The rain turned into snow towards evening, and covered the mountains to their base, but melting as it fell where we were encamped, and with the cooing of the doves which filled the alders, the croaking of the frogs in the marsh next the river, and the patter of the rain upon the bushes, we had other music—nature's deep bass—in a constant roaring sound, like that of old ocean at full tide on a sand beach of the open coast of the Pacific; or like the sound of Niagara, heard half a mile away, but there was no discoverable cause.
Going a mile up and down the river from the camp—if there is up and down to a dead river—we still heard the sound, the same in tone and power. Our Wyandotte—a member of the party who had crossed the plains with Col. Fremont—suggested that it was "the Humboldt sinking."
All the day of the 4th of July we rested here, with our animals in clover, amid the snow which reached even to the foot of the mountains opposite, and the dirge played for us by the unseen hand. It was a quiet, still sweetly sad day—pleasant in memory, and such an one as we shall never spend again—so far from civilized humanity, and in a place so remote from human footsteps, it seemed a natural wonder which had never been properly examined and explained.
Sooner than the old trappers anticipated, will the Humboldt be lined with farms, and the little mountain valleys filled with grazing herds, and the church spire and the cross upon an unassuming building in the centre of a six mile square prairie, indicate the advance of civilization. Yet, except in the mud-lake localities, there is no tract of country that can well be more unpromising than that about the Humboldt; and not many years will elapse before science will make plain and palpable that wonder of the world, "the sinking of the Humboldt."
[CHAPTER XIII.]
Through the country we have thus briefly described, Carson and his men had trapped taking some small game, intending to return late in the season when the cold of this high altitude, with the sun low, was becoming terribly severe, while the grass was dead, and the birds of passage had all departed. Their prospects were cheerless and unpromising, nor were they at all improved after they left the Humboldt; for their route lay through an artemisia desert, varied only by an occasional little valley, where springs of water in the early season had induced the growth of grass.
On reaching Goose Creek, they found it frozen, so that there was no possibility of finding even roots, to satisfy their hunger. Though to-day this is the trail of California emigration, with plenty of grass, for a great portion of the way, in its season; now all was desolate, and inured as they were to hardship, Carson's men had never before suffered so much from hunger, nor did their animals fare much better. Capt. McCoy had taken with him all not needed by Carson's party, because he could give them food, and it was fortunate for them he had adopted this course.
The magnificent mountain scenery on the route could scarcely excite admiration or remark from this company of hungry, toil-worn men; even that unique exhibition of nature's improvised ideality, done in stone—pyramid circle—with its pagodas, temples, obelisks, and altars, within a curiously wrought rock wall, they only wished were the adobe walls and houses of Fort Hall. However, nothing daunted by the dreary prospect before them, they here bled their horses, and drank the precious draught, well knowing they were taking the wind from the sails upon which they must rely to waft them into port, if they ever reached it.