Greater Britain Part 11

Little was heard of the Danites from the time that the Mormons were driven from Illinois and Missouri until 1852, when murder after murder, ma.s.sacre after ma.s.sacre, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTER ROCKWELL.--P. 154.]

The atrocities culminated in the Mountain Meadows ma.s.sacre 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 ma.s.s 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 ident.i.ty 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 sh.o.r.es, and the Wasatch, Goshoot, Waroja, Toi, Abbe, 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 b.u.mped, 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 munic.i.p.ality, and claiming the t.i.tle of "city." By night we crossed by Reynolds' Pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s, 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 d.u.c.h.ess, each man a Coriola.n.u.s. 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 cla.s.ses. 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 pa.s.sengers 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 'c.o.o.n-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 pa.s.s. 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, Brigham!" "Ho, Joseph!" "Ho, Grant!"--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.

Through a gap in the mountain crest we sighted the West Humboldt Range, across an open country dotted here and there with stunted cedar, and, crossing Smoky Valley, we plunged into a deep pa.s.s in the Toi Abbe Range, and reached Austin--a mining town of importance, rising two years old--in the afternoon of the fourth day from Salt Lake City.

After dining at an Italian digger's restaurant with an amount of luxury that recalled our feasts at Salt Lake City, I started on a stroll, in which I was stopped at once by a shout from an open bar-room of "Say, mister!" Pulling up sharply, I was surrounded by an eager crowd, asking from all sides the one question: "Might you be Professor Muller?"

Although flattered to find that I looked less disreputable and ruffianly than I felt, I nevertheless explained as best I could that I was no professor--only to be a.s.sured that if I was any professor at all, Muller or other, I should do just as well: a mule was ready for me to ride to the mine, and "Jess kinder fix us up about this new lode." If my new-found friends had not carried an overwhelming force of pistols, I might have gone to the mine as Professor Muller, and given my opinion for what it was worth: as it was, I escaped only by "liquoring up" over the error. Cases of mistaken ident.i.ty are not always so pleasant in Austin. They told me that, a few weeks before, a man riding down the street heard a shot, saw his hat fall into the mud, and, picking it up, found a small round hole on each side. Looking up, he saw a tall miner, revolver smoking in hand, who smiled grimly, and said: "Guess thet's my muel." Having politely explained when and where the mule was bought, the miner professed himself satisfied with a "Guess I was wrong--let's liquor."

In the course of my walk through Austin I came upon a row of neat huts, each with a board on which was painted, "Sam Sing, washing and ironing,"

or "Mangling by Ah Low." A few paces farther on was a shop painted red, but adorned with cabalistic scrawls in black ink; and farther still was a tiny joss house. Yellow men, in spotless clothes of dark-green and blue, were busy at buying and selling, at cooking, at washing. Some, at a short trot, were carrying burdens at the end of a long bamboo pole.

All were quiet, quick, orderly, and clean. I had at last come thoroughly among the Chinese people, not to lose sight of them again until I left Geelong, or even Suez.

Returning to the room where I had dined, I parted with Pat Bryant, quitting him, in Western fashion, after a good "trade" or "swop." He had taken a fancy to the bigger of my two revolvers. He was going to breed cattle in Oregon, he told me, and thought it might be useful for shooting his wildest beasts by riding in the Indian manner, side by side with them, and shooting at the heart. I answered by guessing that I "was on the sell;" and traded the weapon against one of his that matched my smaller tool. When I reached Virginia City, I inquired prices, and was almost disappointed to find that I had not been cheated in the "trade."

A few minutes after leaving the "hotel" at Austin, and calling at the post-office for the mails, I again found myself in the desert--indeed, Austin itself can hardly be styled an oasis: it may have gold, but it has no green thing within its limits. It is in canyons and on plains like these, with the skeletons of oxen every few yards along the track, that one comes to comprehend the full significance of the terrible entry in the army route-books--"No gra.s.s; no water."

