The heart of the continent : a record of travel across the plains and in Oregon, with an examination of the Mormon principle

Front matter

)e

THE

HEART OF THE CONTINENT

Chapter I. Paqk The Setting Out 1

CHAPTER H.

CHAPTER m.

FROM THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES . . . 102

CHAPTER IV.

pike's PIKE AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS .... 139

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VH.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE DEAD SEA. — THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY

'OF ITS BASIN 376

CHAPTER IX.

Yl CONTENTS.

CHAPTER X.

PAOB ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON ... ... 445

CHAPTER XL

THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT.

CHAPTER I.

THE SETTING OUT.

I MIGHT pass over without a word the whole line of railway communication between New York and Atchison, on the Missouri River, were it not that the uniform kindness of its officers to the party of which I was a member, and their interest in the artistic and scientific purposes of our expedition, deserve to be as well known by our acknowledgment, as their roads are without our mention.

The moment that we stated our project to Mr. Scott and the other officers of the Pennsylvania Central, they not only presented the entire party with transportation over their own road to Pittsburg, but gave us letters of introduction which insured our being treated with similar courtesy on all the remaining roads to St. Louis.

To them, to the officers of the Crestline route between Pittsburg and Cincinnati, and to Messrs. Larned and M' Alpine of the Cincinnati and St. Louis road, we owe recognition, no less for the fine spirit of appreciation and helpfulness in which they received our enterprise, than for the diminution effected by their kindness in the burdens of a necessarily very expensive journey. There can scarcely be a better indica-

1 N tion for the future of Science, Art, and Literature in our country, than the cordiality which such a course as that of these gentlemen shows existing between those professions and Commerce. I might add that Commerce herself has reason to note this indication as gladly ; for Science, Art, and Literature are daughters of the same mature civilization as she, and together they flourish or decay.

At St. Louis we found a letter awaiting us from Colonel William Osborne, formerly of the Hannibal and St. Joseph's road and then President of the Platte County Railroad, extending between St. Joseph and the Missouri border opposite Atchison. This letter introduced us to Mr. Sturgeon, President of the Northern Railroad of Missouri, and, by the combined courtesy of these gentlemen, we were forwarded freely all the way to the Kansas terminus of railway communication. I shall have other such courtesies to acknowledge as our journey proceeds.

At St. Joseph we completed our outfit by the purchase of additional blankets and ammunition ; and after a few pleasant days spent in a family of personal friends, went down by rail to the starting-point of our Overland Journey.

Atchison is a small town, but a lively one. We had scarcely touched the ferry-wharf on the Kansas side before we were invited to a hanging. Lynch, C. J., was to sit that afternoon upon a couple of bushwhackers. His is a most impartial tribunal, which, to avoid giving offense, acquits nobody. The accused were, first, a man of fifty-five or thereabouts, a gray person who, in a more advanced state of society, might have bulled the gold market and cheated his acquaintance under the asgis of eminent respectability without the wa'gging of a reprobative tongue ; second, a young fellow of imperturbable address, whom Wall Street would have esteemed highly in the position of confidential clerk to the foregoing. Neither of them had any look of the popularly conceived criminal, — probably neither of them were any worse than fifty men in the crowd who clamored for their death. I heard one man, enthusiastic upon the even-handed justice of the occasion, who, if he had the theme of his eulogy meted to himself, would swing higher than Haman, or leave locks of his gray hair dabbled in blood upon every threshold in Atchison, — a man with the effrontery to live under the very noses of citizens whose crape for brothers slaughtered by him in the borderruffian times was scarce yet rusty on their wide-awakes. I speak thus, not because I deprecate stern frontier justice, but because the hands which administer it are nerved, almost invariably, by brute fury or caprice. In a new country, the indomitable pioneers who build the basement of civilization, have too much to do with subduing nature to bother their heads especially regarding government. But government, while mankind stays selfish, never can regulate itself While the workers are felling trees, breaking roads, and building cabins, the knaves and do-nothings get into political power. Before long the judge sits only to intimidate the just and excuse the villain. The sheriff's baton becomes a finger-post to loop-holes for the •escape of thieves and murderers. The jury and the malefactor wink at each other across a rail. The governor stands waiting with a pardon to poke a hole through the coarse legal sieve which has casually caught an exceptional rascal across a wire. The legislature pass laws with cunning quirks in them, provi-

