The next morning I started back for Fire Hole, riding with the broken machine as well as I could, and saw the Grotto in eruption. This one is a mound six or eight feet high, filled with large holes through which the water spurts in all directions. And the Growler was muttering, too. This is not much more than a hole in the earth, but the deep, guttural sound that comes forth every few minutes with a gush of hot steam, leaves the impression that it is well named. I might go on and describe the Castle, the Grand, the Giant, and others,—there are seventy-one of these spouting hot springs in the park—but will mention only one more, and that the greatest of all. It is the Excelsior at Hell’s Half Acre, an appropriate name, as you will see. It isn’t a half acre alone, but an acre and a quarter of water heated to the verge of boiling. The immense caldron is so obscured by clouds of steam that one only obtains momentary glimpses of its surface, but he who has seen it may well speak of it as an outflow from the infernal regions. There is no sight in the park more impressive. The water, boiling sometimes, is about four feet below the banks that enclose it on one side, on which it is continually making encroachments. These banks jut over it from having been hollowed away beneath, and there is danger in going too near, as it is not easy to tell when they will cave in. The whole surface about is made by a lime deposit, and behind as well as before the visitor are these lakes of heated water, from which arise clouds of steam that are colored green and red by the reflection from the water below. This geyser has been known to go off but once, and that in 1882, when it suddenly burst forth, sending a stream of hot water 300 feet into the air, and boiling over such a quantity that it raised Fire Hole River two feet. It played for nearly a week, then subsided, and has since remained comparatively quiet. I wet my feet in the warm water, then started on toward Fire Hole. The paint pots, springs of boiling mud of red, gray, and different colors, are to be seen in several localities.
The roads in many places are black with small pieces of glass, and I saw chunks of it by the road-side, from the Obsidian Cliffs, mountains of black and different colored glass, two or three hundred feet high; but these, as well as the Mammoth Hot Springs, I missed by not going forty miles out of my route. Still, as it was, I saw enough, much more than I can describe.
Reaching Fire Hole, where the only blacksmith’s shop within a hundred miles is situated, I found the blacksmith was off on a drunk, so I had to try and fix the handle bar or walk a hundred miles to Beaver Cañon, for my supply of money was nearly gone. But I found something with which to run a new thread upon the handle bar, and getting out the broken piece I screwed the shortened bar in place, and went on my way rejoicing.
The day before I started back for Beaver Cañon a detachment of United States troops were sent out in that direction from the park, to intercept and drive back a party of Indians who were reported on their way from a reservation to hunt in the park. The first day I saw and heard nothing of them, but the next forenoon, when about ten miles from any ranch, for the ranches are fifteen or twenty miles apart, an Indian came galloping up from across the meadow. According to tradition my scalp should have been the first thing he asked for, but instead he wanted to know, in broken English, if I had seen a party of Indians hunting, and asked where I came from, how many miles a day I could make, and the usual string of questions that almost every white person asks, and then he said, “You know my name?” I replied I had no recollections of ever meeting him before. “My name is Major Jim, Major,” with considerable emphasis on the last word; and with that we parted, and I reached Beaver Cañon without further incident.
Distance traveled with the wheel, 3,505 miles.
Chapter XXII.
Through the Black Cañon and the Royal Gorge.
One day’s ride by train from Beaver Cañon through a section of country composed mostly of sand and sage brush, overlying that same sheet of lava, and through Mormon cities of eight and ten thousand inhabitants, where they had made the desert blossom for miles around, brought me back to Salt Lake City. Here occurred the first rain that had caused even an hour’s delay in my trip since the middle of May, three months and a half ago. After leaving Omaha, sufficient rain had not fallen in the eight or ten States and Territories through which I had passed to dampen my shirt sleeves, and when I reached the Yellowstone, it had been so long since I had even felt a rain drop, that the thorough wetting I received there was really enjoyed. But on reaching Salt Lake City, I was delayed a week by a cloud burst on the line of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, which swept away seven bridges and a mile or two of track.
I started out and had gone about 100 miles before coming to the break, when the train was sent back to Salt Lake City again. As it was in going West, so now in returning, I was laid under lasting obligations to another Mormon, for cash on a personal check. This time it was Mr. D. S. Davis, Captain of the bicycle club. Still the enforced delay was not time wholly wasted. It showed me Mormonism in a different light from that in which I had seen it on my first visit. The Mormons professed to me their thorough loyalty to the United States Government, but their actions belie their words. The act of hoisting the stars and stripes at half mast on the Fourth of July does not strengthen one’s belief in their loyalty, and to refer to the returning army of Eastern veterans who are daily passing through the city on their way home as a “parcel of blatherskites,” as a Mormon bishop did on a public occasion, these and many other instances are daily occurring to show that the Mormons, instead of loving, are beginning to fairly hate the government.