Descending a succession of tremendous "grades," as inclines upon roads and railroads are called out West, we came on to the lava-covered plain of Reese's River Valley, a wall of snowy mountain rising grandly in our front. Close to the stream were a ranch or two, and a double camp, of miners and of a company of Federal troops. The diggers were playing with their glistening knives as diggers only can; the soldiers--their huge sombreros worn loosely on one side--were lounging idly in the sun.

Within an hour, we were again in snow and ice upon the summit of another nameless range.

This evening, after five sleepless nights, I felt most terribly the peculiar form of fatigue that we had experienced after six days and nights upon the plains. Again the brain seemed divided into two parts, thinking independently, and one side putting questions while the other answered them; but this time there was also a sort of half insanity, a not altogether disagreeable wandering of the mind, a replacing of the actual by an imagined ideal scene.

On and on we journeyed, avoiding the Shoshone and West Humboldt Mountains, but picking our way along the most fearful ledges that it has been my fate to cross, and traversing from end to end the dreadful Mirage Plains. At nightfall we sighted Mount Davidson and the Washoe Range, and at 3 A.M. I was in bed once more--in Virginia City.

CHAPTER XIX.

VIRGINIA CITY.

"Guess the governor's consid'rable skeert."

"You bet, he's mad."

My sitting down to breakfast at the same small table seemed to end the talk; but I had not been out West for nothing, so explaining that I was only four hours in Virginia City, I inquired what had occurred to fill the governor of Nevada with vexation and alarm.

"D'you tell now! only four hours in this great young city. Wall, guess it's a bully business. You see, some time back the governor pardoned a road agent after the citizens had voted him a rope. Yes, sir! But that ain't all: yesterday, cuss me if he didn't refuse ter pardon one of the boys who had jess shot another in play like. Guess he thinks hisself some pumpkins." I duly expressed my horror, and my informant went on: "Wall, guess the citizens paid him off purty slick. They jess sent him a short thick bit of rope with a label 'For his Excellency.' You bet ef he ain't mad--you bet! Pa.s.s us those mola.s.ses, mister."

I was not disappointed: I had not come to Nevada for nothing. To see Virginia City and Carson, since I first heard their fame in New York, had been with me a pa.s.sion, but the deed thus told me in the dining-room of the "Empire" Hotel was worthy a place in the annals of "Washoe."

Under its former name, the chief town of Nevada was ranked not only the highest, but the "cussedest" town in the States, its citizens expecting a "dead man for breakfast" every day, and its streets ranging from seven to eight thousand feet above the sea. Its twofold fame is leaving it: the Coloradan villages of North Empire and Black Hawk are nine or ten thousand feet above sea level, and Austin, and Virginia City in Montana beat it in playful pistoling and vice. Nevertheless, in the point of "pure cussedness" old Washoe still stands well, as my first introduction to its ways will show. All the talk of Nevada reformation applies only to the surface signs: when a miner tells you that Washoe is turning pious, and that he intends shortly to "vamose," he means that, unlike Austin, which is still in its first state of mule-stealing and monte, Virginia City has pa.s.sed through the second period--that of "vigilance committees" and "historic trees"--and is entering the third, the stage of churches and "city officers," or police.

The population is still a shifting one. A by-law of the munic.i.p.ality tells us that the "permanent population" consists of those who reside more than a month within the city. At this moment the miners are pouring into Washoe from north and south and east, from Montana, from Arizona, and from Utah, coming to the gayeties of the largest mining city to spend their money during the fierce short winter. When I saw Virginia City, it was worse than Austin.

Every other house is a restaurant, a drinking-shop, a gaming-h.e.l.l, or worse. With no one to make beds, to mend clothes, to cook food--with no house, no home--men are almost certain to drink and gamble. The Washoe bar-rooms are the most brilliant in the States: as we drove in from Austin at 3 A.M., there was blaze enough for us to see from the frozen street the portraits of Lola Montez, Ada Menken, Heenan, and the other Californian celebrities with which the bar-rooms were adorned.

Although "petticoats," even Chinese, are scarce, dancing was going on in every house; but there is a rule in miners' b.a.l.l.s that prevents all difficulties arising from an over-supply of men: every one who has a patch on the rear portion of his breeches does duty for a lady in the dance, and as gentlemen are forced by the custom of the place to treat their partners at the bar, patches are popular.

