342

CHURCH BUTTE AND FORT BRIDGER.

[1865. The butte is a strange irregular pile of bare gray earth, half a mile in circumference, hundreds of feet high. Crowned with masses of red sandstone, worn by the pitiless elements into all manner of fantastic forms, the mystic moonlight transforms it into a vast ruined cathedral with crumbling walls, quaint turrets and niches holding sculptured figures. There too we can trace a huge fallen sphinx with face downward, a long colonnade with half its noble pillars broken, great human heads, owls, eagles, centaurs, and two enormous lions couchant overlooking and guarding the whole. Fort Bridger, eight thousand feet above the sea, with gurgling rills threading its green parade ground and supplying its neat log barracks, is one of our most beautiful frontier posts. It was formerly a great rendezvous for traders and trappers. The traders lived with their families in secure forts, buying furs of the trappers and buffalo robes of the Indians. They professed to give St. Louis prices; but paid in coffee and sugar at two dollars per cup, calico at two dollars per yard and whisky and tobacco at corresponding rates. A cup of sugar was the ordinary payment for a buffalo robe.

A few of the trappers still survive, walking cyclopedias of narrow escapes and exciting adventures-living volumes of travel, incident and romance. Buffalo-hunts, hand-to-hand conflicts with grizzly bears, long wanderings when lost among the mountains, without food or shelter, miraculous endurance of hardships and wounds, and deadly fights with Indians, form the staple of their legendary lore. Sometimes a vein of quaint, unexpected humor runs through their stirring naratives.

While waiting breakfast at Fort Bridger, in the gray of this June morning, our party sat around the fire of the great sutlerstore of Judge Carter, who combines the functions of merchant and magistrate, listening to the tales of Jack Robinson, a trapper of forty years experience. He supplemented his history of hairbreadth 'scapes with the remark:

'But the most singular thing I ever did was to make a hundred and fifty Blackfoot Indians run.'

'How was that?' we asked.

'It was one year when the red devils were very hostile, and lifted the hair of every white man they could catch. Riding a

1865.]

AN OLD TRAPPER'S STORY.

343

swift horse, I suddenly came upon a party of them. I turned and ran and they all ran after me; but they didn't catch old Jack.'

From Fort Bridger in the fall of 1857, Colonel Marcy with a hundred men started through the mountains for Fort Massachusetts, New Mexico, to bring provisions for the Government expedition against Utah. They lost most of their animals, and were frequently compelled to break the track by crawling through the snow. After suffering untold hardships they at last reached their destination. American pioneer history has nothing more gallant than their energy and endurance.

We found the long warehouse of the post-sutler crowded with goods. His trade was said to net him seventy-five thousand dollars a year. We did ample justice to his hospitable breakfast, and listened wonderingly while his pretty daughters and their governess evoked music from their piano. The instrument an.swered spiritedly to their touch, manifesting neither loneliness nor debility after its journey of two thousand five hundred miles from New York, one-half the way in an ox-wagon.

When we pressed on, the day was charming. Coming from a desert dreary as Sahara, we began to view mountains that rival Switzerland, and skies of Italian beauty. The air was soft and warm; flowers abounded, and mosquitoes buzzed about us, though patches of snow were on all sides. From the ridges we looked over an immense area of green valleys gay with flowers, bright with silver streams; and mountains of every hue, dotted with dark cedars, streaked with snow, and lost in din, fleecy clouds. Once we stopped the coach, and in a little aspen thicket where the snow was fifteen feet deep, had a rough-and-tumble snow-balling frolic. But of this diversion man wants but little here below, nor wants that little long. So with well-pelted faces, stinging ears and aching hands, we came back over the greensward, among the mosquitoes, roses, sunflowers, violets, daisies, and forget-me-nots, to the dusty road.

We dined with a Mormon elder, whose young wife rarely gave us a glimpse of her black eyes. The driver assured us that she was his fifth-that her four predecessors all ran away from him. From his cheerful good humor I think the husband classed them among blessings which brightened when they took their flight.