4 THE HEART OF THE COKTINENT.

dent against a day when these shall be convenient for themselves. When this occurs, and the honest men find it out, Lynch-law is the only practical transition to a good form of government. A most horrible thing in the abstract, it becomes the sole thing in the concrete. Perhaps it is essential to it that it should in most cases be administered by a furious mob ; but that is the most horrible part of its horror to a stranger.

Nearly two thousand people were assembled in a deep ravine indented in the rolling plain back of the town, around a lone cotton-wood tree, under which stood the fatal wagon. Such a dreadful multitude may God keep from the death-scene of every man whose guilt is not double-dyed ! There was no attempt to classify it. Shaggy-bearded horsemen trampled under hoof swarming footmen, boys, and, shame to say it, women. Here and there stood the unhitched wagons of whole families who had come in from distant ranches to make gala-day of the execution. These were the objects of general envy, for the view from their pedestals was not only more commanding, but more comfortable. It was a selfish sort of enjoyment to sit one's saddle at such a place. Stern Justice and Domestic Felicity were both satisfied in the little family party which sat — grown people on boards, children on knees, babes in arms — cracking grim jokes with each other till the dreadful melodrama should begin.

The trial was a short one. It was testified that the two accused had proceeded to the ranche of an old farmer living twenty miles out in the wilds back of Atchison; had beaten him insensible with a pistolbutt ; knocked his wife down with a chair ; and then hung his boy, a child of twelve years, tiU, to save himself from suifocation, he consented to reveal the hiding-place of the farmer's funds. Taking these, whicli amounted to forty dollars, and all the horses in the corral, they had returned to the Missouri, converted the animals into cash, and, without the least attempt at absconding, began to enjoy their gains in speculation. Three days from the date of their crime they were in the hands of Lynch.

These facts having been announced to the crowd, an opportunity, as they say in other assemblies, was given for the brethren to make a few remarks. One man on horseback, better dressed and more refined in his appearance than the rest, held the attention of the crowd with a speech of equal force and freedom from temper, in which he drew a sketch of the defenselessness which would result to the settler if, in his lonely cabin, he could not be sure that prompt and certain vengeance hung over his would-be assassins. The people heard him with a running fire of murmurs, — saying, "Good!" "That's it T" and "I'm there too !" when he concluded his little speech with a vote for the instant death of both the bushwhackers. He was followed by others who spoke less ably, but all to the same point ; and the crowd finally decided that the younger man should be executed at once, — the elder have respite till the next day but one succeeding. I may be uncharitable to communities of incipient civilization, but the respite seemed to me granted rather with a view to thrifty economy of pleasures than for the sake of pity and completed shrift. Indeed, one person told me, " If we hung 'em both on Thursday, we shouldn't have anybody to hang on Saturday."

The sentence being determined, its subject was asked by the immediate committee in charge, what he had to say for himself.

" Nothing," he replied, in a tone of nonchalance ; " only that you're going to murder a better man than any of yourselves."

He was lifted to the wagon ; surveyed the stony faces of the crowd with a quick glance that took in no single look of pity ; the rope was adjusted, the wagon driven away, and there, a horrid fruit of man's hateful passions, he hung, uncovered to all vengeful eyes, and the pure, sweet, but unhelping heaven of May, quivering from the limb of the cotton-wood.

This is the wickedness of Lynch executions. Like old Tyburn, they rear more gallows-birds than they intimidate. The horribly hardening effects of public deaths was visible, audible in all the crowd. As the poor wretch swung there, now past injuring them, and to all noble natures an object of pity, if only for the first time, the men cracked their brutal jokes, and women laughed at them. Mothers pointed their boys to the tree, not as to a warning, but a spectacle.

