my attempts at their language, at* which they would listen and laugh by the hour. They say that a woman first 534 STRANGE PRACTICE. taught them how to weave blankets and make water-jars, for which cause it is a point of honor with a Navajo never to strike a woman. Their women are not overworked or abused, and are consequently more shapely and graceful than those of other tribes. It is a singular sight to witness an Indian carrying a baby, while the squaw walks unweighted, but one may see it every day about Defiance. They formerly captured many Mexican women, whom they adopted and married, which may have produced some change in the general characteristics of the tribe. They are the only wild tribe I know who do not scalp dead enemies. They never had that practice. In fact, they never touch a dead body, even of their own people. Each hogan is so construct- ed that the weight rests mostly on two main beams. When one dies in a hogan, they loosen these two outside, and let it drop upon him. If one dies on the plain, they pile enough stones upon him to keep off the coyotes, but never touch the body. This observance is a serious draw- back in one respect: it pre- vents them from building permanent dwellings. It is said to be a part of their religion, but from the confused accounts I have of it, I draw the conclusion that it originated in some great plague, where contagion resulted from touching the corpse. They are very inquisitive; a watch or pocket-compass will interest them for hours. If I were in the mission business, I would rather be a missionary among the Navajoes than any savage people 1 know of, for here is some native mental activity to work upon. But their language would present a great barrier to Christianizing them. NAVAJO BELLE. "EL-SOO-SEE EN-NO W-LO-KYH." 535 They unconsciously perpetrated a small joke on the writer. There are so few white men there that they know every stranger, and generally give him a name. In my wanderings among them, I frequently heard them speak of En-now-lo-kyh, some- times joined with the word el-soo-see, and as I stooped to enter a hogan, could sometimes hear the head of the family call to order with " Hah-koh ! El-soo-see En-now-lo-kyh ! " Learning that this was my Navajo name, I sought the interpreter, highly flattered at my noble title, to learn its meaning. A broad grin adorned his features as he informed me that the two words, translated literally, meant " Slim-man-with-a-white-eye." Feel- ing this to be somewhat personal, and iuferentially abusive, I had him explain somewhat of rny business to them and construct a name indicative of my profession; and henceforth I hope to become historical among the Navajoes by an unpronounceable word of six syllables, meaning in English "Big Quill." When a communication is twice translated, it triples the am- biguity ; and that is the method employed with them ; one interpreter speaks English and Spanish, the other Spanish and Navajo. I made my remarks in the plainest, most terse English I could command, which the American translated into the florid Castilian ; this, in turn, the Spaniard rendered in the hissing, complicated phrases and cumbrous polysyllables of tire aborigi- nal tongue. But while pleasantly employed in labors philological, ethno- logical and antiquarian, the second week of my visit came an officer from Wingate, bringing letters from Santa Fe and news of such a storm of wrath at the writer, that it would seem the roar might have been heard over the Sierra Madre. Santa Fe was in a white heat of indignation, and my name was coupled every hour of the day with the most opprobrious epithets two languages could furnish. My letters from that virtuous city to the Cincinnati Commercial had come to hand in due time; an indignation meeting of Jews and Mexicans decided that the public mind must be informed how badly I had slandered Santa Fe, and one of the former was deputed to squelch me. He prepared a three-column broadside, which was sent to the 536 SANTA FE AGAIN. Commercial and various Western papers, setting forth the u damning facts" that my associations in Santa Fe were not of the best, etc., etc. Now, I have just this much of an apology to make to Santa Fe: I saw, in two days there, that it was a queer place; and, when I began to take the evidence of old residents, I saw that if I published the half that was told me I should stir up a beauti- ful row. Therefore I carefully took down each man's name and his evidence, with a note of his facilities for getting information ; and then, duly mindful of the religious character of the Com- mercial, I expunged all the really vile and loathsome portions of the testimony, and only sent the mildest statements. I find on my note-book the names of seventeen citizens who gave me their testimony. They begin with Honorables and Reverends, and run down to hotel-waiters and black boys. If the citizens of the 14 City of Holy Faith " are distressed about the photograph I took of them, I can furnish them some pretty respectable authorities. I have since suspected that some of the young fellows were trying how big a lie they could tell ; and as they were the ones most enraged, if their reputations -have suffered, they have no one but themselves to blarne. Moral : Don't vote the next stranger a fool because he hap- pens to have a halt in one foot or a cast in one eye; but wait and see if he is "a chiel a takin' notes," before you try how big a lie you can tell about your own town. But if they feel sore over my light touches, what do they think of the following, written by a brave soldier who had spent three years of service in the two Territories ? With a little toning down it strikes me as a pretty correct picture. I expur- gate the worst passages : ARIZONA AND NEW MEXICO. Having seen many illuminated oil paintings and water-color sketches of this 1 Terrestrial Paradise," I beg leave to present my photograph for inspection. PRINTED FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE AUTHOR. Fierce Mars I bid a glad farewell, And turn my back upon Bellona, To photograph in doggerel New Mexico and Arizona. POETICAL TOPOGRAPHY. 537 ARIZONA LANDSCAPE. The stinging grass and thorny plants And all its prickly tropic glories, The thieving, starved inhabitants, Who look so picturesque in stories. The dusty, long, hot, dreary way, Where 'neath a blazing sun you totter, To reach a camp at close of day And find it destitute of water. The dying mule, the dried-up spring, Which novel writers seldom notice ; The song the blood mosquitoes sing, And midnight howling of coyotes. Tarantulas and centipedes, Horn'd toads and piercing mezquit daggers, With thorny bushes, grass and weeds To bleed the traveler as he staggers. Why paint things in a rosy light, And never tell the simple fact thus How one sits down to rest at night, And ofter squats upon a cactus ? As desert, mountain rock and sand Comprise the topographic features, There's little left at my command Except to paint the living creatures. In point of energy and sense, The wild Apaches are the head men, And so, in fairness, I commence To tell you something of the red men. 538 A CABALLERO. Each mountain chain contains a hive Of these marauding sons of thunder, Who somehow manage and contrive To live upon mescal and plunder. Too long my pen has dwelt upon These foes to railroads, soap and labor, A few short years, and they are gone Beyond the reach of prayer or saber. Now turn we to another race Inhabiting this sunny region, In calm and fearless truth to trace Their manners, habits and religion. There is no fairer law than that Which gives to Csesar what is Caesar's, Yet this is not a land of fat Because the people are called Greasers. These natives, in a Yankee's eyes, Have neither virtue, brains nor vigor A most unhappy compromise Between the Ingin and the nigger. Their language is a mongrel whine, From which the meaning seems to vanish, Like strength from lager beer or wine A parody upon the Spanish. On what they live besides the air You may perhaps be interested ; They have as queer a bill of fare As human stomach e'er digested. They eat frijoles, carne, (free-ho-lays, car-nay) corn, And on a hog's intestines riot; Tortillas, sheeps-head (hair and horn), With chile (chee-la) for the favorite diet. But little care he ever feels, So he but apes the Spanish hero, With monstrous spurs upon his heels, And on his head a broad sombrero. He looks so grim and full of fight, You might suppose his temper soured ; But danger turns him nearly white, And proves the hero is a coward. MANNERS AND MORALS. 539 He grimly scowls at Gringo jokes, Though he has not a single tlaco, With dignity he calmly smokea His cigarette of bad tobacco. Smoking and lolling in the shade, Their lazy souls no thought perplexes ; But make a chimney undismayed Out of the noses of both sexes. They tell a thousand barefaced lies, To all the saints in heaven appealing Confess their sins with tearful eyes, Devoutly pray but keep on stealing. They go to church, believe in hell, (Where their own torment must be hot ones), They play on fiddles, ring a bell, And worship God with drums and shot-guns. Upon their heads in triumph reign Great swarms of vermin, fat and saucy ; Those rovers of the Spanish mane, Cruise fearless o'er an ocean glossy. Their mode of travel on the road Would frighten one who never met a Dirty, screaming, stupid load Of Greasers in an old curreta. Great wooden wheels, devoid of grease, And oxen rushing with a vengeance A noise like forty thousand geese, Or like a score of new steam-engines. They plow the soil with forked logs, For fuel dig the earth with shovels, Cut grass with hoes, chain up their hogs, And keep their horses in their hovels. When Gabriel plays his final trump, And all the nations are paraded For grand inspection in a lump, This breed will prove the most degraded, 540 A DESIRED IMPROVEMENT. An earthquake which should sink the land, Some great subterranean motion, And leave this tract of barren sand The pavement of a heaving ocean , Some huge convulsive water shake, Some terrible spasmodic movement, Subsiding but to leave a lake, Would be a most desired improvement. I've not, in picturing this clime, Been either brilliant or pathetic, But told of facts in simple rhyme, By far more truthful than poetic. My photograph, I must confess, The country does by no means flatter The people and their customs less, But it is true that's what's the matter. If any think me too severe, Or call my yarn a wicked libel, I'll take, to prove myself sincere, My " davy " on a Mormon Bible. The author of this "pome" had to fly the country. His picture is a little overdrawn, but there is too much truth for a joke in it. CHAPTER XXVI. A RJDE THROUGH WONDERLAND. Diamonds ! perhaps Curious stones in the Navajo country Ready Kindness of Agent Reams Navajo Forest Entering De Chelley The " Cliff Cities " An evening of beauty Out upon the Desert Water! Water! Sickness and exhaustion Navajo doctoring Climbing for water Down again, and night- ride Camp at last " Hah-koh Melicano ! " Reach Moqui Curious people Chino and Misiamtenah " Moquis steal nothing." to REAT events if rumors and excitements may be styled events were about to occur in relation to the country I was traversing ; but happily I was ignorant thereof. For had I turned aside from my regular business to hunt diamonds, I should undoubtedly have been so much poorer from time lost, and the public poorer by lack of needed information. In my excursions about the Navajo country I had everywhere remarked the strange abundance of curious and sparkling stones. Quartz crystals might have been gathered by the bushel. Every Indian had a pint or so of garnets none of them particularly valuable; and common turquoises were so plentiful that many a Navajo belle was adorned with a string of them, ground into octagon shape and worn as beads. Many other curious stones I saw, of which I did not know the name. Continual discussion was in progress among the Agency employes as to whether it was, or was not, a diamond country ; and a little book on " Diamond Mines," be- longing to Mr. Keams, was read almost to pieces. My Navajo companions on our trips brought me great quantities of glassy pebbles, of which I selected only the most curious. Had I known then what thousands of people learned after they in- vested, I would have known that the beautiful glitter of the rude pebble was proof positive it was not a diamond. 541 PRECIOUS STONES. "All is not gold that glitters/ 7 to which the practical miner adds, "Nothing is gold that glitters in the mine;" for native gold is rather a dull mineral. Similarly : "All that sparkle are not diamonds," and nothing that sparkles in its native state is a diamond; for a native diamond is just such a rough stone as the unscientific would invariably reject as a dull, pebble. Only the practiced eye can detect ifr. The brilliant hues are in it, somewhere; but only the lapidary's skill can give their bright- ness show. However, we did not know that so well then as we did three months afterwards; and when one Dr. Stallo, jeweler, of San Francisco, arrived at Defiance with a small party and provisions for six months, to gather diamonds, we considered the matter about settled. On the ant-hills all over that part of Arizona one can often find numbers of small garnets, brought there by the ants. It is generally supposed that they bring up the bright stones and shining gravel found on the hills, from their chambers below; but Indians and old plainsmen say this is an error, and that they bring them from a distance, and pile them on the dirt mound to make a hard, firm surface. They are evidently at- tracted by bright articles, whether from a sense of beauty or otherwise, and I have found on their mounds garnet, flakes of mica, fused quartz, and many grains of glassy stones. A species of aqua-marine is very plentiful, of every size from a grain of wheat to a large cherry. The post trader at Defiance had a quart or so of these, which looked to me like those used as watch crystals. A few very fine sapphires had been found, one of which was taken to New York and cut, proving quite valuable. Opals have been found farther north, but rarely. There were no specimens there. One "spinel ruby/' of consid- erable value, was found, and many had stones which they be- lieved to be diamonds. Those sho.wn to me were only fused quartz, or other vitreous stones. Malachite is found there in small chips, a half inch or an inch square; but during my stay an Indian brought from some place south a slab of it three inches long. Some beautiful turquoises were found in the same neighborhood, and many inferior ones. The country abounds TOPOGRAPHY. 543 in curious petrifactions, and more fossils than Agassiz could classify in a hundred years. It presents to me the appearance of a country in which rivers were once numerous and animal life abundant; but sudden drought came upon it, the rivers dried up, and the plants and animals turned to stone. In 1871, some men came here from San Francisco and spent the summer in collecting stones, supposed to be precious, of which they took away three or four bushels ; and it was reported that they obtained from the whole mass over a million dollars worth of garnets, rubies, turquoises, and diamonds. Dr. Stallo went south from Defiance to the region where malachite abounds, expecting to find turquoises in the same vicinity. Whether they are right in their theory that the country has the exact formation fora diamond region, I can not say. It is an elevated sandstone country, with few living streams and many dry river- beds, with heaps of wash gravel, shells and curious petrifactions, but no indications of recent volcanic action. Coal indications are not infrequent. There is one considerable vein a few miles east of Defiance. Whether these facts do or do not indicate precious stones, quien sabe ? Defiance is located on some maps directly on the Territorial line ; by others in New Mexico, and by others, still, some sixty miles west of the line in Arizona. It is, in fact, three miles due west of the surveyed line. On maps of later date you will find a Fort Canby in New Mexico, and Defiance in Arizona. They are the same, called by different names. The situation is pleasant and romantic. The Benito Hills, averaging five hun- dred feet above the plain, run directly north and south. On the west side of them is a vast inclosed basin, from which Cafion Benito breaks directly through the hills a sharp, abrupt gorge, square across the formation, with perpendicular walls entirely inaccessible. The east end of the cafion broadens into a little valley, at the mouth of which, though out on the plain, the fort is situated. A large river once ran through the gorge, of which the successive periods can be traced on the sandstone walls to a hight of two hundred feet. This seems to have been the original bottom of the canon, whence the river steadily 544 WALKING CATFISH. cut deeper until it had completely drained the basin above. The river had long been dry when the fort was located, but several springs in the east end of the canon created a stream sufficent to irrigate two sections of the land on the plain. Here the Navajoes had raised corn and melons from time immemorial; they had no other vegetables when found by the whites. The present occupants of Defiance have thrown a dam across this end of the caiion, producing a beautiful artificial lake some three hundred yards long, and rising so high as to leave barely room for a wagon road. The lake is strongly alkaline, but a few rods below is a strong spring of the nicest and purest water to be found in these mountains. It is the one important trea- sure of this post, which, without it, would be almost uninhabi- table. In the States towns are located according to convenience for trade ; in the mountains settlement is determined by the presence of never-failing water. The lake contains a species of "catfish with legs," which are found in other alkaline lakes in this region. I give the name as used there, but think them a species of siredons other species of which are found in the alkaline lakes of Wyoming. They have the body and mouth of a catfish, with a very long tail, and four legs. At my request the Navajo boys shot their arrows through some of them in the shallow water, and brought them ashore. They were ten inches in length, with teeth like common fish, and skin like catfish. Their legs were soft, but terminated in five claws as firm as the finger nail. They can climb a bank or travel over a dry bar, but never remain long out of water. Ten days among the " gentle savages " for so the Navajoes appeared to me had given me a rest, and I was ready to go west, expecting to accompany part of the tribe on their "sum- mer hunt" down the Colorado. But time was pressing, and I concluded to employ one to take me via De Chelley to the Moquis, where a trading party would overtake us, and go on to St. George, in Utah. Mr. Thomas V. Keams, Clerk and Acting Agent, outdid official courtesy to give me a good send- off; and calling in Juerro, war-chief of the tribe, together they selected a most intelligent young man of about twenty-five. I QUEER LANGUAGE. 545 also procured gun, horse, and equipments, blankets and provi- sions at reasonable rates; for it takes an Indian to trade with an Indian. I was to provision myself and one man to the Mormon settlements, and one man back, besides his fee. Thus ran the bill : Thirty pounds of flour, ten pounds of bacon, ten pounds of sugar, five pounds of coffee, and six boxes of sardines, the whole costing but twenty dollars. The same sum to my guides, and five dollars for the hire of a burro, made the total expense for a trip of nearly five hundred miles, forty-five dollars not much more than railroad fare. My horse, bridle, saddle, lariat, gun (a Spencer) and two Navajo blankets cost me two hundred dollars; but these are not to be counted in the general expense, as they were worth nearly as much in Utah. My Navajo knew a few words of Spanish, perhaps fifty in all, about equal to my list in his language; but unfortunately for general conversation, our words covered about the same objects, such as travelers most frequently use. The following, from our common list, will enable Oriental scholars to trace considerable resemblance between Navajo and the Turanian tongues. (I re- present the sharp accent at the end of the word by doubling the final consonant, and the prolonged nasal sound by n h.) NAVAJO. MEXICAN-SPANISH. ENGLISH. Tohh, Agua, Water. Klohh, Cicata, Grass. Chizz, Brado, Wood. Knhuh, Lumbre, Fire. Klee, Caballo, Horse. Klitt, Furao, Smoke. Hahkohh ! Veen ! Come ! Tennehh, Hombre, Man. The numerals, as far as twenty, are as follows : Kli, nahkee, tab, dteen, estlahh, hostonn, susett, seepee, nastyy, niznahh, klitsetta, nahkeetsetta, tahtsetta, dteentsetta, estlahta, hostahhta, susetetta, seepetta, nastytsetta, nahta, nahta kli, nahta nah- kee, etc. June 18th, we were off at 10 A. M., the whole population (white) joining us in a "stirrup-cup," and waving a hearty good-bye. John, as I christened my Navajo companion, has an 35 546 NAVAJO PASTURES. intellect that is not to be sneezed at. He knows the whole country between the Big and Little Coloradoes like a book ; and in the good old days before his tribe were bound by trou- blesome treaties, has been on many a trip to the Mormon settle- ments in the business of equine abduction. (Nobody steals now-a-days.) He rides a short burro, which carries in addition the flour and bacon ; while I ride a large, gray American horse and take charge of the sugars, coffee, and other light articles. Our direction is north by northwest to the head of Caflon de Chelley. All this part of Arizona consists of a succession of high, almost barren sandstone ridges, separated by narrow valleys abounding in rich grass. While on its eastern border I thought the Navajo Reservation a very poor strip it contains nearly 6000 square miles but since I have seen more of it I think it will graze at least half a million sheep and goats, besides horses enough for the necessities of the tribe. Three miles out, a turn around a sandstone cliff brought to view a delightful surprise in the shape of a beautiful green valley, about a mile square, perfectly level and covered with grass a foot high. On 'every side of it rose bare columns and ridges of sand-rock, but from their base trickled here and there tiny rills of water enough to keep the valley fertile. Herds of sheep and goats, attended by Navajo girls, and some horses attended by boys, enlivened the scene. Through this, and on to another sand ridge, then three miles more, brought us to a long narrow valley, winding for miles among the hills, and looking as if it had once been the bed of a river, and been heaved up by some convulsion. For hours we crossed such valleys every two or three miles, none of them more than a hundred yards wide, and separated by barren ridges. The grass in the valleys was rank and thrifty; the ridges had nothing but an occasional sprig of sage brush or cactus.. Every- where along the grass plats were shepherd girls with consider- able flocks, each girl carrying a set of Navajo spools and a bunch of wool, on which she worked in the intervals of watching. These spools are very similar in shape to those used in our rural districts, but large and clumsy. With a NAVAJO FOREST. 547 pointed stick, turned in the right hand, the spinner runs the wool on to the larger spool in rolls somewhat smaller than the little finger. Having filled it, and transferred to a smaller stick, she runs it to the smaller spool in the form of a very coarse yarn, when it is ready for the " filling " in a blanket. Herding is the most laborious work the Navajo girls have to do; they have all the advantages of the healthful climate, without, the fatigue of long expedition, and are, as a rule, stronger and healthier than the men. They are the only Indian girls I ever saw who even approximate to the Cooper ideal. Their dress is picturesque, consisting of separate waist and skirt; the former leaves the arms bare, and is made loose above and neat at the w r aist ; the latter is of flowered calico, with a leaning to red and black, and terminates just below the knee in black border or frills. Neat moccasins complete the costume, the limbs being left bare generally in the summer. They are very shapely and graceful, and their strength is pro- digious. How these mountaineers, on the thin food they have, manage to produce such specimens of perfect physical woman- hood, is a mystery to me. One of the prettiest girls I saw at Defiance, named "Zella" by the Teacher, who knew a little English, informed me that for months at a time she had nothing but goats' milk, boiled with a thin, watery root, which they use for food. Where goats' milk is plenty, the children thrive well on that alone. These shepherds are the best situ- ated of any part of the tribe, and their living, though plain, is not so uncertain as that of the cultivators. From the grazing region, we descended a slope of 'some two hundred feet to a wooded hollow, on the opposite side of which we encountered a rocky-faced hill, rising six or seven hundred feet, thick-set with scrubby pines, and barely accessible. Toil- ing up this, with frequent rests when a "shoulder" of the rock gave our animals level standing room, we entered at the summit on the most magnificent forest I have seen since leaving California. The tall sugar pines, from three inches to two feet in thickness, mingled with a few dwarfish oaks, were scattered in regular proportion, and their branches completely excluded 648 BEAUTIFUL VALLEY. THROUGH THE NAVAJO FOREST. the sunshine. A cold wind had chilled us on the ridges, but in "the forest there was a dead calm, though we could hear the breeze sighing far above us. This splendid natural park con- tinued for ten miles; then we descended to another valley, where the soil was evidently rich, though perfectly bare for want of water ; but around the edges was a bordering meadow of good grass, spangled with red and yellow flowers. This valley is an oval some five miles long, opening northward, and lacks only water to become a little Eden. From this we rose to another forest, also of sugar pines, but not so large or thrifty as the first. My guide informs me that these forests are as long as they are wide, and as we traveled twelve or fifteen miles through them, they must cover some two hundred square miles. This will be a great source of wealth to the Navajoes, INTO BAT CANON. 649 if they learn how to use it; for when the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad is completed, every section of this timber will be worth at least five thousand dollars. The timber continued to the entrance of Bat Cafion, by which we enter the De Chelley. There my guide points to a side gulch, exclaiming, Tohh klohh no mas, and we stop for the night. Hoppling the horse for a night's grazing, we sample our provisions, with satisfactory results, and retire. Navajo blankets will not admit the moist- ure of the ground, even if there had been any, which there was not; and with two over me, and the saddle blanket below me, I was comfortable till toward morning, when the cold was more intense. June 19th. We hasten to descend into the cafion before the sun is high, going down the first hollow, which soon widens into a sandy plain, dotted with scrubby hemlocks, and some- times with timber of larger growth. The surroundings all show that we are on the Pacific coast : the dry, gray and yellow grass, straight sugar pines and scraggy hemlocks, and the soft airs loaded with resinous odors. We enter next upon a vast flat of sandstone, on which the little feet of Navajo buwos have cut the trail into a groove two inches deep, and cross it to Bat Cafion. The first view of it is frightful enough. We come suddenly to an abrupt break in the sandstone, no more than a rod wide, but down which we can look to the yellow bottom, eleven hundred feet below. The trail runs along the cliff to a point where the canon has widened to a hundred yards ; then enters a side cafion, and leads down to the main one, and through a series of rocky grooves we work our way with slow and cautious steps. Making the packs and saddles fast, each man fixes his lariat to train over the horse's back ; gets behind, and slowly urges him down the rocky incline. There are several places where even the thickness of a man's limb is too much between the horse and the cliff, and he would suffer a fearful squeeze, or be the cause of throwing himself and horse hundreds of feet down the ragged rocks. We advance, perhaps, half a rnile in descending, and near the bottom the caflon again narrows, and we pass under overhanging cliffs, 5.50 STRANGE FORMATION. WIND CARVINGS. through a gorge where the sun never shines, and thousands of gaunt bats, of a strange species, inhabit the crevices of the cliffs, and flit about in midday twilight. According to my guide, this is the place by way of which cowardly Navajoes must enter the spirit land after death. Passing this the narrow walls give back, and we are in a valley with running water and occasional clumps of grass, a hundred yards wideband bounded by perpendicular cliffs. As we proceed, the valley gets wider, but the walls appear to over- hang rather than maintain a plumb line. Occasionally, an entirely detached rock is seen standing out from some sharp corner where there is a turn in the cafion, a sort of tower several hundred feet high, and no more than a hundred thick, its sides and summit cut into a thousand fanciful shapes by the action of sand and wind. Other pieces of the cliff seem to STONE MENAGERIE. 551 have slipped loose and slid down where there was a slight incline, and many such I saw of two hundred feet in hight, enormous slabs leaning against the wall. In other places portions of the stone were harder than the rest, and re- sisted the wearing pro- cess, and now stand out from the wall, or on the edge of the cliff above in fanciful and gro- tesque likeness. Ele- phants, hippopotami, alligators, and most ludicrous human heads are seen from below ; and atone point, where the northern wall pro- jects some distance over its base, a gigantic bear seems to be plunging over from the summit. The cailon had widened into a con- siderable valley, with many strips of grass; when the guide called out, "mahloka!" (woman), and a shep- herd girl came spring- ing down over the rocks in a side gulch, so small, that I had not LEANING TOWER. noticed it. She showed me, through 552 THE THREE PEAKS. the narrow opening into the gulch, that the latter widened out behind the cliffs into a rocky valley where her herd of goats were feeding. She preferred the common request for chin-ne-ah- go (bread), and in return for a small gift, conducted us to a plat of good grass, near the junction of Gallon de Chelley, where we let our animals graze two hours, as I intended remaining in the cailon all day. I have said that the Navajoes are apt, social, and industrious; but these virtues are balanced by some trouble- some vices: they will beg, and occasionally steal, in which they are like all other wild Indians. But, if you employ one, he will neither take nor let others take the value of a cent; in which they are unlike nearly all other Indians. We had scarcely got our baggage piled, before the whole community of three families were about us. I pacified them with tobacco, preferring, if we got into a strait, to do without that, rather than bread. Bat Cailon there runs nearly straight west, and is joined by Cafion de Chelley from the northeast; the meeting of the two and the turn below produces three grand peaks, facing to one center, some fifteen hundred feet high, and quite perpendicular. But the most remarkable and unaccountable feature of the locality is where the two cailons meet. There stands out a hundred feet from the point, entirely isolated, a vast leaning rock tower, at least twelve hundred feet high, and not over two hundred thick at the base, as if it had originally been the sharp termination of the cliff, and been broken off and shoved farther out. It almost 'seems that one must be mistaken, that it must have some con- nection with the cliff, until one goes around it and finds it a hundred feet or more from the former. It leans at an angle from the perpendicular, I should say, of at least fifteen degrees; and lying down at the base on the under side, by the best " sight- ing" I could make, it seemed to me that the opposite upper edge was directly over me. That is to say, mechanically speaking, its center of gravity barely falls within the base, and a heave of only a yard or two more would cause it to topple over. Appear- ances indicate that it was originally connected with the point of the cliff, but the intermediate and softer sand-rock has fallen, been reduced to sand, and wafted away down the cailon. Climb- " ETTAH-HOGANDAY." 553 ing to some of the curious round holes in the cliff I could se O the process of wear going on; the harder particles of the sand being blown into the holes, were being whirled about by th wind, slowly and steadily boring into the cliffs, and beginning that carving which is to result in more of the grotesque shapes. We were off at noon, after a light lunch, and while leaning on the pommel of my saddle in an after dinner rest, I was startled by a shout from my guide of " Ah-yee ! Ah-yee, Melicano, cttah-hoganday ! " (" There, there, sir American ; the mountain- houses.") Looking, I saw the first hamlet, a small collection of stone huts some fifteen hundred feet albove the cafion bed, and perhaps three hundred feet below the summit. One glance served to disprove many of the theories advanced about rope ladders and the like. It could not have been reached thus, for the cliff overhung considerably both above and below it. In- deed, a rope dropped from the brow of the cliff above would have swung over the cafion a hundred feet farther out than the ledge on which the houses stood. As near as I could judge at the distance, the ledge was fifty feet wide, and the houses sonr twenty feet square. Evidently the "Aztecs" who boarded ther did not go to bed by means of a rope ladder. My guide was now all life and animation, shouting and calling my attention to everything of note on the cliffs as we walked our horses slowly down the sandy stream. He seemed to take as much interest in the ettah-hoganday as I did. An hour more brought us to a better object of study : the ruins of a considerable village were on the bottom of the canon, by the foot of the cliff, and about a hundred feet straight above them, ten or a dozen houses in perfect preservation, standing all together on a ledge a hundred feet wide, and completely inac- cessible. Above the village the cliff was perpendicular for a hundred feet or more, then gradually swelled outwardly till it extended considerably over the houses, leaving them thus actu- ally in a great crevice in the rook. Here was a wonder. My Navajo ran about with the activity of a cat, and in several places managed to climb up twenty feet or so, then the smooth wall cut off further progress. Hunting along the rock he found and 554 " AH-YEE ! MELICANO, ETTAH HOGANDAY I" INSPECTION OF THE BUILDINGS. 555 called my attention to some holes looking like steps cut into the stone, which seemed to lead up to a point where one of the peculiar stone slabs I have described leaned against the cliff. The opposite side of the cailon was accessible, and not more than two hundred yards distant, so we went over there and climbed to a point somewhat higher than the pueblo. I then saw that the ledge or groove in the rock, in which the pueblo was built, ran along the cliff for a quarter of a mile, some distance beyond where we found the stone steps; and thought I saw indications of steps, leading down from it a little way toward the detached slab. Possibly, I thought, this slab may have been fast above when the village had inhabitants, and furnished them a winding stairway. I saw also, that the houses were of a most admirable construction, built of flat stones laid in mortar, and neatly white- washed inside ; and that the joists were of massive timber, round, nearly a foot thick, and dressed with some care. At the distance of seven or eight hundred feet there was much uncertainty, but I fancied I also saw fragments of iron and leather on the floor of one house the only one into which the sunshine fell directly. From the situation of the cliffs, I judge that about 10 o'clock in the morning the sun would be shining directly in the front doors. A remarkable echo is observable here. A sentence of ten words shouted from the south side, is returned clearly and dis- tinctly. Not far below we found the ruins of another house, not more than forty feet high, with shelving rock below. The Navnjo found steps to lead half way up. He then walked along a flat offset five or six feet below the house, and held his hands against my feet while I climbed a shelving rock and reached it. It was in ruins, and most of the material lay in a heap in the cailon below. Only the fire-place and chimney, built against the cliff, remained whole; they were of the common Pueblo pattern, and showed dabs of whitewash. I sustained one serious disappointment. Through some blunder of my guide or the interpreter who instructed him at Defiance, I missed the greatest wonder. We ought to have turned up the Cafion de Chelley from where we entered it, and a mile or two would have brought us to the largest pueblo, one capable of containing 556 HOW DID THEY REACH THEM? a thousand people, and situated on a ledge fifteen hundred feet above the cafton and three hundred below the cliff. I had been told of this at Defiance, but through ignorance of the locality missed seeing it and several others. A lieutenant (name forgotten) from Wingate visited it some weeks before with ropes and a pow- erful field-glass. From the opposite side he saw the interior of most of the houses, all of the common pueblo style. They were neatly whitewashed, and the fragments of acquarra showed that they had translucent windows. Broken pottery lay about in heaps, but there were no skeletons or indications of any, show- ing either that the inhabitants had ample time to escape, or that time has destroyed all trace of them. This village, it is said, could be reached by ropes from above ; and as I have only partly attempted what ought to be well and scientifically done, I venture a suggestion. A party of half a dozen should start from Defiance, with ropes, a ladder or two, and powerful field- glasses ; and thus several of the ruins could be reached. The country is perfectly safe, only two hundred and fifty miles from Santa Fe, and the Navajoes are the best of guides and servants. Many and various are the theories among the few whites who have visited these places as to their inhabitants, and how they reached their houses. Besides that of the rope ladders previ- ously mentioned, it is often suggested that the bed of the canon was at that hight when the houses were built, and has since washed down. But this will not do, for the plainest indications show that it would require, at the very least, a hundred thou- sand years for such a wearing down, or washing out, to take place. Besides, the best evidence shows that the cafion is filling, instead of deepening, on account of the sand drifting down. In my opinion, these slabs of stone help to explain it. But this is only a venture, and whether there were once projections from the cliff sufficient to furnish a road, since fallen away, it will take more evidence to settle. I can only sum up as do other visitors : the houses are there, and I have seen them ; but how they got there is a mystery. Who were the inhabitants ? Pueblos, unquestionably, I think ; of the same general stock as the Moquis, Zuflis and Teguas. WHO WERE THEY? 557 The houses are an exact reproduction of those, formerly de- scribed, at the Pueblo de Laguna, including stone, mortar, towers, acquarra windows and whitewashed interior. The country once, no doubt, contained five times as many as to-day, since swept off by increasing drought, Utes and Apaches. Their whole existence was a continual war. They seem to have retreated from the lower valleys to the most hidden or defensi- ble caflons, and then to these clifts, where their horse-riding enemies could not follow them. There they pastured their goats in rugged gorges, and cultivated a few little patches where they could find water. They must often have suffered seasons of iamiue, and probably never had an abundance; and, by the kind law oil nature forbidding increase with no promise but want and misery, the nation slowly dwindled away. The Zufiis, Moquis, New Mexican Pueblos and the Teguas, perhaps also the Pimoles and Maricopas, are their fragmentary surviv- ors. Their ruins, and broken pieces of their pottery, still attest their former extent. Agent Miller's party discovered on the San Juan the ruins of one pueblo which might have con- tained two thousand inhabitants: nor was it abandoned on account of drought : their acecquias still remain, and the San Juan is ample to fill them. The formation of Cafion de Chelley is exclusively of sand- stone; I have, indeed, seen no other kind for a hundred miles. The cafion bed presents the appearance of a vast river of sand. As we journey down it, the water sometimes appears, and runs a feeble stream for a few rods, then disappears, and we travel over what seems a glistening dry plain. But examination shows the sand to be quite moist; our horses' feet turn up moisture, and occasional Navajo corn fields indicate some fertil- ity. At one place we find a large acecquia running some miles along the northern side, which, the guide tells me, formerly ran full till late in the summer, but has been totally dry for some years. The disintegrating sand cliffs are piling barrenness over what was once cultivated land. Occasionally bright meadows of green grass appear on the slopes, and again the river of sand seems to divide and flow around a fertile island a little higher 558 A WALLED CAMP, than the main land, and containing a few acres of dense wheat- grass, as high as a man's head. Again we find the cliffs sinking from a perpendicular to a slope of sixty degrees or so, and bordered by considerable foot-hills; and there we see shrubby hemlock, bunch grass, a few herds and Navajo hogans. Above are their goats clambering up what appears the bare, yellow face of stone; but riding near we observe hundreds of little gullies worn in the rock, each with a slight stain of soil and a few bunches of yellow grass. Looking for camp early, we came upon a green island of some ten acres, containing three Navajo huts ; my guide shouted to the first shepherd girl he saw, who pointed to a peak half a mile away, exclaiming, "Klohh-tohh!" We rode thither, and to rny surprise found lhat the cliffs gave back and inclosed a level plat of a few acres, a sort of mountain cove, sodded with luxuriant grass, and containing another Navajo settlement. Their goats were kind enough to prefer the high gulches, leaving the green grass of the plat in abundance for our stock. In the center was a dug spring, but no running water. The community had abundance of goats' milk and white roots- nothing else. While the Navajo prepared our supper, I went to the first hogan, finding an old man quite sick, who asked the only Spanish he knew if I had any azucar y cafe, adding that he had not tasted food for a week. His daughter went back to camp with me, after the sugar and coffee, and all the other women in the settlement having arrived, they waited to see us eat. Opening a tin box, to their great astonishment, I took out a sardine and jokingly held it out for them to see, then ate it, when they turned away with such expressions of horror and disgust that I was heartily ashamed of myself. Their feelings were probably about the same as ours would be on seeing a Fejee chewing on the corpse of his grandmother. Fish and turkeys either will be or have been human beings, in their the- ology ; they never touch the former, and the latter only to escape absolute starvation. I had been warned that I would find my Navajo prone to disregard cleanliness ; I found him rather neat and careful. But imagine my astonishment when I saw that INDIAN DISEASES. 