IN THE OLD WEST 225 



Struggling up mountains, slipping down preci- 

 pices, dashing over prairies which resounded with 

 their Indian songs, charging the Indians wherever 

 they met them, and without regard to their num- 

 bers ; frightening with their lusty war-whoops the 

 miserable Diggers, who were not unfrequently sur- 

 prised while gathering roots in the mountain 

 plains, and who, scrambling up the rocks and con- 

 cealing 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-tim- 

 bered 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 un- 

 broken sterility to the foot of the range of the 

 Sierra Nevada — a mountain-chain, capped with 

 perpetual snow, that bounds the northern extrem- 

 ity 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 characterize the 