" This is not, nor it cannot come to good ! "

With glutted eyes and unmoved hearts the crowd slowly withdrew from their place of fascination ; but, as their murmur lessened, the air was broken with wails of agony which might have melted a Marat. Lying at full length in a wagon outside of the crowd's former hem, a young woman, without friend or comforter, was crying aloud for a husband whom she called God to witness had been cruelly murdered.

These things are too horrible to dwell upon. We, at the East, are apt to think that the punishment of our old national transgressions is all condensed in the war which has smitten us so sorely. But I felt within myself, that day at Atchison, that the bitter seed sown by ruffians under the segis of our Federal Government never bore fruit more poison to the constitution of society than such executions as had just taken place. It is but little wonder that the contempt for law, as the sum of all atrocities under a sanctified disguise, which was studiously cultivated among the people of Kansas by a past Administration, should breed to-day all manner of cruelties, though the powers that be have changed. Barbaric habitudes of society cannot be nurtured for years, and then uprooted in a week. The arrow has been withdrawn from her heart; but "bleeding Kansas " bleeds still.

I know all the palliations which a young society may plead for its excesses ; but I must say that the recklessness which met me in the street, at the business places, in my hotel, after the execution, made me wonder whether I was on earth or in hell. Women in the dress of ladies leaned across the tea-table and asked, "Have you been to the hanging ?" with as much sang-froid as a New Yorker might say, " Have you seen Faust?" Then, between sips of tea and bites of biscuit, such as had been, regaled those who had not, with particulars that made a stranger sicken at his food.

I was expressing my surprise to an indigenous acquaintance made that morning, when he replied, " Haven't been long in Kansas, have you ? " " Six hours," I informed him. " Thought so. Lord bless you, nobody thinks anything of being hanged in this country ! Why, in one Kansas settlement there lived an old man who was too lazy to do anything for his living, and whose neighbors had to support him, until finally they got tired of sendin' on him things, and concluded to put him out of his misery. When he stood on the wagon, with the rope around his neck, one new settler in the crowd took pity on him, and called out, ' Hold hard ! ye needn't hang him. I'll give him ten bushel o' corn.' ' Is it shelled ? ' drawled the old man in his old, lazy voice. ' No, — 'ta'nt,' says the settler. ' Drive on with your wagon,' says the old man."

After which veritable history, my new acquaintance looked up at the sky, remarked that it was a pity they didn't hang both the bushwhackers, " it was such a nice day for liangin'," and bid me good-by with regrets that I could not stay over io-morrow.

To turn an Eastern man's notions still more completely topsy-turvy on the subject of tribunals and government, as we went down to the coach-office to arrange for our places overland, we met an agent, whom we had expected to transact with, going over to Leavenworth between two dragoons, to answer before the Brigadier-General of the Department for having violated some freight contract on the stageroute. I began to wonder whether, if we stayed a little longer in Atchison, we should not see a soldier tried for desertion in a justice court, or a churchmember turned out of the fold for heresy by a surrogate.

The Massasoit House, though far enough from resembling its ever-memorable namesake in Springfield, was still a very creditable hotel for a place on the extreme borders of civilization ; and we should have slept well but for the fact that a party of ranchmen and wagon-drivers, who had come into town for holiday, saw fit to end their pleasantly stimulating afternoon by a night of carouse in a neighboring rum-shop. Fiddles, that were a fortuitous concourse of wood and catgut, without any attempt to systematize them or their noise; the sound of heels in the breakdown, loud swearing and yells for drink, kept us awake till a late hour of our last night on the Missouri River. It was not astonishing that, after a series of such unimagined horrors as we had passed through, an Eastern lady just arrived should have asked us next morning, "whether those were bushwhackers next door."