559 all his native politeness could not entirely conceal his disgust at eating with me! The sardines have done the business for my reputation among the Navajoes. After supper I took an evening stroll as far as I could go up one of the gulches, and after lighting my pipe had sat down upon a rock to watch the line of sunshine and shadows slowly creep up the sixteen hundred feet of the opposite cliff, when I was startled by something like a groan. Within a rod of me, but so low that I had not noticed it, was a temporary hogan; and glancing in I saw a woman with ulcerated face, lying on an old blanket, and murmuring in troubled sleep. She waked, and, seeing me, muttered, "Hah-koh!" which invitation being declined, she reached out a trembling and blotched hand, mur- muring, "Nah-toh, nah-toh" (tobacco). Having given her all I had with me, she became quite communicative; then, seeing I did not fully understand, pointed to the sores on her arms and mournfully muttered, "Chah-chos, chah-chos" a Navajo word indicating the venereal poison. She was in the last stages, and had evidently been removed to this place to die, as they never use a hogan in which any one has died another singular resemblance to the Chinese. Their physicians treat this disease with the sweat-house and the application of a peculiar clayey stone, pounded fine, and indigenous herbs; and often, white men tell me, with great success. There is something horrible in the idea of these simple mountaineers receiving such a curse from the. superior race. Sunlight gave place to moonlight as I returned to camp, the bright moonlight of this climate, which poured a flood of glory on the barren scene east of us, transforming the sand peaks to shining mountains of gold, and the flat to a flowing, glitter- ing stream of gems. I was weary, but the sight was too glorious for sleep, and so I sat and gazed for hours. When I attempt to philosophize or geologize on mountain scenery, or speculate on the age of such peaks and cafions, or the causes that brought them about, I soon drift out of science and into mystical imag- inings. Such scenery never will let me philosophize ; ife will have me muse. t&O A POOR PROSPECT. We may go back, back, from one geologic age to another ; from cosmic process to cosmic process; from the wearing period to the glacial period, and thence to the cooling period and the gaseous period, and come at last to a mighty void, over which the mind can only reach out to " IN THE BEGINNING, GOD " There in childhood we began; there, after weary years of science, must we rest. Reason, exhausted, leans on faith, and learning's last endeavor ends where Moses and Revelation began. June 20th. We were off at the first glimmer of dawn, hoping to reach grass and water early in the afternoon, and knowing that at the best we had a long day's ride before us. It is delightful for traveling till about 10 o'clock ; then the morning breeze dies away, and as the afternoon breeze does not rise till about three, the intervening heat is terrible. We are already nearly two thousand feet below Defiance, and going a little lower every day, with corresponding change in the climate. The grand scenery continues to the very mouth of the canon, which we reached in two hours, then breaks down into a brief succession of foothills and ridges of loose sand, and brings us to an open plain. Here were two or three sections of land under some sort of cultivation by the Navajoes, but it was the most pitiable prospect for a crop I ever saw. The feeble, yel- low blades of corn, three or four inches in hight, had struggled along through drought and cold till the heavy frost of June 17th, and now most of them lay flat on the ground. My guide waved his hand over the field, exclaiming, mournfully, " Muerto, muerto" (dead); "no chinneahgo Navajoes" A few of the more resolute were out replanting, which they did with a sharpened stick, or rather paddle. They dig a hole some ten inches through the dry surface sand to the moist layer underneath, in the edge of which they deposit the grain. They plant wheat the same way, in little hills a foot or so apart, and weed it care- fully till it is grown enough to spade the ground. If there is water they irrigate; otherwise, it has to take its chances, and the guide informed me that the acecquia we saw issuing from the caflon had been dry pasar muchos afios. Twenty bushels of CHALKY MOUNTAIN. 561 corn and ten of wheat are extra crops. If any citizen of rural Ohio, who can deliberately sit down three times a day and reck- lessly eat all his appetite craves, is dissatisfied, he ought to travel awhile in this country. The stream that sinks above gives this tract enough of subsoil moisture to insure some growth. Cross- ing the dry arroyo we rose on the western side to a vast flood plain, ten miles wide, and running as far as I could see from north to south. The surface showed that it had been flooded some time within the last few years ; there was not a trace of alkali or other noxious mineral, and the soil was of great natural fertility. But there was not a spear of vegetation on it, simply for lack of moisture. Here are at least a hundred square miles, formed of detritus and vegetable mold, utterly worthless for want of water. If artesian wells are possible, the whole tract may be of great value. We rose thence by a succession of white sandhills to a horrible desert, which extended some twenty miles. Our horses suffered from both heat and thirst, and the water in our canteens was soon simmering warm. As we neared a low range of gray and chalky-looking hills, the sagebrush appeared a little more thrifty, and sometimes showed a faint green tinge, indicating there was water somewhere in the vicinity. A faint track, as if made by sheep or goats, crossed our trail, whereat the guide whirled his horse toward the ridge, ran his eye along the peaks, and se- lecting one which to my eye in no way differed from the rest, exclaimed, " Toh!" and we started for it. At the mouth of the gorge was a sickly little cotton wood in a small depression, at which the guide remarked: u Toh pasar muchos anos" ("water many years ago"), and we struck up the nearest gulch. The rock everywhere was crumbling away; it was like riding up a moun- tain of chalk. At the foot of, and partly underneath a large cliff, we found two holes, scooped out by Indian hatchets, and containing a gallon or so of water to each, the one almost cool and the other blood warm. After treating ourselves to a quart or so each my horse drank the cool one and the burro the other, and we struck into the desert again. On the western side, my guide had told me, we should see the last Navajoes ; but we 36 iiiiiiiiiiiinii mi 562 VILE DRINK. 563 soon met most of the colony driving before them their little herds, and to the guide's question they replied that the grass there was gone, the water dried up to one spring, and that was hohkciwah ki wano (decidedly not good). Though I did not quite understand this, I saw, by its effect on the guide, that it was bad news for us, who had already ridden forty miles. We found but one family left, and their brush hogan showed that they were on the move. The woman brought out a copper kettle full of water from the only spring, a mile up the gulch which was horribly slimy and stinking; but the guide decided that we must have some of it, and in an hour's climbing we reached it. All around the little pool the sandstone had been trodden to powder, and was blowing into the spring , the water was of a sickening green, full of weeds and ugly creatures, and looked and smelt as if ten thousand goats had 'waded through it. Nevertheless, a catholic stomach triumphed over a protesting nose, and I drowned half a pint of it like so much necessary physic, while my horse drank freely. My Navajo pointed sadly to a few tufts of grass, which had been chewed to the ground, and even the roots pulled up by the goats, and inti- mated, by gestures, that we must go till long after sundown to find good grass. We were not an hour on our way when both of us. felt symptoms of the water " coming back upon us," and I soon rolled out of my saddle on to the sand, too sick to sit up. The fluid part of the water had been absorbed, and the solid contents were putting my stomach to its trumps. The guide hastily rigged a blanket on the largest sage brush, furnishing me a little shade ; then placed another under my head, gazed awhile at my contortions, and decided, as shown by signs, that " it must come up." He ran to a gully a few rods away and brought back a few dry, yellow flowers, which he lighted with a wisp of sage brush, and held under my nose, resulting in a violent sneezing and discharge of blood. He then got my pipe, filled, lighted and placed it in my mouth ; the taste was horri- ble at such a time, but he insisted that it was wano. As this did not seem to produce the desired effect, he moistened a lot of 564 AN INDIAN EMETIC. tobacco in his mouth and rubbed it on the pit of ray stomach and under my arms. In a few minutes I began to heave, and shortly was relieved of everything in my stomach, and was soon pretty well. But my sickness was succeeded by a horrible thirst, which I had to endure for fifteen miles further. Then we turned off the trail to another peak of rather hard sandstone, up which we toiled for nearly a thousand feet. Here he pointed out a black pass between two rocks, and leaving our horses we entered it to find a beautiful pool of cold, clear water, nearly a rod square and completely covered by overhanging rocks. Here we drank and rested un- til the moon was high enough to light us back to the plain. My horse either smelt the water or heard its splash, and uttered a low pleading whinny that went to my heart. It was impossi- ble to get him under the rocky arch into the cave, and I had no vessel but a tin cup. I tried that, but could not even moist- en his tongue; I wet ray handkerchief and tried to "swab" his mouth ; he chewed it to rags and bit my finger in the opera- tion. About to give up in despair, I thought of my wool hat, and filled that for him. It fitted his mouth admirably, and by eleven trips with it he was satisfied. Half a dozen hatfuls sufficed for the burro, and we worked our way down hill again. But this time my Navajo's sense of locality failed him, and on the steepest part he took the wrong chute, pulling up his burro VAH ! MELICANO, MALO, MALO SLEEPING IN THE SADDLE. 565 just in time to avoid his plunging head first into a ravine, but not in time to save himself, as the saddle girth gave way just at the Wrong moment. As he went head first into a pile of boulders and sand, I looked on in horror, fully satisfied that I was left alone in this terrible place ; but he sprang up instantly, and with a silly smile, and, " Vah, vah, Melicano, malo, malo !" remounted and rode on, only rubbing his crown occasionally. Getting back to the plain, we continued our former course southwest along the foot of the mesa. My eyelids began to droop with weariness, and for fear I should drop off my horse in sleep, I loosed my feet, and raising the stirrup leathers, wrapped them about each arm. The position was not favorable to sleep, nor could I keep entirely awake ; and soon I suffered from that dangerous symptom of dreaming with the eyes wide open, and fixed upon the very object of my dream. The bright moonlight fell upon the projecting peaks of the ridge to our right, and I endeavored to keep awake by contemplating their beauty ; but as I gazed I saw suddenly a score of bright, clear streams dashing down as many gulches, and a broad savanna on the plain below, rich and green with inviting grass. I shouted to the guide: " Kloh ! Toh!" ("grass, water"), and jerking up my horse, pitched forward on his neck and awoke. I braced myself more firmly to keep awake, and in a few mo- ments, looking on a rock a little ahead, I saw a hideous painted Indian bound out from behind it and take position in the sage brush near the trail. I yelled to the guide and grabbed my gun, and just as the hammer was clicking under my hand, Indian and rock disappeared, and the answering shout of the guide brought me to my waking senses. I knew there was not a hostile Indian in fifty miles, so for fear I should shoot my own horse, I gave the gun to the Navajo, and again resolved to keep awake. He still pointed ahead for grass, but indicated that it was now "pokedo" ("a little way"). While gazing on a sand ridge we were crossing, I seemed to see it covered with grass and flowers, and shouting that this was the place, reined up my horse suddenly, and again butted him in the back of the head, at the imminent risk of giving us both the poll-evil. 566 " HAH-KOH, MELICANO ! " At last, about 11 o'clock, we reached the promised place I had anticipated in so many fitful dreams a little valley, rich with bunch and herd grass, where we made a " dry camp." Taking the estimated distance from De Chelley, and deducting the remaining distance to Moqui, we had ridden at least sixty- five miles, probably much more, and this under a burning sun, without a bite to eat, and with water only three times. We stood it amazingly, but it is a wonder it did not kill the ani- mals. I think the little burro t not much bigger than a sheep, and carrying a good-sized Navajo and twenty pounds of pro- visions, stood it better than my horse. As soon as I could unload and hopple my horse, without removing any clothing, I wrapped both blankets about me, sank upon the grass, with head on saddle, and in two minutes was sound asleep. June 21st. I scarcely seemed to have closed my eyes when I was aroused by a "Hah-koh, Melicano" and starting up, saw my Navajo with the animals ready to mount, and pointing to the east, already rosy with the coming dawn. Moving his hand toward a point half way to the zenith, he remarked : "Kloh t toh no calor" Spanish, Navajo, and sign-language, meaning in full, "By starting now, we shall reach grass and water the middle of the forenoon, and before the heat of the day." It is astonishing how much conversation two men can carry on with only a hundred words in common, if both are good at gesture. Thus, on starting out in the morning, I point to the zenith and ask: "Kloh, foA?"to which my Navajo replies: "Ou ay," pointing to the animals with a rapid gyration of his fingers. This means in full : " Shall we reach grass and water by noon?" "Yes, if the animals travel well." True, this does not admit of going into the higher realms of literature or phi- losophy, but men lose much of their interest in those higher realms while crossing these deserts. Grass and water are the most sublime objects of their search; and the country is so generally barren that all journeys have to be measured and calculated with regard to the few places where these are to be found. The knowledge of the Indians on this subject seems almost like a sixth sense. Standing on the plain, my Navajo MORNING HIDE. 567 "THE SHADOW OF A GREAT ROCK IN A WEARY LAND." will fix his eye on the distant peaks, of which every one looks alike to me, and selecting one, exclaim, (< Toh!" start for it, and come unerringly to water. In one instance we followed on his selected course, and found the spring dry, when his confusion was as great as mine would be if I should get lost in my native town. We had enough water in the canteen to maKe two cups of coffee, after which we found the morning ride delightful, and through a much better country, containing considerable grass. The vnlley soon narrowed to a mere pass, then opened suddenly to an extensive plain, in the center of which, some ten miles away, rose a vast oval mesa, which the guide pointed out as Moqui. We stopped at the point of the mountain, opening on 568 DISTANT VIEW OF MOQUI. the plain ; but when the guide indicated grass and water up and over a perfectly bare white sand hill, I shook my head. He only smiled, and led the way. With frequent rests to our horses, we had toiled up and over the rising sand hills for something like a mile, when a sudden descent brought us into a circular hollow, containing half a dozen shrubs and nearly an acre of densely matted grass. At the foot of the cliff was a slight moisture, and pointing to a black rock which appeared nearly five hundred feet straight above us, the guide intimated there was our spring. Everything was stripped from the ani- mals except the lariats, but how we ever got them up that hill is a mystery to me; but we did, and found plenty of good water, brought down our supply, and remained in this camp until 3 P. M. I am now convinced that my horse could go up or down any pair of stairs in (Cincinnati. We had exhausted what bread we started with, and cooked a fresh supply here; after which we enjoyed a delightful " laze" of four hours in the shadow of the rock. From this point, when the afternoon breeze had sprung up, we entered upon the sandy plain, and followed a slight trail towards the mesa. Occasional depressions were filled with yellow bunch grass, but most of the plain was of hard bare white sand, seeming to literally bake in the heat of the sun. Approaching the foot of the mesa we found the sand a little more loose and dark. Here I noticed rows of stones a foot or so apart, and was amazed to find, on examination, we were in a Moqui field. By every little hill of corn or beans they had laid a stone, about half the size of a peck measure; for what I cannot imagine, unless it is to draw moisture. From the foothills I gazed with astonishment upon the per- pendicular walls and projecting cliffs of the mesa, rising a thousand feet above me. It is little over half a mile long and half as wide, and rises abruptly from the plain on every side; around it run half galleries and footpaths, winding in and out upon the crevices and projecting shelves of rock ; and far above my head, as it seemed almost in mid-air, I saw goat-pens upon STRANGE EMOTIONS. 569 SHEEP-PENS AT MOQUI. the very face of the cliff, and opening back into dark, cool caves, where the stock is inclosed at night. Here and there was to be seen a Moqui woman, toiling wearily up the rocky galleries with a water-jug strapped on her back; and above, on the summit, I saw the houses, at an angle of forty-five above me, looking like pigeon-houses set on a cliff. The sight was one to awaken strange emotions. I was look- ing upon the chosen stronghold of the most peculiar and unac- countable of all American Indians; probably upon an ancient seat of the Aztecs ; upon a city about which all has been con- jecture and romance, founded upon the vague reports of prospectors and hunters, but which no writer had visited and described ; a town the very existence of which is often considered fabulous. As a natural fortification it is probably the strongest 570 AT THE FOOT OF THE MESA. in the land. Around the entire mesa there is but one narrow way that a horse can ascend, and on that, at a score of points, a squad of boys with nothing but stones could defy the cavalry of the world. The springs which supply the community are situ- ated around the base of the highest cliffs, where the foothills begin, but so far up that most of them can not be reached by horses from below; and even most of their little fields are hidden among the foothills, and only to be found from above. From the general level of the plain to the flat top of the mesa I estimate at a thousand feet. Half of this rise is by a succession of rolling sand ridges, and then we come to a perpendicular cliff, only surmountable by these rock-hewn galleries. The community owns neither horses nor cattle ; nothing but goats, and equally agile burros, can surmount the obstacles of such a situation. It is at once the strongest, most astonishing and un- accountable site for a town I ever saw. f We entered upon the ascent in a hot and narrow pass between two sand ridges, and soon reached the first spring, below which was a succession of walled fields. Each field was about three rods wide and six long, and contained some three hundred hills of corn ; they were built up against the sand ridge, a stone wall four or five feet high forming at once the division for one and support for the dirt in the next, the fields rising in a succession of terraces. The feeble stream was exhausted before it passed the second field, and it is only in the night that the lower ones can be irrigated. Farther down, where there is no water, the Moqui digs a hole in the sand eighteen or twenty inches deep, and plants his corn where a slight moisture has percolated from above. We passed the slope, and were about to enter on the gallery road, when a Moqui shouted to us from directly over- head, and in obedience to his directions, though at the imminent risk of our necks, the guide turned down a rocky footpath to another gallery. A few steps showed us that a vast sand-rock had fallen across the other road, and a new one had been built. All the men of the place seemed to be absent as we turned the last groove in the gallery, and, almost before we were aware of it, the houses looking so much like stone, were right in the MISIAMTEWAH. 571 first town. At Defiance I was told to ask for Chino, the Capitan of this mesa, before I talked to any one else ; so I shouted to call out some one. A woman came on top of the nearest house, and seeing me immediately set up a cry of jokow! jokow ! Then from every house women and children, with occasionally a man or good-sized boy, came running on to the house-tops and down the ladders to the street, while the cry went ahead from house to house, jokow ! jokow ! jokow ! A population of several hundred was soon crowding about me, or gazing in astonishment from the house-tops; the women were chattering and exclaiming, and the children when I rode near a house yelling with fright, and altogether we were creating a decided sensation. Again I called for Chino, and a dozen boys jumped into the road and ran along the cliff, beckoning me to follow. We passed through the first town, the whole popula- tion following in a tumultuous mass, and in the scond town a hundred yards on found and were admitted to the lower part of Chino's house. He was not at home, but they let us into an extension of his dwelling, containing but one story, where we deposited our packs. Twenty boys and women were already on the house-top, jostling each other to look through the square opening at us ; as many more were crowding into the room, and about four hundred were outside struggling for a good place. It is not pleasant to be stared at, even by barbarians ; my Navajo also got embarrassed, and suggested that Chino could not be far away, and a few shots from my gun would bring him. I stepped to the edge of the cliff and fired three shots as fast as I could run the slide of my " Spencer/ 7 which elicited uni- versal cries ofjokow! Then an old woman suggested some- thing that sounded like Mice-eye, and a boy was sent after that person. He arrived in a few minutes and asked at once, in pretty good Spanish, who I was, what I wanted, where I came from, where was I going, and what did I intend to do when I got there ? His name he told me, and had it written on a card by some white man, was Misiamtewah. He had seen the Mor- moneys, and could talk Moqui, Tegua and Spanish, and a few 572 EL CAPJTAN CHINO. 57-"5 words of English. What could I talk, and what did I want at Moqui ? I made friends with him at the start. Chino soon arrived and assigned us a large and commodious room, a sort of addition to his house. Here were the cooking utensils, and a few books left by Mr. T. C. Crothers, son of the Pueblo Agent at Santa Fe, who had visited Moqui the previous year and remained several weeks. With them were a number of star candles, some writing paper, a clay pipe, and old news- papers, all of which Chino had religiously preserved, and now delivered them to me. Per Misiamtewah, Chino assured me this was rny room, my town, my country while I stayed ; and John soon piled all our property inside, and sent the animals out to Chi no's herd. I suggested that he had better keep a sharp lookout for our little luxuries ; but he answered, with a meaning smile, in halting Spanish and Navajo, with gestures most expressive of hooking, what might be fully translated thus: " Oh, no, Sefior, among Mexican and Melican you watch ; Na- vajo you watch, when you have no good one with you; but here you never watch at all ; Moquis steal nothing." It proved literally true. Not one of Chino's family would touch an ar- ticle without my invitation; and it is the testimony of all, that among these people the women are chaste and the men scrupu- lously honest. By the third day of our stay John is in a fever of anxiety to go home. He ought to be satisfied to await my pleasure, for he is enjoying three meals a day at my expense ; but the impecunious cuss knows there is five dollars waiting for him there, when he brings letters from me, and he wants to get there and have a time with the boys. Luckily, he cannot buy whisky, but he will have his spree all the same ; and his extravagance will break out in reckless displays of new paint and flowered calico, and lavish gifts of white sugar. I hate to part with him, for he has proved a good fellow. Like most common Indians, the poor fellow has no name, or I should immortalize him. CHAPTER XXVII. THE LAST OF THE AZTECS. Theory and fact What I know about the Moquis Location Numbers Dwellings Dress A dinner of State Dog-meat and a Catholic stomach Strange dialogue on religion Tuba and Telashnimki Oraybe Radicals Fur- ther enquiries Division of the subjects Mounds in Ohio In Mississippi Valley Mexico Central America Peru Theories Jews, Chinese, Malays, Phoenicians, Romans, or Atlanteans Modest conclusion. HO are the Moquis? This historical conundrum must be referred to the class of inquiries relative to the " Mound- Builders," and other prehistoric races of America ; for it is, to my mind, self-evident that the civilized Indians of Arizona are but the last feeble remnants of a long series of races. Theory is worthless with- out a good basis of fact. Let me, therefore, recount what I saw before I attempt antiquarian researches. The three Moqui towns, on the one mesa, where I spent four days, are situated as nearly as I can determine in latitude 36 north, and between the meridians 110 and 111 west of Greenwich; in the center of an oval plain, some twenty by thirty miles in extent. It appears to be walled in by precipi- tous mountains, with five or six openings ; but this is only in appearance, as a succession of ridged mesas, scattered over the country, appear to the traveler at any one point as forming a circle. Around the border, where it rises toward the enclosing hills, the plain is rich in bunch and white-seed grass; whence toward the towns it falls off to a horribly barren plain of dry and burning sand. From this plain the mesa rises, oval-shaped and equally on every side, to the hight of one thousand or twelve hundred feet. At first view I set it down as much higher, but having since been around it, and climbed down and 574 A NATURAL FORTRESS. NORTHWEST FRONT OF MOQUI. up, I reduce it somewhat. This rocky mole, of mingled white and red sandstone, with a lower stratum of soapstone, is nearly half a mile long, (I measured it by stepping), and not quite a quarter wide. From the edge the cliff falls off perpendicularly, or even with a slight overhang, some half way down ; then the foothills begin and slope away in a succession of sandy inclines. At one place only, by rock-hewn galleries and dug and walled ways, can horses reach the summit. In two other places per- sons can descend or ascend by toilsome climbing. Up one of these, leading to the main spring, I toiled for an hour. The Moqui women ascend it in fifteen minutes, with heavy water jugs slung on their heads, springing from shelf to shelf of the rock with amazing agility. 576 SEVEN TOWNS. The three or four springs which supply the place break out from under the rock about the point where the abrupt cliff joins the foot-hills, and can all be fortified against the approach of an enemy from below. All the provision is stored as fast as gathered, in the houses, and thus they seem always ready to sustain a long siege. As far as possible up the cliffs, where caves open inward, flats have been worked upon the rock, and sheep and goat pens constructed leading into the caves. As I stand upon the cliff soon after sunrise I can look down hun- dreds of feet into the outer portion of these pens, and see the Moquis milking their goats in what seems like a great rocky balcony standing out from the wall. All around extends the yellow plain, and as I walk upon these bights in the bright starlight, it seems tossing and heaving below me like a sea of molten brass. Moqui, a common name given by whites and the other Indians, is only the name of one town; but there are seven in all : Moqui, Moquina, Tegua, Hualpec, Shepalawa, Oraybe, and Beowawe so spelled by the Spaniards, but pronounced by themselves, respectively, Mokee, Mokeenah, Taywah, Wallpake, Shapalawah, Orybay, and Baowahway. The first three on this mesa contain altogether, I conclude, about a thousand inhabit- ants. Their houses are generally square, and of "first rate architectural design. They are built of flat stones laid in a fine cement, which seems to harden with time; the joists are of immense timbers, apparently a species of sugar pine, hewn round ; they are plastered heavily inside, and whitewashed with a material which gives a hard, smooth polish. Thus they are easily kept clean, and always have a neat, inviting appearance; indeed, there is very little dust or dirt flying about on the mesa. Sand storms raised below, strike against the cliff some distance down. Houses are built together in groups, with but narrow pas- sages between, and thus neither town covers more than four or five acres. They are two or three stories in hight, the stories each very high except the lowest. That is seldom used in summer, and Dot being more than four or five feet high, I at SOLID CONSTRUCTION. I 577 DISTANT VIEW OF ORAYBE. first thought it only a raised platform on which the main house stood, until they showed me the square holes opening into it, and the interior arranged for living. On this, the second story, two or three feet narrower all around, rises ten or twelve feet. Upon the joists of this are piled willows, or other long branches two or three feet deep, covered with dirt, which is again over- laid with hard plastering, smoothed and polished, making at once roof for the second, and floor for the third stories. This is never more than half or a third as large as the second, and (which struck me with astonishment, as did the same fact at the Laguna Pueblo), the upper walls are often built directly across the lower, and supported entirely by the immense joists. They sleep on these roofs altogether, ascending by ladders, or 37 578 A FRIENDLY RACE. by the projection of stone always built out at one of the corners so as to form a rude staircase. The better class carpet their houses with sheep-skins, and all have sheep-skins to sit on, though the floor is kept scrupulously clean. There is not dampness enough to produce troublesome mold, even in the lowest story, and only one noisome insect, (genus unknown to me,) the presence of which is at once betrayed by the white- wash, so it is easily guarded against. I had supposed they were a rather reserved people, but I found them exceedingly kind and communicative. When the novelty of rny appearance had worn away a little, and I could walk about town without a wondering crowd after me, I rarely turned toward a house without receiving the welcome wave of the hand to the lips and breast, with the words, "Ho, Melicano, messay vo;" or sometimes, as many know a few words of Spanish, " Entre: Pasar adelante." Then a boy or girl would run down the stone staircase, and extend a hand to steady me in ascending. They took me into every room in their houses, and seemed to take a pride in exhibiting their best specimens of pottery, wicker-jugs, and other property. Of their children they were particularly demonstrative ; and, indeed, they looked well enough. I did not, in all the towns, see a single birth- mark, blotch or deformity, except albinism. Children of both sexes go entirely naked till about the age of ten years. I noted one curious fact: The small children seemed almost as white as American children, till the age of six months or a year; then they began to turn darker, and at ten or twelve had attained to a rich mahogany color. They play for hours along these cliffs, chasing each other from rock to rock at that dizzy bight, and yet they seemed surprised when I asked if accidents did not happen. Their mode of living is very simple, and I happened upon a time of unusual scarcity. The general drought of the past three years had cut off their crops. As often as Chino, the Capitan of this mesa, visited me, I had presented him a tin of warm, sweetened coffee, of which they are very fond, and which was the only thing I could spare; and I had partaken HIGH LIVING. 579 of parched corn with him the evening of my arrival, when I received a special invitation to dine with him " the day before I left." (People with weak stomachs may skip the next para- graph.) They breakfast early, and dine between 11 and 12. Be- sides Misiamtewah, a sort of official interpreter, there is another Moqui who speaks Spanish tolerably well, having been a year in Tucson and Prescott; and both were at dinner with us. We sat upon sheep-skins on the floor, in a circle around the earthern bowls, in which the food was placed. The staple was a thick corn mush, which to me was rather tasteless for the want of salt. The regular bread of the Moqtiis is a decided curiosity. The wheat is ground with mdats (smooth stones), as by the Navajoes, but much finer, six or seven women grinding together, reducing the flour to the merest dust. It is then mixed as thin as milk; the woman cooking dashes a handful on the hot stone, where it cooks almost instantly, and comes off no thicker than paper, and of a bright blue color. The flakes are about two feet long, and as they are stacked two or three feet deep on the platter, look remarkably like a pile of blue silk. They raise white, blue and red corn ; and by various mixtures of the meal with wheaten flour, produce seven different colors in the bread. These they stack in alternate layers for a feast, producing a pretty effect. It is very sweet and nourishing, but there are two objections to it : one can eat an hour or two before getting satisfied, and then, in some cases, they mix it with chamber-lye, which makes it all a little suspi- cious. Clean as their houses are, they are as dirty in their cooking as the wild Indians, and will not compare at all with the Navajoes. Their goats' milk, as I purchased it, was always so suspicious, that in this case I took my private tin cup along, and strained my own share through a handkerchief I reserved for that purpose. It was rather an awkward thing for an invited guest to do, but I did not perceive that it gave any offence. But the piece de resistance was the meat, which con- sisted of the hinder half of a very fat young dog, elegantly dressed and well cooked, that animal being the favorite food 580 STEWED DOG. GROUP OF MOQUIS. of the Moquis. It is subject to greater extremes than beef; the meat of an old, lean dog is very tough, and that of a fat, young puppy, very tender. I took from my own store a box of sardines, and Misiamtewah was prevailed upon to eat one; but Chino and the rest rejected them with horror. There's gastronomic prejudice for you. This man is sweet on dog, and rejects a sardine with abhorrence; my Eastern friends take sardines with avidity, but their gorge rises at the thought of dog, while my catholic stomach takes dog and sardine with equal impartiality. Parched corn completed the bill of fare, with beverage of goat's milk. Both the Moquis and Navajoes never use it until heated almost to the boiling point; but after one cup of this, I requested and was served with mine cold. The stove, ingeniously constructed of flat stones, is either on the ground just beside the door, or on the roof of the first story, by the door of the second. MODE OF FARMING. 581 With my Navajo guide and Chino's son, we formed a very pleasant party of six, and had quite a social time. The second interpreter informed me that he went to Prescott some years ago with Melicanoes and Meshicauoes, and that they named him it was probably in sport Jesus Papa (Hay-soos Pahpah). He was much more communicative than Misiamtewah, and had a very fair idea of the Americans. To these simple people I represented in person all the dignity of that great Nation, of whom such wonderful reports had reached them. And here I must own to a little deceit. They were at first very inquisitive as to my business, and could not imagine why a white man should be making such a long trip with only Indians for com- panions. Savage people can rarely understand that intelligent curiosity which is the product of civilization, and suspect some ulterior purpose when one has nothing to trade, and wishes to buy nothing. Repeatedly questioned at first, I told Chino I was un escribano del Gobicrno de los Indios (" a writer for the Government in regard to the Indians "), which may be passed as partly true in a sense. The Moquis have a close struggle for existence. The sand surrounding the mesa presents the poorest show for farming I ever saw, yet everywhere among these sand hills are their little walled fields, three or four rods square, and from the measure Papa showed me, I estimated that his field had produced what would amount to twelve or fifteen bushels of corn, and half as much wheat to the acre. The water from neither of the springs runs more than ten rods before sinking in the sand ; but in some places they have constructed little troughs of rock or wood which carry a stream perhaps as big as one's finger to the field and help the case a little. With a sharp stick they dig a hole about eighteen inches deep through the top sand, which brings them to a stratum of moister sand, in which they lodge the grain. Around the hill they then place a few stones, and after dressing in clean clothes, sit in solemn silence for hours by the fields supposed to be praying for rain. If no rain comes, which is generally the case, they usually carry water in their wicker jugs from the spring, and pour a pint or so on each hill. 582 HISTORY AND TRADITION. I suppose the stones are put there to draw or retain moisture ; but it may be merely to mark the exact spot. A month often elapses before the stalk appears above ground. It rarely grows more than two feet high, and the ear is short and thick, with dark, round, very hard grains, much like that variety we used to call " squaw corn " on the Wabash. Along the foot of these bordering sand-hills, in the shallow where there seems to be some moisture, and in the bordering mountains, grow many peach trees, which bear abundantly every year. The kernels of the stones are pounded and formed into little cakes, used apparently as a sort of relish. With all this the difficulty of living is very great, and the industry and enterprise displayed quite astonishing. Their sheep and goats are always sure of good pasture somewhere in the neighborhood, and these furnish their dependence when all else fails. Of history or tradition they seem to have little or none, and all my endeavors failed to discover the slightest trace of any religion. The simplest form in which I could put questions on that point seemed to completely bewilder them. The Span- ish word Dios they had never heard, and the-American word God only as an oath, and did not know what it implied. To my question, " Who made all these mountains?" Papa only smiled, then stared, and finally replied : " Nada ; siempre son aqui." ("Nothing; they are always here.") Fearing from this that my limited command of Spanish had caused him to misunderstand me, I entered into a very minute explanation, in the simplest possible words, of our belief, and had him repeat till I was sure he fully understood it, but apparently it roused no answering conceptions in his mind. Part of the talk struck me as so curious that I at once copied it : Myself The Melicans and Mexicans have one they call God, or Dios. We think He made us, made this mesa, made these mountains, made all men and all things. We talk to and ask good things of this God. Papa Yes; I much hear Melican man say "G d " (repeating an oath too blasphemous to be written). Myself No, no ; that is bad. He was a bad Melican who RELIGION. 583 STREET IN THE v DEAD TOWN. said that. We think this God all good. Have the Moquis a God like that ? P. Nothing ! (Nada.) The grandfathers said nothing ofDios what you say Got God (making several attempts at the word). M. But, say to me, who made this mesa, these mountains, all that you see there ? P. Nothing ! It is here. M. Was it always here ? P. (With a short laugh) Yes, certainly, always here. What would make it be away from here ? M. But where do the dead 'Moquis go? Where is the child I saw put in the sand yesterday ? Where does it go? P. Not at all. Nowhere ; you saw it put in the sand. How can it go anywhere ? 