132 A CALIFORNIA TRAMP. 



rest, and looked haggard and unhappy. The Indian was inso- 

 lent, and stood warming himself before the fire, holding in his 

 hand a bow and arrows. As we had been walking ahead of 

 the teams, we staid here to warm until they came up ; but we 

 gladly left the house, not liking the looks of the inmates. 

 Be3^ond here in a valley we came upon a camp of Mexicans, 

 on whom I aired my Spanish with poor success. You never 

 know how little you understand a language until you try to 

 utilize it. They looked like a pack of land-pirates, with their 

 knives, broad hats, and heads stuck through the centres of 

 their blankets. 



At sunset we came to a new settlement, called Beaver, com- 

 posed of three or four hundred people. It had been a dis- 

 appointment, as there had been frosts every month in the 

 year. At night we went to a religious meeting held in the 

 schoolhouse. The congregation was rough, and rudely clad, 

 in homespun, calico and buckskin. I saw here what reminded 

 me of the old-time Puritan worship : bowie knives and re- 

 volvers in church. There was no regular minister ; the ser- 

 vices being carried on by different members giving in their 

 " experience." Their language was rough and ungrammatical, 

 and some of the narrations so comical as to set the audience 

 to laughing. Some grew pathetic, and their hearers cried, and 

 on the whole they enjoyed themselves. One told how, when 

 once afflicted with a plague of grasshoppers, prayers for de- 

 liverance were made, when flocks of a peculiar bird, strange 

 to that country, came among them and devoured them all. 



We laid up the next da}^ for the purpose of recruiting our 

 mules and horses, so our conductors said ; but I thought that 

 the real reason was that the Beaver folks might get some of 

 our gold. Every village we passed through was formed, for 

 the time, into a toll house, wherein we would be systematically 

 relieved of our superfluity of evil's root. Our Mormons, know- 

 ing the poverty of their isolated brethren, favored them all 