The hour of eight saw us embarked upon our vehicle, with all the baggage which it was absolutely necessary to carry : our commissary stores in boxes under our feet, where they might be easy of access in any of those frequent cases of semi-starvation which occur at the stations between the Missouri and the Pacific. Our guns hung in their cases by the straps of the wagon-top ; our blankets were folded under us to supplement the cushions. To guard against any emergency, we were dressed exactly as we should want to be, if need occurred to camp out all night. We wore broad slouch hats of the softest felt, which made capital night-caps for an out-door bed ; blue flannel shirts with breast-pockets, the only garment, as far as material goes, which in all weathers or climates is equally serviceable, healthful, and comfortable; stout pantaloons of gray Cheviot, tucked into knee-boots ; revolvers and cartouche-boxes on belts of broad leather about our waists ; and light, loose linen sacks over all. I may here anticipate, in order to dismiss the subject, by saying that a few hundred miles made some changes expedient in our attire. We doffed our sacks, and rode in our hunting-shirts ; we took off our belts, and slung them with holsters and ammunition beside our guns ; and exchanged our boots for loose slipperSj which are much less galling during a protracted wagon-journey, keeping the former close at hand for use when we had, as sometimes happened, to ease the horses over a hard piece of road by walking ourselves.

The Overland Mail vehicle is of that description known as the Concord wagon, — a stout oblong box on springs, painted red, with heavy wheels and axles, having a flat arched roof of water-proof cloth erected on strong posts, like those of a rockaway, and to this are attached curtains of the same fabric, which in bad weather may be let down and buttoned so tight as to make the sides practically as proof against storms as the top. In fine weather, when the curtains are up, no airier arrangement or more unobstructed view could be desired. The seats of the wagon are three, the passengers at the end sitting vis-a-vis ; those in the middle looking forward, with their backs against a strap hooked to the side-posts, as in the old-fashioned stage-coach. Six persons can ride comfortably inside, if they are only used to sleeping in an upright position; but the great pressure of travel to Denver often at that day compelled passengers to ride three on a seat, — an arrangement calculated to give one the liveliest ideas of the horrors of a negro hold on the middle passage. By the politeness of Messrs. Ben Holladay and Center, we were furnished with such letters to the Atchison agent of their line as insured us a stage to ourselves as far as Denver ; and Mr. Munger, the superintendent between Atchison and Fort Kearney, did everything in his power to make our ride as comfortable as it could be. Just before we set out, we became acquainted with a Denver gentleman, Mr. Kershaw, and a lady in his charge, who were both anxious to reach Colorado by the earliest conveyance. We accordingly offered them our remaining seats, and had no occasion to regret the hospitality, finding them most pleasant companions as far as they went with us, and becoming afterward indebted to them for many courtesies in Colorado.

Just before we left, Mr. Hunger got word from further west that the buffaloes had started northward for their summer resorts, and were now reported upon the south bank of the Republican Fork of the Kaw. We immediately made up our minds not to lose their visit, as we might have no second chance of seeing them in their glory, perhaps none of seeing them at all, if we went on to Denver without stopping, and returned from the Pacific coast — as was then possible, and eventually proved actual — by the way of Panama or Nicaragua. We accordingly made arrangements with Mr. Munger to lie by and wait for him about one hundred and eighty-five miles west of Atchison, at Comstock's Ranche in Nebraska. He, meanwhile, would make some final preparations for the proposed foray on the Kaw, and meet us at the ranche, or overtake us on the road in his light double buggy. The good sense of this course was afterward proved to our great satisfaction, as we never again saw buffaloes in a state of nature after leaving the Republican Fork, passing Fort Kearney, where the main herd makes its most frequent transit to the plains north of the Platte, some weeks before they crossed the road there.

The Concord wagon rumbled out of Atchison, and we were fairly on " The Plains." For a while we were accompanied by picket fences ; but these, in despair at the idea of limiting immensity, soon gave way to rails, and by the time we reached Lancaster, — a station merely, not a town, — ten miles out of Atchison, the rails themselves had succumbed, and we were running through an unbroken waste.