584 STRANGE CUSTOMS. M. Did you ever hear of Montezuma ? P. No ; Monte Montzoo (attempting the word) Meli- cano man ? M. No ; one of your people, we think. What are these dances for that you have sometimes ? P. The grandfathers always had them. So ended my attempts to inquire into Moqui theology. Papa may only have been pretending ignorance; if so, he did it well. This is so different from all I had heard of the Moquis that it puzzled me. Mr. Clark, Spanish in- terpreter for the Pue- blos, spent 6 months here, and he wit- nessed many religi- ous ceremonies ; and Major Powell, if I mistake not, ob- tained from them a tolerably connected account of their ideas of God, and the im- mortality of the soul. Either of two con- clusions is possible : That there is a diffe- rence of opinion among them, or that they felt too much suspicion of a comparative stranger to tell me anything about the matter. But they have another custom, in which, if it have not a reli- gious significance, I fail to see any meaning. About bedtime Chino goes to the top of his 'house and utters a loud call or chant for about five minutes, after which the whole population are very still. At the first break of day a man runs the whole TUBA AND TELASHNIMKI. A DELIVERER LOOKED FOR. 585 length of the mesa with a number of cow-bells attached to his belt ; the entire population turn out at once, and while the others proceed to milk their goats, the bellman and a few young men descend to the plain and go a mile or more towards the East. An army officer who has visited them, says that they look for a deliverer to come from that direction ; and send an embassy every morning to meet him ! How wide-spread, how deeply rooted is this Messianic idea. From the Jew who looked for one that should restore Israel and break the Roman yoke, to the poor Hindoo who fondly trusts that the Tenth Avatar will descend, "And Camdeo bright, and Ganessa sublime, Shall bless with joy their own propitious clime ; " from the cultivated white Christian to the poor brown Moqui all, all are looking for One who shall speak with authority, bring universal peace, and restore to each his own. Is it a myth? Did God send hunger, and not send bread? Did He implant a universal hope and longing, for which He was to pro- vide no realization. This world-wide hope means something. One has come, or is to come, who will usher in a time " When useless lances into scythes shall bend, And the broad falchion in a plow-share end ; When wars shall cease, and ancient fraud shall fail ; Returning Justice lift aloft her scale ; Peace o'er the world her olive wand extend, And white-robed Innocence from heaven descend." Of their own arrival in the region they now occupy, the Moquis have no tradition ; but have a well connected account of the Navajoes, who came, "the grandfathers say," not many genera- tions ago, from a northern country. They have also a vague account that they -were once more rich and numerous than now. " The grandfathers " often told them that the ruins on the adjacent mesa were inhabited by a powerful race of Moquis, and a big spring watered the plain ; but an earthquake threw down many of the houses, and dried up the spring ; many of the 586 OBAYBE. people perished of famine, and the remnant went to a south country. They have much more acquaintance with white men than I had supposed. Several Mormons, particularly Jacob Hamlin, the Indian Agent, have visited them and remained some time. Telashnimki and Tuba, two Oraybes, husband and wife, accompanied Hamlin to Salt Lake City, and were delighted with all they saw. Since their return, a portion of the Oraybes have seceded from the main body, and established a new settle- ment, to which they invite white men, and propose more friendly relations. The Moquis pointed out Gray be in the distance ; but did not think it safe for me to visit it, as the Apaches visit there constantly. The Mormons are establishing friendly rela- tions with all the tribes of northwestern Arizona, and will, it is to he hoped, succeed in peace in their vicinity. One question frequently asked me was, "Are the Mormoneys Americans ? " A plain affirmative was near enough to the truth for the views of the Indians; but, in point of fact, the question is open to argument. Two years before, an American was wounded in the neigh- borhood, and remained at Moqui nearly a year ; and the previous winter Mr. O. C. Crothers, son of the Pueblo agent, at Santa Fe, had remained there three or four months. They now receive regu- lar annuities of Government goods. Some ten or twenty miles west is another mesa, with three villages, and fifteen miles from that the Oraybe village; thus their total number must be about three thousand. The Orbayes refuse to receive an agent or make any treaty, and repulse the advances of whites, but have committed no violence. They trade and fraternize extensively with the Apaches. The dress of a Moqui consists of very loose jacket and draw- ers, made of calico obtained from traders. The first is made close at the neck, and flows loosely to the hips ; the second reaches from the waist to a little below the knees. Heavy san- dals protect the feet. But this dress is only conventional, and they often appear entirely naked, except the girdle and breech- clout. The women wear a heavy woolen of their own nianu- INDIAN POLYGAMY. 587 facture, consisting of single skirt and a sort of half-waist, or rather a fold thrown over the shoulders, and leaving one arm and breast bare. Their disposition is eminently civil and un- warlike. They have a great horror of shedding blood, and always retreated before any attack. The oldest men have no recollection of any time when they were at war, and I saw no weapons of war among them. Polygamy seems to prevail to a slight extent. Chino and Misiamtewah each have two wives, but from what little they said on the subject, I conclude they consider it a burden rather than a privilege. The women are rather hbmely, short, and stumpy, I think from carrying loads upon their head. None of them will compare with the graceful and shapely Navajo girls ; nor are they prolific. Their numbers are evidently decreasing steadily. The town at the south end of the mesa is slowly falling to ruins; not half the houses are inhabited, and through the other towns there are many abandoned dwellings, now used for stables and sheep pens, or for storing hay. The kindly law of nature will not permit increase in a country which can only furnish a bare living. Moqui means " Dead Man," and Moquina may be translated " Little Dead Town." This is the half-abandoned town on the south end of the mesa; and I was informed by Jacob Hamlin that some five years before most of the inhabitants there died of small-pox. Most singular of all, two languages are spoken on this mesa. The Tegua town, the one we first enter on coming up the cliif, has a language quite distinct from the ordinary Moqui. Those who have examined say the Tegua is the same as that spoken by the Pueblos near the city of Mexico. If true, this is a most important fact, and to my mind goes far to supply the missing link in Baron Humboldt's history of the Aztecs. Governor Amy, of Santa Fe, collected many facts on this subject, but whether they have been published I do not know. But the most gratifying part of my experience here was a sight of some of the renowned "white Indians/' though the result was rather ludicrous than otherwise. I had learned all that Papa and Misiamtewah could tell me on the subject, when 588 "WHITE INDIANS." the former came to my room one day and stated that a family of them, three men and two women, had just come on a visit from the next mesa. I was transported with delight. I now had an opportunity to bodily examine a people who might almost be styled fabulous. For half a century we have had enchanting stories of this people, seeming all the more romantic from the fact that they had to be repeated through a dozen channels be- fore they reached the philosophic critic. It was said that a Welsh family had settled in the tribe two centuries ago as to just how they got there the tradition was silent and that their descendants had multiplied to an extensive class, with white skin, blue eyes', and red hair. Another story was that they were captured Spaniards, adopted into the tribe. But the most romantic account ran thus: In the reign of Queen Elizabeth a Spanish fleet made a descent upon the western coasts of Great Britain and Ireland and carried off several hundred Scotch and Irish. According to the custom of the time, they were sent to work in the newly-opened mines of Mexico. There they revolted, and escaped in a body to the Aztecs of the north, who were still resisting the Spaniards, and became the ancestors of a new race. It is a pity to spoil so much romance, but the prosaic fact is, these "White Indians" are nothing but Indians, pure and simple, as much so as the blackest of the tribe. They are nothing but albinos, and differ only from African albinos in the fact that this form is rather more apt to be hereditary than the other. In the majority of cases it is transmissible, but not always. The fact is proved conclusively by hair, skin, and eyes : the first is a sickly, pinky red, mixed with white ; the second is a waxy white, stained in places with yellow, and the eyes are very weak and " mooney," or perpetually "dancing." The girl of this family was almost blind at noon ; the woman had tolerably good sight, but was " moon-eyed ; " and the man's eyes looked like two glittering pieces of glass stuck in the bot- tom of auger holes. His sight, however, appeared tolerably good, and the two boys, whose complexions were more nearly like those of other Moquis, had good natural eyes. It is possi- ble, of course, that there may be somewhere in Arizona a race DECAYING RACES. 589 of " White Indians," but as for these, among the Zunis and Moquis, they are evidently not a distinct race. Both interpre- ters tell me all the others are just like these; that they some- times have dark children, and occasionally full-color Moquis have white children. Their whiteness, in fact, is nothing but a disease. If the term be medically correct, I would call it a spe- cies of American leprosy. We need not go far to find the causes : a people living in this hot, dry climate, on hard, dry food, in the midst of burning sands, drouth, and misery, and shut up in these little isolated communities, where the same families have intermarried in all probability for twenty-five generations. The only wonder is that they are not totally extinct, or ring-streaked, speckled, and grizzled. With the exception of their houses, the Moquis do not appear to me as much advanced in the arts as the Navajoes. They weave blankets, but not as good as those of' the latter. They make beautiful crockery, painting it with fanciful figures and flowers by means of different colored clays or stones obtained from the mountains. Their cookery is infe- rior to the Navajoes, and they learn much less readily. They are, in fact, a decaying race, at the last end of the series; while the Navajoes are at the beginning, a new and vigorous race. In the "good old time/' when the Pueblo races dominated the whole country, they were much more numerous than now, and their settlements nearly continuous; intermarriages took place between the various towns, their language was nearly the same, and they were prolific and progressive. Now they con- stitute but little islands, as it were, in an ocean of Utes, Nava- joes, and Apaches; the separated towns have gradually grown apart, and become distinct nations ; they have no central priest- hood or ecclesiastical connection, their religion and learning steadily decay, and even the tradition of a common origin is fast becoming obscure. So much for what I know about the Moquis. And as I pro- ceed to a wider range of inquiry, allow me to state that in what follows there is no attempt at an exhaustive or scientific treat- ment of the subject. I merely aim to state, in popular language, (1) What is positively known ; (2) What may be considered 590 THE MOUND BUILDEES. proved ; and (3) What may reasonably be conjectured in regard to the ancient civilized inhabitants of America. I. WHAT IS POSITIVELY KNOWN. A people for whom we have no name, vaguely included under the general term of Mound-Builders, have left evidences of ex- tensive works in the vicinity of the Mississippi and Ohio and their tributaries. These remains are of three kinds : mounds, square and circular inclosures, and raised embankments of various forms. Of mounds, the following are most important and best known: One at Grave Cre^k, West Virginia, 70 feet high, and 1000 feet in circumference at the base; one near Miamisburg, Ohio, 68 feet high, and 852 feet in circumference; the great truncated pyramid at Cahokia, Illinois, 700 feet long, 500 wide, and 90 in hight; the immense square mound, with face of 188 feet, near Marietta, Ohio; and some hundreds of inferior mounds from six to thirty feet in hight, in different States, from Wis- consin to the mouth of the Mississippi. Some of those in Wis- consin are described in the first chapter of this work. Unlike all the mounds in Mexico and Central and South America, those in our country have no trace of buildings on them. Why? Until I visited Arizona I had no answer. There the solution was easy. In those regions stone was abundant, and timber scarce ; here the reverse was the case. Our predecessors built of wood, the others of stone; the works of the latter remain to this day, while wooden buildings would leave no trace after one or two centuries, if indeed they were not burnt by the savages as soon as abandoned. Of the second class the best known are : the square fortifica- tion at Cedar Bank, Scioto River, Ohio, with face of 800 feet, inclosing a mound 245 feet long by 150 broad ; the works four miles north of Chillicothe, Ohio, a square and a circular forti- fication inclosing twenty acres each ; the graded way near Piketon, Ohio; about a hundred mounds and inclosures in Ross County, Ohio ; the pyramid at Seltzertown, Mississippi, 600 feet long and 40 feet high, and a vast number of mounds, inclosures, MEXICAN ANTIQUITIES. 591 squares and pyramids on the upper lakes and scattered through the Southern and Western States. Of raised embankments I note : the Great Serpent, in Adams County, Ohio, five feet high and thirty wide, winding in ser- pentine form for 1000 feet, and terminating in a triple coil; embankments enclosing sixteen acres, seemingly intended to fortify a hill, in Butler County, Ohio; besides a number of graded ways at Circleville, Ohio, and Frankfort, Kentucky. The work of Messrs. Squier & Davis, published by the Smith- sonian Institution, the highest authority on the subject, gives account of over two thousand of these remains, scattered over the Southern and Western States. Their location caused A. D. Richardson to say : " The centers of population are now where they were when the Mound Builders existed/' But there is this important difference: the densest population was then in the South ; their military border was towards the North. The second division of American antiquities begins in Utah and Nevada, and extends southward through Arizona and Mexico. Like those in the United States these are pretty well known and described ; for but few of them are located in dan- gerous districts. The ruins heretofore described, the Casas Grandes on the Gila, the remains of the original City of Mex- ico, the great pyramid at Xochicalco, State of Mexico, the City of Tulha, ancient capital of the Toltecs, and a regular line of ruins thence down to Central America, and across to the mouth of the Mississippi, serve to connect these with those of the United States and those further south. Among them are re- mains of dwellings, palaces, temples, vast tumuli, acecquias and aguadas, or artificial ponds. They were of hewn stone laid in mortar, and have consequently endured better than our own wooden erections. The third, and by far the greatest, division is in Central and South America ; and here we find ourselves at the point where our ancient civilization reached its hight, among works which are the astonishment of explorers and perplexity of scholars. Yucatan is a vast field for antiquarian research ; dotted from one end to the other with the ruins of cities, temples and pal- 592 ANCIENT YUCATAN. aces. But in the great forest which covers the northern half of Guatemala, the southern half of Yucatan, and parts of other States, covering an area larger than Ohio, is to be found the key to our ancient history. Within a few years past cities have been found there which must have contained a population of a quarter of a million, in an advanced condition of life; and yet, owing to the jealousy of the natives and the indifference of scholars, next to nothing is known, and few scientific researches have been made upon this intensely interesting subject. Never- theless, by the labors of Stephens, Del Rio, Bourbourg, Captain Dupaix and others, a good beginning has been made. I ap- pend briefly the facts and figures definitely known : Palenque, in the Mexican State of Chiapa, was unknown alike to the Aztecs and invading Spaniards forgotten long before the time of Cortez. It is so named from a small town near, now inhabited. Two hundred years after the conquest, to wit, in 1750, the ruins were first discovered by the Spaniards; and in 1787 Captain Del Rio visited them, and took measure- ments of "fourteen edifices admirably built of hewn stone, ex- tending seven or eight leagues along the river Chacamas and half a league the other way." Many others have since visited the place. The largest building, called the Palace, has a pyra- midal foundation 40 feet high, 310 long and 260 wide; the edifice is 228 feet long, 180 wide and 25 feet high, with four- teen doorways on each side and eleven at each end. It was built entirely of elegantly hewn stone, laid with precision, in mortar of the best quality. There is much fine carving, and evidence of some skill in painting. Other noted buildings are of somewhat smaller size, and the entire city must have con- tained a hundred thousand inhabitants. Copan is in the extreme western part of Honduras, in a soli- tary and almost impenetrable forest. The natives are barbar- ous and suspicious of strangers. Nevertheless the place has been visited and fully described. The ruins extend three miles along the river but how far back is not known. There are walls of sixty and ninety feet in hight; the front of one palace with richly sculptured designs; another with fine arabesques, and a number of carved monoliths and basso relievos. QUIRIGUA AND MITLA. 593 Quirigua (Keereewafi) is a name given to a vast extent of ruins on the river Motagua, in the forest of Guatemala. The ruins appear to be much older than those previously described, and are evidently those of an immense city. There are pyra- midal structures with stone steps, immense carved monoliths, large obelisks carved with human figures, and a vast array of broken walls, the sides covered by inscriptions. Mitla is in the Mexican State of Oxaca, in a valley, sur- rounded by a barren waste. Only six edifices and three pyra- mids remain ; but these are most elegant. Captain Dupaix and Desire Charnay (who saw them in 1866) both speak in most extravagant terms of the elaborate work. Says the latter: " Evidently the palaces were built with lavish magnificence. They combine the solidity of the works of Egypt with the ele- gance of those of Greece. But what is most interesting and remarkable in these monuments, which alone would be sufficient to give them the first rank among the orders of architecture, is the execution of their mosaic relievos, very different from plain mosaic, and consequently requiring more ingenious combination and greater art and labor. They are inlaid on the surface of the wall, and their duration is owing to the method of fixing the prepared stones into the stone surface, which made their union with it perfect. Their beauty can only be matched by the monuments of Greece and Rome in their best days." In the same region is an astronomical monument, with a figure of a man in profile, holding to his eye a tube which is directed toward the stars. On all these ruins are found patches of inferior stone work on the superior, and evidently of later date ; and on that work traces of painting wholly primitive in style, rude figures of men and idols, and wandering lines that have no significance. These facts are held to indicate that after the first builders, the places were occupied by a somewhat in- ferior people, who in turn gave way to comparative barbarians. But when we pass to the third division, in Peru and neigh- boring countries, we find the most conclusive proofs of art and civilization many centuries before the first of the Incas. The proofs multiply with every examination. There was a vast 38 594 A WONDERFUL PEOPLE. empire, extending over twenty degrees of latitude. There was one paved road five hundred miles long, the pebbles of which it was constructed so well laid that large sections of it remain to this day. There were curious manufactures, and there are beautiful monuments. There were gauzy articles, wrought of pure gold, so light that a zephyr might waft them from your fingers. They had complicated records, both public and pri- vate, kept by the quippus threads of various colors, ingeniously arranged and tied in knots to express ideas, numbers and sen- tences. A skull in the possession of a lady in Cuzco, from one tomb, shows that they understood the operation of trepanning; and the skill displayed was equal to that of the present day. Their surgical instruments, now in the Bureau of Peruvian Antiquities, show that they practised bleeding, tooth-drawing and amputation; they treated fractures by wrapping the broken limb in several species of plants till reunion of the bone took place. Several heads have been found in which the natural palate had been destroyed, and the difficulty somewhat relieved by a fine gold plate. Numerous drawings both of plants and figures show that they examined the tongue in gastric troubles, employed a species of valerian as an antispasmodic, and gave a decoction of the plant from which quinine is made as a remedy for fevers. They had timbrels, bells, drums, a pipe with nine reeds, a stringed instrument resembling the guitar, and a variety of flutes and trumpets. One has been found, made of a human thigh- bone. Their religion was a sort of enlightened idolatry ; light, fire and the sun were objects of worship; and from numerous vases, cups and drawings, Dr. Augustus Le Plongeon, latest and most thorough explorer, demonstrates that they practised bap- tism, confirmation and confession, and believed in the immor- tality of the soul and a future of rewards and punishments. Their principal city was supplied with water by pipes inlaid with gold, from immense springs in the mountains. The In- dians at the time of the Conquest destroyed most of these, to deprive the Spaniards of water, and the latter cut up many for the gold ; but one remains entire, and now supplies the convent PROOFS POSITIVE. 595 of Santo Domingo. The obscurity hanging over their history seems utterly impenetrable. There are numerous inscriptions, but nobody can read them. Some few of their books remain, but scientific enquirers have not yet obtained possession of them. The furious cupidity and fanaticism of the Spaniards cut off our best sources of knowledge; they converted the natives to Catholicism with the stake, sword and bloodhound ; they melted every golden ornament and destroyed the most important forti- fications, while the priests burned every book they could obtain, and employed the most destructive means to eradicate from the native mind every vestige of their ancient faith. Incredible were the precious evidences of art and learning that vanished before the blind fury of these gold-hunting Christians, who only excelled those they supplanted in one particular the science of shedding blood. But it is now known that a few of the books escaped. M. Brasseur de Bourbourg has rendered one inestimable service to American antiquarians. He passed several years among the Mayas Indians of Yucatan, learned their language, and thereby found a key to translate one of the old books of Mayapan, throwing a flood of light upon its his- tory. But no connection has been established between it and the Peruvian inscriptions. II. WHAT IS CONSIDERED PROVED. In my limited space I confine this enquiry mostly to the remains in our own country. From what we see in the West- ern and Southern States, the following conclusions are evident : 1. The Mound-Builders constituted a considerable popula- tion, under one government. No wandering and feeble tribes could have erected such works ; and the extent of the works, evidently many years in erection, as well as their completeness and scientific exactness, show the controlling energy of one directing central power. 2. They were an agricultural people. The barbarous state requires at least a hundred times as large an area for the same number of people as the civilized state ; and the savage condi- tion a much larger. The State of Ohio will support an agri- 596 THE TOLTECS OUK MOUND-BUILDEKS. cultural population of ten millions ; it never contained fifty thousand savages. It is easily demonstrable that that portion of the United States east of the Mississippi never contained half a million, probably not a quarter of a million, Indians. It follows, also, that a very large portion of the country around their works must have been cleared of timber and in cultivated fields. 3. They left our country a long time ago. Nature does not give a forest growth at once to abandoned fields ; a preparatory growth of shrubs and softer timber comes first. But forest trees have been found upon the summit of their mounds which show, by annual rings and other signs, at least six hundred years of growth. Their works are never found upon the lowest terrace of the formation on the rivers ; though many signs indicate that they built some as nearly on a level with the streams as possible. Tlieir "covered ways," leading down to water, now terminate on the second terrace above. It is demonstrable that of the various terraces" second bottoms " on our streams, the low- est was longest in forming. From these and many other signs, it is proved that the last of the Mound-Builders left the Ohio valley at least a thousand years ago. 4. They occupied the country, at least the southern part of it, where their population was densest, a very long time. This is shown by the extent of their works, the evidences of their working the copper-mines of the Superior region, and many other proofs. The best judges estimate that nearly a thousand years elapsed from the time of their entrance till their de- parture from the Mississippi valley. 5. At the south they were at peace ; but as they advanced northward, they came more and more into contact with the wild tribes, before whom they finally retired again towards the south. These facts are clearly proved by the increase of fortifications northward, and broad flat mounds, suitable only for buildings, southward. So much for proof; and, connecting these with other proofs, the latest antiquarians are of opinion that the Toltecs the civilized race preceding the Aztecs were our Mound-Builders. THE COLHUAS. 597 When we pass to the more southern ruins the proofs of great antiquity, large population and long occupation are vastly in- creased. Some of them have been alluded to. The great forest of Guatemala and Yucatan is nearly as large as Ohio and Indiana combined, and could easily have sustained a civil- ized population of ten millions. The Aztecs, whom the Span- iards found, were the last of at least three civilized races, and much inferior to the Toltecs immediately preceding them. Their history indicates that they were merely one of the original races, who overthrew and mingled with the Toltecs, adopting part of their religion and civilization. The Peruvian Incas, found by Plzarro, seemed to have been the second in the series of races. But civilization is not spontaneous ; it must have required nearly a thousand years for the first of the three dynasties to have developed art and learning far enough to erect the buildings we find. To that race before the Incas, the authors of the original civilization, De Bourbourg and others have given the name of Colhuas. Thus we have the series : a thousand years since the Mound- Builders left our country; a previous thousand years of settle- ment and occupation, and a thousand years for the precedent civilization to develop. Or, beginning in Mexico, etc. : a thou- sand years of Spaniard and Aztec ; a previous thousand years for Toltec migration and settlement, and a thousand years before that for the Colhuas to develop, flourish and decline. This carries us back to the time when the same course of events was inaugurated on the Eastern Continent. We know that it has required so long to produce all we see in Europe and Asia ; all reasoning, by analogy and from independent facts, goes to show that at least as long a time has been required to produce equally great evidences in America. III. WHAT MAY REASONABLY BE CONJECTURED. Besides a host of surmises there have been at least nine theories promulgated, and strenuously defended, in regard to the origin of this civilization. 1. The Jewish theory. Some forty years since Major Noah i 596 JEW, MALAY OR ASSYRIAN. 59D maintained that the "Lost Tribes" were the ancestors of the American Indians and the builders of the ruins described ; and a few others held that, if not the Ten Tribes, there was a Jewish Colony. It would certainly be an amazing thing if such a people as the Jews could, in a few centuries, lose all trace of their language, religion, laws, form of government, art, science, and general knowledge, and sink into a tribe of barbarians. But when we add that their bodily shape must have completely changed, their skulls lengthened, the beard dropped from their faces, and their language undergone a reversion from a deriva- tive to a primitive type a thing unkown in any human tongue the supposition becomes too monstrous even to be dis- cussed. As far as I know Orson Pratt, the renowned champion of Mormonism and polygamy, is the only scholar of the present day who maintains that theory; and he is forced to admit that all these changes must have been^the result of a stupendous miracle " God cursing them with black skins." The average Gentile mind is not equal to the task of receiving such a theory. From Alaska to Patagonia not a Hebrew letter has been found in any inscription. 2. The Malay Theory is that a great Malay Empire, once existing in the island of Malaysia, planted colcnies here ; but this is easily disproved. 3. The Phoanician Theory : that those ancient navigators planted colonies in America. If correct, this would be certain of demonstration ; for they were preeminently a people of letters and monuments. The Phoenician alphabet is the parent of all the alphabets of Europe except the Turkish. They must have left some trace of their language. But none has been found. Nor can any similarity be traced in the ruins with the works of the Phoenicians. 4. 5, 6. The Assyrian, Egyptian and Roman Theories fell for the same reasons as the Phoenician. The works of none of these people have any marked resemblance to those found in America. A pyramid or temple here is no more like an 600 WHY AN EXOTIC? Egyptian or Assyrian one than a Chinese pagoda is like an American Church. 7. The Northmen in America have been credited with these works. It is barely possible the remains in the United States might be thus accounted for ; but how about the far more extensive and elaborate works in Mexico, Central and South America? The cause ascribed is utterly inadequate for the effect. 8. The Chinese or Tartary Theory is, that about the year 1 250 Kublai Khan sent Tartar colonies to America ; that among them were some Nestorian Christians, which accounts for the crosses found. The time is utterly inadequate. Palenque and Copan were built and abandoned before the year 1250. 9. The Atlantean Theory is, by far, the most brilliant and fascinating of all proposed, and appeals with subtle power to the imagination. It is propounded by Brasseur de Bourbourg, who maintains that the Island of Atlantis, often mentioned by ancient poets, had a real existence ; that it extended nearly across the Atlantic, and was the cradle of civilization ; that it actually sank in the sea as the Greek poets tell us, and that the West India Islands are the only portions that remain above water. He conjectures that from this common center civilization spread east and west, and supports this view by numerous traditions from both sides of the Atlantic. Of this theory we must regret- fully say, " Not proven." To dispose of so many theories to make way for my own opinion, is scarcely in keeping with the modesty I had proposed to myself; but, in my humble judgment, these theorists all start from one fatal assumption : that this civilization was necessarily an exotic. Why not a civilization native to America as well as to any other country ? I would suggest that a good basis might be laid by analogy with the course of civilization in Europe. There it began in the South, spread slowly by successive develop- ments towards the North, where it was overwhelmed and driven back, as it were, by an irruption of barbarians ; it again revived in the South, and slowly extended to the North, where it is now advanced beyond the original. Similarly here the Colhuas originated civilization in the South ; A NATIVE CIVILIZATION. 601 their successors, the Toltecs, carried it towards the North ; about the line of Ohio, they encountered the irruption of northern barbarians, and slowly retired towards the South ; there civiliza- tion again revived, and was steadily advancing towards the North when the Spaniards came and destroyed it. On each conti- nent the full cycle required about three thousand years. On this basis I should place the Moquis and other Pueblo races the last in a series of four, the second the greatest, and a decline thence to the last: Col huas, Toltecs, Aztecs, Pueblos. In summing up, why are we reduced to the necessity of adopt- ing any hypothesis of an Eastern origin ? Is it unreasonable to believe that self-improvement began among savages in America, as it did three thousand years ago among savages in Egypt and Greece? Does sound philosophy forbid the theory of a spontaneous civilization in America? We are, perhaps, too much in the habit of thinking that everything really good originated with our branch of the human race. To my mind, the evidences are many though a profound American archa3- ologist might smile at the supposition that this civilization was sui generis, native and not derived. We now know that in China a civilization developed spontaneously, totally unlike and receiving no aid from that of Europe. Two starting points proved, what is there to forbid the idea of a third ? This is as distinct from the European as is the Chinese; it shows no signs of derivation, and facts indicate clearly that the native mind of America is naturally equal to either of the others. Within the memory of man a Cherokee has invented a complete alphabet, one serving the purpose in his language better than ours does in the English. (Better because each letter represents invariably one and the same sound.) This fact is worth a vol- ume of conjecture. It shows that the human mind was slowly working toward something better in America, the same as in Europe, the only difference being that, from reasons of race or climate, it there got an earlier start. And as to the Northern barbarians who destroyed this civili- zation, why are we driven to inventing a plausible theory as to how they crossed from Asia? The account of a literal Garden 602 CONCLUDING THEORY. \ of Eden, and one only pair from whom all the two thousand varieties of our race descended, is given up by many of the most learned divines of the age. Nor is the hypothesis of a confusion of tongues, in the popular sense, borne out by a criti- cal reading of Genesis ix. ; and the structure of language shows it to be totally unnecessary to account for the present variety of tongues. Every one of them would have existed just the same, resulting from a natural principle of divergence, if Babel had never been. On the whole, then, I incline to flank all the diffi- culties of the main question thus: America, as shown by geology, is the oldest of the continents, and, it is quite reasona- ble, therefore, to suppose, was first inhabited. She had an origi- nal population of her own, independent of Adam and Eve, Noah, or any other man. This race had a native genius peculiarly its own, totally unlike that which developed in Asia the Chinese civilization, or that in Europe which created that of the Greek and Roman and the later nations. Like them, thousands of years passed in barbarism before even a start was apparent. But civilization did begin in America, and was reviving from its first overthrow when the whites came. In seeking to engraft on it an alien civilization they destroyed it. Mexico had advanced through the savage and barbarous to the half-civilized state- the New England tribes had taken the first steps toward improve- ment, and the New York Indians had already a political organi- zation, code of laws, national confederacy, and system of repre- sentative council and government. Had the whites discovered America a thousand years later, they might have found on the Atlantic coast a completed native civilization, as perfect as that of China to-day, or more so. The innate power of the Indian mind, among the superior tribes, is evident. The infe- rior ones would have perished as did inferior aboriginal races before Asiatic and European civilization. As I disclaimed in the beginning a critical acquaintance with American archaeology, this may go as merely my theory about the Pueblos. If the reader don't like it, he is quite at liberty to construct one of his own. CHAPTER XXVIII. ARIZONA. JL big country A strange parallelogram A region of mountain, canon and plateau Antiquities Wild Indians Maricopas and other village Indians We leave Moqui Nature of the country Camp of the " Outlaw Navajoes"- Romantic narrations Navajo beauty Their theology Fish, turkeys, and human beings Who are they ? Their treatment of women. ISTANCES are deceitful in the far West ; and, as the Eastern reader understands them, it may almost be said that figures will lie. For when I say that I journeyed eight hundred miles in nine weeks, through New-Mexico and Arizona, the reader will hastily conclude that I must have seen most of the country worth seeing. In reality I saw but a very small part of it ; for the two Territories together are five or six times the size of Ohio. I merely saw a specimen of each division, its productions and inhabitants. But before I go ^northward, a brief sketch of Arizona entire, is appropriate. This Territory and the western half of New Mexico form a singular parallelogram, with an area about five times that of Indiana. Size is the only point of comparison with our State which would be intelligible to the Eastern reader : all the pro- cesses of nature, as well as the productions and inhabitants, seem to be on a totally different plan. This parallelogram is bounded on the east by the Rio Grande ("Great River"), on the west by the Colorado ("Red-earth River"), on the south by the Gila (Hee-lay\ and on the north by the Colorado and San Juan ("St. John"). The whole square lies in a succession of plateaus from two to eight thousand feet above the level of the sea. Nearly down the center some fifty miles east of the Arizona boundary runs the Sierra Madre 603 604 DESCRIPTIVE. BREAK TN THE FORMATION. 1 * (" Mother Range") Mountains ; from their summit, eight thousand feet high, the country falls off in a succession of mesas and pla- teaus each way, to the two great rivers. The trav- eler proceeding westward from the Rio Grande, over an almost level mesa, sees rising before him a range of rocky hills, from a hundred to a thousand feet high, and naturally looks for a descent on the western side. But reaching the sum- mit, he again finds the level, often bar- ren mesa spreading away before him, till its sandy and glistening surface fades into the blue horizon. Thus the eastern half of this region might be represented as a great flattened pyra- mid, the successive " benches" stretch- TOPOGRAPHICAL. 605 ing away from ten to a hundred miles in width. A great change appears westward of the summit. There the high plateaus are broken across by awful chasms; gorges with perpendicular sides go winding tortuously through the formation ; all the streams run in great cailons from two to five thousand feet in depth, with bottoms from one to four thousand feet above the level of the sea. Here and there the barren plateau appears to drop suddenly to a level plain, and rocky ranges of hills enclose an oval valley, walled in on every side by inaccessible mountains, and with passes out only up or down the beds of ancient streams, long since dry. It is the oldest country on earth, except per- haps the "back bone" of Central Africa; natural convulsions have slowly heaved it far above the region of abundant rains or snows, and the great Colorado, with its affluents, has for ages been slowly cutting deeper and deeper channels in the sandstone formation, tapping the sources of the springs at lower points, and steadily sucking the life out of its own basin. On the rocky hills are still some fine forests ; on the slopes the Indians find abundant bunch grass and wild sage for their hardy animals ; and at rare intervals, a hidden valley is found, low enough to have a growing season without frost, with water enough for irrigation, its soil the volcanic detritus of neighboring hills, and of wonderful fertility. Perhaps one-twentieth of the entire area is fit for agriculture. Along the northern portion of this parallelogram are found strange races of friendly and partially civilized Indians : the Pueblos, Zufiis, Moquis, Teguas, Oraybes, and Navajoes. All but the last are included in a general class as Pueblos, meaning " villagers." They plow the soil with forked logs ; raise corn and beans ; manufacture blankets and pottery, and are generally simple, civil and unwarlike. Far otherwise is it south of the Little Colorado and Ptierco. There the San Fran- cisco, White and Mogollon Mountains and their spurs break up the country into a thousand hidden valleys, in which the mur- derous Apaches hide, and graze their stock ; the few trails go twisting through narrow cafions, in which at most unexpected places the savages let fly upon the unwary traveler a shower of 606 COST OF AN APACHE. poisoned arrows; and dreary intervals of fifty or a hundred miles separate the few water holes, which are hidden in rocky coverts or scrubby .thickets, where the Indians keep almost continual ambush. Hence in Arizona the white population is found exclusively along the Gila, and in the southwestern corner, unless we include a few Mormon ranches northwest of the Colorado. The whites consist of four thousand Americans and seven thousand Mexicans ; and this small number average a loss of ten per month from the Apaches about half the mortality of an army in active service. The entire Apache race, consisting of the Final, Mohave, Coyotero, Mescalero, and White Mountain tribes, does not exceed seven thousand per- sons perhaps two thousand warriors. These warriors cost the Government annually a thousand dollars apiece : two million dollars a year for the army in Arizona, to protect four thousand Americans against two thousand Apaches. It is a costly ex- periment, and almost a total failure. There are a few tribes with whom the present policy is not a success. Hence I turned northward when I reached the border of the Apache country. It is my firm belief, from considerable study of the subject, that the American Indians are capable of civilization, if a proper course were adopted. But there are exceptional branches among them, just as there are among white, black or brown races : certain tribes are doomed to extinction, and chief among these are the Apaches. The build of their heads forbids all idea of quiet industry; the conception of civilization could not be fired into their skulls. Every Apache is a born robber and murderer. Extermination, whether in war or under the form of reservations and legal justice, is their certain fate ; and the quickest way is, perhaps, the most merciful. It is directly the opposite with the Navajoes. They acquired considerable civilization before they met the whites; they will work readily at any productive employment, and learn the use of tools very readily. There is as great a difference between a Navajo and an Apache skull as between that of a Saxon and a Malay. I took occasion to examine several of both tribes when our party got down to the old hunting-ground, where INDIAN DEPREDATIONS. 