Up to eleven in the morning hardly a man was to be seen: a community that sits up all night, begins its work in the afternoon. For hours I had the blazing hills called streets to myself for meditating ground; but it did not need hours to bring me to think that a Vermonter's description of the climate of the mountains was not a bad one when he said: "You rise at eight, and shiver in your cloak till nine, when you lay it aside, and walk freely in your woolens. At twelve you come in for your gauze coat and your Panama; at two you are in a hammock cursing the heat, but at four you venture out again, and by five are in your woolens. At six you begin to shake with cold, and shiver on till bedtime, which you make darned early." Even at this great height, the thermometer in the afternoon touches 80 Fahr. in the shade, while from sunset to sunrise there is a bitter frost. So it is throughout the plateau. When morning after morning we reached a ranch, and rushed out of the freezing ambulance through the still colder outer air to the fragrant cedar fire, there to roll with pain at the thawing of our joints, it was hard to bear it in mind that by eight o'clock we should be shutting out the sun, and by noon melting even in the deepest shade.

As I sat at dinner in a miner's restaurant, my opposite neighbor, finding that I was not long from England, informed me he was "the independent editor of the _Nevada Union Gazette_," and went on to ask: "And how might you have left literatooral pursoots? How air Tennyson and Thomas T. Carlyle?" I a.s.sured him that to the best of my belief they were fairly well, to which his reply was: "Guess them ther men ken sling ink, they ken." When we parted, he gave me a copy of his paper, in which I found that he called a rival editor "a walking whisky-bottle" and "a Fenian imp." The latter phrase reminded me that, of the two or three dozen American editors that I had met, this New Englander was the first who was "native born." Stenhouse, in Salt Lake City, is an Englishman, so is Stanton, of Denver, and the whole of the remainder of the band were Irishmen. As for the earlier a.s.sertion in the "editorial," it was not a wild one, seeing that Virginia City has five hundred whisky-shops for a population of ten thousand. Artemus Ward said of Virginia City, in a farewell speech to the inhabitants that should have been published in his works: "I never, gentlemen, was in a city where I was treated so _well_, nor, I will add, so _often_." Through every open door the diggers can be seen tossing the whisky down their throats with a scowl of resolve, as though they were committing suicide--which, indeed, except in the point of speed, is probably the case.

The _Union Gazette_ was not the only paper that I had given me to read that morning. Not a bridge over a "crick," not even a blacked pair of boots, made me so thoroughly aware that I had in a measure returned to civilization as did the gift of an _Alta Californian_ containing a report of a debate in the English Parliament upon the Bank Charter Act.

The speeches were appropriate to my feelings; I had just returned not only to civilization, but to the European inconveniences of gold and silver money. In Utah, gold and greenbacks circulate indifferently, with a double set of prices always marked and asked; in Nevada and California, greenbacks are as invisible as gold in New York or Kansas.

Nothing can persuade the Californians that the adoption by the Eastern States of an inconvertible paper system is anything but the result of a conspiracy against the Pacific States--one in which they at least are determined to have no share. Strongly Unionist in feeling as were California, Oregon, and Nevada during the rebellion, to have forced greenbacks upon them would have been almost more than their loyalty would have borne. In the severest taxation they were prepared to acquiesce; but paper money they believe to be downright robbery, and the invention of the devil.

To me the reaching gold once more was far from pleasant, for the advantages of paper money to the traveler are enormous; it is light, it wears no holes in your pockets, it reveals its presence by no untimely clinking; when you jump from a coach, every thief within a mile is not at once aware that you have ten dollars in your right-hand pocket. The Nevadans say that forgeries are so common that their neighbors in Colorado have been forced to agree that any decent imitation shall be taken as good, it being too difficult to examine into each case. For my part, though in rapid travel a good deal of paper pa.s.sed through my hands in change, my only loss by forgery was one half-dollar note; my loss by wear and tear the same.