"The Plains" are very different in their character from the Prairies. Nowhere, after leaving the Missouri River westward, does the traveller behold such stretches of grass running to the horizon, everywhere level like the sea, as he finds in Illinois. The great sedimentary deposits which form the prairies proper, were laid in a period of long quiet, and denuded of their superadjacent water by a slow uniform upheaval, or equally slow evaporation, which embraced much larger tracts of country than the formative influences further west. As might be expected, the land gives evidence of more spasmodic and irregular disturbances the nearer we approach the great spinal mountain-chain of the Continent.

The grass around us was long and rich. Prairie-hens abounded in it, seeming almost as tame as barn-yard fowl. They were continually coming to the road and running ahead of the horses, so close to us, indeed, that, had we chosen, we might have bagged the whole party's supper from the wagon as we rode. The common plover were only less plenty, dodging about in the grass with their peculiar culprit manner as we approached. The mourning dove, a little creature of lovely shape and typical color, whose haunts embrace the entire Plains region, fluttered or hopped constantly about us in pairs. Several varieties of hawks, one of which we afterward discovered to be a true falcon ; some large ravens, and a species of meadow-lark, were the other principal birds which attracted our attention on this day.

The air was delightfully soft, the sky clear, and the road in excellent condition, even without considering that Nature and the wheels of travel are here the only menders of highway. In some places it was as compact and smooth as the finest gravel roads of the East. Indeed, with the exception of the portion traversing the terrible desert of Utah, and a few shorter pieces elsewhere, the entire route astonished me by its excellence.

Just after sundown we arrived at Seneca, a settlement as well as a station, sixty miles from Atchison. Here we took tea in quite an ambitious frame tavern, and our eyes lay lingeringly on the shingle of Civilization's last justice of the peace. There was a tinshop in Seneca ; I think a lawyer's office ; and there were several dwelling-houses.

After the darkness came on, and we rolled away from Seneca into its darkness, I began to realize that we were not going to stop anywhere for the night. It was a strange sensation, this ; like being in an armchair, and sentenced not to get out of it from the Missouri to California.

I do not know whether it is necessary to inform anybody that the Overland Mail travelled night and day. I had known it always, but I never felt it till about twelve o'clock the first night out, when my legs began growing unpleasantly long, and my feet swelled to such a size that they touched all the boxes and musket-butts upon the floor. When these symptoms were further accompanied by a dull heat between the shoulders, and a longing for something soft applied to the nape of the neck, I wondered whether this was not what people on shore called wanting to go to bed. The facilities for such a gratification were so amusingly scanty that I con-eluded I must be mistaken. The back cushions of the wagon were stuffed as hard as cricket-balls, and the seat might have been the flat side of a bat. I tried fastening my head in a corner by a pocket-handkerchief sling ; but just as unconsciousness arrived, the head was sure to slip out, and, in despair, I finally gave over trying to do anything with it. At Guittards', a station famous among such passengers as have reached there in proper season for delicious suppers, we to-night stopped only long enough to change horses, and I took advantage of the halt to climb to the box. Here I rode the rest of the night, convinced that I could not surrender to Sleep until he had made a more protracted siege around the outworks. I felt convinced that my friends inside would not miss me, they having, some time before, reached that stage of sensation in which a stage-floor seems piled with human feet. When the fresh team started out with a plunge, and the fresh night-breath of the Plains began fanning my forehead, the fever of unsuccessful sleepiness left me, and I enjoyed myself as much as if I were not sure it would return to-morrow.

During the night, near a small settlement called Marysville, we forded the Big Blue, one of the largest streams in this portion of Kansas — timbered with cotton-woods, sycamores, oaks, and occasional elms — and, a little after sunrise, stopped at " Seventeen Mile Point," one hundred and eleven miles from Atchison, and the last station this side of Nebraska.