607 several battles had been fought, and where I saw probably fifty skulls, both Apache and Navajo. The latter are high and round enough to show considerable development in the moral qualities, and the capacity to keep treaties. Mangus, an old Apache chief who used to raid on the Jor- nada del Muerto and stage road south of Santa Fe, it is said, once made a promise to a stage driver who had saved his life, and kept his word. But it is the only case I ever heard of. His skull, showing the hole where a rifle ball entered his brain, is now in the possession of Professor O. S. Fowler, who kindly allowed meadrawing of it. From the shape I suspect he was not a real Apache, but a runaway from some superior tribe. Of the southwestern part of the Territory a reliable acquaintance writes, dating at Prescott, the capital : " There is plenty of good farming land on all the streams here, and some very large arable valleys. Much of this part of Arizona is a fine grazing country, and would be covered with herds if the Indians were out of the country. " I certainly believe I am within bounds, when I say that the Indians steal one-fourth of the live stock every year. They take more horses and mules than other stock, and in some dis- tricts steal at least one-half of these every year ! People expect forays, and have philosophically determined to take the chances. Since I have been here (two and a half years), herds of cows have been driven off by Indians, from within one mile of this town, three times; the herders killed at one time, and at the other desperately wounded. These outrages occurred within A FRIENDLY APACHE. 608 PRODUCE. SKULL OF MANGUS COLORADO, OR " RED SLEEVE." A "GOOD INDIAN." one mile of Fort Whipple, military headquarters of the Terri- tory. You may imagine that people do not keep very fine stock, to have them take their chances, and be run off at every incursion by the red devils ; but, unfortunately, they do. There are not many teams kept for driving, the people mostly travel- ing on horseback. The freighting is done by mule teams, though ox teams are extensively employed. All the groceries, dry goods, farming and mining tools, machinery, etc., have to be hauled by teams an average of two hundred and fifty miles. Then there is all the hay and grain for the various military posts to be delivered ; so you see that freighting is an important industry here, and is attended with great risk. "The average cost of delivering merchandise, from California to the points where it is consumed, is about ten cents per pound, which makes living here rather expensive, though we have always plenty to eat. The country lacks one thing, that is, fresh fish. There are no good fish in this country ; game is plenty; so is butter in the summer, at $1.25 per pound, and eggs at $1 per doz. ; potatoes average about 8 cents per pound ; corn and barley about 7 cents; oats we have none; but we get enough to eat, and are contented enough under the circum- FARMING AND MINING PROSPECTS. 609 stances, and if the Indians would only let us alone, we would do well enough. We are living in hopes that a railroad will soon be built through the Territory, which will clear out the Indians, while nothing else will. The country has plenty of rich mines, but no mines in the world can be worked and pay the prices we now have to pay for everything we use, not in- cluding the losses to be sustained from Indian depredations. Now it takes two men to do one man's work : one to watch for Indians while the other works. One day last week the Indians drove off every hoof of stock from a mining camp thirty miles south of here. This is no unusual occurrence; on the other hand, it has become so common that it is forgotten in a day. A railroad will change all this; for with it comes cheap trans- portation and plenty of men to work the rich mines of the country. " There is no doubt but the Thirty-fifth parallel railroad is one of the best routes across the Continent. It passes through the richest portion of the country, on a route easily built, and one that will have no snow to interfere with its travel in the worst winter. It passes through a country well timbered, a fine grazing country, and the richest mining country on the con- tinent, which, without the railroad, is of but little value. "One-half of the Territory is an unknown land. Every year parties make trips into the Indian country, and never fail to find good farming and mining prospects, though they can never give the country a thorough exploration, as the red-skins are always after them. There is a strip of country 100 miles wide and 200 miles long here, known to abound in minerals of every kind ; but the white man can not get into it to do anything until the Indians are disposed of. This is what we are all waiting for, and for this I am going to stay ; and if the Indians don't last longer than I do, I expect yet to have something out of the country. " Crops have been short, almost a failure, except when they had water for irrigation. There is plenty of land here that has water for irrigation, but most of it lies in localities that cannot be used on account of Indians. 39 610 CROPS. FORMATION ON THE STREAMS. *' The whole country shows ruins left by a people who once inhabited, but have ages ago deserted it, and left no clue of who they were or where they went. An agricultural people, no doubt they were, for you can see traces of their -irrigating ditches wherever you go, and in places large canals undoubtedly used for irrigating purposes on an extensive scale. It is evident that they, like the present white population, had a hostile people to contend with. "In the higher parts of the country they can raise anything that grows in New York ; and in the southern or lower parts, on Salt River, and on the Gila River, oranges and other tropical fruits are grown in profusion. On the river lands they can obtain plenty of water for irrigation, and can raise two crops of grain in the year. F. C. A." I have erased from the foregoing all that treated specifically of the Indians. Still, occasional references to them will be seen. ARIZONA RIVERS. 611 The average Arizonian mind will effervesce on the Apache question. On the map, Arizona appears to have abundance of water ; and, on general principles, it would seem that a Territory with water frontage of six hundred miles on as large a river as the Colorado, and crossed by two rivers each five hundred miles long, would have fine facilities for commerce. Quite the reverse is the fact, " For thirty miles from the mouth of the Colorado Elver the spring tides rise twenty-five or thirty feet, and are preceded by breakers six feet high, rushing up stream with ter- rific velocity, and endangering small crafts and even large ves- sels if insecurely moored. The channel is very crooked, with an average depth of eight feet in low water, with occasional bars that have only three feet. The ordinary tides rise ten feet, and the river is ten feet deeper during the July freshet (supplied by the melting snows) than in November. The current has an average speed of two and a half miles per hour in low water and five miles in high water. There are snags and shifting banks of sand, but few rocks for three hundred miles from the mouth of the river; then we come to one hundred miles of the best part of the river for navigation, where bars of gravel are fre- quent; then there are fifty miles of stony bed, with frequent rapids ; and beyond the rapids we come to the celebrated Colo- rado Canon, the rocky walls of which rise steeply in some places almost perpendicularly to a hight of four or five thousand feet. The river-bed in the canon has a rapid descent and many large rocks, so that navigation is very difficult and dangerous. The explorers of the caflon have found places where, by looking up through narrow tributary gullies, they could see the stars at midday, so little of the sky was in sight, and so dark was the spot where they stood. The elevation of the river four hundred and fifty miles from its mouth is eight hundred feet above the sea, showing an average descent of two feet per mile." Along the Gila are various tribes of peculiar and interesting half-civilized Indians: the Pimas, Maricopas and Papagoes. They cultivate the ground with some skill, and in that fertile soil and warm climate produce immense crops of wheat, pump- 612 APACHES DIMINISHING IN NUMBERS. SCENE ON THE COLORADO. kins and melons. They are also well supplied with horses and cattle. They have always been friendly to the whites, and until a few years past took pleasure in feeding and assisting travelers. But now they are reserved and uncommunicative, saying that the whites are trying to get their land, their women, and to divert the water they need for irrigation. They, too, are exposed to Apache raids. "All the other Indians are utterly savage, and rapidly decreasing by violence, disease and intoxicating liquors. Among the Yavapais there are four natural deaths to one birth. The Mohaves lose one-tenth their number yearly by venereal dis- eases alone. Fifty years agro the Apaches numbered thirty thousand. Two thousand warriors could readily be collected for a single raid into Mexico. Now six or seven thousand is the highest number assigned them. Arizona need not com- plain of them long." "JOHN." 613 " The Coyotero Apaches have few horses, and are very poor. The Pinalefio Apaches are the most formidable tribe, having more courage, cunning, and animosity against the white men than any of the others. The Tontos are hostile and murderous, but cowardly. The Wallapais, the Yavapais, and the Coy- oteros are divided up into little cliques, some of which want peace and others do not. Among the Arizona Indians there is no strong tribal organization, and no men of much influence. The hostile parties are often made up, not from any one clique or small settlement, nor do the members join at the command of a chief; but some ambitious leader sends word that he will start on a raid, and invites the braves of the vicinity to join. It is, therefore, utterly impossible to govern the tribes through the chiefs in the manner practised east of the Rocky Moun- tains." So much for Arizona at large, I resume the course of my own journey. The last day of my stay at Moqui, Navajoes were arriving and departing in considerable numbers, some to trade at other Moqui towns, and others to go on the trip west- ward to the Colorado. Among them were the father and sister of my new guide, the former en route to Utah, and the latter merely on a friendly visit to the Moquis. My guide arrived on the 23d, and presented his nelsoass, which read as follows : " To all whom it may concern : " The bearer, a Navajo Indian, with his father, have permission to accompany J. H. Beadle, Esq., to the Mormon settlements. They are good Indians, and I trust any one who meets them will treat them kindly. THOMAS V. KEAMS, Clerk Navajo Agency, June 21, 1872. Acting Agent." For convenience' sake I christened him John, the universal title for Indians and Chinese. And here I must record a marvel of aboriginal mail service. My spare time at Moqui I had employed in writing, and when my first Navajo started back to Defiance I delivered him an immense envelope full of MSS., directed to the Commercial, 614 MAIL SERVICE. with instructions to deliver it to Mr. Keams at Defiance. From there an Indian is sent once a fortnight or oftener down to Wingate, and thence a military express runs once a week to Santa Fe. My letters went through all those changes, and the material I delivered to John on the 24th of June was published in the Cincinnati Commercial on the 13th of July! Mem. to Senator Ramsey : Send for some Navajoes to take charge of the mails in Utah, and on the Union Pacific, where I once lost seventeen letters in three months. A heated discussion ensued in regard to the route. All were agreed that the usual route, straight westward vid the Oraybe village, would not do now, as the unusual drought had dried up most of the pools; and the others were in favor of a more southern route, requiring two more days, but with abun- dance of water. John, however, decided on a more northern route; and the result was he and I started alone, with the understanding that we were to meet with others on the way. The flowered calico I had taken to pay expenses at Moqui was exhausted, as the people had been extremely kind in furnishing me milk, and carrying in blankets full of grass for my horses; so I had nothing for a parting present to Chino but my sole remaining linen shirt no use to me in this country. He gave me in return a most affectionate parting hug, and a large roll of mescal. This plant (more properly maguey) is only occa- sionally used by the Moquis, but forms half the living of the Apaches, as it comes to better perfection down in their country. In its green state it is the size of a large cabbage, but a little more compact, the leaves resembling those of a young raullen plant. Stripping these off, the fruit inside appears in shape much like a pine-apple, but not quite so large. It is crushed into cakes and dried, when it appears of a rich brown color, looking and tasting very much like a mass of dried peaches or, rather, like those sugar-soaked canes we sometimes find in Orleans sugar. I like the taste of it very much, but on the road it seemed to produce too much thirst for comfort, unless we are nearing water. It is slightly cathartic in tendency, and is a very good change with dry bread and bacon. " DRY CAMP." 615 ^s3 civil law has no business with it. Climbing upon the "jerky," at Beaver, I was pleased to recognize in the driver my old friend Will Kimball, who drove a team across the Plains in the same train as I did in 1868. Kimball's father was one of the many arrested the previous winter on charges relating to the conduct of the Mormon militia, in the rebellion of 1857, but was released with a hun- dred and twenty others, when the Supreme Court reversed Judge McKean's rulings. In the progress of Utah affairs nearly all of the family left by old Heber Kimball have become pretty good Gentiles. This seems to be the course of all such delusions which do not end in blood. The original force of fanaticism wears itself out. It may be compared to one of Utah's mountain streams, which plunges from a rocky gulch in torrents that threaten to tear up the whole country below. Five miles down the plain it has become a gentle rivulet or sluggish stream ; five miles further there is a channel of dry sand, with here and there a brackish pool. Thus with the Irvingites, Muggletonians, etc., and so with this delusion. Old Mormons die; young ones grow up infidels, and the system moderates to a mild Protestantism. Kimball and I were the only occupants, and had a delightful evening ride to Fillmore, which we reached soon after midnight. There I went to sleep in the "jerky," to wait for the Pioche stage, expected in two hours, and slept so sound that all their racket 666 REMARKABLE LAVA PEAK. in changing horses did not waken me, and only the morning sunshine in my face brought me to a consciousness that, willy nitty, I was to spend a day in Fill more. . This is the old Territorial capital, something like a hundred and seventy-five miles southwest of Salt Lake, and quite a beautiful town. Several wealthy Mormons reside here, in elegant brick and stone houses, and the place is old enough for all the shade trees and shrubbery to have attained a good growth. Some thirty miles west of Fillmore is a remarkable mountain peak, or rather round heap of cinders and lava, some five hundred feet high. It is broken square across by a gulch with almost perpendicular sides, at the bottom of which is a spring that is coated with ice around the edges for eleven months in the year. The altitude is no higher than that of Fillmore, but the sun never shines in the gorge, and snow always lies upon the sheltered hills. The Church at Fillmore was busy cutting off those who refused to assist the new move for a State Government. In their attempts at local indepen- dence the Mormons have succeeded completely in showing that they are unfit for it. Of some two hundred Mormons, the majority women, who voted and petitioned against the admis- sion of Utah as a State, every one has been cited before the Council and forced to publish a recantation or be "cut-off, and delivered over to the bufferings of Satan." Such is a "free vote" under an "infallible priesthood." We got on the road by 2 A. M., of the 20th, my companions being three miners and two "girls" from Pioche, and a young man and woman whom we could not exactly make out, and who soon became quite a mystery to the rest of us. Their loving conduct led us to conclude that they were a young married couple ; but, after their first scare at us was over, they ventured to hint that they were cousins, and going from St. George to Salt Lake City. Every Gentile in Utah can recognize, or imagines he can, a Mormon at first sight; and as these two had not the slightest sign of the "yahoo" about them, the rest of the party made themselves free and merry over every sight on the road, indulging in all the Gentile slang so common in Utah. 667 The miners were particularly emphatic in denouncing Brigham Young as a villain and a murderer, while the "girls" asked such questions and made such ridiculous suggestions as to the way he divided time and kept peace among his wives, that our coach resounded with screams of laughter. To all this the young couple vouchsafed only a faint smile. We reached Pay- son at midnight, and learning that the next coach would not go on till 8 A. M., the " girls " took a room in the stage hotel, the miners and myself took to the stable-loft, while the young couple concluded to remain in the coach the rest of the night. Of course this was well enough for " cousins," but then " some people will make remarks." Where we stopped at dinner next day, at Spanish Fork, the Mormon family were delighted to see the young woman, and to our horror and astonishment we learned that it was Brigham Young's daughter ! I cursed my stupidity at not recognizing her, having seen her often in the city. Against her father's will she married a young Mormon some two years since, and both are generally regarded as apos- tates. I congratulated myself that I at least had said nothing very much out of the way, but for the rest of that ride I think we were the quietest coach load of people in America. At Draperville the young woman's husband met us, and the " cousin " became " even as one of us." On the evening of July 21, I found myself once more in " Zion," exactly four months from the day I left St. Louis for a tour through the Southern Territories. In that time I had traveled fourteen hundred miles by rail, six hundred by stage, three hundred by military wagon, two hundred on foot, and six hundred on horseback at a total cost of $535. I reached " Zion " in splendid health, but complete disguise, if I am to judge from the conduct of my friends, many of whom passed me on the street without a nod, or with only a slight look of curiosity, as if some old and half-forgotten memory were stirred by sight of a face that "had a sort o' familiar look," How- ever, after a bath in the warm springs, getting off my buckskin pantaloons, spangled Mexican jacket and Navajo scarf, and donning a new summer suit, my fingers received once more the 668 wonted squeeze, and once more I began to feel very like a Christian. PUBLISHERS' NOTE. Shortly after the Author reached Salt Lake City, Mr. E. O. Beaman, photographer to the Powell Expedition, crossed the desert to Moqui, and spent several days taking views among those people. The representations of those towns are from photographs kindly furnished by Mr. Beaman ; those of scenes from Fort Wingate to Moqui, from sketches by the Author. SALT LAKE THEATRE. CHAPTER XXXI. MY SUMMER VACATION. Diamonds by the bushel ! My conclusion The sad fact Off for Soda Springs Cache Valley Gen. Connor and the Battle of Bear River Soda Mounds Health-restoring waters "Anti-polygamy " Spring Wonders of the Yellow- stoneReport of Hon. U. P. Langford Return to Salt Lake City Politics and Religion Popular absurdities about Utah A blast at Brigham and hia allies. i AVING traveled four months on business, I decided to travel one for pleasure ; and with that view turned towards the Northern Territories. I had gone into the wilderness to investigate .the resources of the Thirty-fifth parallel road ; when I came out on the other side, the public had forgotten the proposed railroad, and the "Great Diamond Excitement" was at its hight. It was the queerest episode in my Western experience. All my friends who were "footloose 77 had the "Arizona fever," and "wanted to know, you know, just the truth about the matter," as I had traveled directly through the diamond district. Diamonds by the bushel was about the least measure talked of. The following, from the San Francisco Morning Call, illustrates the prevailing ideas among the most moderate and cautious journals : A Call reporter was detailed to look into the matter yesterday, and obtain such reliable particulars as he could ; and as a preliminary he paid a visit to the Bank of California, where, he was informed, the diamonds, alleged to have been found in New Mexico, were to be seen. Passing into the directors' room, rather a curious sight presented itself. In the middle of the room was a handsome leather- covered table, such as is provided for the accommodation of directors of wealthy corporations ; and around it, with their heads close together like a group of boya examining into a contested game of marbles, were a dozen or so of capitalists, all intent upon something which their by no means attenuated persons first hid from the reporter's eye. It is true that a quart or two of self-evident rubies stood at one end of the table in an iron cash-box ; but the reporter had come to see 669 670 DIAMONDS AND RUBIES. LOWER FALLS OF THE YELLOWSTONE, WYOMING, (350 FEET IN RIGHT.) diamonds, and rubies for the time being, though at other times they would have enchained his respectful attention, failed to attract him. The reporter found it necessary to gently push aside the representatives of a few million dollars, and then introducing his own head into the circle of bald and iron-gray cherclurat, he found himself gazing at last upon the diamonds. There they lay scattered carelessly about, or heaped in an equally careless fashion upon pieces of torn newspaper; and no very imposing sight did they present. Gold looks aristo- PRECIOUS STOXES. 671 cratic even in its quartz, and it glistens as suggestively there as in the twenty- dollar piece ; but the diamond has a most plebeian air until it has passed through the training and finishing school of the lapidary. The diamonds, in fact, looked like pieces of bright quartz; some were not even bright. They were of all shapes and sizes, from that of a canary seed to that of a small Lima bean. Some were almost cubic in shape, some were spherical, others pyramidical, others pear-shaped, and they numbered, perhaps, three thousand. Some were white, some yellowish in color, others bluish or greenish, and two or three pieces of black mineral, each about the size of a man's thumb, were lying among them, which our reporter was informed were " black diamonds," and were useful for cutting purposes more useful than ornamental. Nearly all the diamonds were uncut. Some few a dozen or two had been subjected to the lathe and shone brilliantly. Among the diamonds lay some dark blue stones; uninteresting enough in appearance, but acquiring more importance in one's eyes when recognized as large sapphires. They were uncut, and were therefore muddy and dull ; but when cut they will probably be splendid stones, as some of them were as large as the upper part of a man's thumb. Rubies stood about the table in little heaps. Perhaps there were a couple of quarts of them ; some almost as small as a grain of sand, others fine handsome stones. The few cut rubies which were shown were some of them of remarka- bly good color. I produce this entire on account of its wonderful moderation of statement. Had the tenth part of what was published and sworn to proved true, diamonds would have become a drug in the market. To answer a thousand enquirers at once, early in August I published a caveat, concluding as follows : " I traveled directly through the reported diamond country, as located by the San Francisco Company, and I think I can safely make oath there were no diamonds there. Turquoises and garnets there are in abundance; every Indian has a pint or so. Occasionally a ruby, of a very common kind, is to be met with, and lumps of fused quartz can be gathered by the bushel. The country has been open most of the time since 1850, and every year or so some man imagined he found diamonds. The officers from Fort Wingate prospected the entire region many years ago, with no results, and there have been parties there every summer since the close of the Navajo war looking for diamonds. The Spaniards gathered bushels of curious stones there a hundred years ago, and found not a diamond among them. So common has this hunting been that the Indians look upon every new-comer as a diamond hunter. My Navajo com- 672 DIAMOND SWINDLE. panions, seeing I had nothing to trade, and was not a hunter, could not be convinced that I was not looking for diamonds, and brought me every curious stone they could find. I could have brought out bushels of quartz crystals, fused quartz, garnets, red stone, conglomerate rock and obsidian; but no diamonds. Now, it seems to me reasonable to conclude that, with all this hunting since 1850, if any diamonds were there they would have been discovered ere this. For this, and reasons too numerous to mention, from the lay of the country, etc., I say emphatically : ' No diamonds/ " I am happy to state that this remains as true as the day it was written. And of the "Diamond Swindle,- how the pro- jectors "salted" the ground, and ignorantly put stones side by side which are never found together in a state of nature ; how a two million diamond company was organized, and half a million dollars paid in; how even "experts" were victimized, and how the swindlers "got away with the baggage" is it not all re- corded indelibly in the chronicles of those who invested their money and came out minus ? On Sunday, August 4th, I set out from Corinne for Soda Springs, on a "narrow-gauge" mule, and reached the first ranche in Cache Valley by night. The Mormons have pro- jected a narrow-gauge railroad from a point on the Central Pacific about five miles west of Ogden, to the Springs; and had then finished it twenty-five miles, to the "divide" between Beaver River and Cache Valley. They promise to complete their road by August, 1873, and then this will undoubtedly become a great place of resort. Cache (" concealed ") Valley is a renowned place in the history of the West. Bear River, after forming a U in Idaho, with the bend to the north, runs through a beautiful canon into Cache, through which it winds in an irregular semi-circle for nearly seventy miles. From it rich coves and valleys put back into the mountains, and at the south- west corner it breaks through a rugged gap and "cafions" downward to Bear River Valley. Thus Cache is inclosed on all sides by lofty mountains, their peaks tipped with snow all summer, and with but a few narrow openings ; while the climate XOBLE SHOSHONE. 073 ON GUARD. is singularly mild and equable, and grass and water abundant. Forty years ago it was the winter rendezvous of the Northwest Fur Company, and the annals of that time tell of great councils held here with the Bannocks, Shoshones (Snakes), Uintahs and representatives from the Arrapahoes, Utes, Blackfeet and dis- tant tribes ; of barter in furs and Indian goods to the value of millions; of love-making between the swarthy trappers and Indian maidens, and too often of grand revels ending in a gen- eral fight, in which the ordinary hostile divisions were ignored and every man went in for personal revenge. The Indians still hang around in considerable numbers, gaining an uncertain subsistence from the diminished game, or by begging from the settlements. Between Corinne and the Springs I passed some seventy lodges. But the " noble Sho- shone" of early romance has disappeared. This tribe, which once dominated a region three hundred by four hundred miles in extent, is now reduced to eight or nine thousand ; and those who live near the settlements are low and degraded, but little above Piutes. They made their last stand at Battle Creek in 43 674 8ODA SPRINGS. 1861 and 1862, and killed many emigrants to Oregon and Mon- tana, besides committing many depredations on the Mormon settlements below. There General Connor, commanding the Nevada volunteers and a regiment of California cavalry, at- tacked them in January, 1863; and after a bloody and obstinate battle, completely defeated them, killing and capturing four hundred warriors. The coalition of Bannocks and Shoshones was completely broken, and they have given no serious trouble since. This opened the way to the full settlement of Cache, which now contains thirteen Mormon towns with a population of twelve thousand, and is the great grain producing region of Utah. The Saints now extend from a point sixty miles into Idaho to the lower Colorado, a hundred miles into Arizona, making a nearly continuous line of settlements six hundred miles long. From the upper part of Cache, partly in Idaho, the road rises to a rocky plateau, across which eighteen miles bring one to the Springs. Here, at the northern bend of Bear River, the mountains give back in a sort of semicircle, inclosing a broad plain, dotted by soda mounds. Everywhere on and among these mounds, mostly in solid rock, are the Soda Springs, of every size, from two inches to a rod in width. Some boil fur- iously with a loud bubbling noise and escape of gas ; others show but a faint effervescence; some are always calm, and never overflow, while others send out large and constant streams, and still others sink a foot or two when the air is cool, and rise to an overflow only when it is warm. The springs on the soda mounds are mere tanks, but a few inches wide, sending out such faint streams that all the solid contents are precipitated and the water quite evaporated before reaching the plain. Thus it is easily seen how these mounds were built by the water; and many of them have risen so high that they have no springs, tlit> water having broken out at some other place. The springs most relied on for their tonic properties are four in number. 1. The Octagon, about a yard wide, and half a mile from the river. It seems to contain about equal parts of iron and soda, ANTI-MORMON SPRING. 675 and its tonic effects are wonderful. Invalids often insist that the first drink does them good, and that they can notice a de- cided improvement every day they use it. The taste, however, is not as pleasant as that of the pure soda springs. 2. Roland's Spring, only a few rods from the river bank, is considered nearly as good as the first in other respects, and much better for dyspepsia alone. It is a clear, cold pool in red rock, does not overflow, effervesces but slightly, and is rather .more acid to the taste than the first. 3. The Big Spring, or Hooper's, is some two or three miles from the river and near the point of the mountain. It is a rod wide, and presents the appearance of an immense cauldron boiling furiously. But the water is nearly ice cold and very pleasant. I am informed it contains nothing but pure soda. Hence it is more pleasant to the taste than either of the others, but is not quite so fine a tonic. The rock basis there is covered with a rich soil heavily sodded with grass, which lines the spring, and hangs into the water; and above it rises the green slope of the mountain, giving this the most picturesque location of all the springs. From it flows a stream some six feet wide and nearly a foot deep, into Soda Creek, which, made almost entirely by chemical springs, forms the outlet of Soda Lake, a few miles above. In a beautiful location near this spring Hon. W. H. Hooper has a handsome summer residence, now occu- pied by himself and family. This water is often used with lemon-sugar, making a drink equal to the best soda from foun- tains. 4. The Ninety-per-cent. Spring, which Gentiles call the Anti- polygamy Spring, is some two miles west of Hooper's, and about the same distance from the river. Of the solid contents ninety per cent, is soda, and the rest of some peculiar mineral which has a remarkable effect on the male human. Many ridiculous stories are told of its anti-Mormon properties, but fortunately the specific effect lasts but a few weeks. A few quarts of it will destroy the strongest faith in the necessity of polygamy. Suffice it to add that if Joe Smith had been living near such a spring in the early months of 1843, the Mormon Church would never have been cursed with the doctrine of " plural wives." 676 GAME. TOWER FALLS WYOMING. The climate in August is about as cool as early October in Salt Lake City, and the air most delightful. There is fine fish- ing in Bear River, and good hunting grounds half a day's ride eastward. A day farther in that direction, across the first mountain, will bring one to the range of larger game, such a> cinnamon bears, mountain lions and bighorn sheep : but few SARATOGA OF THE WEST. 677 visitors care to try it. Four miles above the Big Spring are the Formation Springs, and a remarkable cave. There may be seen the remarkable sight of grass and sage brush, part petrified and part still growing, as the spray settles on the upper portion of it; while farther down in the water may be found sage brush and greasewood moulded in solid stone. A few miles up the river are sulphur springs, and a little below the Octagon is the Steamboat Spring, the only feature of the place which seriously disappointed me. I had heard so much of its wonders, that when I found it merely a hole in the rock, two feet wide, filled with boiling water, with a smaller hole near emitting steam, I felt defrauded. Here is a region some ten miles square, espe- cially set apart as a sort of museum for the wild play of nature's chemicals called Soda Springs only because that article pre- dominates. The original formation seems to have been a sort of red volcanic stone, mingled with iron ; through this the soda has boiled up and built a deposit of soil. To this place, in 1863, General Connor brought three com- panies of soldiers and established a military post, which has been abandoned some years, the necessity for it having passed away. With Connor came eighty families of Morrisites, who had been " scattered and peeled" for a year or so, living as out- casts among the Mormons ; they built a considerable town, and many of them remain. The rest removed in a body to Wash- ington Territory. Jhe location is too cool for grain, and the settlers devote themselves to stock raising, in which they are quite prosperous. Two years ago Captain Hooper and Brigham Young bought most of the land in the vicinity, and decided to make this an important point. And they will succeed, for here are the air and the water which have a magical effect on in- valids. By next August they promise to have their narrow-gauge road completed ; then one can reach here from the Pacific road in nine hours, and in a few years, I have no doubt, Soda Springs will drop the prefix "future" and become the actual " Saratoga of the West." Three hundred miles northeast of Soda Springs, but two or three times as far away by any possible road, is the new National 678 GEYSEK BA.SIN. Park of the Yellowstone. First brought to public notice in 1870, by the notable expedition of Hon. N. P. Langford, Gen- eral H. D. Washburne, Hon. Truman 0. Everts, and other distinguished citizens of Montana, it is now attracting great attention, and destined to be the goal of curiosity seekers for a quarter of a century. The party, consisting of nineteen persons, followed up the Gallatin to its head and crossed over a rocky ridge to the Yellowstone; from the last inhabited spot on that stream, they followed up an Indian trail to the great basin of the Yellowstone. Their report told of such wonders that it was received with incredulity ; but later explorations have more than verified them. They were threatened by hostile Indians most of the time, and obliged to keep guard night and day. Of the first curiosity, which they named "The Devil's Slide," Mr. Langford says: "Two parallel vertical walls of rock project from the side of the mountain to a hight of 125 feet, traversing the mountain from base to summit, a distance of 1500 feet. The sides are as even as if they had been worked by line and plumb, the whole space between, and on either side of them, having been eroded and washed away." Of the Geyser Basin he says: "One of our company aptly compared it to the entrance of the infernal regions. It looked like nothing earthly we had seen, and the pungent fumes which filled the air were not unaccompanied by a* disagreeable sense of possible suffocation. We found the entire surface of the earth covered with the incrusted sinter thrown from the springs. Jets of hot vapor were expelled through a hundred orifices. The springs were all in a state of violent ebullition, throwing their liquid contents to the hight of three or four feet." The report gives interesting descriptions of giant geysers, throwing boiling water high in the air; of the Upper and Lower Falls of the Yellowstone; of the great falls of Tower Creek, and Rock Pinnacles excelling all others in the moun- tains. As time did not admit of my visiting these wonder-. 1 present drawings thereof, from original sketches by Mr. Laii- ford's party; the which, if the reader studios carefully, he will know more about them than I do. (579 680 ELECTION I : K RINK. UPPER KALLS OF THE YELLOWSTONE. From the coolness and quiet of Soda Springs I returned to the heat of Zion then hot in a doable sense,. for the Saints- were all wearing white hats and yelling themselves hoarse for Horace Greeley. When I reached there from the South it seemed to me that I had never seen Salt Lake so free from politico- religious excitement since the early autumn of 1868; there appeared actually nothing to quarrel about. The State Govern- ment agitation was mostly over, and all were taking a sort of truce. The Courts were again in operation under the new regime, which leaves the power about equally divided; Judge McKean was back in his old place, and, despite his legal rebuff at Washington, universally respected by Gentiles and Liberal Mormons. The improvement in business over last year had not been as great as the sanguine hoped for, still there was an improvement; and though the increase in mining over 1871 was not as great as in that year over 1870, it was great enough to warrant large investments. In this condition of affairs the campaign opened. The Church nominated for Congress George Q. Cannon, a four-wived apostle, declaring in so many words that Hooper was only a " sort of Mormon, anyhow/' and Utah should be represented by one in NOMINATIONS FOR CONGKE.SS. 681 YELLOWSTONE LAKE. full faith and good practice. There was in the declaration a most ludicrous assumption of superior Mormon morality and toleration, plainly conveying this idea : We have humored this nation long enough; and tolerated their prejudices till they think we must ; we will send them a good Saint and a representative man, who will give dignity and decency to a corrupt Congress, etc. The Liberals nominated Gen. George R. Maxwell ; and all the bitterness of the contest in the nation was increased ten- fold by the religious element introduced into the quarrel. Again the Tabernacle resounded with prophecies, threats and denunci- ations ; and again we heard, for the ten-thousandth time, of the "wonderful sobriety, energy and industry of this people; who broke the roads to this country, redeemed the wilderness, made the desert blossom as the rose," etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam. A few words on this subject before I bid good-bye to Utah as I hope, forever. It is indeed curious that the Mormon claim on this point should be allowed so fully in the East, even by intelligent men. As an instance, I quote from an article in a prominent Eastern magazine one* no doubt regarded as the embodiment of all that is correct by some fifty thousand fami- lies. The author came to Salt Lake City, stayed a week, and really ought to have known something about the Territory. Yet here is what he says : " They have, in an incredibly short 682 "MORMON ENTERPRISE." space of time, planted in Utah a most industrious population of a quarter of a million. Their agriculture is a marvel of skill, and they have drawn abundant wealth out of a soil which all before them had pronounced utterly worthless. Their manu- factures rival those of the older States; and for five hundred miles from north to south, in the center of the American Desert, the traveler sees with amazement a succession of turnpikes, cities with improved streets and elegant homes, and looks upon hun- dreds of miles of canals in what was once thought a waterless desert." The best answer to such fustian is in a few plain facts, such as any one may verify for himself by the census and agricul- tural reports, or by writing to any reliable resident. Utah has been settled a quarter of a century; about the same time as Iowa; twice as long as Colorado or Nevada, and three times as long as Montana. The census of 1870 gave Utah a population of 90,000. There is not a foot of regular turnpike, a rod of bowldered street, or a mile of navigable canal in the entire Territory. What they call turnpike in Utah is simply the natural soil thrown up in the worst places, and owing to the dryness of the climate, it is tolerably good for nine months in the year. Their streets are the natural gravel, very good in good weather, very bad in bad weather. The Mormons have never tried to make more than' one canal : the twenty-four mile canal from Cottonwood, to float the stone to the temple. It was begun by inspiration of Brigham Young; every ward detailed a certain number of men to work on it, and when $35,000 had been expended in money and labor, it was found that the city end of the canal was about ten feet higher than the Cottonwood end, where the water was to be turned in ! Water would not run uphill even for a Prophet, and the dry channel remains a beautiful monument to " Mormon enterprise." Brig- ham has made four attempts at manufacturing, but every one has proved a flat failure. The manufacture of beet sugar was undertaken under his special direction, and $60,000 invested in buildings and machinery. It proved a total failure, and not a dollar was ever realized bv those who invested. "COLORADO COMPANY." 