Greater Britain

CHAPTER XVIII.

NAMELESS ALPS

AT the post-office, in Main Street, I gave Mr. Dixon a few last messages for home – he one to me for some Egyptian friends; and, with a shake and a wave, we parted, to meet in London after between us completing the circuit of the globe.

This time again I was not alone: an Irish miner from Montana, with a bottle of whisky, a revolver and pick, shared the back-seat with the mail-bags. Before we had forded the Jordan, he had sung “The Wearing of the Green,” and told me the day and the hour at which the republic was to be proclaimed at his native village in Galway. Like a true Irishman of the South or West, he was happy only when he could be generous; and so much joy did he show when I discovered that the cork had slipped from my flask, and left me dependent on him for my escape from the alkaline poison, that I half believed he had drawn it himself when we stopped to change horses for mules. Certain it is that he pressed his whisky so fast upon me and the various drivers, that the day we most needed its aid there was none, and the bottle itself had ended its career by serving as a target for a trial of breech-loading pistols.

At the sixth ranch from the city, which stands on the shores of the lake, and close to the foot of the mountains, we found Porter Rockwell, accredited chief of the Danites, the “Avenging Angels” of Utah, and leader, it is said, of the “White Indians” at the Mountain Meadows massacre.

Since 1840 there has been no name of greater terror in the West than Rockwell‘s; but in 1860 his death was reported in England, and the career of the great Brother of Gideon was ended, as we thought. I was told in Salt Lake City that he was still alive and well, and his portrait was among those that I got from Mr. Ottinger; but I am not convinced that the man I saw, and whose picture I possess, was in fact the Porter Rockwell who murdered Stephenson in 1842. It may be convenient to have two or three men to pass by the one name; and I suspect that this is so in the Rockwell case.

Under the name of Porter Rockwell some man (or men) has been the terror of the Mississippi Valley, of plains and plateau, for thirty years. In 1841, Joe Smith prophesied the death of Governor Boggs, of Missouri, within six months: within that time he was shot – rumor said by Rockwell. When the Danite was publicly charged with having done the deed for fifty dollars and a wagon-team, he swore he‘d shoot any man who said he‘d shot Boggs for gain; “but if I am charged with shooting him, they‘ll have to prove it” – words that looked like guilt. In 1842 Stephenson died by the same hand, it is believed. Rockwell was known to be the working chief of the band organized in 1838 to defend the First Presidency by any means whatever, fair or foul, known at various times as the “Big Fan” that should winnow the chaff from the wheat; the “Daughter of Zion,” the “Destructives,” the “Flying Angels,” the “Brother of Gideon,” the “Destroying Angels.” “Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion, for I will make thy horn iron, and will make thy hoofs brass; and thou shalt beat in pieces many people; and I will consecrate their gain unto the Lord, and their substance unto the lords of the whole earth” – this was the motto of the band.

Little was heard of the Danites from the time that the Mormons were driven from Illinois and Missouri until 1852, when murder after murder, massacre after massacre, occurred in the Grand Plateau. Bands of immigrants, of settlers on their road to California, parties of United States officers, and escaping Mormons, were attacked by “Indians,” and found scalped by the next whites who came upon their trail. It was rumored in the Eastern States that the red men were Mormons in disguise, following the tactics of the Anti-Renters of New York. In the case of Almon Babbitt, the “Indians” were proved to have been white.

The atrocities culminated in the Mountain Meadows massacre in 1857, when hundreds of men, women, and children were murdered by men armed and clothed as Indians, but sworn to by some who escaped as being whites. Porter Rockwell has had the infamy of this tremendous slaughter piled on to the huge mass of his earlier deeds of blood – whether rightly or wrongly, who shall say? The man that I saw was the man that Captain Burton saw in 1860. His death was solemnly recorded in the autumn of that year, yet of the identity of the person I saw with the person described by Captain Burton there can be no question. The bald, frowning forehead, the sinister smile, the long grizzly curls falling upon the back, the red cheek, the coal beard, the gray eye, are not to be mistaken. Rockwell or not, he is a man capable of any deed. I had his photograph in my pocket, and wanted to get him to sign it; but when, in awe of his glittering bowie and of his fame, I asked, by way of caution, the ranchman – a new-come Paddy – whether Rockwell could write, the fellow told me with many an oath that “the boss” was as innocent of letters as a babe. “As for writin’,” he said, “cuss me if he‘s on it. You bet he‘s not – you bet.”

Not far beyond Rockwell‘s, we drove close to the bench-land; and I was able to stop for a moment and examine the rocks. From the veranda of the Mormon poet Naisbitt‘s house in Salt Lake City, I had remarked a double line of terrace running on one even level round the whole of the great valley to the south, cut by nature along the base alike of the Oquirrh and the Wasatch.

