152 LIFE IN THE FAR WEST. 



their daily camps, many a band of Yutas, throufrli 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 southeastern base of the Great Salt 

 Lake, and which extends in almost unbroken sterility to the foot 

 of the range of the Sierra Nevada — a m.ountain 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 characterizes 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 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, impregnated with 

 the impurities of the soil through which it percolates, affords but 

 nauseating draughts to the thirsty traveler. 



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- work- 

 ed 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 every where in 

 the western regions in uncongenial soils where other vegetation 

 refuses to grow. The visible change in the scenery had also a 