683 His next project was the Colorado Transportation Company. All the goods for Utah were to be brought by steamers np the Colorado, reducing the land passage to four or five hundred miles, and making all Southern Utah independent of the freighters across the plains. At his direction at his command rather such prominent men as W. S. Godbe, Henry Lawrence, and others, subscribed heavily to the stock, paying in dollar for dollar, and the " long warehouses " at Callville, on the Colo- rado, were erected. They still stand, freight still comes over the plains and stock in the " Colorado Company " is worth four cents on the dollar " for speculative purposes." And this failure is not due to the railroad ; the scheme had collapsed years before the Union Pacific started out of Omaha. W. S. Godbe cited these facts when he was on trial before the " School of the Prophets," as proof that God did not inspire men in business matters; but that experience was the only true guide there. Brigham replied that the stock in that company would yet come up to a premium, to which Godbe rejoined with a sarcastic offer to sell his to Brigham now at ten cents on the dollar. As to manufactures, there are said to be some in successful operation in the southern part of Utah. The Beaver Woolen Mill, which takes the lead, is about such a factory as one may find in every county in Ohio. Possibly ten thousand miners have been added since 1870, bringing the total population to 100,000. The Mormons made a great outcry about fraud and misrepresentation in this census, and soon after entered upon an enumeration of their own, to prove that they had people enough to entitle them to a State Government. They have devoted considerable of their vaunted "energy" to publishing nothing whatever of the results, but now say, in general terms, that their people number 120,000. As to wealth, there are no people in the United States, New Mexico possibly excepted, who will average as poor as the Mormons. The twenty thousand Gentiles now in Utah own thirty per cent, more property than all the eighty thousand Mormons. The mines of Utah are already worth more than 684 RICHES. the real estate; four-fifths of the money now in circulation comes from Gentiles, and the Emma Mine alone brings more money into the country than the agriculture of any two counties in Utah. Brigham may possibly be worth a million dollars, but I doubt it. I can not see where it came from. Below him there are not, inside the Church, twenty wealthy men; and even in Salt Lake City the finest houses, best im- proved property, and most paying institutions are in the hands of Gentiles. Walker Brothers, who got out of the Church young enough to learn Gentile ways, and substitute common sense for inspiration, do a business equal to that of all the retail co-operative stores; and Mr. Warren Hussey, the Gentile banker of Salt Lake City, could buy out the whole "College of the Twelve Apostles " with one year's income. In the year 1872, Mr. Hussey paid within a few hundred dollars of twice the amount of revenue paid by the whole Mormon people, from Brigham Young down. In the enor- mous fortunes which have been made in the last two years by mining operations, I know of but two Mormons who have shared, and one of 'them, a Mr. Groesbeck, is already under a cloud, threatened with excommunication by Brigham because he declines to divide. A very little reflection will show any business man that the Mormons can not be a wealthy people; that there can not be that wealth in the hands of Brigham Young which is so often spoken of. They went to Utah in the last stages of poverty, next door to starvation; and their converts since have been from the lowest, poorest and most ignorant peasantry of Europe. Most of them could only emigrate with aid extended by the Church. As Brigham said in a sermon lately : " They did not know enough to put a pig in a pen and where they came from never had a pig to put in a pen." Manifestly they brought no wealth with them. The Church records show that of the new converts at least forty per cent, apostatize and get away before three years ; and about thirty per cent, more apostatize soon or late. I once heard Brigham make out the figures in a sermon, demonstrating that of all who joined the Church over seventy MORMON POVERTY. 685 per cent, apostatized. And by a singular coincidence it is those who have the most money who generally apostatize. And where did this supposed wealth come from? They were there three years before they had any trade ; then came the California emigration, which gave them some trade until 1855 or 1856. But all from that source would not make fifty dollars to each person in Utah. Then came successively the trade with other mining countries, which redeemed Utah from utter poverty ; but all combined could not make her rich. A community can not get rich on the sale of surplus produce, when four families out of five have no surplus. And that is the case two years out of three in Utah. The Mormon farms average from five to ten acres. Twenty acres is an immense farm in one of these little valleys. Indeed, one family can not tend so much with their wretchedly awkward system of irrigation. Most of the families are barely self-sustaining on such a little patch as that. There has probably been more wholesale judicious lying done by Mormon missionaries in Europe, about the glories and advantages of JJtah, than by the advocates of any other cause in the world. The Mormons are better off, far better off, now than ever before in their history; and this is owing entirely to the development of the mines, which the pig-headed priesthood so long opposed. I wish our brilliant rnagazinist had gone to some of the more remote settlements to look at some of those "elegant homes" he speaks of. In Salt Lake City there are some nice buildings perhaps one-third or one-half as many as in Omaha and other Western cities of the size. A few more may be found in Ogden, Provo, Fillmore, and three or four other prominent places. But let the traveler turn out to Heber City, or the secluded places up San Pete or the Sevier, and he will find a degree of poverty and ignorance he would scarcely have credited among the peasantry of Europe. And there he will find the simon-pure, straight-out and fanatical Mormons a race of simple shepherds, with reason scarce above the sheep they drive. There the unhappy traveler, if compelled to seek shelter in winter, will find it in a Swedish " dug-out" or a half-mud hut, tenanted equally by dogs, Danes, 686 THE UNIVERSITY. fleas, and other undesirables. He will thaw his numbed limbs by the sickly simmer of a sage-brush fire, force a scant supper of suspicious porridge, and sink to uneasy slumbers upon the ground or a pile of straw, from which he will rise in the morning steaming with earthy damps or wrenched with rheuma- tism, lined with fleas, or half crazy with itch. A single night in one of these "elegant homes " will fully prepare him for eulogies on Mormon thrift and progress. In Kansas, Nebraska or Dakota, all of which were then open to the Mormons, it costs about three dollars to make an acre of wild land fit for cultivation; in Utah from twenty-five to a hundred dollars. And to this country, across that country, Brigham, " by inspiration," led his people eleven hundred miles. The answer, of course, is that he wanted to isolate them. Well, polygamy was the only reason for wanting them isolated ; and in the very nature of things only a few of the leading and wealthy men, about one in six of the whole, can practise polygamy. And that this little aristocracy may live a life of domestic sensuality, all the rest must spend a weary life of profitless toil. If such a man be a real Moses, where do you find a spurious one? And what of education ? Look again at the census, and find single counties in Utah with more adults who can not read and write than in any Congressional district in the States. Two or three times a year the "University of Deserct" puts forth a pretentious catalogue, with a lengthy list of professors and officials, which is quoted admiringly "in foreign parts;" and every day hundreds of strangers in the city pass the said "Uni- versity" building, without the slightest suspicion that they are within the shadow of an institution of learning. Ask at random a hundred visitors to Utah, and ninety-nine of them will declare they saw no "University." And yet every one of them passed it when they entered the city. It is a two-story adobe, plastered and dun-colored, perhaps forty by twenty feet in extent, at the upper end of Main Street; and looks like a tolerably respectable second rate grocery store. But the highest eulogies are reserved for " Mormon indus- EVILS OF MOKMONISM. 687 try." The Mormons are just like all other people in one respect they will work rather than starve ; but unlike most other people in America in the fact that, when their purely material wants are satisfied, the most of them care for nothing further. They have adopted the bee as their model, and are content with the blind instincts of the bee satisfied with food and shelter, with little regard to the higher man. I never had the evils and wrongs of Mormonism, in a purely economical view, so forcibly brought to my mind as when 1 went thence to Minnesota. There were Scandinavian colonies of the same race as many of the Mormon converts in Utah, who came to this country in the same condition of poverty as these; they are now the wealthiest people in the country, and these, as Brigham says, " have a cow and two or three pigs apiece, and are beginning to live." In 1859, when I lived in Minnesota, I could but laugh at the odd and poverty-stricken appearance of the long trains of Norweigans I saw filing in to their colo- nies. Last September I saw the same colonies with all that heart could wish ; their granaries full, and their cattle num- bered by tens of thousands; and the little colony of Norwegians above Monticello, Minnesota, on a tract perhaps eight miles square, have more ready money, and more that will sell for ready money, than all the Scandinavians in Utah. There we see the. results of un trammeled energy following natural law; here the results of a cruel and repressive theo- cratic system, which destroys individuality and contravenes natural law. And, indeed, how can these people improve their condition? To advance, an agricultural community must have a regular surplus to apply in improvements and new investments. But the surplus of these people is taken up in tithing and donations to the Church, and the ten per cent, a year which ought to go to building up each man's prosperity, goes to swell the revenues of the Church. And worse than all, the Church itself, or rather the priesthood, does not profit thereby ; for the system is a wasteful one and destructive to real prosperity. All the sap and nutriment of the country, all that ought to return in vivifying currents to the extremities, 688 BRIG HAM YOUNG RESPONSIBLE. THE GIANTESS YELLOWSTONE. goes to swell, not a healthful center, but a bloated and unwholesome ex- crescence. And this is my indictment against Brigham Young : That he has brought these poor people here with delusive pro- mises; that his sys- tem keeps them almost as poor as they were in Eu- rope, when the same labor else- where in our coun- try would have made them rich ; that he has wasted their -energies in the pursuit of a . wild fanaticism, and, though their condition be a little improved, his un- natural system of religious govern- ment has made fifty thousand producers the poorest in the country, and a source only of weakness and poli- t i c a 1 em bar rass- ment to the Nation, MORMONISM A HUMBUG. 689 when a natural system of immigration, each pursuing his own good, untrammeled by priestcraft or theocracy, would have made each one of them rich, and added fifty millions to the wealth of the Nation. Mormonism is even a greater humbug as an industrial sys- tem than as a religion there is less production to the number of workers though take it as one may, it is the champion humbug of modern times. It began on a stolen romance, fraudulently palmed off as a bible. Its prophet was a fiddling sot ; his successor is socially a boor, and as a financier or manager the worst overrated man of the age ; and its pretences of industry, morality and sobriety are even more fraudulent and unfounded than its claims as a religion. A very little reflection ought to convince any one that the claims put forth for Mormon industry and progress could not be true while its social system is as it is ; for it is in the nature of things impos- sible that material progress should be cotemporary with moral retrogression ; that a people should for any length of time go forward in industry and education, and backward in sense and morals. No, those who maintain that the Mormons are pro- gressing so finely in material things, must admit either that their religion is true, or that the soundest principles of philoso- phy are in their case falsified. I do not wonder at Mormons boasting ; for a people united in the faith they are, are necessarily in opposition to all the rest of the world. I do not object to their falsehoods about themselves; for falsehood is an essential of their religion.- But I do object to their outside apologists attempting by such mis- representations to bolster up a falling cause. Under the anomalous voting system of Utah, the Gentile minority, though paying three-fourths of the Government taxes, is completely disfranchised ; the mere will of Brigham Young, operating through the Church machinery, determining who shall be elected. The Governor and District Courts are all that stand between Gentile property and Mormon rapacity ; but that barrier they now seek to remove by a State organiza- tion. 44 690 NO PEACE IN UTAH. It is said that there are still a few people in the East in favor of creating a Mormon State. That is, be it understood, a State where every official, from Governor to Constable, would be nominated by Brigham Young, and elected by the Mormon majority, voting solidly under the direction of the priesthood. Then we should have Gentile mining interests, involving millions, settled by Mormon priests as judge and jury; Gentile estates cut up in Mormon Probate, and Mormons tithing the inheritance of the widow and orphan ; Mormon officials pur- suing accused men into Gentile towns, searching and insulting whom they pleased. Riots, mobs and forcible rescues would follow as naturally as the crop follows the seed ; for nobody would have any confidence in the law. These foreigners, arrogant by their religion and swelled by triumph, would again organize the Nauvoo Legion, which the gallant Shaffer abol- ished, and enjoy themselves lording it over American citizens. And would the miners and Gentiles peaceably endure this? No, never. Come what may, though it cost blood to prevent it, this incestuous race and foresworn priesthood should never snap the whip of priestly domination over American miners. You might as well tell me that you can make Vesuvius into a powder-house, as that you can erect a Mormon State in Utah, and have peace. CHAPTER XXXII, SHORT NOTES ON A LONG EXCURSION. Another ride on the Union Pacific Down to St. Louis Up to Nauvoo His- toric interest A strange old place German vintners Beauty of the site- Through Iowa Southern Dakota Yankton politicians Territorial Officials " The Government cannot afford good men "Down the Missouri An uncertain channel On the Sioux City and St. Paul Road. ! O fully enjoy a ride on the Trans-Continental, one ought to be a " Pioneer" one of those who whacked mules or oxen across the Plains in the olden time. Then the bright contrast smoothness and speed where he toiled so slowly and wearily along raises his enjoyment far above that of commonplace travelers by rail. I am only half qualified in this respect, as I drove a mule team only four hun- dred miles my first trip to Salt Lake City. But in the short time since the road has worked Wondrous changes. I left " Zion " at 4 A. M. of August 20th ; breakfasted at Ogden, and soon entered upon the long ride in one of those rolling palaces which have done so much to make travel by rail a continual delight. What a change from the back of an ambling American horse on which I made the tour of Arizona. And I could but ask myself, somewhat doubtfully, too : shall I ever roll along the line of the Thirty-fifth parallel road in a Pullman palace, as I now ride where four years ago I toiled with mule teams ? The change would be no greater than I have seen here. Our sleeping car contained the usual assortment to be found on eastern bound cars at this season. Four English families from Honolulu were on their way home on a visit. Fifteen years ago the young people had gone there, married and settled; 691 692 ON THE UNION PACIFIC. THE OLD WAY ACROSS THE PLAINS. they had promised themselves a trip to "Hold Hingland" as soon as the great American road should be completed, enabling them to break the monotony of a long sea voyage, and in three years after its completion had got ready to start. The bright 'children, natives of the Sandwich Isles, had preserved the clear skin and bright blue eyes of the native Briton ; but on this Anglo-Saxon basis were engrafted a thousand queer Western ways, accompanied by soft tropical words, Kanaka names and "native" slang.' There were three young Britons from China, returning home after five years' absence ; and two Russian gen- tlemen, prominent in science, who had been exploring the mines and mountains of Utah for some weeks past. Of our own people there was more variety : the mountain miner who had "struck it rich" in some of the newly discovered placers, and was on his way East to enjoy hi* fortune ; the returned Cali- fornian, who had been "in luck," and a dozen classes of moun- taineers, prospectors, hunters and tourists. The pile of trunks at the junction formed quite a study : they were marked Mel- bourne, Hong Kong, London, Victoria, San Diego and Alaska; with a score of places in " the States," Chicago always predom- inating. IMPROVEMENTS. 693 Improvements are noticeable everywhere on the road. All traces of the wrecks of last winter are gone ; the defective sheds are removed, and every place of possible blockade carefully guarded, so that it is nearly or quite impossible that the trouble of last winter should ever be repeated. With the improvements on the California end the whole line is about as near perfect as man's work can become, and we may justly claim that it is not only the longest, but the best built road in the world. Reaching Oma- ha I saw by the press that twenty persons had died the previous day in St. Louis by sun- stroke. I had put in the early part of the summer where one needed two or three blan- kets every night, and it seemed that I would melt under the heat of the Missouri Valley. But the thermom- eter marked the same degree as in Utah. The same temperature is much more debilitating in the Mississippi Valley to one just from the mountains ; it appears more steamy and weakening than the day heat of Utah and Northern Arizona. MOHUMKNT ROCK ECHO CANON. 694 NAUVOO. After two days at St. Louis I was informed that " our party at Yankton, Dakota, were ready for excursion on the North Pacific ;" and on the 31st of August took boat northward, saving one day for a visit to Nauvoo a city of great historic interest to Utah people. It has the most beautiful site in Illinois. The river makes a bend westward nearly in the shape of a U ; the point in the lower part is a mile wide, and lies just high enough above the river for commercial convenience; and thence the hill rises by gentle slopes for two miles eastward. At the upper end of the flat on the river is a splendid steamboat landing, and about half way around the bend the rapids begin, giving a fine front for manufacturing purposes. Here the Mormons had projected a row of cotton manufactories; they were to bring the cotton up the river, and with their own operatives, converted from the workshops of England, build up a great manufacturing community. Could they have maintained peace with their neighbors, they would have had some fifteen years to perfect this scheme before the railroad era superseded river transporta- tion, and Nauvoo would have had too great a start for the tide to turn. They and their apologists of course maintain that the Gentiles were altogether to blame for the breaking up of these fine schemes ; but when a man moves six or seven times, as they did, and quarrels with the neighbors every time, I am in- clined to conclude that he takes the worst neighbor along with him every move. I was most agreeably disappointed in the appearance of Nauvoo, having often heard that it was a gloomy collection of uninhabited and dilapidated houses. I found it neat, prosperous and beautifully improved, with a population of twenty-five hundred, many new dwellings, and not one un- occupied. After the Mormons came a people even more curious than they, but quite harmless : the Icarians, or French " Fraternal Society " of Communists, under the lead of M. Cabet. The term has been so much abused of late that I will explain by stating that these Communists were substantially of the same class as those Robert Owen brought to Posey County, Indiana that is, all the property belonged to the society. They wore NATIVE WINES. 695 a common uniform, maintained the family relation, and worked in detailed squads. But Cabet used poor judgment in his se- lections : here was to be seen a former college professor herding swine ; there a Paris goldsmith driving oxen, and a well-known scholar, crack-brained on socialistic theories, was made assistant sawyer at the society's mill. It cured him, however. Inherent in all such societies is one fatal weakness: they ignore individuality; forget the patent fact that zeal for the community is only a secondary sentiment, resulting from the individual's zeal for himself, and like the Jews with the Sab- bath, imagine that man was made for society, instead of society for the convenience of the man. Two or three years the ex- periment continued ; then the Icarians divided their property and left, and Nauvoo sunk to a village of some six hundred people. Ten years after it began to improve, and is now pros- perous, the bulk of its inhabitants being German vine-dressers, a neat, trusty and pleasant class of Bavarians and Westphalians. Every house is surrounded by orchards and vineyards, and native wine and fruits of all kinds are cheap. By invitation of Fred. Baum, the principal vintner of the place, I spent two hours in his cellars, and found the wine equal to any of native production. After sampling the white and red Concord, Ca- tawba, Delaware and a peculiar sweet wine made from the Nor- ton seedling grape, rny palate became somewhat confused, and I declined the Clinton and Nauvoo Sparke which, as the best, were reserved to the last. The place is rapidly becoming im- portant for its vintage. Where the great Mormon temple once stood is now a fine vineyard, and not one of the original stones remains. Three of the neighboring houses are built entirely of the beautiful white rock, and the rest has made walls and foundations all over town. This wonderful structure cost between a half and three-quarters of a million dollars in money and labor, and the Icarians had proposed to fit it up as a social hall and school- room. But at 2 A.M. of November 10, 1848, it was found to be on fire, and before daylight every particle of woodwork was destroyed. It was set on fire in the third story of the steeple, 696 MORMON TEMPLE BURNED. MORMON TEMPLE AT XAUVOO, ILLINOIS. one hundred and forty feet from the ground. The dry pine burned like tinder; there was no mode of reaching the fire, and in twenty minutes the whole wooden interior was a mass of flames. In two hours nothing remained but hot walls, in- closing a bed of embers. At Montrose and Fort Madison, Iowa, they could distinguish every house in Nauvoo, and the light was seen forty miles away in both States. It was a great loss to Nauvoo, and the citizens for a time supposed that it was fired by the Mormons, unwilling that the Gentiles should en- joy their work. But it has since transpired that the incendiary was one Joe Agnew, of Pontoosuc, fourteen miles above Nauvoo. Parties to whom he confessed revealed it after his death. He had suffered at the hands of the Mormons, and was determined " no trace of them should remain on the soil of Illinois." He broke in at a window in the southeast corner of the basement, whence a stairway led into the steeple. The hurricane of REFLECTIONS. 697 NAUVOO MILITIA AND "GENERAL" JOSEPH SMITH. 1850 threw down most of the walls, and prevented it from being refitted. From the deck of a Mississippi steamer Nau- voo, which once had fourteen thousand inhabitants, now looks like a suburb of retired country seats, stretching for two or three miles up a handsome slope ; and thousands yearly pass on the river admiring the rural beauty of the place, but little thinking that a quarter of a century since it was the largest city in Illi- nois, and the most notorious in America / the chosen stronghold of a most peculiar faith and destined capital of a vast religious empire. Thence by steamer to Burlington, Iowa; and by regular course of rail to Sioux City, which I found much improved in the year since I had last seen it, but now, like all of Iowa, blazing with political excitement. Thence to Yankton, by stage, I found the country with signs of considerable improvement over the previous year. Eastern and southeastern Dakota con- tain 30,000 square miles of the richest farming land in the 698 NORTHERN DAKOTA. world, at least half of it yet open to the pre-emptor; and nearly all of it to the settler. A fertile area about the size of Indiana contains a population of only 20,000. The objection commonly urged is the climate ; but this need not deter the native of our Northern States. Those who have settled there do not find it excessively rigorous. The corresponding parts of Iowa and Minnesota have proved well adapted to the development of man ; and with the healthful air of Dakota, while the material is not wanting, we may say: " Man is the nobler growth our realms supply ; And souls are ripened in our Northern sky." The railroad is now completed from Sioux City to Yankton. We found it difficult to decide on our route to the Northern Pacific. Stages run tip the eastern side of the Territory to Sioux Falls; but from there extends an uninhabited region for a hundred and fifty miles, to the railroad crossing of Red River. Next it was suggested that we take steamer up the Missouri to the crossing, whence it was only seventy-five miles eastward to the end of the track. Northern Dakota is in the North Intemperate zone, if I may judge from my experience of it; but late settlers in Red River Valley, mostly from Northern Europe, pronounce the climate delightful, arid have succeeded in producing all the grains of the temperate regions, particularly wheat and rye. The Terri- tory claims to have the most moral and industrious settlers in the West, and the meanest politicians in the world ; and, from what I saw, I think the claim must be allowed. About one- third of the Federal officials are half the time at Washington, trying to get another third removed. The remaining third are neutral ; and, like political neutrals generally, have to fight both factions. There were three Republican parties and a faction at my last visit; and the political heat of the Nation at large was as the balminess of a May morning, compared to the consuming wrath of Dakota parties. The standard of morality may be guessed from the fact that one official boasted openly of the amount of money he had made as Indian Agent, and how, clos- ing with this pithy paraphrase of Lake Erie Perry, "We have ^ 77' 699 700 ONE-LEGGED FIGHT. PEOPLE OF PEMBINA, AND THEIR OX-CARTS. met the Injins; and what was theirs is ours." Another, a Judge of the Supreme Court, who walks on two cork-legs, in a public speech in Yankton, made scandalous charges against the wife of a soldier employed in the Land Office. The soldier, who had but one leg, attacked the Judge at Vermilion City, and what the Sioux City Journal characterized as a " One-legged Fight" was the result. The first onslaught literally knocked the Judge " off his pins," and the soldier falling on him, loos- ened his own wooden leg, and then ensued a scene which called for the pen of a " Phoenix " and the pencil of a Darley : two manly bodies rolling on the floor, and four hands clenched or striking wildly, with one solitary leg attached. Unfortunately, " His Honor " (?) survived, to shed further luster on the Federal Courts of Dakota. In 1868 the Territory had five candidates for Delegate to Congress ; and out of 5200 votes the successful man only re- ceived some 1300. Two years after, there were but three can- didates, and the same in 1872; both resulted in Hon. M. K. Armstrong, Democrat, being elected, in spite of an overwhelm- DAKOTA POLITICIANS. 701 ing Republican majority. With 150,000 square miles of surface, Dakota has the population of an average county in Ohio ; and most men would not consider its offices worth much. The sad fact is this : Government cannot afford good men in office in most of the Territories ; the salary is so much less than they can make at any legitimate business. With this pencil I can earn a salary equal to that of any Territorial Governor; a young man making a hundred dollars a month in Cincinnati is richer than the Chief Justice of Utah ; and the Police Judge of Evansville, Indiana, makes double the clear money of the best paid official from Pembina to Arizona. And worst of all, when they try to do their duty, they are almost certain to be removed before they learn how. For an Eastern man is worth very little his first year or two in any Territory. The official, if honest, is exposed to a constant pressure from those ruled over, and a constant war on the Presi- dent to have him removed. If he had no care but doing his duty, he would still have trouble enough ; but efficiency and duty are no dependence upon the favor of the Administration ; and while the official in the Territory is harassed by complaints, by a salary insufficient for himself and family, by the damning criticisms or equally damning overpraise of the local press, he is more and more disquieted by notes from his friends at Wash- ington, where the fiat of Executive wrath hangs daily over his official head, like the ever trembling sword of Damocles sus- pended by a single hair. There are men in every Territorial capital who turn uneasily upon their beds from some dark hint in the evening paper, and whose matin slumbers are disquieted by anxiety for the morning paper to see " the latest from Wash- ington." Let certain Members and Senators die, or resign, or be defeated, or differ with the President on some pet scheme, and away their heads would go like pins from the alley ; and the more they had done their duty the more they might expect decapitation. That a man who already lives in the West should want an office there seems reasonable enough ; but that one who has a good business in the States should want to leave it for such a position rather puzzles me. 702 OLD FORT BENTON MONTANA. At the last moment our party decided not to go up the Mis- souri River, as the shortest time any steamer could promise at this season was ten days, and we might be much longer in reaching the North Pacific Railroad crossing. By rail through Minnesota had at least the merit of certainty, and we, therefore, left Yankton at daybreak on the 12th, by the steamer Key West, which had lain at the landing all night; for steamers, for the most part, only run by daylight or bright moonlight everywhere above Sioux City. This was the best season ever known for boating on the Upper Missouri, and boats were able to reach Benton, Montana Territory, until September. Three years out of four, Benton can not be reached later than the first of August, and often only during the "June rise." The Key West had been this trip to Fort Peck, from which point there. is a tolerably good wagon road to Helena and all Eastern Montana. Her capacity is four hundred .tons, about the largest boat employed in this navigation ; as the tortuous and shifting channel of the Missouri requires steamers of very TOPOGRAPHY. 703 light draught and peculiar construction. On her up trip she carried groceries and machinery /or the mining camps of Eastern Montana, as also supplies for the military posts along the river; down stream she was lightly loaded, but had a fair complement of passengers, mostly from the " Crossing/ 7 as the point where the North Pacific Railroad strikes the river is generally known in the Northwest. The boat preceding the Key West carried thirty Indians from the Sioux bands above, going down to Washington, for one of those periodical "Talks with the Great Father." By stage from Yankton to Sioux City is sixty-five miles, and the fare $6.50 ; by steamer, the distance is a hundred and fifty, and the fare fifty cents less, with the added advantage of three or four meals, and conveniences for sleeping and reading. The time is just as it happens: you must start when the boat is ready, and take your chances on board, sometimes getting through in ten hours, sometimes in thirty. We made splendid time all forenoon, the low clay banks receding so rapidly that their natural ugliness was changed to a swiftly gliding view of something nearly like beauty. The water is a little thicker than cream, but not quite as thick as plaster, and of a dirty yellow color, its solid contents consisting of nearly equal parts of fine clay and silt; but when taken aboard and settled, it is very palatable. Immediately on ^he river, the timber is small and scrubby, but a mile or so back are fine forests of good- sized trees, extending a mile or two in width, and behind them the richest prairie " bottom " in the world, varying in width from five to twenty miles, and yielding to gentle foot-hills and wooded bluffs. In three or four places the river spreads to a mile or more in width, broken by sand-bars and low islands ; there the boat usually stuck fast for a while, till the hands could "pole off," when she would back out and try another channel, and then another, till one was found passable. On such occasions the captain cheered us up with appropriate remarks : " D d channel was on that side when I came up. Thought the river would take a sky-wash around the other way, judging from the set agin that bluff. But there's nothing 704 " SIOUX CITY." impossible under this Administration. Howsomever, we'll reach Sioux City by 5 o'clock, if we don't fall down/' which last I judge to be a facetious reference to our sparring off with the " boat's crutches." But we did " fall down " just at noon, running hard aground on the head of a sand-island. Then oaths, spars, " nigger-engine " and all the other available machinery was set in operation ; and after two hours of swear- ing, bell ringing, and toil, the stern was got far enough into the current to swing around ; then all control of it was lost, and that end grounded below. Then the bow was shoved off, swung around and stuck again ; then the stern made a half- circle swing, and thus on, in a series of swings and " drags," over half-sunken trees, the boat groaning through all her timbers like a thing possessed, we made a final swing off the lower end of the island, and floated on. When they spar thus on both sides, they are said to " grasshopper over." Such is boating on the Upper Missouri. We reached Sioux City at 9 P. M., sixteen hours from Yank- ton, and early next morning took the Dubuque and Sioux City Railroad for the " Junction," so-called, though there was no junction yet. The Sioux City and St. 'Paul Railroad track was then within ten miles of the Dubuque and Sioux City line, which gap passengers traversed by stage. The Dubuque and Sioux City Railroad is known everywhere in Iowa as the Illinois Central, being leased by that company. It runs north- east from Sioux City for twenty-five miles, to Le Mars, whence the Sioux City and St. Paul continues in a northeast direction. For twenty-five miles they are to use the same track. The last-named road results from the union of two companies : one building the Sioux City and St. Paul road, northeastward from the former city, the other the St. Paul and Sioux City road from the last city. They meet at the State Line, and were completed in two weeks after I We traveled all afternoon over a country with the same general character: a high rolling prairie, without sloughs, with very rich soil and rank grass, but no timber in sight. The "MINNESOTA." 705 " summit level " between the waters running northward and southward abounds in lakes, but before 3 P. M. we got down upon the slopes leading to the Minnesota River, and soon thereafter left the " Land of the Sleepyheads " for the land of "Blue Waters" Minnesota. 45 CHAPTER XXXIII. MINNESOTA. My stepmother An impecunious youth Trials of poverty I drive for excur- sion parties Not a success My Canadian friends Return home Mankato Crystal Lake Garden City The cabin of my friends My old employer Down to St. Paul The State Fair Northward by rail Lumbermen Big Lake St. Cloud Sauk Rapids Great water-power Northward stage The Lady Superior Belle Prairie Converting Indians We reach Brainerd. INNESOTA was my fair but cruel stepmother. For in that new State I made my first independent venture away from home; and some reminescences of my life there might serve as lessons to the young and ardent. In May, 1859, I first became a "Gopher" practical Western title of the Minnesotians. On the 2d of that month I left Rockville, Indiana, with the magnificent sum of $33.50 in my pockets. I was just out of college, in miserable health, and as ignorant of business as it is possible to conceive. I had never been away from home alone, and fancied the above sum would amply suffice, until I could get something to do; reached St. Paul on the 24th of May, and next day struck out northward with $8.50 of my cash still on hand. Then was the very worst period of the noted "hard times" in this State. It had been settled with the usual humbug and hurrah of the "glorious, free and boundless West," in 1856 and 1857; everything was selling at three or four times its actual value, and every second man was a millionaire in town lots. Most of the people had come by neighborhoods from New York and New England, and freely indorsed for each other to any desired extent. The crash came and they were like a row of bricks, each one knocking down the next all around the circle. In June, 1857, everybody was rich ; in October they gazed upon 706 MISFORTUNES. 707 the ruin of their paper houses, and every man rushed off to his lawyer to sue his neighbor, compromise with his creditors, or " put his property out of his hands." Every important town got into a squabble about the title to the town site, and lawyers reaped big harvests in fee bills ; but could not get the cash, and were dunned by the washerwoman with thousands in unpaid bills in their desks. The laws of two Legislatures conflicted ; one Judge overruled or denied the jurisdiction of another Judge; Courts of Equity in the afternoon enjoined proceedings directed by Courts of Law in the fore- noon ; injunctions and re- straining orders tied up every- thing and everybody, and the weary way of contending claimants for town sites lay across a pocket- wasting desert of litigation, diversified at in- tervals by mountains of fee bills, and graveled with cer- tiorariSj nisi primes, and writs of error. The Demo- cratic Legislature of 1858 burdened the young State with an enormous debt, which the. succeeding Legislature (Republican) repudiated; and, I believe, most of it is yet unpaid. On all this came the grass- hoppers. The crop of 1856 was half destroyed, and the next year every green thing, and every head of ripe grain, was eaten clean; the insects leaving the country black and bare behind them. In 1858 a tolerable crop was raised, but everything that could be sold had to go to pay taxes and judgments of foreign creditors, and when I arrived the people were living on what they could not sell, to wit: corn -bread, potatoes and "green truck," to which, in the country, was generally added milk and THE AUTHOR, BEING IN FEEBLE HEALTH, GOES TO MINNESOTA. 708 HARD WORK POOR PAY. butter a wonderful help. For six weeks I worked for my board not a cent of wages for one man in Wright County ; and the whole time never tasted tea, coffee, flour-bread, meat, or any one of the things we consider "square feed" in Indiana. Our standard living was corn-bread, " Dutch cheese/' butter and milk, to which, on Saturdays, was added a mess of fish from the lake, when work was not too pressing; and after strawberries and wild tomatoes came in the whole family usually took to the prairie on Sunday and " browsed." The income that year was mostly from the sale of ginseng. I had walked nearly a hundred miles northward from St. Paul looking for a school ; turned back from Princeton, (ha last settlement, and crossed the Mississippi to Wright County, being re- duced to my last half dollar before I began at board wages. From there I footed it to St. Paul, and got work in Ford's nursery at forty cents a day ! At the end of ten days all the "little men" were discharged for larger men, who " would do more and work cheaper." EEBLE IN A party of us decided to go south till we got to where harvest was ripe, then har- vest northward with the season. In pursuance of this plan, I sold all my clothes I could not carry in a hand valise, and thus raised money enough to go two hundred miles up the Minne- sota River to Blue Earth County. Striking south from Man- kato, I found the harvest ripe and spoiling for hands ; but to my application the uniform answer was, "Not a cent o' money; can pay you in lumber or wheat." Lumber and wheat would POCKET, RETURNS FROM MIN- NESOTA. SOCIAL DISTINCTIONS. 