LIFE IN THE FAR WEST. 131 



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 scattered. 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 box-alder 

 and quaking-ash, which had hitherto fringed the creeks, 

 and where the deer and bear loved to resort the former to 

 browse on the leaves and tender shoots, the latter to devour 

 the fruit now entirely disappeared, and the only shrub seen 

 was the eternal sage-bush, which flourishes everywhere in 

 the western regions in uncongenial soils where other vege- 

 tation refuses to grow. The visible change in the scenery 

 had also a sensible effect on the spirits of the mountaineers. 

 They travelled on in silence through the deserted plains ; 

 the hi-hi-hiya of their Indian chants was no longer heard 

 enlivening the line of march. More than once a Digger 

 of the Piyutah tribe took himself and hair in safety from 

 their path, and almost unnoticed ; but as they advanced they 

 became more cautious in their movements, and testified, by 

 the vigilant watch they kept, that they anticipated hostile 

 attacks even in these arid wastes. They had passed with- 

 out molestation through the country infested by the bolder 

 Indians. The mountain Yutas, not relishing the appear- 

 ance of the hunters, had left them unmolested ; but they 

 were now entering a country inhabited by the most de- 

 graded and abject of the western tribes ; who, nevertheless, 

 ever suffering from the extremities of hunger, have their 

 brutish wits sharpened by the necessity of procuring food, 

 and rarely fail to levy a contribution of rations, of horse 

 or mule flesh, on the passenger in their inhospitable 

 country. The brutish cunning and animal instinct of 

 these wretches is such, that, although arrant cowards, their 

 attacks are more feared than those of bolder Indians. 

 These people called the Yamparicas or Root Diggers 

 are, nevertheless, the degenerate descendants of those tribes 

 which once overran that portion of the continent of North 





