TO THE GREAT SOUTH PASS. 81 



escarpment between rocks which rise four hundred feet perpen- 

 dicularly above it, the width of the passage being thirty feet. 

 The bed of the stream is choked up with masses of rock which 

 have fallen from above, among which the river tumbles and 

 foames as it rushes onward through this diabolically named 

 defile. We were obliged to make somewhat of a detour to get 

 around the southern gate-post, and we encamped after noon 

 about a mile beyond, on a high, barren bluff, overlooking the 

 Sweet Water, which here flows through a level bottom, a half 

 a mile wide, and covered with a scanty growth of sapless grass. 

 So crooked was the river that it often doubled on itself as it 

 flowed along, looking from our elevated position like a huge 

 serpent crawling over the valley. In our search for grass we 

 found a good supply back of the granite hills, bordering the 

 northern shore of the Sweet Water; and in order that our 

 animals might recruit, we remained all day at out camping 

 place. 



The scenery along this river was gloomy and repulsive. 

 The snow-covered mountains gleaming in the far distance, the 

 gray, sage-covered plain, the river-flat, with its yellow, withered 

 grass, gave a cheerless picture, made still more so by the 

 numerous human graves, and carcasses and bones of oxen 

 which strewed the margins of the road and made a vast 

 charnel-house of the valley of the Sweet Water. Near the 

 Devil's Gate we saw where many men, women and children 

 had been buried by the roadside, the victims of a species of 

 plague which had attacked emigrants a few years before. Some 

 of them were unmarked, save by ominous depressions, while 

 others were covered b}^ huge rocks which kindly hands had 

 rolled over them to do double duty for the dead: as monu- 

 ments and protection from the fangs of wolf and coyote. Their 

 names had been rudely painted on these rocks, but the sun 

 and rain had nearly obliterated them. 



My occupation and its surroundings had about driven from 