709 not pay my passage out of Minnesota, whence I had resolved to go before cold weather, and it was then the second week in August. Finally, one William Long, near Garden City, " thought he could raise five dollars %re I'd want to leave." I helped him harvest and make hay, but the money he could not raise. Thence I went up the Watonwan River, and shoveled gravel on a mill-dam for forty cents a day ; but gave out the third day, minus some ten square inches of palm cuticle. Then I tried a livery stable ; drove carriage and the like for excursionists vis- iting the country, for some two weeks, when, to my surprise, I was peremptorily discharged. Being but a boy, I lacked the judgment to keep still, and often entered freely into conversation with my passengers, without knowing just how to assume that naturally deferential air which is thought to be due from him who holds the reins to the one who sits beside or behind him. For, if you imagine, kind reader, that political equality makes social, or civil, or any other kind of equality, you only demon- strate that you are an innocent pastoral in the dry fields of politics and social philosophy ; and that you are almost as ignor- ant as was your servant, the writer, at the age of nineteen, in the year of grace 1859. In a variety of positions I have since discovered that social distinctions are as natural and inevitable under a republican as a monarchical government; and when, during the " Reconstruction Period," the souls of the fearful were disquieted by the sleep-murdering spectre of "negro equality," I was calm as a summer morning. For I reasoned with myself thus: Have I not been a servant, and an employe in many positions ; and do I not know that voting never pro- duced any social equality among whites? How, then, can it between whites and blacks? But I digress. My freedom offended somebody, and thereby I lost my lucrative position. Moral : Never know more than your business demands. After that I went wild, so to speak, and lived awhile with two Canadian half-breeds on the shore of Loon Lake. We worked in their little patch about half of each day, hunted and 710 GOOD FARM LAND IN MINNESOTA. fished the rest of the time, lived on game and corn bread, and made the night hideous, often till the " small hours/' with our songs, dances, and barbarous patois. I lost my hat the first night I was with them ; hadn't a cent to buy another ; went without two weeks or so, and got as brown as a hazel-nut. Loon Lake was then the western limit of settlement ; now the railroad passes only four miles west of where our cabin stood, and the population of the county has grown from five to twenty- two thousand. Late in September Mr. Long borrowed five dollars from a Mr. Baker, formerly Auditor of State in Ohio, and then a can- didate for the same office in Minnesota ; paid the sum to me, and I struck out afoot for St. Paul. Strange to say, my health rapidly improved through all my ups and downs, and I had become reconciled to staying in Minnesota. But the new State just then did not want men without capital, unless they had an immense amount of muscle, and were willing to use it for little or nothing. In these new countries it is pure Darwinism " natural selec- tion and survival of the fittest." I was not the fittest, and did not survive as a citizen of Minnesota ; but returned quite con- tentedly to my college, and there remained till I was of age, when the war gave me another opportunity to leave home with credit. I thought Minnesota the most beautiful State in the Union ; and during the short farming season, it is certainly the nicest State to farm in. I speak of the mere pleasure of working in the ground. The land is never water-soaked, never " bakes," and I never saw a clod as big as my fist. There is no " sour clay" land; it is nearly all black and loose, with just sufficient mixture of sand to make it warm rapidly and pulverize beauti- fully. The season in spring is astonishingly rapid. There are many popular errors as to the comparative advan- tages of warm and cold climates. Carolinians think it cold enough where they are, and a little too sharp in Virginia; the F. F. Vs wonder how the farmer can get through the winters in New York; while the Yankee shudders as he thinks of the CLIMATE. 711 hard fate of the "Canucks" and "Blue-noses" of British America. But in these Northern latitudes people know just what is coming, and prepare for it ; there will be no let-up from the middle of November to the middle of April, and winter travel is even more important and better provided for than summer. In Ben ton county, Minnesota, in the winter of 1871-2, they had a hundred and thirty-four days continuous sleighing. The winters are long, cold and dry ; the river forms ice three or four feet thick, supporting the heaviest teams safely ; no " January thaw " need be apprehended, and it is the unani- mous testimony of young people that they enjoy the winters much more than the summers. The snow remains till about April 1 or 10, then disappears all at once, apparently; the ground is dry in a week, and summer succeeds winter so rapidly as to leave scarcely a month for the intervening spring. The local records show that the Minnesota seasons should be divided thus: winter, five months; spring, one month; summer, four months ; and autumn, two months. The soil will be found to suit the climate. If this section had the heavy clays of Southern Indiana, it would produce nothing; but with the prevailing black sandy loam the crops are immense. " Snow is the poor man's manure," and the soil that is frozen hardest in winter will pulverize finest in summer. Here, after twenty-four hours' rain, the plowman returns to his work without waiting for a "dry- up ; " and in the haste of spring work they frequently " break up " the south slopes while the snow is still lying on the north slopes. Wheat, rye, buckwheat, turnips and potatoes are the leading productions. In the first and last Minnesota leads the world. From two to four hundred bushels per acre is the yield of potatoes. The Sank Valley particularly excels in this line, and in 1859 several fields exceeded the last figures. It used to be said at that time that they "grew as thick in the entire ground, for a foot deep, as their round shape would permit them to lie ; and if some one could invent a square or brick-shaped variety, the whole soil might be grown to a solid mass of potatoes ! " The summer heat is intense for about one month, during 712 THE WEATHER. 713 which time the black, sandy soil will blister the bare feet. In the early spring a single warm day will keep the crops growing two or three days of cold winds. In June, at the point where I resided, the sun shone nearly sixteen hours a day ; and the early and late twilight made the day last from 3.20 A. M. till 8.40 P. M. During the latter part of that month the prairie wind alone tempered the air sufficiently for us to work ; and if it fell dead calm even for an hour we generally " fell" with it in the shade. I kept a regular diary that year, and the follow- ing extracts will indicate the rapidity of the seasons: "May 25 Cold rain, chilly winds. "May 28 Clear and cool. "May 30 Pleasant, and gaining warmth. "June 5 Settled summer weather. "June 15 Prairie flowers all in bloom. " June 25 Intense heat ; strawberries nearly formed. Heavy thunder shower, with most vivid lightning, just after sunset; cooled the air considerably. " July 4 A cooling rain. All families in the township gath- ered at house of J. Smith ; had music, some dancing, and a dinner of 'ham, eggs and rice-pudding quite a treat for Minne- sota. "July 8 Very hot weather again; strawberries beginning to turn. "July 12 First mess of ripe strawberries. "July 14 Early vegetables begin to be used. " August 1 Hottest weather seems to be past. Learn that harvest is ripe in the southern counties, and conclude to start "August 20 (In Blue- Earth County) Finished cutting wheat; fine crop, but no market. Early roasting-ears; can- teloupes ripe on east side of Blue- Earth River. "September 1 Making marsh hay. Corn hardening fast; all kinds of melons ripe, and most gone. " September 18 Heavy frost, apparently all over the county, destroying buckwheat; no other crop particularly injured. Nights getting very cool. " September 28 Thin ice on water ; thermometer down to 714 OLD FRIENDS. 28 this morning. Splendid appetite ; weigh ten pounds more than when I came to Minnesota. Started afoot for St. Paul." The crops were good that year, but there was no market, and the people continued poor. The past season farmers in that county paid from three to four dollars per day for harvest hands, and found a ready market at good prices in Mankato. On nearing that place I was anxious to see some of my old acquaintances in poverty, and left the railroad at the beautiful village of Lake Crystal so named from the pretty sheet of water, four miles west of Loon Lake. I made the best of time to the spot where my Canadians' cabin used to stand, but not a trace of it was visible. The very tree under which I used to sit I could identify; but the whole neighboring region, then an unbroken prairie, is now parceled out in splendid farms, and beautifully improved with neat cottages and tasteful gardens. I hunted the " oldest settler," who told me with some pride that he had been here ten years. (Bah ! what a set of moderns they are, compared with " us pioneers ! ") He had heard of my two friends : one of them went to Nebraska with the Winnebagoes, when they were removed from here ten years ago ; and the other joined the First Minnesota, and " was never heard of after Bull Run." Proceeding on to Garden City, I found that I was "in- deed a stranger in the land." My old employer was still there, but he had been on the losing side in the long drawn out legal fight over the town site, and was now poorer than then, if possible. Much to my regret I found that the railroad had missed most of my old friends ; the country had improved, but they had lost heart in the long, early struggle, and did not profit by the change. Said Mr. Long to me, as we sat at his table next morning, "It was mighty tight times with us, gittin 7 thro 7 the winter after you left (1859-60). It jest seemed like we must go under sometimes. Then when all had got a good start came the Sioux Massacre, in 1862, and ruined us agin. I fit one whole day at New Ulm. It was awful. There was seven hundred women and children in the one big stone hotel, and them Dutch, as didn't know how to load and fire a gun, hid in "HARD TIMES." 715 ST. PAUL. cellars all around, and about sixty of us fightin' a thousand Soos; they had us completely whipt, if they'd only known it. Kept burnin' the town as they come in. Folks moved up here on Blue Earth River and back again to the fort at Mankato, four or five times that fall. Some family murdered every time, and then they'd all run back. Killed the Jewetts only two miles from me." And so ran the report of most of my old friends : part killed by the Sioux, part died in the army, many moved back East before the " hard times" were over, and of all the pioneers not one in ten remained. The little schoolmis- tress from Maine, who was then the only belle in our neighbor- hood, with another young lady and two young men of my acquaintance, were murdered by the Sioux quite late in 1862, and long after the trouble was thought to be over. The Winnebago Reservation, twenty-three miles by thirteen, then unbroken by the plow, is now a rich and populous farming 716 ST. PAUL. district ; and Mankato, then a straggling village of six or eight hundred, is now a flourishing city of five thousand people. But the effects of the "hard times" of 1857-59 still remain in many places, in the shape of interminable lawsuits, unsettled titles, broken fortunes, neighborhood feuds, and men whose energy is gone and their temper soured by disappointment ; many a Min- nesota woman is prematurely old from the troubles of that period, and even in the faces of those I then knew as children I fancy I can see some pinching lines which ought not to mark the visage of blooming youth, unpleasing reminders of a child- hood passed without its natural pleasures, and often stinted because of parental poverty. Thence to St. Paul, down the beautiful and fertile valley of the Minnesota, I saw, every where delightful evidences of a great improvement since I footed it along the same line in September, 1859. Hamlets then are large towns now ; unimportant towns have grown to cities. Everywhere was heard the hum of busy life and Yankee industry; and mingled with it, just at that time, was the roar of political excitement. St. Paul aston- ished me. Except near the river I recognized none of the places familiar in my memory. Twenty thousand visitors were in the city, attending the State Fair; and on the grounds were specimens of vegetation from every spot for seven hundred miles, north and west. Notable among these were bunches of wild rice from the northern lakes ; monster turnips and beets from the line of the Northern Pacific; native grass from Red River Valley, four feet long, and wheat grown at Fort Garry, Red River Settlement, B. A., which yielded seventy bushels per acre. St. Paul is in the southeastern corner, and is the natural entrepot of a wheat-growing region four hundred miles square. Fertile land continues to a point two hundred miles north of our national boundary ; there a sandy desert sets in, and continues to the Arctic Circle. Our party continued to change the programme at each suc- cessive point of departure, as the latest intelligence continued to grow more discouraging in regard to the Missouri River navi- gation. The final plan was to go up the eastern side of the ST. ANTHONY. 717 FALLS OF ST. AXTIIOXY. Mississippi, by rail and stage, to Brainerd ; thence westward to the terminus of the Northern Pacific, and perhaps into the Bad Lands, then eastward to Duluth, and down again to St. Paul. Accordingly, on the evening of the 19th,. after a day on the State Fair Grounds, I took the up train on the Brainerd Branch of the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. The main line crosses the Mississippi . at St. Anthony vulgato voce, " S'nanthony " and Minneapolis, whence it maintains a general course northwest, being completed to Breckinridge, at a point on Red River fifty miles south of the North Pacific Railroad crossing. Besides these lines, that which is popularly known as the Pembina Branch crosses the Mississippi at St. Cloud, and runs westward some twenty miles into Stearns County. Along the very line where, in May, 1859, I footed it, valise in hand, I enjoy the comforts of a first-class passenger car, and find St. Cloud, then 718 "LOGGING CAMPS." the northern limit of white occupation, now a flourishing city of some two thousand people, and considered rather in the cen- tral part of the State. For a few miles out of St. Paul the country is not very at- tractive, that county (Ramsey) being the least important agri- culturally in Central Minnesota. It is rather hilly, for the most part, with a light sandy soil ; but the advance in real estate near St. Paul has been remarkable about 300 per cent, within the last five years, and over 1000 per cent, since 1859. Our long train of passenger cars was densely crowded, all the standing room taken, with people returning from the State Fair; but most of them left us at' the St. Anthony Junction. From there northward the country rapidly grows more beautiful and fertile, presenting that strange feature of the Minnesota landscape known as " oak openings." A traveler from the East is apt to fancy himself in an old orchard, the trees being scattered about in the same proportion, very little larger and with coarse grass between them. These openings, alternating with clear prairie, form the landscape for about a hundred miles northward, then the heavy pine forests begin and extend from one to two hundred miles farther. All the main affluents of the Mississippi from the east take their rise in these forests, and form natural channels by which the lumber is brought to market. The lumbermen spend the long winter in the " logging camps," getting out and hauling the logs to the nearest stream ; then, when the spring rise oc- curs, each company comes do\vn on a " drive," hunting such logs as have lodged along the way, and giving them a fresh start in the current. Every "boss" has his own particular mark cut in the bark ; and the whole mass is caught in the va- rious " booms " near St. Paul, formed into immense rafts, and taken down the Mississippi. In 1859, when I lived upon the banks of that river, in Wright County, there were never less than a hundred logs in sight, and we generally knew of a coming " drive " a day or two beforehand, by the increase of " floaters." The business is always hard and laborious, sometimes very dan- gerous; for occasionally logs will catch on the head of a low, rocky island, and form a "jam," containing many thousands. MINNESOTA AND HER LAKES. 719 In such a case several " drives " often unite ; there is generally what is called a " key-log," and by attaching a rope thereto the whole mass is loosened. Climbing over the "jam/* hunting for this " key-log," and loosening it, is a most perilous business, as the whole mass often gives away at once, and rolls down into the water in a few minutes. I saw a "jam" just above the Copperhead Rapids, near Anoka, which was estimated as con- taining 25,000 logs, and the loosening of a single one freed the entire mass. Travelers coming down the river often made use of these logs, and in July, 1859, I made forty-five miles in one day, on two I had pinned together, using a pole and paddle for steering. Quincy, Illinois, was then the great market for this lumber. Anoka, at the mouth of Rum River, which was a modest hamlet when I last saw it, now appeared from the car windows to be a thriving place of at least two thousand people. Thence northward to Big Lake we traverse a gently rolling prairie, diversified occasionally with " oak openings," and dotted with those clear, white-bottomed lakes which add such a charm to Minnesota. The State has ten thousand lakes, varying in size from five acres to five miles square. In every part of America, as will be seen by a glance at the map, the lake region is on the "summit level," the reason of which is easily seen. Minnesota is on the great "summit level" of the continent, her waters flow out in four different directions ; hence there are more lakes here, probably, than in all the other States. But even here the process of natural drainage still goes on to a slight extent; lakes are becoming marshes, and marshes slowly receding to "water-meadows," and I find that two or three considerable flats of shallow water I knew in 1859 are now dry. I stopped a day at Big Lake, as it was in the nighborhood I formerly ranged. Monticello is just on the opposite side of the river in Wright County, and near there I worked on one farm some six weeks ; but of all the Americans I knew there, not one remains. My old employer, Mr. Randall Smith, served through the war as a captain, then settled in the South, "tired of a country where ye have to feed stock seven months in the 720 EARLY PIONEERS LOSE MONEY. year." Others lost heart in the long continued "hard times" and moved back East ; still others were dead some, I fear, of continued disappointment and a few had gone " farther West." Of all with whom I lived and worked, I could hear of but one or two who had lasted through the "hard times" and come out with bright hopes. And every year of my Western expe- rience convinces me that the real "pioneers" seldom or never make the big profits in a new country. It is the second "inva- sion," those who come in with money after the " pioneers " have lost heart, who reap the richest harvest. The " old set- tler " comes with but a moderate amount of cash men move West because they want money, not because they have it and when he has paid for his claim and got up a cabin he is at the end of his resources. Then if there come short crops for two or three years, or " tight times " from other causes, it takes him years to "get round ;" and nine times out of ten before he does w get round," he is willing to sell out for much less than his place cost him. Everywhere on the border in Kansas and Nebraska, even in tolerably prosperous times, I found oppor- tunities to buy improved places at less cost than it would take to improve a new one. I took a day of rest in the delightful region about Sauk Rapids and St. Cloud, the latter on the western side of the Mississippi, at the foot of the rapids, and two and a half miles below the former city. Back of St. Cloud the fertile Sauk Valley extends for fifty miles, and the country is also good for the same distance up the Mississippi ; but on the eastern side Sauk Rapids seems to be the northern boundary of first-class land. The town bids fair to become an important place for manufacturing, as the rapids supply the finest water-power, and the region for a hundred miles north and east is excellent for sheep. A company with abundant capital has been formed, and is just beginning an extensive system of works to utilize the rapids. The situation is very favorable ; the river channel is but a few feet below the general level of the country, and the firm rock bottom presents the best natural facilities for wing- dams. When I was there, in 1859, St. Cloud was considered "ORDER OF ST. FRANCIS." 721 the head of final navigation, a class of light-draught steamers running between that point and the St. Anthony Falls; but since then still smaller boats have been put on above the rapids, running to Brainerd, and in a few instances further. The Mississippi yields its greatness slowly, and even at a point a hundred miles above St. Paul, it is still a big river. At 2 P. M. of the 21st, we left Sauk Rapids it ought to be called Sauk City, to distinguish it from the rapids in a very uncomfortable, "jerky" stage, and struck directly northward. Our road lay along the east bank of the river, seldom a mile distant from the stream, and ran through a poor, sandy region, alternating scrubby timber and narrow prairies, covered with coarse grass. The cuts in the road and washes near it, showed the soil to be nowhere more than five or six inches deep. The grass starts early in the spring, and, rain being abundant, renews quickly after being cropped, but two or three years of cultivation wear out the soil. Singularly enough all this regio i was settled, and tolerably thickly, eighteen years before; but nine-tenths of it was afterward abandoned, and it is only at rare intervals, in some low, fertile plat, that we see a farm house. There was a general disappointment in the soil ; it proved quite different from the black sandy loam of Wright County, and "wore out" rapidly. On the west side settlements appear numerous. Our little "jerky " carried ten passengers ; a lady and gentleman outside with the driver; inside six gentlemen and a Sister and Mother of the " Order of St. Francis." The last two were on their way to Belle Prairie to take charge of a Frontier Academy just established, and were most enthusiastic over their contemplated field of labor among Chippewas and half-breeds. The Mother Superior was a native English- woman, and the most intelligent one of her Order I ever met ; the Sister was an American lady from the South, lately con- verted to Catholicism : a widow, I judge from her account, and a Sister indeed ; one who, yet in life's prime, had adopted a life of arduous toil on this lonesome frontier for simple devotion to an idea. When I meet these Sisters in the Far West, as I often did formerly in the army hospitals, I am compelled to a pro- 46 722 OBJECT OF THE ORDER. found respect; and the dogmas of Infallibility or Immaculate Conception appear but small things in view of a life-time of self-denial. The day had been barely pleasant, and toward evening a cold wind came sweeping over the prairies, compelling us to muffle iu our blankets and close the coach, as if for winter travel. But, soon after dark, we entered a body of larger timber ; then the air became calm, and at 9 o'clock the gibbous moon arose, throwing a flood of cheering light upon the dull landscape. All became more animated, and the Mother Superior, yielding to the general curiosity expressed as to her hopes of success among the Indians, gave us an interesting account of her Order, its appointed work and her own life, \^hile I listened with pleased surprise to hear the Indian and the educational question dis- cussed from such an unworldly point of view. The Order of St. Francis is devoted to the specific work of teaching, but in times of public calamity, such as war and pestilence, they be- come nurses. The Mother had resided many years in France as teacher, but spent the whole time of the Franco-Prussian war and a year after in the hospitals. There her health was in- jured, and she was sent to the wilds of the Northwest to again become a teacher. To an emphatic statement from one pas- senger that " an Injun couldn't be converted," she replied : " O, perhaps not in my time, but surely soon, the race will come to know and embrace the truth. We work for God, and He will take care of it. If we convert one, it will pay us ten thousand fold." Towards midnight we reached their destination, Belle Prairie, consisting of a few cabins, a small school-house and little chapel near, its white cross gleaming in the cold moonlight in that strange solitude a fit symbol of one of the ten thousand outposts of Rome. Wondrous, wide-extended power of Mother Church ! Who can travel beyond the reach of her world-embracing arms? Alike on the banks of the St. Lawrence and the Rio Grande I have seen the white cross of her chapels; and on the wild fron- tier and in the hut of the savage have met her hardy mission- aries, bronzed by every sun, and weather-beaten by the storms CROW WING. 723 MISSIONARY AMONG THE MINNESOTA INDIANS. of every sky from Pembina to Arizona. Is it any wonder, considering her celibate clergy, who make the flock their family and the whole world their home, and her holy orders of devoted women to whom suffering and self-denial are sweet for the sake of the Church, is it any wonder that a quarter of a billion souls attest her power, and, to the reproach of us Protestants, nearly two-thirds of the Christian world outside of Russia still own allegiance to Rome ? A few miles farther brought us to Crow Wing, where we halted till 8 A. M. next day. This village appears in the last stages of dilapidation, though ten years ago it was the most im- portant place in Upper Minnesota. It was the half-way place between the Indians and Whites, the great depot for Indian goods, and enjoyed an extensive Government patronage. All this has been removed far up the country, and of the fine farms which once surrounded the town, half or more have been " thrown out to the common." Thence an hour of rapid driving took us into the Black Ptnc Forest, in the center of which we found the " City of Brainerd '' on the Northern Pacific Railroad at last. CHAPTER XXXIV. ON THE NORTHERN PACIFIC. Brainerd The Pine forests of Minnesota Sioux and Chippewas Pahya Goon- sey Detroit Lakes Down to Red River Moorehead Out to Jimtown Red River Valley " The equinoctial storm" Eastward again Russian Quakers Scandinavian settlers Scenery on the St. Louis Duluth Emigration Com- panies "POST OFF" Humbug of land circulars Climate on the Northern Pacific " Be not deceived " The testimony experience of A. Toponce, Esq. Comments. RAINERD is emphatically a railroad town, but in two important particulars far superior to the new towns on the Union Pacific: it is built of the finest of lumber, and stands in a forest of slender pines. Except between the railroad track and Front Street the native pines are left standing along the roadsides the middle of the street only being cleared and thus all the side streets look like magnificent avenues. The St. Paul and Pacific road is already graded to this point, and as the junction of the two lines, the city has a prospect of future greatness. From the Rapids to Crow Wing the Mississippi was but a few feet below our road ; since then we have been coming up hill, and the stream at Brainerd runs in a considerable gorge. The Northern Pacific bridge west of the town is a magnificent structure, of three span sixty feet each and appears to me the best bridge I have seen in the West. The water of the river is not quite eighty yards wide, and said to be from five to ten feet deep. So it is no longer the Great River, and a hundred miles north would bring us into the midst of that circle of lakes, Itasca, Leech, Cass and Plantagenet, which form its source. This black pine is not the valuable pine of Minnesota; that is known generally as the Norway pine, and is divided into the white and yellow varieties. Beginning a 724 THE CHIPPEWAS. 725 little northeast of here, at least ten thousand square miles abound more or less with it. After a good dinner at "Headquarters," as the railroad houses on the Northern Pacific are called, I started out for a look at the town. I saw that no one was at work on the railroad build- ings; that all the saloons were open and lively, and here and there a man had on a clean shirt, which suddenly reminded me that it was Sunday. In front of the principal saloon a band of twelve or fifteen Chippewas were performing the " war dance" with an audience of whites. The only instruments were a tin drum and what appeared to be a buckskin tambourine; at the end of each performance, the only "brave" who could speak English went around with a hat, addressing each white with " ten cents a man-n-n, ten cents a man-n-n," while the next in rank delivered a fluent speech in the aboriginal tongue. Onlv a few rods away there was afternoon service at the Episcopal Church, the only one in the place. The Chippewas are much lighter in color than the Sioux, and bear some resemblance to the Navajoes in their physique ; but are far inferior to them in every element of civilization. They are simply low, degraded savages, who enslave their women and attempt no improvement consequently in course of steady and rapid extinction. They had been at war with the Sjoux from time immemorial, and the country from here to Crow Wing is historic ground to them as the scene of their greatest battle. North of town, near the river bank, are signs of rude intrench- ments and rifle-pits, of which the old voyageurs give this account : In 1827 all the available warriors of the Sioux Nation came on a grand campaign against the Chippewas; and having met with no enemy for a hundred miles above here, were floating carelessly down the river. But the main body of the Chippewa* was ambushed at various points between here and Crow Wing, while the advance guard occupied these rifle-pits under com- mand of the great Pahya Goonsey the Napoleon of the North- west. As the Sioux came floating carelessly around the bend, a hundred rifles suddenly blazed from this cover, and forty Sioux 726 GOOD TIMBER. fell dead from their boats. But the remainder rallied, and ceeded in effecting a landing. Runners were dispatched to bring up their other parties, and a most desperate battle raged for four days, in which the Chippewas were five times driven back to Crow Wing, and as often regained their ground- Finally their last detachment arrived ; they attacked the weak- ened Sioux, and soon drove them entirely beyond Red River, which has ever since been the boundary between the two Nations. How bravely some of these old aborigines fought, and how little the world knows about it. They had no newspapers. " Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride ; They had no poet and they died." We were off from Brainerd the next day, just as the cold air and lowering sky gave notice that the first touch of Indian sum- mer was over, and bad weather at hand. For about seventy- five miles westward of that place, the country on the Northern Pacific is rather below the average; the soil is sandy or swampy, the prairie almost barren, and the timber little more than the worthless black pine and tamarac. But after that a rapid im- provement is evident, and at Detroit Lake we seem to enter fairly upon the great and fertile valley of the Red River. For the last fifty miles, before reaching that stream, we moved down a scarcely perceptible slope, through a region of mingled prairie and tim- ber, with every indication of great natural fertility, and occasion- ally a nice improved farm. But settlements are scarce, and the few towns are nothing more than stations, with half a dozen or more of hastily extemporized cabins. The great advantage of the Northern Pacific in the article of timber is everywhere apparent. The commonest cabins are of good lumber, instead of the sod or adobe houses seen on the Union Pacific, and are surrounded by neat fences of plank or paling. Throughout this last division one sees no swamp land, but every few miles bring to view a clear, pretty lake, from a hundred yards to four or five miles in length. The passengers resident inv the country tell me that in winter these lakes are frozen almost solid ; and then is the best time CLIMATE OF MINNESOTA. 727 for freighting, as the sled routes take a straight track from point to point without regard to lakes, streams or sloughs. It is the general, testimony that there is less snow in northern Minnesota than in the region one or two hundred miles south, though the air is colder ; but the little there is blows worse, and it is more dangerous to be " caught out." Frequently a broad prairie will be so bare as to render " logging" quite difficult, while in the narrow strips of timber the snow will be two or. three feet deep. Moorehead, on the eastern bank of Red River, is the end of the passenger division on the road, and the nominal head of navigation ; but it is only in the months of June and July that any steamers run to that point. Frog Point, sixty miles below (northward), is the head of navigation for the rest of the sum- mer, though boats rarely ply before the latter part of May. As Red River has a general course due north, the thaw occurs at the head first, and forces a great break up and massing of the ice down at Fort Garry and other ports in AYiunepeg. But the railroad is fast pushing on to relieve this seven months' blockade. The "Pembina Branch of the St. Paul and Pacific" is located on a line bearing northwest from St. Cloud, crossing the Northern Pacific at Glyndon, seven miles east of Moorehead, and following thence down the eastern bank of Red River. While work on the lower end is suspended, or pushed but slowly, the road is already constructed and regular trains run- ning for a distance of eighty miles northward from Glyndon a rather singular instance of the middle section of a road being finished before either end makes connection. Freight and pas- senger steamers of two hundred tons burden ply pretty regularly on Red River for five months in the year, and the travel from Manitoba and adjacent sections already takes this course. Limiting the fertile land to fifty miles on the east of Red River and twice as far on the west and I am certain it does not ex- ceed that we have the Red River Valley, with a width of one hundred and fifty miles, and length of over three hundred, comprising probably fifty thousand square miles of fertile land. 728 PRODUCE. This must be the source of the prosperity of the Northern Pacific, for I am convinced that after one leaves Red River Valley, and begins to rise to the plateaus of western Dakota and Montana, barrenness is the rule and fertility the exception, even to the border of Oregon and Washington. This large fertile area will produce all the cereals in abundance, as well as turnips and potatoes, with a moderate amount of Indian corn. Wheat can be grown in Winnepeg to a point nearly two hundred miles north of our National boundary. Cranberries and wild plums are the only fruits I hear mentioned as " successful." Moorehead is a rather rough looking frontier town, consisting of rude frames and " shake-ups" of pine lumber, and containing perhaps five hundred people. Fargo, on the Dakota side of Red River, looks even more distressing, and, as I toiled through its streets on a windy morning, carrying my luggage from the end of the passenger division to the beginning of the construc- tion division, I felt an active sympathy for those who " have lots to sell." The river appears about the same size as the Mississippi at Brainerd, and flows due north with a gentle current. The country is being settled, where settled at all, by colonies generally, and most of them from northern Europe. At several of the principal towns the company has erected vast frame hotels, or, rather, reception and lodging houses, especially for the use of emigrants, and unusual facilities are afforded to for- eigners coming to seek homes. It is my conviction that native Americans will form but a small part of the future population of this great valley, and that the bulk of its people will be Scandinavians, with perhaps some Scotch and Russians. The latter people now have some agents out here looking for a loca- tion for a peculiar religious sect, who might be called Russian Quakers. They number several thousand, and refuse to bear arms ; the Czar has ordered them to fight, pay, or emigrate, and they have concluded to come to this region in a body. Straw-ticks, beef and potatoes could be had in either of the barn-like structures, serving as hotels, in Moorehead, for two dollars per day; but there was nothing to be seen requiring EMIGRATION. 729 more than one night's stay. Omnibuses go no farther ; so we carried our own baggage nearly a mile across the bridge, and through Fargo to the construction train, on which we traversed the last hundred miles. The ll Equinoctial storm" had just got down to actual business, dealing cold rain, wind and sleet, when we started westward at 10 A. M. For fifty miles the country appears as level as the calm ocean ; the eye can not discern the slightest incline in the general surface, except at the Shyene and another stream ; and through all this distance the rank grass above, and the black soil below, marking two feet deep in the few cuts, indicated great fertility. We jogged along at eight or ten miles an hour, with thirty platform cars loaded with ties and iron, which- gave me fair time to look at the country from the caboose. About noon the cold rain ceased, and I tried it to the next " siding" on top of the flat cars, in order to get a better view. The time was two hours, and I was heartily glad to get inside again ; the heavy wind from the northwest chilled me to the bones, and toward the last the air showed signs of flying frost. We cross the Shyene River twice, and about midway between the two crossings is a sort of ridge or " divide," which breaks the ordinary monotony. Shyene is merely the English spelling of the French Cheyenne, meaning "scarred arm," the aboriginal name of the tribe which formerly ranged from this river south- westward to the Cheyenne Pass in the Black Hills. Between the Shyene and Dakota or James River, generally known in Dakota as Jim River, is a very considerable rise, and the coun- try is neither so fertile nor monotonous as in the eastern half of this division. West of the " divide" we cross Salt Lake, so- called, though little like the great one of Utah. It appears to be some five miles long, and from one to two wide ; and differs only from the ordinary alkaline lakes of Wyoming in having a little more salt and a little less alkali. Authorities appear to differ about its having an outlet ; the reason is, the Surveyor General tells me, that a low piece of ground connects it with the nearest stream, into which it sometimes overflows in very wet seasons, thus having sometimes an outlet. 730 COLD WEATHER, Night had come before we entered upon the slope leading down to James River, and about 11 o'clock the train drew up 1 on the eastern side of that stream, and we were left to hunt our way through the darkness, across the hollow and into Jimtown- The cold was intense, and the wind had increased to a perfect hurricane. If there is any wind-breaker northwest, between there and Alaska, I had no evidence of it. Burdened with only a valise, I had to stop half a dozen times in half a mile to get breath ; and my overcoat and blanket presented so much sail in proportion to my light hull, that I was in imminent danger of blowing away. Magnificent Eailroad circulars talk of cattle "living out all winter' 7 in this country, but where I can not "live out 7 ' in September, I should like to see the bovine- tin^ could do it in January. However, there is one comfort i all the citizens assure me "it's something very uncommon in fact, it's the Equinoctial storm ; if you stay it through you'll see a month o' good weather after this." Every tent in the- canvas town was full, but after an hour's hunt I got half a bunk from a young Irishman. The astute islander took care to have me lie next the edge of the tent, where the wind whistled over my back in mournful tremolo, and after five hours cold napping I rose and sat by the fire till breakfast. About noon the wind began te fall, the cold decreased and a regular snow storm be- gan. Far as I could see the prairie was white, and the air full of damp snow. Summing up my experience of the last three days I was much inclined to set down a great deal I had heard and read of the " mild, dry and salubrious Northwest," the " health-giving air of Minnesota," and the " northward deflection of the isothermal line/' as merely the exuberance of a playful fancy ; for, as my blue fingers stiffened around the pen, in a tent which clattered in the wind as if it were bound to fly away, the thermometer stood at 28, and outside the air was full of flying snow, which indicated anything but the " mild and salubrious." They tell me there that this is something very unusual " in fact, it's the Equinoctial storm ;" but how anything can be " very unusual at this season" and at the same time the " Equinoctial storm," "EQUINOCTIAL, STORM." 