Camp must be made before the lake was sighted. The next morning the march was resumed, this time straight for a shoulder or butte which rose plain in view across the open, brushy flat. And on this morning of September 6, 1843, climbing the butte the breathless company—Boy Oliver no more excited than Lieutenant Frémont or Kit Carson themselves—gazed out over the Great Salty Lake, at last.
Silent it lay, sluggishly heaving, its shores uninhabited and bare. No city of Ogden anear floated upon the clear air the smoke plumes of man’s supremacy; no Mormon plough had yet stirred the soil by the River Jordan, nor had Mormon trowel laid a single brick of the capital of the State of Utah. The lonely waves washed heavily the whitened lonely beach; the wide lonely surface was broken by but two or three high rocky islands, blue in distance. Beyond, at the far extremity of this inland sea, lifted vague peaks; eyries from whose lofty crags as from a watch-tower peered abroad the couchant genie of the place.
Kit Carson, his weather-beaten face sober, from the saddle scanned intently. As he stood leaning upon his rifle, Lieutenant Frémont’s bold blue eyes flashed with triumph, and his hawk-nose jutted the more dominantly. Scarcely a word was spoken. All were too excited and too absorbed to cheer.
Then, as they gazed, down from those eyries beyond swooped in guise of big black clouds (as in the Arabian Nights) the guardians of this secret spot. They poured from the distant mountain-tops across the darkening water, and with furiously swirling draperies covered islands and everything.
“Wagh!” muttered William New. “Better be getting out o’ hyar! Spirits air angry.”
“We’ll make camp in that first grove, up the river,” said Lieutenant Frémont. “And to-morrow we’ll put things in shape for a trip on the lake. There’s a lot of work to be done, in the way of surveying it.”
Driven backward by the thunder-storm, they retired to a grove of great poplars, about nine miles inland from the butte.