I had thought it possible that the terrace was the result of the varying hardness of the strata; but, near Black Rock, on the overland track, I discovered that where the terrace lines have crossed the mountain precipices, they are continued merely by deep stains upon the rocks. The inference is that within extremely recent, if not historic times, the water has stood at these levels from two to three hundred feet above the present Great Salt Lake City, itself 4500 feet above the sea. Three days’ journey farther west, on the Reese‘s River Range, I detected similar stains. Was the whole basin of the Rocky Mountains – here more than a thousand miles across – once filled with a huge sea, of which the two Sierras were the shores, and the Wasatch, Goshoot, Waroja, Toi, Abbé, Humboldt, Washoe, and a hundred other ranges, the rocks and isles? The Great Salt Lake is but the largest of many such. I saw one on Mirage Plains that is salter than its greater fellow. Carson Sink is evidently the bed of a smaller bitter lake; and there are salt pools in dozens scattered through Ruby and Smoky Valleys. The Great Salt Lake itself is sinking year by year, and the sage-brush is gaining upon the alkali desert throughout the Grand Plateau. All these signs point to the rapid drying-up of a great sea, owing to an alteration of climatic conditions.

In the Odd Fellows’ Library at San Francisco I found a map of North America, signed “John Harris, A.M.,” and dated “1605,” which shows a great lake in the country now comprised in the Territories of Utah and Dakota. It has a width of fifteen degrees, and is named “Thongo, or Thoya.” It is not likely that this inland sea is a mere exaggeration of the present Great Salt Lake, because the views of that sheet of water are everywhere limited by islands in such a way as to give to the eye the effect of exceeding narrowness. It is possible that the Jesuit Fathers, and other Spanish travelers from California, may have looked from the Utah mountains on the dwindling remnant of a great inland sea.

On we jogged and jolted, till we lost sight of the American dead sea and of its lovely valley, and got into a canyon floored with huge boulders and slabs of roughened rock, where I expected each minute to undergo the fate of that Indian traveler who received such a jolt that he bit off the tip of his own tongue, or of Horace Greeley, whose head was bumped, it is said, through the roof of his conveyance. Here, as upon the eastern side of the Wasatch, the track was marked by never-ending lines of skeletons of mules and oxen.

On the first evening from Salt Lake, we escaped once more from man at Stockton, a Gentile mining settlement in Rush Valley, too small to be called a village, though possessed of a municipality, and claiming the title of “city.” By night we crossed by Reynolds’ Pass the Parolom or Cedar Range, in a two-horse “jerky,” to which we had been shifted for speed and safety. Upon the heights the frost was bitter; and when we stopped at 3 A.M. for “supper,” in which breakfast was combined, we crawled into the stable like flies in autumn, half killed by the sudden chill. My miner spoke but once all night. “It‘s right cold,” he said; but fifty times at least he sang “The Wearing of the Green.” It was his only tune.

Soon after light, we passed the spot where Captain Gunnison of the Federal Engineers, who had been in 1853 the first explorer of the Smoky Hill route, was killed “by the Ute Indians.” Gunnison was an old enemy of the Mormons, and the spot is ominously near to Rockwell‘s home. Here we came out once more into the alkali, and our troubles from dust began. For hours we were in a desert white as snow; but for reward we gained a glorious view of the Goshoot Range, which we crossed by night, climbing silently on foot for hours in the moonlight. The walking saved us from the cold.

The third day – a Sunday morning – we were at the foot of the Waroja Mountains, with Egan Canyon for our pass, hewn by nature through the living rock. You dare swear you see the chisel-marks upon the stone. A gold-mill had years ago been erected here, and failed. The heavy machinery was lost upon the road; but the four stone walls contained between them the wreck of the lighter “plant.”

As we jolted and journeyed on across the succeeding plain, we spied in the far distance a group of black dots upon the alkali. Man seems very small in the infinite expanse of the Grand Plateau – the roof, as it were, of the world. At the end of an hour we were upon them – a company of “overlanders” “tracking” across the continent with mules. First came two mounted men, well armed with Deringers in the belt, and Ballard breech-loaders on the thigh, prepared for ambush – ready for action against elk or red-skin. About fifty yards behind these scowling fellows came the main band of bearded, red-shirted diggers, in huge boots and felt hats, each man riding one mule, and driving another laden with packs and buckets. As we came up, the main body halted, and an interchange of compliments began. “Say, mister, thet‘s a slim horse of yourn.” “Guess not – guess he‘s all sorts of a horse, he air. And how far might it be to the State of Varmount?” “Wall, guess the boys down to hum will be kinder joyed to see us, howsomever that may be.” Just at this moment a rattlesnake was spied, and every revolver discharged with a shout, all hailing the successful shot with a “Bully for you; thet hit him whar he lives.” And on, without more ado, they went.

Even the roughest of these overlanders has in him something more than roughness. As far as appearance goes, every woman of the far West is a duchess, each man a Coriolanus. The royal gait, the imperial glance and frown, belong to every ranchman in Nevada. Every fellow that you meet upon the track near Stockton or Austin City, walks as though he were defying lightning, yet this without silly strut or braggadocio. Nothing can be more complete than the ranchman‘s self-command, save in the one point of oaths; the strongest, freshest, however, of their moral features is a grand enthusiasm, amounting sometimes to insanity. As for their oaths, they tell you it is nothing unless the air is “blue with cusses.” At one of the ranches where there was a woman, she said quietly to me, in the middle of an awful burst of swearing, “Guess Bill swears steep;” to which I replied, “Guess so” – the only allusion I ever heard or hazarded to Western swearing.