344

THREE MORMON WIVES-ALL SISTERS. [1865

That evening we passed through Echo Canyon, twenty miles in length, a wonderful gorge in the mountains, where snows

often slide down and overwhelm travelers. As we crossed its flashing stream, and rattled over crazy log bridges, the scene grew wilder and wilder. On the left, steep, grassy, snowcrowned slopes; on the right, an abrupt wall of red conglomerate rock, with lateral canyons breaking it, with the somber mouths of dark caves opening into it, with

swallows' nests plastered to its crags, and those 'dewy masons of the eaves' twittering about them. Here the Mormons fortified on the approach of Johnston's army in 1857. Their rifle-pits in the valley, and their little stone houses with loop-holes, on the very top of the dizzy bluff, are still visible. Higher and higher towers the wall on our right, until smooth as if dressed with the hammer, true as if lined by the plummet, it rises two thousand feet. To see Echo Canyon is worth a journey across the Atlantic.

Emigration Canyon, the first route through the Wasatch mountains opened by the Mormons, is equally famous and almost equally grand. It begins six miles southeast of Salt Lake City, and abounds in wildest and most beautiful scenery.

On the fifth morning from Denver, we breakfasted with a Mormon bishop, who boasts three wives, all of them sisters.

Up one terrible hill, down on its opposite side, through a canyon-and then at our feet was a great basin, walled in by snowstreaked mountains, with blue lakes set like gems in its soft green, and a shining stream lying across it like a ribbon. In the midst of this happy valley, a picture of oriental beauty, we saw

1865.]

FIRST VIEW OF SALT LAKE VALLEY.

345

the neat houses, the quaint public buildings, the deep shade-trees, the broad streets and flashing rivulets of the City of Great Salt Lake.

Though several miles distant, we detected small objects in the town with perfect clearness. From a hill on the west, twenty-two miles away, I have twice distinctly seen the dwellings and trees of Salt Lake City. And trustworthy persons aver that, on clear days, the buildings of Fort Boise, Idaho, are seen with the naked eye, from War Eagle mountain, fifty-five miles, as the bird flies! Mr. Colfax was met by a band of music, and a cavalry escort which conducted him into Camp Douglas, where he paid his

346 SPEECHES AND RESPONSES-HOT SPRINGS. [1865.

respects to the commandant and was greeted with the speaker's salute of fifteen guns. Then approaching the city, weary, sunbrowned and dust-begrimed, he found the (Mormon) common council and citizens awaiting him on a bare hill. Of course there were speeches. W. H. Hooper, delegate to Congress, bade the party welcome to their mountain home, to note the beautiful city, the hundred villages, the two hundred mills and the thousands of farms they had established in this remote region. Here in the early days had they unfurled the Stars and Stripes from Ensign Peak; here had they mourned the loss of our beloved President; here had they reaped the benefits of Schuyler Colfax's life-long fidelity to frontier interests; here had they once welcomed Horace Greeley, always a true friend of the Territory and an honored member of that profession which directs public opinion.

Mr. Colfax the while, stood in the blazing sun, his head covered by a white handkerchief, his face wearing the resigned expression of a blessed martyr. At the close, he responded in one of those pointed speeches which, without a moment's preparation, flow from him as water gushes from a spring. A fervid eulogy upon Abraham Lincoln; a warm commendation of the boys in blue who won our battles; a brilliant picture of our country's future, in whose prosperity and honor Utah would share, if faithful to the constitution, devoted to the Union and obedient to the laws.

Remarks and hand-shakings ended, we drove through the city, very quiet on this Sunday morning, to one of the many tepid springs which abound in the Territory. A mile west of town the Sulphur Spring, as large as a man's thigh, gushes from a hill-side. The water is so hot (one hundred and two degrees) that one shrinks from its first touch, but soon finds it delightful. After ten minutes of plunging and swimming, he comes out cleansed from head to foot; every muscle relaxed, every nerve pervaded by delicious languor. It is claimed that the water possesses rare curative virtues for rheumatism.

Two miles further is the Hot Spring, spouting in a column larger than the body of a man, and hot enough to boil an egg. Among the ancients, its sulphurous smell and great clouds of mist and steam, would have declared it a mouth of Tartarus. Beside