731 I rose and sat by the fire till breakfast. About noon the wind began to fall, the cold decreased and a regular snow storm be- gan. Far as I could see the prairie was white, and the air full of damp snow. Summing up my experience of the last three days I was much inclined to set down a great deal I had heard and read of the " mild, dry and salubrious Northwest," the " health-giving air of Minnesota/ 7 and the "northward deflection of the isothermal line/' as merely the exuberance of a playful fancy ; for, as my blue fingers stiffened around the pen, in a tent which clattered in the wind as if it were bound to fly away, the thermometer stood at 28, and outside the air was full of flying snow, which indicated anything but the " mild and salubrious." They tell me there that this is something very unusual " in fact, it's the Equinoctial storm ;" but how anything can be " very unusual at this season" and at the same time the " Equinoctial storm," I don't quite understand. And, by the way, I hardly ever come far north after the middle of August but what I strike the "Equinoctial storm." In Indiana that storm used to come pretty regularly somewhere between the middle of September and the first of October ; but on the Northern Pacific it appears to have a longer range. A snow-storm on the 25th of September is not particularly suggestive of a mild climate; but from previous observation I know this to have been an exception, and that pleasant weather usually continues till about the first of November. But brief as the storm was, it spoiled our excursion beyond the terminus. The actual "end of the track" on the 25th was nine miles be- yond Jimtown the little canvas "city" on the James River. As we journeyed eastward after the return of good weather, I observed that considerable snow had fallen, leaving the black soil of Red River Valley in a muddy condition. The general testimony makes James River the western border of good land in Dakota, the country thence to the Missouri, about a hundred miles, being a poor tract, with cold, barren soil and alkali flats. At Moorehead we learned that the storm had been universal throughout the Northwest, extending down even to one point 732 SCENERY. on the Union Pacific ; and the passengers by stage from Winne- peg complained of suffering some from the cold. The usual three days' duration for these storms was over; by the next morning the weather was almost moderate, with indications of a mild autumn. The return trip developed no new feature; we rose by an imperceptible grade from Red River to Detroit Lake, through a very fertile region ; then traversed the half barren strip of black pine, tamarack and scrub-oak to Brainerd, where we took another short rest. I like that place better than any I saw on the road west of Dulutli. The head of navigation on the Mississippi, the junction of the main line of the St. Paul and Pacific, and a lumber depot for the pine forests north, it has the promise of a good permanent trade. But I saw no land in the vicinity which appeared to me valuable for agriculture. The city census had just been completed, after the liberal man- ner of Western towns, I suppose, and made the population nearly two thousand. It had two daily papers, of different politics at least nominally though published at the same office. East of Brainerd the country was a decided disappointment to me, consisting for some eighty miles of nearly equal parts of tamarack swamp, sand plain and marshy prairie. Reaching the St. Louis River, some twenty-five miles west of Duluth, the country becomes more picturesque, with indications of good timber. The scenery on that stream is fine, and is said to gain in grandeur as one goes up it to the northwest. Duluth has a fine site on the northern shore of the extreme western point of Lake Superior. The flat along the lake is wide enough for four or five squares; then the land rises, at first gently, then more abruptly, to a wooded hill. I should guess the population at four thousand ; probably the city census reports it twice as much. The prosperity of the place will come from two sources : the lumber trade from Northern Min- nesota, and the shipping of produce from the Red River Valley. Duluth will advance with a steady and regular growth in just the proportion that that valley is settled and developed. The sanguine dream that this is to be a second Chicago, and the FUTURE OF DULUTH. 733 entrepot of a vast trade from the Orient, via a trans-continental line, is not destined to be fulfilled not, at least, in this century. In the first place there is not enough of that celebrated trans- continental trade to make a great city ; and secondly j only a portion of what there is will come this way. But from the de- velopment of the great grain-producing region on Red River this place will, in fifty years, become important. That valley, in our country and Winnepeg, when settled as thickly as Illi- nois and it will comfortably support as many will have a population of two or three millions. To these Duluth will be the shipping point. Whether it will require fifty or a hundred years to settle and develop that region I shall not decide. The calculations of Western speculat- ors are correct in the main as to fu- ture facts : their great error is in re- gard to time. Mul- tiply the years of their prophecies by four, and the result will approximate to the truth. Omaha was to have become a second Babylon on the completion of the Union Pacific, and she will be something of a city yet; but not in time to make the present generation of real estate owners suddenly rich. Duluth has the same air of pretentious newness which marked Omaha in 1866-67, but in most respects is more solid than Omaha then was. " The Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas "local title more generally known as Duluth, did not appear to the best advan- DALLES OF THE ST. LOUIS. 734 " POST-OFFICE." tage just after a September snow-storm ; but it was lively with immigrants, colony agents, real estate speculators, travelers and freighters. All are anxious to assure me that this weather is "not a specimen we really have a mild climate," of which more anon. For many reasons, in this northern region it is much better to settle with a colony ; and one meets here many representatives of the North European people looking for loca- tions. I learned of but one purely American enterprise, the " Red River Colony ; " but they appear to me to have the best location of any. In Clay County, Minnesota, and the adjoining part of Dakota, about the head of Red River, are sixteen town- ships, containing 400,000 acres of the finest land in the North- west, and nearly all railroad land. The St. Paul and Pacific Breckinridge line and the Pembina Branch, both traverse the region ; and both having liberal grants, bring the entire district into market together, and no part of it a day's drive from a railroad. One of the lines is now in operation, and the other will be within a year. The price fixed at present is $4.50 per acre, with many advantages stipulated in the way of transporta- tion ; and the native of New England would not find the change of climate particularly troublesome. L. H. Tenney & Co., of Duluth, are the corresponding officers of the colony, which is just fairly inaugurated. I think the Scandinavians make half or more of the population of the adjacent parts of Minnesota and Dakota a most desirable class of citizens. An old trav- eler relates that he was toiling over the black sandy prairie, one of the hottest days of their hot but short summer, when to his joy he came upon a dirt-roofed log-house with the word ICE in prominent letters on the right side of the door. Drawing near with thirsty haste he saw on the left side in smaller, dim- mer letters the word POST OFF. A Russian or Swedish name, he thought it, and called for ice-water. The woman, ignorant of English, handed him a bundle of letters with instructions in pantomime to pick out what belonged to him ! The only American about the place being absent, he made out after a lengthy discussion with the woman that the two signs were to be read together, and meant POST-OFFICE. 735 DULUTH. We hear much of the " northward deflection of the isothermal line," and something like a thousand pamphlets, or letters of florid correspondents, assure us that the Northern Pacific runs through a milder climate than the Central Route; that "cattle can live out all winter" in the valleys of the Upper Missouri; that the land granted is " worth double the cost of the road," etc., etc. To all of which I respond Bosh ! emphatically, Bosh ! It is quite as cold as in the same latitude East, with the added disadvantage of open plains and furious winds. If the "isothermal line" is in any way accommodating up there, I failed to find it out in a thousand miles of travel and a lengthy residence in Minnesota. At Yankton the winters are pleasant; snow never lies on the ground more than four months, and by dressing to suit it, people get through comfortably. Fifty people were frozen to death in three counties in Minnesota last winter; and the ice blocks taken out of the Mississippi as far down as St. Anthony average three feet thick. Such being the case in the settlements, what reason is there, in physical geo- graphy or common sense, for supposing that they have milder winters three or four hundred miles farther northwest, in the direction whence the cold winds come ? 736 LETTER. Storms of fifty hours' duration are not uncommon even in western Nebraska, and at Cheyenne I have experienced weather cold enough to freeze the ears off the Cardiff Giant. Five hun- dred miles south of the Northern Pacific I have seen cattle frozen stiff in their tracks, horses left in the spring with only the stump of a tail, birds fallen dead from the air in cold wind storms, Indians without nose enough left to blow after a winter's journey, and buffalo by tens of thousands literally frozen to death on the plains. In the light of such well-established facts the assertions in the pamphlets and land circulars quoted, are something more than mere audacious impudence they are an insult to the popular intelligence. Of course there is fertile land on the line, and a climate which suits natives of the extreme north ; and in the course of half a century it will have, and comfortably support, a considerable population. Life is not intolerable in the climate of Canada and Nova Scotia ; and men raise stock, acquire wealth and found noble communities under the skies of Sweden and Norway. But to promise the expectant immigrant an Arcadia, where common sense and common experience forbid the idea, is a fraud. Of a hundred witnesses known to me to be reliable, I will cite but one. The loss of an immense train on the upper Mis- souri by Alex. Toponce, Esq., and his partners, being a matter of some notoriety, in my collection of evidence on the climate I addressed him a note of inquiry. I select his reply from a mass of letters and documents to the same effect : " CORINNE, U. T., March 8, 1873. " MR. J. H. BEADLE : " Dear Sir, .... I give you with pleasure the items of inte- rest of the long-to-be-remembered snow-storm that overtook me in Montana, in 1865. I left Fort Benton in company with Jerry Mann, on my way to Fort Union, on the 14th of November of that year, with an outfit of sixty-one wagons, and 787 head of work cattle; twenty-five head of horses and mules, with seventy-one men ; we arrived at Fort Union December 16th, loaded and started for Fort Benton December HARD ON THE ANIMALS. 737 28th, with weather favorable for a successful trip. About forty miles out on the return trip, on a stream known as Quaking Asp River, putting in on the north side of the Missouri in latitude 48 J degrees ; on the eighth day of January we were overtaken by a terrific snow-storm. The first day of the storm we lost about 150 head of cattle by freezing. Not being able to move we corralled our wagons, and built a stockade around them as a protection from the Indians. " In ten days we had lost all the animals we had except two mules and two steers, which we protected by covering with buf- falo robes and wagon sheets, and built fires around them, feed- ing them on bark, dried buffalo meat and corn-meal. On or about the eighth day of February, in company with Mr. Mann, I started with the two surviving mules for Helena, for a fresh supply of cattle to move our wagons (here I will say that none of the cattle lost died from starvation). Mercury congealed, and never moved for fifteen days ; the air was colder than a man could breathe, walking against it. " The horns of the cattle cracked and the pith burst out. Their tails would freeze stiff in horizontal positions, and dur- ing all this time the buffalo gathered into the timber and thou- sands of them froze to death. They were perfectly tame; would make but one jump on the approach of man. On the seventh or eighth day after leaving camp, as above mentioned, we ar- rived at Fort Copeland, at the mouth of Milk River, about sixty-five miles travel through snow from two and a half to three feet in depth. There we laid over one day with some traders, when we resumed our journey for Fort Benton, with no settlements between the two points a distance of about 250 miles. At the three forks of Milk River we found three In- dian ponies, herded them on the ice and caught them. They came in excellent play, as our mules were played out. At this point the snow was about gone. " We arrived at Fort Benton with nothing farther of inte- rest ; there we got fresh animals from Messrs. Carrol & Steele. All this time we subsisted on buffalo meat without salt our mules living on the same and on bark. We started back from 47 738 HORSES AND MULES DISAPPEAR. Helena on the 20th of March, with six hundred head of cattle and forty-eight horses and mules. No farther difficulty until we reached Sun River, where we were again overtaken by a terrible snow-storm. We camped on the island opposite the Government corral, and the second day of the storm I rode around our camp, a circle of about six miles, looking for Indian signs. Seeing none, that night we turned our stock loose. What was our astonishment in the morning to find all our horses and mules gone, except one that Mr. Mann had at the Govern- ment farm, and one that would not be driven away from camp. Five Indians had been camped only two hundred yards from us during the storm, in the willows. " Then we were obliged to drive the cattle afoot to Fort Benton. There two of our men had a little row, and both were killed. Procuring more horses we drove to the Marias, twelve miles below Fort Benton, built a raft to run over our supply wagons; upset all our provisions in the river, and were again left to subsist on the country, as no supplies could be obtained at Fort Benton. "No farther trouble, except dodging around the country to avoid hostile Indians, driving cattle on foot, wading sloughs in extreme cold weather, and living on buffalo meat the amount it takes to satisfy a man you would hardly credit, eight men often eating in one week the meat of a cow until we reached the lower crossing of Milk River. There in gathering up our cattle we missed one; one of the men went back some four hun- dred yards after him, and in sight of camp was shot, scalped and a checkerboard cut on his back before we could get to him, by Indians in ambush, of whom some forgot the number of their mess. " On the 10th of April the ice very suddenly commenced breaking up in the Missouri River ; gorged against a bluff bank in a short bend of the stream, and dammed the water so that it set back fifteen miles and found a place for a new channel. It broke in above us, and ran through our camp on the Quaking Asp, taking wagons, cabins, trees and everything else before it, drowning elk, deer, and all the animals on the bottom. It came THE FRESHET. 739 so sudden, that men sitting in the cabins had not time to put on their boots, climbing out through the chimneys to save their lives, the water running about fifteen feet deep. One of the cabins floated down the river about ejght miles with three men on it, who cut up a buffalo robe and tied the corners together. Two of them survived. Others climbed trees, hanging on for sixty hours. One party built a fire and cooked their meals on the roof of a cabin. Three men in all perished. Some were crippled by having their limbs broken ; others by hanging on to the trees and chilling nearly to death. " By this freshet I lost my whole train of twenty-six wagons. Mr. Mann's train was camped on the bluff bank, and the water merely rising up into some wagon beds damaged considerable freight; but the others escaped. We lost all the hundred head of cattle brought down from Helena. I was loaded with 200,- 000 pounds of valuable freight, of which all was lost except a few things that lodged among the drift-wood and were not perishable by water. "The merchandize at that time was worth $125,000 ; the stock and wagons about $50,000 more, making in the aggregate $175,000. We gathered up what little was left and reached Helena on the 28th of June I could write much more of my experience in these hard winters, particularly of the stock lost on Snake River and in other portions of Idaho, in the winter of 1864, when I lost a hundred and sixty head. " Friend Beadle, I have given you a plain, unvarnished tale of facts known to a dozen others ; but I must say that, with all my experience of a mountain life, the Mormons have given me a worse jolting up this winter than T ever had before as you have seen by the Gentile papers.* " The route traveled over between Fort Union and Fort * Under the jurisdiction claimed by the Probate Courts of Utah, the cause of the present difficulties there, Mr. Toponce was arrested at the suit of some Mor- mon cattle-dealers ; but in spite of a fearful array of " inspired witnesses," they failed to make out a case. It was pretty clearly proved to be a malicious prose- cution, for which, however, there is no remedy under Mormon law. 740 "TEMPERING GALES." Ben ton is inhabited by the Sioux, Assineboines, Crows, Gros Ventres, Piegans, Bloods and Blackfeet Indians, all hostile. " Truly Yours, ALEX. TOPONCE." One of the brilliant pamphlets above quoted explains that the low passes there in the Rocky Mountains " admit the tempering gales from the Pacific/' thus accounting for a " mild and equable climate " in that latitude. Mr. Toponce's route was along those " low passes," and accordingly he should have experienced those "tempering gales ;" but they appear to have missed him some- how. How could these " tempering gales " get over three ranges of mountain, from six to twelve thousand feet high ? The region above spoken of has a good climate for five months in the year sufficient to produce all the necessaries of life; and eastern Dakota has a fertile soil. But as to the " mild winters," even the buifaloes know better than to believe it ; for they go south in winter or start south, though many are frozen to death before they get far. CHAPTER XXXV. THE WAY TO OREGON. Westward again Iowa Union Pacific Utah Central Pacific Sacramento California and Oregon Railroad Chico General Bidwell's Ranche Semi- Tropical Fruits and Flowers Reading Shasta Joaquin Miller Shasta In- dians " Venus and Adonis " Staging on the Sierras Mount Shasta Yreka Frontier justice Immense Forests Oregon Rogue River Umpqua Willamette Portland. ROWN October, 1872, found me again rolling through Iowa, vid the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad, to visit the western end of the Northern Pacific. Five seasons had made great changes since I first crossed the State. Now there are four lines of rail from Mis- sissippi to Missouri, and others in course of construction. My fourteenth trip over the Union Pacific, at the prettiest season of the year, was an unusually pleasant one ; and reaching " Zion " I found the truce of the past season broken, and Mor- mon and Gentile in their regular and normal condition of at- tack and defence. Eastern people earnestly and honestly inquire : Why can not the two parties there simply let each other alone? Similarly it was said : Let Slavery alone, and it will not cause national trouble. But there are certain institutions which can not be left alone, because from their very nature they can not let anything else alone. If Mormonism were only a Church, it could easily be let alone ; but it is a political entity, claiming divine right to rule a certain portion of territory, and to regulate the trade, pursuits, marriages, and social relations of all its subjects. Shall we submit to any political power be- cause it is also a Church ? A. is a merchant ; the Church takes her stand at his door, and orders away his customers. B. is an artizan ; he withdraws 741 742 THEORY. IN THE TUNNEL SIERRA NEVADA. from the Church, and by her simple fiat she deprives him of patrons. C. is a farmer, an apostate; the Church orders his neighbors not to join with him, and to deny him water-privi- leges, etc. D. is a miner, who gets drunk or commits some trifling offence; the Church, acting openly through the civil power, takes all his money and puts him on the chain-gang a month. Of course A., B., C., and D. ought to love the Church, and pray Congress for toleration ; but somehow we do not love those who hate us. We are natives, they are foreigners; we are mostly Americans, they mostly British ; we love a republic, they adore a theocracy ; their theory is that power comes from the head, ours that it proceeds from the people; they believe most of the Gentile world to be scoundrels and prostitutes, and are not slow to say so ; they want us to stay away ; we feel that that is our country as much as any part of America ; they hate SILVER PALACE CARS. 743 DONNER LAKE SIERRA NEVADA. us, and we despise them. Beautiful conditions for a spontane- ous peace ! It is nonsense to say this conflict in Utah is cre- ated, or "worked up by schemers;" it simply exists. Gentiles can no more avoid conflict with Mormons than with Indians unless the priesthood permit the people to become Americanized, and soundly democratized. So the old conflict goes on in one shape or another first one side getting ahead and then the other, like a pair of balky oxen ; or, as we used to say on the Wabash, "like a half sled on ice." It had grown monotonous, and after a few days' rest, I was off for the Coast, taking passage in one of the Silver Palace cars in use on the Central Pacific. The company have discarded the Pullman, on account, as they allege, of its extortionate charges ; and use these cars, from the manufactory of Jackson & Sharp. They are decidedly convenient for single gentlemen, having extensive sitting rooms at each end, in which smoking 744 SNOW SHEDS. SNOW SHEDS ON THE CENTRAL PACIFIC. is allowed, as they can be completely shut off from the main room ; but in other respects they do not appear to me as com- fortable in winter as the Pullman. Different parts of the car seem to heat unequally. The last was a " late fall " in the mountains, but we had a cold night on the Promontory and Goose Creek Range, and at daylight, descending the slope to Humboldt, found the ground covered with several inches of snow. As we moved down the Humboldt, the air grew sensibly warmer, and after noon we saw no more snow on the plain. But it was already six inches deep on the Sierras, and all indications were that winter had regularly set in. Between the first station on Truckee and Cape Horn are forty miles of snow sheds, said by competent judges to be the best ever constructed in the world. It was here the English Lord complained of these sheds as "a blarsted DIFFERENT ROUTES. 745 long depot longest I ever saw." They continue down the western slope to an elevation of only 4500 feet above the sea, where there is no danger of a blockade; and cost a million and a half. No snow can fall sufficient to block the road, as they are built against the upper side in such a way as to shed it into the deep valleys, inclining to one side or the other with the slope of the hills. Down the western slope we found the climate moderating rapidly every mile. Soon we were out of the snow and among the brilliant leaves and yellow grass which mark the autumn scenery of the Pacific slope. There had been very little rain yet only two light showers not more than enough to mode- rate the dust. The stimulating air and cloudless sky showed that the rainy season was not regularly begun ; and I was to have delightful weather for my inland journey to Oregon. The route from Sacramento to Portland consists of three divisions : By the Oregon Branch of the Central Pacific, one hundred and seventy miles to Reading, present terminus; then two hundred and eighty-two miles of staging to Oakland, then terminus of the Oregon and California road, and thence one hundred and eighty-one miles on that road to Portland. It is an open question, and vehemently argued there, whether this or the route from San Francisco by water is the more pleasant. Probably it depends on the individual traveler, and whether he is more subject to sea sickness or stage sickness. In order to give an intelligent opinion, I went one route and returned the other. Through tickets from Sacramento to Portland this way can be had for forty-five dollars, the fare by water ten dollars less. As we move out of Sacramento, the country shows signs of some rain having fallen ; the bright yellow of the grass, and summer-dried look of the leaves have yielded to a velvety brown, with patches of pale green ; and the vineyards and fig orchards show that the face of nature has been slightly washed. As we proceed northward and up the valley, signs of fertility increase, more rain has fallen, and the soil is naturally much richer than the red plains east of Sacramento. At sundown we 746 GENERAL BIDWELL'S RESIDENCE. stop half an hour at Marysville, in Yuba County, a beautiful place of some five thousand people, with more of a New En<>-- land look, and less of that half-Spanish air which marks so many California towns. I had determined to stop at two or three of the principal towns, and having run past Chico was informed that I had left one of the most important; accordingly I stopped overnight at Nord Station, and returned by early train next morning. The principal point of interest here is the great ranche of General John Bid well, containing 20,000 acres, and under the best general cultivation of any part of the valley. The plains of the Sacramento have a varying width of from twenty-five to fifty miles between the Coast Range and the foothills of the Sierras. In a state of nature, they were neither prairie nor timbered, but "oak openings," the growth very scattering, and abundant grass everywhere among the trees. The ranche of General Bidwell includes part of the city, and his magnificent residence is but twenty minutes 7 walk from the hotel. Four years since he represented this district in Congress, and ranks here as a pioneer of the pioneers, having come to California during the " first invasion/ 7 in 1846. This is the notable year, before the discovery of gold the same year that Governor Boggs and party, Judge Thornton, Edwin M. Bryant first American Alcade of San Francisco and the unfortunate Donner party, crossed from Missouri and Illinois; for at least five thousand Americans had crossed the Plains, and settled in California before the "great rush" of 1849. Most of them engaged in cattle-raising, the only business of the Mexican population ; for as late as 1850, few people believed that these dry summers would admit of regular farming. The General's ranche is one of the old Mexican grants, to which the title was stipulated for by the treaty, and has been repeatedly confirmed by the United States Courts. All the fruits and grains of the temperate zone are produced, with many of those of the tropics; but wheat and barley are the principal products. He has raised some corn also every year, but only a few of the lowest tracts of the valley, containing most moisture, are fit for RAISIN CULTURE. 747 that crop ; the long dry summers would require too expensive irrigation. Even of the moist lands, it is found that most are more profitable for hay and grazing, and corn is not considered staple. The ranche has a hundred and fifty acres of orchard, and seventy-five in vineyard ; hut on the last only one-third of the vines are yet bearing. The rest are one, two, and three years old. The General is going extensively into the raisin business, now planting species of grapes especially for their manufacture. The favorites are the White Muscat of Alexandria, the White Malaga, and White Neisse, The first is by far the sweetest. Another kind, imported from Spain, and known as the Fiahzagos, makes an elegant raisin, but they are thin-skinned, and do not bear transportation well. Hence they are only useful for home consumption. So far the preparation of raisins in this vicinity has proved quite a success. Mr. J. J. Moak, of Cliico, last year shipped a large quantity which are quoted in the market as equal to any from the Orient. Sixty varieties of the grape are now produced here, of which a third or more will make good raisins. There is inexhaustible wealth in these foothills, only requiring a moderate industry to develop it, and it is a kind of wealth that is permanent and increasing. A vine once growing and productive, is good for two genera- tions. The use of grapes, as of fruit of all kinds, is on the increase here, and must result in an improvement of the gene- ral health. People will learn to use fruit more, and stimulants less. When this country was first settled, men lived on meat and bread alone for years. Such was the living of the original Californians, and the Americans fell into their ways ; beef only was plenty and cheap, and beef was the staff of life. Such a style of living could not produce the highest type of humanity. By a law of " natural selection," men sought only the most fiery stimulants; and even now it is a source of surprise to visitors that, while the State produces the finest of wines, the national beverage of California is whisky. Arriving at a way- side hotel at .this season, three to one the traveler will find no fire; and if he complain, the common answer is: " Walk right 748 FRUITS. into the bar warm you up for four bits, and heat you red hot for a dollar." This is a remnant of the tastes of the early settlers, who worked hard and lived hard on beef, pork, and Chili flour, and never tasted milk, wine, or vegetables for years together. As we walked around the grounds adjacent to Bid well man- sion, we saw oranges, olives and pomegranates growing luxuri- antly, while the borders were a brilliant maze of white and red, diversified by the branching palm, pampas grass ten feet high, with beautiful white plumes, and the delicate tints of the giant oleander. Workmen were busy covering the young orange trees, which must be shielded from the coldest winds during the first three or four years, but on the full-grown trees the growing oranges were nearly of full size, the green rind beginning to change to a pale yellow. Just now, at the " turn of the season," the walking is pleasant; but in a few weeks the early rains, generally the heaviest, will create a landscape of mud, very like some of our late March or early April scenes in Indiana. For a month or two of the California winter the mud is dis- tressing. The hardest rain is past early in January, the ground has become firm, the roads are good, and the growing season has fairly set in. Then these valleys are indeed beautiful. Strawberries and other early fruits are soon in market, the plains are of a rich green, plowing is pushed forward with vigor, wheat is sown and springs quickly into growing life. In March the rainy season appears to come again, though generally ACORN CACHES OF THE CALI FORNIA INDIANS. WHEAT. 749 the "later rain" is light. Thence the showers grow slowly less and less frequent till some time in May. The wheat is about full grown, early potatoes begin to appear, and slight signs of drought are manifest. The grass gets ripe, the Spanish oats (wild) begin to turn yellow, and early in June the wheat is harvested. \ It lies or stands in shocks on the ground, to be threshed out at will ; for no rain need now be apprehended. The surface begins to show signs of extreme drought; by the middle of July the freshets are all past and the marshes dried up ; the ground cracks open in long fissures* into which the grass seeds fall and are preserved to another growing season. As summer advances all the minor vegetation loses its green ; the grass, dead ripe, stands cured to a bright yellow, varied in places by a dirty brown; creation assumes a gray and dusty color, and only the purple fig leaves and faint green of those trees which have a deeper root relieve the general aspect of barrenness. On the slopes of the Sierras the red dust lies six inches in depth, and the prospect is brightened only by occasional patches of verdure along the mountain streams, and the pale-green oval leaves of the manzanita. Still the heavens remain clear. Then one may see through the valley of the Sacramento great stacks of wheat in sacks, standing in the open fields till a convenient time arrives for hauling it away, and threshing machines run- ning in the open air, with no fear of rain. The stubble of the old fields retains its brightness, and the long dry autumn of California is fairly inaugurated. The marshes become beds of dust, which blows up in stifling clouds; the mirage appears upon the plain in deceptive floods of what the Mexicans call " lying waters," the tides become dry as tinder, and at night the Sacramento is lighted for miles by the fires that rage over the same area where eight months before a steamboat could ply at ease. The yellow grass is eaten to the ground, and the herds are driven far up the mountains ; the dust, which has become insufferable in the roads, seems .to blow away and on to the fields ; the roads are often bare and dry, hardened like sunburnt, brick, and the depressions in the fields knee deep in dust. The 750 THE RIGHT TIME TO VISIT CALIFORNIA. sky at last appears to become coppery, or obscured ; the sun rises red and fiery, and disappears about 4 o'clock in a bank of yellow haze. The wind on the coast, which has been from the west for months, begins to veer round to the southwest, and people begin to prepare for the rainy season. A few boards are nailed on the worst places of the apology for shed or barn ; what wheat remains in the field is hastily hauled away or stored, and the California!! is prepared for winter. After a few preliminary showers in late October or early November, the "early rain" begins in earnest; torrents of water descend upon beds of dust, and all creation is changed to a sea of thin mud. But this con- tinues only for a few weeks ; by January 1 the soil again becomes soaked and firm, and in two weeks more the growing and de- lightful season is again inaugurated. Moral : If you are coming to California for pleasure, come between New Year's and the Fourth of July. Between Chico and Reading I encountered the first rain of the season ; but, like most California rains, there was very little bluster about it ; the rain fell in a steady shower, without driving winds, and the air was about as cool as that of early April in Ohio. All the accompaniments were those of a spring rain in the East; there was a soft, balmy air, the grass appeared to revive under the shower, and the red foot-hills sent down vast streams of muddy water, through gulches which had been dusty for six months. We reached Reading, terminus of the road, at midnight; and the stage passengers started on at once for the three days' ride to the south end of the Oregon and California road. After a few hours' sleep I mounted a cayuse and rode seven miles over the hills to Shasta, a straggling irregular mountain town, stretch- ing two or three miles along a narrow valley, and the county seat of Shasta County. Here and in this vicinity are the materials for the unwritten history of Mr. Heiner Miller, now better known to the literary public as Joaquin (Wawkeen) Miller ; he resided hereabouts for three years 1856 to 1859 and did not adopt his poetical title till some time after his hurried departure. His achievements DIGGER INDIANS. 751 are still celebrated in local chronicles ; his Shasta squaw still lives near here, and in the county are many traces of him. He is accused of all sorts of misdemeanors, and the county records contain papers of strange import as to his reputation. His Indian wife was of a Pitt River band of the Diggers, and now lives with an old mountaineer named Brock, in the upper part of this county. Miller joined the band in 1856 and lived with them nearly two years. His half-breed daughter was born early in 1857, when Miller and his squaw lived in a cabin on Cloud River, a branch of the Pitt, at the foot of the Shasta Mountains. He and Brock were good hunters, and supplied themselves and Indian companions plentifully with game, but in other respects lived exactly like the Indians. The staple food of the Diggers is of acorns, grass-seeds, pine nuts and kamas roots ; but in times of scarcity they eat service-berries, manzanita berries and the balls of the mountain buckeye. These last, in their natural state, are a deadly poison; but toward spring they become comparatively harmless. Then the Diggers gather and pound them in a mass, which they allow to freeze ; of this they make a sort of paste or bread, which is highly nu- tritious. Their great luxury is dried, or tainted, salmon ; and white men, strangely enough, learn to eat it so, and like it even more tainted than do the savages. But this Pitt River band appears to me one of the very lowest of the Digger race ; and from the specimens I have seen I should say the sight, or rather the smell, of one of their squaws would turn the stomach of any man not a poet. Nevertheless many old mountaineers, and even some later comers, are to be found cabined among these hills, living each contentedly with his squaw; and it is common testimony that after a white man has lived with one of them two or three years, he would not leave her for the best white woman in the country. They learn to do housework after a fashion, and on gala days rig out in 'hoops and waterfalls of most fantastic pattern. But they boil or roast the carcasses of their dead relatives; mix the x grease with tar, and mat it on their 'heads and necks, making a sort of helmet, with only the eyes and mouth free ; then for seven weeks they howl on the hill- 752 VENUS AND ADONIS. tops every morning and evening to scare away the evil spirits. I saw one of these " in mourning," and am convinced that if she don't scare the Devil away, he must be a spirit of some nerve. A white man, disposed to Indian life, can adopt all their customs in a month, while an Indian can not adopt ours in fifty years. Arithmetically speaking, it is a hundred times as easy for a white man to go wild as for an Indian to civilize. It was amid such associations as these, and in a wild life among the beautiful scenery of these moun- tains, that Miller first tried his hand at lit- erature. His reading while here was ex- clusively of French romances, amatory poetry, and the lives of pirates and robbers. From one of the last he adopted his pre- sent name. Joaquin Murietta was a noted outlaw and murderer, some years before the American occupation, and was long the terror of the Upper Joaquin Valley. He VENUS AND ADONIS "DIGGER INDIANS, appears to have been of the "dashing, chivalrous," Claude Duval style of bandits, and spent his gains freely with the senoritas of Monterey and other Mexican towns. This character seems to have fascinated Miller. The most charitable opinion in Shasta about the latter was that he was slightly insane and crazed with an aifectation to imitate the heroes of Spanish romance. But while Miller was enjoying himself and absorbing poetic PITT RIVER MASSACRE. 753 fire from the companionship of Shasta squaws, a serious tragedy was enacted, which nearly proved the death of the incipient poet. In January, 1857, a colony of twelve whites, on Pitt River, were massacred by the Indians, some of the same race with whom Miller was living. Among the settlers were twin brothers named Harry and Samuel R. Lockhart, but the latter being absent down the river, escaped, the only survivor. He swore undying vengeance against the whole Pitt River band, and pursued them for nine years, until he had killed twenty- five, every one of the band concerned in the massacre. He became a monomaniac on the subject, and though often arrested by the Federal authorities, as soon as released took to the moun- tains, "hunting for Shastas." He stole two Indian children, and made them spies and decoys, and by their aid killed several of the family with which Miller was connected, and captured Miller himself. Uncertain of the poet's guilt, he tied and brought him to Yreka, and into the office of Judge Rosborotigh, where he stood guard over his prisoner for two nights and a day, until the Judge could collect the evidence. There was none to criminate Miller, and Lockhart was with difficulty per- suaded not to shoot him. The fate of Lockhart was a melancholy one. After the last of the guilty band was killed, he went to Silver City, Idaho, and was employed by the noted Hill Beachy as a guard on the Ida El more Mine. When the battle took place over the pos- session of the mine, Lockhart was shot through the left arm. Amputation was delayed by his obstinacy, until Beachy had convinced him there would still be enough of the arm left to rest a rifle across and take aim. It was then too late; mortifi- cation followed, and he died a terrible death. We were off from Reading by the stage at 1 o'clock in the morning. It carried all the delayed mail which had accumu- lated during the last storm seventeen hundred pounds of it.. On the top, rear and " boot/ 7 it was piled as long as it could be strapped fast; the front seat was filled to the roof, and the rest of the little coach was left for seven passengers and their minor luggage. Besides myself, there were an old man returning 48 754 IMMENSE TIMBER. home to Oregon from a visit " to the States," two invalids to try the upper country, and three emigrants to Oregon, but fortunately no ladies. The stage company had done the best possible under the circumstances, but the storm had left five feet of snow on the other route there are two stage routes from Reading the coaches had to draw off that line, and delayed mail and passengers were scattered at every main station along the way. At daylight we were ferried over Pitt River, and entered fairly upon the mountains. The valley of the Sacramento, which has been narrowing northward for fifty miles, may be said to stop at this point, as the spurs of the Sierras put out westward toward the Coast Range, and, in mining parlance, "pinch in "upon the plain. Pitt River is really the Upper Sacramento, being the largest of the confluent streams, and preserving a general course southwestward, after emerging from the mountains. Along its right bluff, we preserved a general northeast course all day. Again and again we thought we had left it, as the coach turned directly away and labored up mountainous passes, and along frightful " dugways " for miles, to an elevation of hundreds of feet above the stream ; then we would turn to the right, and come thundering down a long rocky grade for two or three miles to the water's edge again. And every time we appeared to be coming back to the same place : there were the same timbered hills and rocky bluffs, perpendicular on one side of the stream and sloping on the other ; the same immense gray boulders, rocky islands and towers in the bed of the stream, and the same white foaming rapids. For fifty miles the river is a series of cascades and rapids ; and though, through our ups and downs, we but kept even with the stream, we must have been gaining rapidly in general elevation. The sun rose clear, and the bright day and sublime scenery made us forget the fatigues of the way. The immense timber through which this road runs is a constant astonishment to the traveler. For two hundred miles, broken only by two or three open spaces, stretches 9, vast forest of firs and pines of every diameter, from one to ten feet. Here is in- MOUNT SHASTA. 