Leaving to our north a snowy range – nameless here, but marked on European maps as the East Humboldt – we reached the foot of the Ruby Valley Mountains on the Sunday afternoon in glowing sunshine, and crossed them in a snow-storm. In the night we journeyed up and down the Diamond or Quartz Range, and morning found us at the foot of the Pond Chain. At the ranch – where, in the absence of elk, we ate “bacon,” and dreamt we breakfasted – I chatted with an agent of the Mail Company on the position of the ranchmen, divisible, as he told me, into “cooks and hostlers.” The cooks, my experience had taught me, were the aptest scholars, the greatest politicians; the hostlers, men of war and completest masters of the art of Western swearing. The cooks had a New England cut; the hostlers, like Southerners, wore their hair all down their backs. I begged an explanation of the reason for the marked distinction. “They are picked,” he said, “from different classes. When a boy comes to me and asks for something to do, I give him a look, and see what kind of stuff he‘s made of. If he‘s a gay duck out for a six-weeks’ spree, I send him down here, or to Bitter Wells; but if he‘s a clerk or a poet, or any such sorter fool as that, why then I set him cooking; and plaguy good cooks they make, as you must find.”

The drivers on this portion of the route are as odd fellows as are the ranchmen. Wearing huge jack-boots, flannel shirts tucked into their trowsers, but no coat or vest, and hats with enormous brims, they have their hair long, and their beards untrimmed. Their oaths, I need hardly say, are fearful. At night they wrap themselves in an enormous cloak, drink as much whisky as their passengers can spare them, crack their whips, and yell strange yells. They are quarrelsome and overbearing, honest probably, but eccentric in their ways of showing it. They belong chiefly to the mixed Irish and German race, and have all been in Australia during the gold rush, and in California before deep sinking replaced the surface diggings. They will tell you how they often washed out and gambled away a thousand ounces in a month, living like Roman emperors, then started in digging-life again upon the charity of their wealthier friends. They hate men dressed in “biled shirts,” or in “store clothes,” and show their aversion in strange ways. I had no objection myself to build fires and fetch wood; but I drew the line at going into the sage-brush to catch the mules, that not being a business which I felt competent to undertake. The season was advanced, the snows had not yet reached the valleys, which were parched by the drought of all the summer, feed for the mules was scarce, and they wandered a long way. Time after time we would drive into a station, the driver saying, with strange oaths, “Guess them mules is clared out from this here ranch; guess they is into this sage-brush;” and it would be an hour before the mules would be discovered feeding in some forgotten valley. Meanwhile the miner and myself would have revolver practice at the skeletons and telegraph-posts when sage fowl failed us, and rattlesnakes grew scarce.

After all, it is easy to speak of the eccentricities of dress and manner displayed by Western men, but Eastern men and Europeans upon the plateau are not the prim creatures of Fifth Avenue or Pall Mall. From San Francisco I sent home an excellent photograph of myself in the clothes in which I had crossed the plateau, those being the only ones I had to wear till my baggage came round from Panama. The result was, that my oldest friends failed to recognize the portrait. At the foot I had written “A Border Ruffian:” they believed not the likeness, but the legend.

The difficulties of dress upon these mountain ranges are great indeed. To sit one night exposed to keen frost and biting wind, and the next day to toil for hours up a mountain-side, beneath a blazing sun, are very opposite conditions. I found my dress no bad one. At night I wore a Canadian fox-fur cap, Mormon ’coon-skin gloves, two coats, and the whole of my light silk shirts. By day I took off the coats, the gloves, and cap, and walked in my shirts, adding but a Panama hat to my “fit-out.”

As we began the ascent of the Pond River Range, we caught up a bullock-train, which there was not room to pass. The miner and myself turned out from the jerky, and for hours climbed alongside the wagons. I was struck by the freemasonry of this mountain travel: Bryant, the miner, had come to the end of his “solace,” as the most famed chewing tobacco in these parts is called. Going up to the nearest teamster, he asked for some, and was at once presented with a huge cake – enough, I should have thought, to have lasted a Channel pilot for ten years.

The climb was long enough to give me deep insight into the inner mysteries of bullock-driving. Each of the great two-storied Californian wagons was drawn by twelve stout oxen; still, the pace was not a mile an hour, accomplished, as it seemed to me, not so much by the aid as in spite of tremendous flogging. Each teamster carried a short-handled whip with a twelve-foot leathern lash, which was wielded with two hands, and, after many a whirl, brought down along the whole length of the back of each bullock of the team in turn, the stroke being accompanied by a shout of the bullock‘s name, and followed, as it was preceded, by a string of the most explosive oaths. The favorite names for bullocks were those of noted public characters and of Mormon elders, and cries were frequent of “Ho, Brígham!” “Ho, Jóseph!” “Ho, Gránt!” – the blow falling with the accented syllable. The London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would find at Pond River ranch an excellent opening for a mission. The appointed officer should be supplied with two Deringers and a well-filled whisky-barrel.