The stations on the Overland Road, between the Missouri and Denver, generally consist of a single wooden house, with stables attached, and a large corral, or inclosed yard, just adjacent. Some of the more ambitious station-keepers cultivate several acres of land adjoining, in which case the traveller is delighted by the entrance of fresh vegetables into a bill of fare, which is elsewhere unquahfied pork and greasy potatoes. Occasionally, too, the station-keeper has both time and penchant for hunting ; the happy result being buffalo-hump, antelope-steaks, and fricassee of prairie-chickens. But the majority of these important personages seem to have retired from the world under the influence of an ascetic spirit, and take grim delight in visiting the wrongs inflicted upon them by the society which they have left, on the innocent wayfarer compelled to pay for their hospitality. Many of them have married copartners in their social grudge ; stern females, who boil bad coffee in an affronted manner, and hand you hot saleratus biscuit with an air of personal insult. All their principal supplies are drawn from Atchison by the Mail Company's conveyances ; and it is no unusual occurrence to lack sugar as well as milk in your tea, because "that stage" hasn't brought up the last order. The station-keepers charge variously from fifty cents in Kansas to a dollar in Nebraska, and westward, for every meal, without regard to quality. Their charges upon the passengers they collect personally (though it is possible to buy meal-tickets at Atchison for the whole route) ; the board of the drivers is paid by the Company, who keep an account with the keepers for them and the stable-tenders.

"While breakfast was cooking, I loaded a shot-gun, and started out for a short excursion in search of prairie-hens. Though we had seen numbers of them along the road, I was unable to start a single one in the grass. This I found to be the ordinary case at this hour of the morning and season of the year.

They wait till the sun is high and warm before they come out to strut and coquet with each other, — being the dandies and people of elegant leisure in the social system of the Plains. I got back to the station-house with the charge in my gun, yet with pleasant sensations of willingness to be charged myself, due to more than a mile's tramp through the rich grass of the breezy divide.

Just beyond the breakfast-place we entered Nebraska. The country now became wilder and somewhat more sterile. The signs of human occupation disappeared entirely, and with them the prairie-chickens became less and less abundant. These fowl, as may be known, flourish best in the neighborhood of settlements, — sometimes, like quail, relying principally, over tracts of many miles square, for most of their subsistence, upon gleanings from the rick and stubble field. When found to any extent in perfectly wild regions, they occupy some secret spot far in the bosom of the Plains, where their natural food is steady and abundant; but they always prefer grain when they can get it, and will accompany wagons or stages for miles to pick up the droppings. Though the prairie-fowl diminished, the plovers and doves were still abundant.

At Virginia City, one hundred and thirty miles from Atchison, the stage stopped for dinner about noon ; but our recollections of a station breakfast were not sufficiently fascinating to tempt us into sitting down at table. We now had occasion to congratulate ourselves on our provision in the matter of commissary stores, for, opening one of the boxes under our feet, we lunched, alfresco, under lee of the station-barn, on pilot-bread, sardines, and canned peaches. Our travelling larder contained, beside many duplicates of such a lunch as this, apple-butter, put up by the Shakers ; preserved green corn and tomatoes ; jars of assorted pickles, tamarinds, and cans of beef, prepared by a process which left nothing but salt and heating necessary for the creation of a capital ragout. Before these stores were exhausted we had repeated occasion to thank them for three meals a day, several days in succession. Indeed, wherever we stopped long enough to do, or get any cooking done, on our behalf, we always varied our else carnivorous meal by something succulent from the Shakers' tins.

By this time the whole party were greatly distressed from loss of sleep. A more sad-eyed, out-all-nigh tish set I never saw anywhere. But all of them except myself were just far enough gone in fatigue to take cat-naps against their strap or in their corners. My head was swollen with fever, but I could not succumb. After half an hour's vain attempt at sleeping in a heap, I left my room to the others who were in a condition to prefer it to the company of the best of friends, and once more sought the stage-box, where it was blowing a gale of wind that made fever and hats alike difficult to hold on to.