180 LIFE IN THE FAR WEST 



not whether they were friends or foes. Passing many 

 other heads of streams, they struck at last the edge of 

 the desert, lying along the south-eastern base of the 

 Great Salt Lake, and which extends in almost unbroken 

 sterility to the foot of the range of the Sierra Nevada 

 a mountain chain, capped with perpetual snow, that 

 bounds the northern extremity of a singular tract of 

 country, willed by mountains and utterly desert, whose 

 salt lagoons and lakes, although fed by many streams, 

 find no outlet to the ocean, but are absorbed in the 

 spongy soil or thirsty sand, which characterise the 

 different portions of this deserted tract. In the 

 " Grand Basin," it is reported, neither human nor 

 animal life can be supported. No oases cheer the 

 wanderer in the unbroken solitude of the vast wilder- 

 ness. More than once the lone trapper has penetrated 

 with hardy enterprise, into the salt plains of the basin ; 

 but no signs of beaver or fur-bearing animal rewarded 

 the attempt. The ground is scantily covered with 

 coarse unwholesome grass that mules and horses refuse 

 to eat ; and the water of the springs, impregnated with 

 the impurities of the soil through which it percolates, 

 affords but nauseating draughts to the thirsty traveller. 

 In passing from the more fertile uplands to the lower 

 plains, as they descended the streams, the timber on 

 their banks became scarcer, and the groves more scat- 

 tered. The rich buffalo or grama grass was exchanged 

 for a coarser species, on which the hard- worked animals 

 soon grew poor and weak. The thickets of plum and 

 cherry, of boxalder and quaking ash, which had hitherto 