755 BOUGH ON THE OLD MAN. exhaustible wealth in lumber. Both are good ; the fir is harder to work than the pine, but is more durable; and the timber alone would amply repay the cost of the projected railroad. With facilities for shipping, every acre of these woods would be worth from five hundred to a thousand dollars. At last, near night, we left the river and worked slowly up hill for two hours to a sort of mountain plateau. Crossing this we saw to our right Mount Shasta, 14,400 feet high, presenting in the cold, clear moonlight a view of indescribable beauty. The lower portion looked like polished marble, shading off by degrees to a bright green ; while the summit, covered all the year with snow and ice, appeared a monument of dazzling whiteness. Sentiment was soon overpowered by sense ; for, though we had gained two hours of troubled sleep on the ascent, rest was impossible on the descent. The drivers, to "gain time," took advantage of all the down-grades ; the coach bumped over great boulders, and threw us against the roof and back against the 756 ROUGH COACH RIDING. seats till phrenological development went on at both ends with most uncomfortable rapidity. The old man, occupying the middle of our seat, took up at least half of it, and every lurch our way threw his whole weight on me, while his groans and smothered curses made me fear several times in the night that he would die* right on top of me. Lean men, in general, can not endure coach riding as well as plump ones; and I think (if there be any truth in Darwinism) in my years of travel I ought to have grown or " developed" a series of pads on the angles which strike the vehicle. Nature probably knew what she was about when she gave man his present make-up, but she evidently intended him for turning up the soil in a level country. For mountaineering I could suggest an improvement a cast-iron backbone with a hinge in it, ter- minating below in a sole-leather, copper-lined flap. We reached Yreka (only four hours behind time) at 2 A. M., and the old man, two invalids and myself tumbled out of the coach, exhausted, and applied for a " lay over," unable to go further. Nine hours 7 sleep did me some good, though I felt as if I had been pounded from hoad to foot with a clapboard. Passengers usually ride through the two hundred and eighty miles between the railroads without stopping, but I learned at the telegraph office that the last five loads are scattered all the way, stopping at convenient places for the next coach, then riding fifty or a hundred miles, or as long as they can stand it. Yreka is a place of wonderful beauty. From the town a gently undulating valley extends in every direction, rising by a succession of timbered foothills to the lofty mountains, whose notched and pointed summits, now dazzling white with snow, seem to join the blue heavens or lose themselves in clouds. But it is only on the points of the mountains that any mist can be seen ; above us the sky is cloudless, and the cool air is exhilarat- ing as some ethereal gas. It is difficult to give Eastern readers a general description of California climate. When so-called generally, it always means the climate of the interior, which is three-fourths of agricultural California, including the Sacra- mento, Joaquin and Tulare Valleys. But there are also at least MINING. 757 thirty minor valleys opening out of the Sierras, of which each has a different climate ; from Sonora, where lemons and pome- granates ripen, and flowers bloom all the year, to Yreka, where snow often lies upon the ground a month, and the cool stimu- lating air in winter is like that of late October in New England. A few miles east of Yreka is the home of the Modocs, and soon after the region becomes historic on account of that curious O " tempest-in-a-teapot," the Modoc War. Like all old mining counties, this is heavily taxed. In some counties the taxes have often amounted to five per cent, on the valuation. When I visited the State first, in 1869, her politicians were discussing the project of having the State afford relief to some of them. This was officially decided to be unconstitutional ; but it is now suggested that it may be done indirectly, by allowing these counties a rebate on State taxes. A mining population of ten thousand or more organized a county on a magnificent basis, voted public works and bonds to erect them, and thus imposed a debt which would not have been oppressive to such a popula- tion. But the miners nearly all left, and a community of three or four thousand farmers, graziers and wine-growers have to pay the debt and run the county. Mining began near Yreka in 1850, in Shasta County then; and the town was known as Shasta Butte City. The real, aboriginal name is Wyeka ; as no Indian uses the letter " r " any more than a Chinaman, and that name is still seen on one of the oldest signs. There is a tradition that a Dutch baker painted the present name on his sign by mistake, and it was noted that Yreka Bakery spelt the same both ways, which struck the citizens as such a curious and happy combination that it was retained by general consent. In like manner the name of the new county soon organized, Siskiyou, is supposed to result from the Indians and miners' attempt to pronounce the French Six Cailloux (" six boulders "), the name of the district from six large rocks in the river. As one of the old settlers informed me, most of the early comers learned French and Indian by the aid of a "sleeping dictionary," the pronounciation is not strictly academic. When the miners first came they learned that a 758 JUSTICE. Scotchman named McKie had been living among the Klamaths for forty years, and was very popular with them ; hence their first salutation was " Mak a Mahkee ?" " Are you a McKie ? " or good white man a question which facts soon answered in the negative. The records of the early Courts are ludicrous. The first Alcalde, in 1851, was known as " Cut-eye Foster," but he left no docket, and soon ran away, and George C. Vail reigned in his stead. No law book was ever used in his Court; he decided each case on its own merits, writing out the full history, and his docket is a curiosity. In one case brought be- fore him, a boy had driven a team from Oregon and worked all winter for a man, who declined to pay. He sold out in the spring and was leaving suddenly when, on complaint of the boy, Vail and two constables stopped him on the road. It was proved that he had received three thousand dollars on his sale, but he declared himself unable to pay, though not denying the boy's claim. Judge Vail decided in these words: " Constables, stand this man on his head, shake him well, and see if you can't hear something drop ! " No sooner said than done. A vigorous shaking brought to light a wallet containing two thou- sand dollars in gold dust; the boy received his claim of three hundred dollars, the Judge and constables took an ounce apiece for their trouble, and the defendant went his way a lighter man. Justice like this was cheap at three ounces. The next coach did not arrive till 4 in the morning, giving us a night's rest, and four exhausted passengers took a " lay-over," making room for the recuperated four to go on. We traveled northwest for two or three hours, crossing theKlamath Eiverby a "swing-ferry" soon after daylight. I was surprised at the size of this stream, which is not among the noted rivers of the coast; it looked big enough at the crossing for navigation with good- sized boats. The valley amounts to but little agriculturally, as the stream runs between rugged hills through most of its course; but on its head-waters is the greatest game and fishing region in the West, if not in the world. Every kind of game known to the Sierras is abundant, and the cold waters of Klamath Lake and tributaries are alive with trout. It is the paradise of sportsmen, FINE CLIMATE. 759 and nothing but its remote and inaccessible position prevents its being a region of great resort. Our ride to-day was a pleasant surprise : we bad no rugged mountains to cross, and the coacb was quite comfortable. Soon after leaving the Klamath we enter Oregon, and the impression given on this road is that the State is covered by one immense and gloomy forest. In places the very daylight seemed to vanish into a mild twlight, and, in the few " clearings " we passed through, the sunshine was novel and enjoyable. After noon the country began to show signs of improvement; settlers' cabins became numerous, and, after running down a narrow caiion, we came out into the beautiful valley of Rogue Kiver. Here is said to be the finest climate in Oregon, and to wearied passengers just over the mountains the sight was like a revelation of beauty. Where we enter, the valley is no more than two miles wide, but as we go down it widens gradually to five, thirteen or twenty, while on every hand appear fine farms, thrifty orchards, great piles of red and yellow apples of wondrous size, barns full of wheat and fine stock, and we feel with delight that we are out of the mountains and u in the settlements/ 7 Though far retired from the road, the mountains still appear rugged and lofty, sending out a succession of rocky spurs one every two or three miles and between these, far back into the hills, extend most beautiful coves in long fan-like shapes. The air was mild, the roads firm and smooth, and the coach rolled along with just enough of motion to give variety and appetite. Everybody and everything we saw had the unmistakable " Oregon look." We were among the " Web-feet " at last, and a comely race they are, if I may judge from the plump forms and fresh, clear complexions I saw on this part of the route. The climate had no suggestions of extra dampness; the sky was clear and the air cool and dry, with the general features of Indian Summer in Ohio. Double plows were running in many of the fields, " breaking fallow for spring wheat," the natives said, and the apples, just gathered, were lying in heaps, to be stored away the last of the month, showing that no freeze is to be apprehended before December. Though not extensive, this 760 PRICE OF A MEAL. FALLS OF THE WILLAMETTE. is one of the finest valleys in Oregon, and well settled. Land appears to be as high as in the rural districts of Indiana. All the farmers whom I questioned at the stations held theirs at fifty or sixty dollars per acre. At the principal town, the four immigrants got out, leaving the coach to two of us, and, soon after, we entered upon the last mountain drive. The range \vas low, but the night was too cold for sleep. Daylight came upon us in the dense woods that lie between Cow Creek and the South Umpqua, and under the heavy interlocking branches it was still hazy at 8 o'clock. The stock at the stage of stations seemed quite worn out, from the late storm and extra work, and our progress was slow. Old settlers tell me that but one-fifth of Oregon is covered with timber, but from the route I came I should have guessed nine- tenths. In the thickest part of the timber we ran out into day- light at a cleared space of perhaps a mile square, with a dozen dwellings and home station, where we took breakfast. Every- where on this line "four bits" in coin is the customary price of a meal ; "one bit" for a cigar or drink, and if you pass out twenty-five cents the dealer hands back a dime. If you pay a dime, it is all right. The people are so accustomed of old to high prices that the difference of two-and-a-half cents between a dime and a "bit" is not taken account of. Thence we TRAVELING. 761 entered on a timbered canon, down which we made but fifteen miles in four hours. The heavy coach alone was a load, over the rocky road, for the four horses, every one of which lilled exactly Isaiah's description of the natural man, their whole heads were sick and their whole hearts faint, and from tho crown of the head to the sole of the foot they were wounds and bruises and putrefying sores. We were now so near the settled Willamette Valley that lumber is an object, and the whole trade of this district consists in getting out logs and floating them down Canon Creek to the Cafionville sawmills. Driving hour after hour through these seemingly endless forests, often hidden from the sunlight in their somber shades, it seems strange that lumber should be scarce anywhere, for here ia enough of it to supply the Nation for half a century. But the railroad is needed to make it available, and the general opinion there is that the road will not be completed for some years. The same company own the road that own the principal line of ocean steamers from Portland to Sari Francisco ; and it is freely stated that they only want the road to the head of Willa- mette Valley to serve as a " feeder" to their ocean line, and that to construct it through would be only to make a rival for them- selves. As the routes now are, I will "take sea-sickness in mine' 7 rather than travel by stage over the Shasta Mountains again. At Cafionville we ran out into the Umpqua Valley, at the point where the river comes in from the east. Crossing it by an uneasy and dangerous bridge, we travel down the east side of the valley the rest of the day, as the river there turns due north. Many clear and pretty streams dash clown from the Cascade Range, cross our road and the valley, and empty into the Umpqua. The valley is larger than that of Rogue River, but the climate does not appear so genial. The Cascade Range, which is really a northward continuation of the Sierra Nevadas, bends in more toward the coast; hence, none of these valleys are so wide as those of the Sacramento and Joaquin in California. After a long pause at Oakland, the Oregon and California road had just been completed to Roseburgh, where we arrived 762 WILLAMETTE VALLEY. at dark, and saved eighteen miles of staging, as we expected to go to Oakland when we left Reading. The hardships of my trip were over when I reached the end of the Oregon and California road, and I was in a condition to properly appreciate railroads. And I fully realize that in spite of all which has been done in the last ten years, Oregon is still a long way from "the States," and an exceedingly difficult place to get to. I used to wonder why a naturally rich and very extensive country, which had been in process of settlement for nearly a third of a century, should still have less than a hundred thousand people ; but I now understand it. I can not remember a more pleasant trip than our slow Sunday ride down the Willamette Valley. Roseburgh is a little beyond the (< divide/ 7 and on the slopes leading down to the Klamath River; but the intermediate ridge is not very high, and moun- tain spurs always look much more romantic from the inside of a comfortable car. Forty miles brought us fairly down into the Willamette the great valley of Oregon. It is a hundred and forty miles long, with an average width of forty miles five or six thousand square miles of the most fertile land in the world. The day was like those of our late October, and the train seemed a sort of excursion outfit for the people at the various villages along the way; twelve hours were consumed in making the run, giving ample time to study the natives. The " Webfoot" is sm generis ; there is a distinctively Oregonian look about all the natives and old residents which is hard to describe. Certainly they are not an enterprising people. They drifted in here all along from 1845 to 1855, and some of them at an even earlier period, when many western Americans came to the Pacific coast to engage in cattle raising not considering the country fit for much else. They left Missouri and Illinois most of them because those States were even then " too crowded 77 for them, and they wanted to get away where " they was plenty o 7 range and plenty o 7 game, 77 and have a good, easy time. With one team to each family (time being no object to such people) it cost them nothing to move ; and the peculiar land laws applied to Oregon gave SETTLERS. 763 them every advantage, and have been a serious hindrance to settlement ever since. Each single male settler could acquire title to 'three hundred and twenty acres, and each married man to six hundred and forty ; there were besides some inducements to families, so that the birth of a child was a pecuniary advan- tage to the parents. The result was that hundreds of girls of eleven, twelve and thirteen years of age were married ; and the further result, that all this fine land is owned in vast bodies by these old families, many of whom will neither sell, improve, nor hire any one else to improve. They acknowledge their own laziness, and talk about it so good-humoredly that one is com- pelled to sympathize with them. One of the better class gave me this account: "These old Pikers don't want the country fenced up and the game scared off. What do they care about your style o' livin' ? One of 'em will go out and tramp a week till he can kill a deer then bring it home, and while his wife cuts it up, he'll lay down and sleep and sleep till his head aches; then he'll get up and eat and eat till his belly aches; then he'll sit on a log and whittle and whittle till his back aches, and then he'll think o' goin' after another deer." I think the climate adds something to their natural laziness. It is delightfully balmy, mild and temperate for about seven months in the year, and the rest of the time foggy, muggy, and neither warm nor cold. Their chief export is wheat; on this xU ' % " > depend for supplies. In townships where thousands of bushels of apples lie rotting on the ground it is impossible to get a drink of cider, and most of them tell me that they import their dried fruit from California. And "land is high, too. Inquiring along the way between Eugene City and Portland, I find it held everywhere from twenty to sixty dollars per acre, and the annual rent is stated at from two dollars and fifty cents to five dollars. These facts do not strike me as encouraging to immigration, though this valley has not one-fourth the agricultural population it ought to have to equal most of the Western States. The soil is wonderful, being in many places from fifteen to thirty feet in depth, literally inexhaustible. And for location it is extremely fortunate. The high Cascade Range shuts off all 764 BEAVER LANDS. PORTLAND OREGON FROM EAST SIDE OF WILLAMETTE. hard winter storms; the lower Coast Range on the west only admits the mildest airs of the Pacific ; the summers never get so dry or hot as in California; all the rains are gentle, and de- structive storms and freshets are unknown. The surprisingly slow development of such a region can only be accounted for by the facts I have stated. The new settlers eagerly seize on every chance for improvement, and are doing considerable; but it is complained that these old fellows "hold on to the land like burrs, and die mighty slow." And from longer experience with the "first families," I am driven to the painful conclusion that about a hundred first-class funerals would prove a great advan- tage to Oregon. In the lower portions of the valley the road traverses what are called " Beaver Lands/' said to be the choicest of all the lands in Oregon. The theory of their origin is that the beavers, by damming up the shallow creeks and building their houses in them, caused the beds and adjacent low lands to overflow and fill with accumulations of earthy matter and decayed vegetable deposits. This must have been the work of many centuries, and has left a soil which only grows more fertile by cultivation. But these lands are found nowhere but in the Willamette Valley, and do not altogether exceed twenty thousand acres. ALMOST A LONDON FOG. 765 There were only two or three towns along the way of much importance. Eugene City, near the head of the river, looked rather more lively than Oregon generally. Salem had a de- lightfully quiet New England Sabbath look, and Oregon City, at the falls of the Willamette, had the appearance of a thriving manufacturing town. To one lately accustomed to the driving ways of the Union Pacific and Iowa roads, there does not ap- pear to be any particular stir about the Oregon and California road. On the upper (southern) end I saw enough to convince me that they do intend to continue it some time. The papers announce with an air of confidence that it will be completed to the connection in California by 1874. If the " Webfeet" don't display more enterprise in this than in other things I've noticed, I should say 1974 would be nearer the figures. I reached Portland at sunset of a beautiful Sabbath evening not at all suggestive of the fog and rain which are generally attributed to this climate. For two days the weather was de- lightful, though everybody spoke of it as the coldest they had ever experienced. The wind was from the northwest, very gentle, the sky clear, and ice half an inch thick formed on the gutters a rare thing in Portland. In the evening the ther- mometer rose from 28 to 38, and next morning I wondered why I waked up and was so restless in the night. I turned over suddenly, and an old shot wound in the knee gave me a fearful wrench. Then I felt something like ague along my backbone. I struck a match, looked at my watch, and it was nearly 8 o'clock. Such a fog! One could almost chew it up and spit it out. With a sharp knife it might be cut out in chunks and stored for dry weather. They say the winters here are healthful. It must be for differently constituted lungs from mine. It don't seem to me like breathing ; it is rather a sort of pulmonic swallowing. Only the smoke and dust of a great city here is needed to give Portland occasional fogs fully equal to those of London. This fog continued till noon, then broke away, and a gentle drizzle finished the day. Portlanders all agree that they have the finest climate in the world in summer, and part of the spring 766 CLIMATE. STREET IN OLYMPIA WASHINGTON TERRITORY. and fall ; but admit that it is rather unpleasant for three or four months of winter. Rain may be expected at any moment when the thermometer is above 35. If the rain happens to miss a day or two the fog may be depended on. At such a time the wind, what little there is, is mostly from the southwest. As soon as it comes from the northwest the mercury drops to 30,' or lower, the sky clears, the clouds sail away to the southwest, and cool delightful weather follows. It is evident by a mere glance at the country, that Portland can never get so dry and hot in summer as do most of the towns in California. The heavily-timbered hills all around indicate a very different con- dition; and it is the universal testimony that the summers are temperate and pleasant. CHAPTER XXXVI. IN CONCLUSION. Season too late Washington Territory" Good-bye, Jonah "Down the Willa- mette In the Columbia A fog Salmon fisheries Strange instincts of the salmon On the heaving ocean " The first to fall " Down below " Just a Iktle qualmish "Philosophy on the subject Smoother water" On an even keel " Arrival at Frisco Bancroft & Co. Homeward bound. HAD delayed too long on the eastern end of the line, for the heavy Oregon rain was coming fast, the roads were becoming intolerable, and it was too late to make a tour in Washington Territory without great discom- fort. To go all the way to Oregon to visit the west end of the North Pacific, and return without doing so, is somewhat like the case of some of my friends, who go all the way to California to see the Yosemite, and then are scared at the stage ride, and do not go. Nevertheless, it is just what I did. During the five days I spent in Portland, I met from five to fifty persons a day just returned from the upper country, and the unanimous opinion was: "It is too late for you to go and see anything." All who were interested in that country urged me not to go and see it at this season, as they were certain I would bring up an evil report of the land. Portland is located on the west side of the Willamette (pro- nounced WiWam-et), twelve miles above its mouth, at the head of navigation. They have two feet of tide-water, but back- water from the Columbia often causes great rises, giving the surface of the stream a variation of thirty -two feet. At the anchorage I noted one English vessel, one loading for the Sand- wich Islands, and two ocean steamers, for ports on this coast, 767 768 POKTLAND. PUGET SOUND AND MT. KAINIEB. besides a number of small- er Columbia River steam- ers. West of the city is a range of high wooded hills, covered mostly with fir timber. There being a considerable bend in the river, the range of hills runs straight across the bend, leaving a flat and slope about a mile deep and three miles long, about half of which the city covers. The streets run with the cardinal points very nearly, being numbered from the river, and the principal ones have the Nicolson pavement. Most of the others are boarded with plank, four inches thick, of native timber, making elegant drives. Some few of the outer streets are yet unimproved and very muddy in winter. Although there is not freeze enough to pro- duce deep mud, yet even when it is not rainy it is foggy or cloudy, and the surface is very sloppy. All the older portion of the city appears to me quite beautiful, with many evidences of wealth and taste. There is an unusually large number of fine residences. The city ordinances for many years have com- pelled the planting of trees in front of every lot, and all that LOCATION AND INHABITANTS. 769 part of town occupied by private residences is yearly growing in beauty. As one result of their smooth planked streets, ranch attention is given to fine turn-outs and stock, and of pleasant afternoons the main avenues are quite lively. The location is picturesque. The Cascade Kange is visible part of the time; Mount Hood rears its white summit sixty miles to the eastward, but looking as if it were just out of town ; while Mount St. Helens is often visible, though eighty miles to the northeast. "Pigtails" are even more numerous on all the streets than in " Frisco," and I learn with surprise that one- sixth of the population of Portland two thousand in all are Chinamen. They are porters, washmen, railroad laborers, cigar-makers, and some few artisans of other sorts, but they have an unusually large number of the higher castes, engaged as merchants and importers. Sam Poy Sahong has seven stores on this coast, his head- quarters being at Portland. Calling at his establishment one evening I found him posting his books for the day, and I can pronounce him a rapid writer and intelligent man. The firm of Tung Duck, Chung & Co. charter vessels and import from China. Some other Chinese firms import exten- sively, and there are several large dealers among their mer- chants. Other foreigners are not numerous ; I think the Jews predominate. Aside from them there are few Germans, and not many French or Irish. In fact, Portland has almost an exclu- sive Yankee population, as to the whites; there are compara- tively few Western people immediately in the city, though the bulk of the rural population is from Missouri, Illinois and neighboring States. For enterprise, the city seems to have that which the State at large lacks ; for I am sorry to say my opinion of rural Oregon's enterprise has not at all improved by longer acquaintance. The steamer, by which I engaged passage down the coast, was to start on Friday evening at dark ; but, going on board, I was informed that the start was delayed till next morning, "to get the high tide on the bar at the mouth of the Cohuibia." So my friends made an evening of it to see me off properly, 49 770 HEM ED Y FOR SEA-SICKNESS. and, by way of encouragement, gave me their experience with sea-sickness, and a world of good advice. All had come to Oregon by sea, and all had been sea-sick ; but there was one little difficulty about their advice, no two agreed in any par- ticular but one. Said number one : " Lie down and stay there. No need of being sea-sick as long as you keep perfectly still. The moment you sit up or move about, you are sick. I lay in my berth all the way from Frisco." " Bosh,' 7 said number two, " you stay on deck right in the cold air just as long as you can. The minute you go below, where you move without seein' it, and the lamps and things are swingin' around, you're a goner! Take your stand right on the bow, an' stick to it." A grave and reverend senior thus pronounced : " The will has more to do with it than you'd think. Make up your mind you're not goin' to be sick, and ten to one you wont." A chorus of dissent. Then another recommended lemons and sherry wine ! But all agreed on one thing : that it was best to eat every meal one could, and take plenty of air and exercise. Having properly prepared my nerves, and emptied fourteen bottles of "Bass," the party of six saw me aboard, at midnight, with the parting " Good-bye, Jonah, and when you begin to heave, think of us." I found on board an "old salt," with whom I had got acquainted at the hotel, and his advice was: "Take half a dozen limes in your pocket, eat one whenever you feel giddy, walk the deck with me, and I'll insure you. Stick to the deck, with a blanket and overcoat, if it's cold, and you can't get very sick." This I did, and found it the best plan. At daylight, the bang of a six-pounder on the bow aroused me from dreams of shipwreck, and pretty soon the " hoh-he-hoh " of the seamen's chorus, and the rattle of lines and jingle of bells announced that we were off. The easy motion of the vessel lulled me to another nap of an hour, from which I awoke to find that we were dead still neither tied nor anchored, but swinging with the current, and buried in a fog, ON THE WATER. 771 so dense that I had to feel my way along the berths to the cabin door. We were near the mouth of the Willamette, and were to stay there any time from one to twenty-four hours. Hour by hour the fog slowly lifted, drizzle and mist taking its place, and chilling one to the very bones. The cabin passen- gers crowded around the stoves, while the Chinese and other steerage passengers walked the deck, or crowded around the smoke-stacks for warmth ; the melancholy " Johns," with glazed caps and black pig-tails, looking like a lot of half- drowned crows. About 2 p. M. blue spots began to appear, bright rays broke through the gloom, a light wind was felt from the northwest, and soon the fog was sailing away in fleecy clouds toward the Cascade Range. The call of " Tickets, gents," showed one man without the pasteboard; the davits were loosed, the boat swung to the water, and two hours more were consumed in setting him ashore on a point three miles away. Moving down the broad stream little to be seen but low, wooded banks we ran out into the Columbia, and were soon surrounded by extensive flocks of ducks and wild geese, with occasionally a gull or Walloon. But most of them kept out of gunshot from the vessel. I saw no settlements anywhere on the Columbia bottoms, unless the fishermen's cabins can be so called. Timber of medium size lines the river everywhere, and very few cleared fields are to be seen. By dark jve had reached the principal salmon fisheries, and there, for some reason to me unknown, the steamer stopped for the night, probably to wait for another high tide on the bar. The amphibious race who follow the calling of fisherman on the lower Columbia, might be set down as a separate variety of our species. They know all about salmon, and next to nothing of everything else. Here and next morning at Astoria, our boat took on a hundred tons of canned salmon "no put- up, at all," the clerk said and the figures given me as to the extent of shipments appear incredible. Three hours' persistent interviewing of the fishermen developed these facts : The salmon vary from five to thirty pounds in weight, twelve pounds being a fair average. They are now a standard luxury 772 SALMON. iu all the markets of the world. They begin to ascend the river in the spring rise May or June and turn into all the tributaries and small creeks, to the highest point they can reach. During the " season " a salmon is never found with head down stream "always bucking agin the current/ 7 says the natives. In many places they get entangled among the rocks, and some are found worn almost smooth by their strug- gles. No instance is known of one x>f these being caught with a hook, and from observation the fishermen are universally of opinion that the salmon eat nothing during the entire spawn- ing season. The consequence is that they get poorer, and the meat whiter, every mile up stream. No Oregonian will eat of salmon caught above the mouth of the Willamette. When they enter the Columbia the meat is of a bright red color; in the Willamette it is of a pale vermilion, and at Oregon City, and up at the Dalles almost white. The nearer the mouth of the Columbia, the more valuable the fisheries. When they have reached the highest point attainable, they spawn among the gravel and on the rocks, where the water is but two or three inches deep. Then they die by thousands, and masses of dead salmon are cast ashore, or found floating in the eddies. It used to be thought that all which came up died ; but the fishermen say it is now known that many of the old ones sur- vive to return to the ocean ; but they float sluggishly with the current, keeping very low in the water. Next year the young ones go out to the ocean in vast schools, and occasionally one of them is caught with a hook, but not often. The meat of the salmon is poison to a dog. Their spawning grounds have been found as far as a thousand miles from the sea. There is a remarkable difference between various localities. At places on the Sound, the salmon is not fit to eat ; at others it is infe- rior, but still palatable. The Columbia takes precedence of all points on the coast. We spent three hours at Astoria, a curious old town strung along under the wooded hills, and a party of us walked out to see the first house built in Oregon the old residence of Astor. The place is now of little importance except for shipping salmon. " ETHIOPIAN WALK- AROUND." 773 The call to a late breakfast showed the fifty cabin passengers all on hand, each one speculating humorously as to how many would sit down to the next meal ; for we could already see the white foam on the bar, and knew that a " high sea was running outside." The Columbia bar was long the terror of navigators, but it appears to have been such only through ignorance, and since proper soundings have been made, no more accidents have occurred in the last twenty years than at the mouths of other large rivers. We passed it in an hour, without difficulty, and soon were upon the " heaving ocean," of which we read. It was a rough introduction. The heaviest sea encountered on the voyage was at the start. One minute the bow appeared to be rearing up to square off at the midday sun, and the next to get down and root for something at the bottom of the ocean. Bets were made as to who would be the " first to fall," and a party of twenty or more of us went to the hurricane deck to stand it out. With songs, shouts and laughter we danced about on unsteady footing, attempting an " Ethiopian walk-around " on the heaving deck, determined to fight off the sickness to the last moment. Then we practised balancing against the waves, Watching the water in the hollows of the deck, and seiain"* on O O the moment when it started one way to throw ourselves to the opposite. While enjoying this pastime, a lad of some fifteen years suddenly sank to the deck, then rose and emptied his stomach at one vast heave. Ther.e was a yell of laughter as he started below, but in a minute two more followed suit. Then they fell away rapidly, and in an hour only five of us remained. As I gazed on the bow, admiring the majestic sweep of its rise and fall, and the swell of the ocean beyond, it suddenly appeared to stop; then it stood dead still, and the whole body of the ocean appeared to rise and fall instead, and in a moment my head seemed to rise and fall with it, leaving the bow between us quite fixed. I had been warned not to look at the bow, but I forgot it. I tried in vain to restore the natural order, but the illusion had become to me a reality : the bow was still, and my head and the ocean alone moved. At every rise my neck seemed to stretch out longer, my head get farther from my body, 774 "A LITTLE QUALMISH." "A LITTLE QUALMISH." and soon I lost it altogether, or only became conscious of it by taking it in my hand, when it seemed about the size of a sugar hogshead. Then a terrible, creeping, crawling sensation became apparent, extending down my person, and I started below. My stomach was still quiet, and as soon as I got to the cabin my giddiness ceased. The passengers were falling on every hand, for nearly all were "land-lubbers." The crowd was a study : an Englishman and lady sat to- gether, holding each other by the hand, bracing themselves firmly as if they could resist the motion ; a " fast young man " held his head with a savage grip between his hands, and looked fixedly in the coal-box, while the ladies one by one appealed to their companions : " Won't you please assist me to the berth I feel ah just a little qualmish." Lunch was called and half the number went below. I had seated myself and got one mouthful of soup, when the vessel gave an unusual heave; I felt the soup "coming back," clapped iny hand to my mouth, and rushed on deck. But the fight was SEA-SICKNESS. 775 over, and I was defeated. The terrible mat de mer had me in spite of my struggles, and I felt my way to my room. Next door to me was a family of four, making their first trip away from Oregon. As I passed, the little girl and boy were lying in the lower berth, with their heads over a basin, moaning with sickness; the young mother lay above, pale as the sheet, and unable even to resist the motion of the vessel, which tossed her from side to side, and the husband sat by trying to cheer them, while the dark bile swelled up in his cheeks and his eye showed the composure of despair. I could not repress a sickly smile, for they had been the most hilarious of our party on deck. From the gentlemen's berths came a mixed sound of curses, groans and regurgitations. One enormous fat old fellow was crying like a baby, and finally called out in despair: "O o o I can't stand this ; won't some Christian throw me over- board." My sailor friend, who was standing at my door to encourage me, promptly made reply : " Well, I ain't much of a Christian, but if it's any accommodation, I'll chuck ye overboard." My sickness lasted for three hours, then a most delightful calm succeeded, followed by a long sweet sleep. I learned a new fact, to me: there are really two kinds of sea-sickness; one begins in the head, the other in the stomach, and a man may have either or both. The latter, I am convinced, is simply a reversal of the peristaltic motion of the stomach and bowels. In the long swells as the boat rises one feels perfectly delightful ; the "insides" settle down, down, down, and are at rest. But as the boat sinks all the internal viscera rise as one passenger expressed it, "you fall away from your grub" they press even against the throat, producing a fearful and indescribable nausea. There is nothing I can compare it to. Even now the recol- lection makes me shudder. And one may have this kind of sea-sickness without being a particle giddy. But the other kind begins in the head ; it is the result of the eye having nothing fixed or solid to rest upon. Everything one looks at is moving the boat, the lamps, the waves are so many sources of irrita- 776 GOOD ADVICE. POINT ARENA LIGHTHOUSE COAST OF CALIFORNIA. tion to the optic nerve and brain. Nothing is fixed. All one's notions of security are unsettled. In a whirling swing or stage- coach, where some people are affected, one can never be entirely lost, for there is the " sure and firm-set earth " to come back upon as a solid basis ; but on the ocean that last resource is lacking, and the eye and brain are hopelessly deranged. Thence, by sympathy merely, the derangement spreads to the stomach ; the affection of that is only secondary. This last was the kind of sea-sickness I had, with but little of the other. Hence as soon as I lay down and shut my eyes, I began to recover. And for such cases that advice is good. But for those whose sick- THE SEA CALM. 777 BANCROFT'S GREAT PUBLISHING HOUSE SAN FRANCISCO. ness begins at the stomach there is no such hope ; they must suffer it through. Next morning the sea was calm, the boat was "running nearly on an even keel," and the rest of the voyage was delight- ful. Our third day on the ocean, the table was full again and everybody jolly. So I stick to my original conclusion : Take a day's sea-sickness on the way to Oregon, rather than go by stage. There is another argument in favor of this route. The fare from " Frisco " to Portland is only $25.00, while from Sacramento there by land is $45.00, both in gold. 778 OVER THE PACIFIC RAILROAD AGAIN. The second night we saw from afar the glowing summit of Point Arena Lighthouse a sublime sight from a distance upon the ocean. Next night, soon after dark, we passed the Golden Gate, and at daylight I was delighted to find myself once more on terra firma. No " Life on the ocean wave " for me, if you please. My first trip has convinced me that I haven't the head for life on the Atlantic ; for what we saw on the Pacific is a mere nothing. Solid ground is good enough for me. San Francisco showed great improvement since I had first seen it three years before ; but my walks were mostly among the publishing houses, of which the city has an extensive supply. A quarter of a century since, a dull and sleepy Mexican mis- sion adorned (?) this row of sandhills; now a city of nearly two hundred thousand, is supplied by six daily papers, half a dozen periodicals, and several large publishing houses. That of A- L. Bancroft & Co., established in 1852, now equals any in the Eastern States. Almost everything in that line which is peculiarly Californian bears their imprint. In law books par- ticularly, and other work usually confined to a few houses in the East, they have shown great enterprise. Besides their original works, several hundred thousand volumes of Eastern books have been sold by them on the Pacific Coast. Their fine building on Market Street is an enduring monument to the general intelligence and love of literature of the people of California. To leave the mild air of "Frisco" for the snows of the mountains was anything but agreeable; but there were rumors of impending snow blockades ; important business called me to Indiana, and I took a hasty departure from the Far West. To close happily, every book should have a hero ; but this has none, unless the author may by courtesy be permitted to fill that position. Suffice it then to say, that seven days' riding from San Francisco brought me again to my native Hoosier- dom, vastly improved in health by my five years of Western travel. THE END. U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES CDD3D30MSM