130 LIFE IN THE FAR WEST. 



could escape, the whites were upon them with loud shouts, 

 and in three minutes the scalps of eleven were dangling 

 from their saddle-horns. 



Struggling up mountains, slipping down precipices, 

 dashing over prairies which resounded with their Indian 

 songs, charging the Indians wherever they met them, and 

 without regard to their numbers ; frightening with their 

 lusty war-whoops the miserable Diggers, who were not 

 unfrequently surprised while gathering roots in the moun- 

 tain plains, and who, scrambling up the rocks and conceal- 

 ing themselves, like sage rabbits, in holes and corners, 

 peered, chattering with fear, as the wild and noisy troop 

 rode by : scarce drawing rein, they passed rapidly the 

 heads of Green and Grand Rivers, through a country 

 abounding in game and in excellent pasture ; encountering 

 in the upland valleys, through which meandered the well- 

 timbered creeks on which they made their daily camps, 

 many a band of Yutas, through whom they dashed at 

 random, caring 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, walled 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 re- 

 ported, neither human nor animal life can be supported. 

 No oases cheer the wanderer in the unbroken solitude of 

 the vast wilderness. 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, impreg- 

 nated with the impurities of the soil through which it 



