The Desert Home: The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness

by Mayne Reid

There are many mountains, where no trees are seen, nor any signs of vegetation along their sides. Huge naked rocks of granite appear piled upon each other, or jutting out over dark and frowning chasms. There are peaks perfectly white, because they are covered with a thick mantle of snow. These can always be seen from the greatest distance, as the snow lying upon them all the year without melting proves them to be of vast elevation above the level of the sea. There are other peaks almost as white, and yet it is not with snow. They are of a milky hue, and stunted cedar-trees may be seen clinging in seams and crevices along their sides. These are mountains of pure limestone, or the white quartz rock. There are mountains, again, upon which neither tree nor leaf is to be; seen; but, in their stead, the most vivid colours of red and green and yellow and white, appearing in stripes along their sides, as though they had been freshly painted. These stripes mark the strata of different coloured rocks, of which the mountains are composed. And there are still other mountains in the Great American Desert, to startle the traveller with their strange appearance. They are those that glitter with the mica and selenite. These, when seen from a distance flashing under the sun, look as though they were mountains of silver and gold!

The rivers, too. Strange rivers are they. Some run over broad shallow beds of bright sand. Large rivers—hundreds of yards in width, with sparkling waters. Follow them down their course. What do you find? Instead of growing larger, like the rivers of your own land, they become less and less, until at length their waters sink into the sands, and you see nothing but the dry channel for miles after miles! Go still farther down, and again the water appears, and increases in volume, until—thousands of miles from the sea—large ships can float upon their bosom. Such are the Arkansas and the Platte.

There are other rivers that run between bleak, rocky banks—banks a thousand feet high, whose bald, naked “bluffs” frown at each other across the deep chasm, in the bottom of which roars the troubled water. Often these banks extend for hundreds of miles, so steep at all points that one cannot go down to the bed of their stream; and often—often—the traveller has perished with thirst, while the roar of their water was sounding in his ears! Such are the Colorado and the Snake.

Still others go sweeping through the broad plains, tearing up the clay with their mighty floods, and year after year changing their channels, until they are sometimes an hundred miles from their ancient beds. Here they are found gurgling for many leagues under ground—under vast rafts formed by the trees which they have borne downward in their current. There you find them winding by a thousand loops like the sinuosities of a great serpent, rolling sluggishly along, with waters red and turbid as though they were rivers of blood! Such are the Brazos and the Red River.

Strange rivers are they that struggle through the mountains, and valleys, and plateau-lands of the Great American Desert.

Not less strange are its lakes. Some lie in the deep recesses of hills that dip down so steeply you cannot reach their shores; while the mountains around them are so bleak and naked, that not even a bird ever wings its flight across their silent waters. Other lakes are seen in broad, barren plains; and yet, a few years after, the traveller finds them not—they have dried up and disappeared. Some are fresh, with waters like crystal—others brackish and muddy—while many of them are more salt than the ocean itself.

In this Desert there are springs—springs of soda and sulphur, and salt waters; and others so hot that they boil up as in a great caldron, and you could not dip your finger into them without scalding it.

There are vast caves piercing the sides of the mountains, and deep chasms opening into the plains—some of them so deep, that you might fancy mountains had been scooped out to form them. They are called “barrancas.” There are precipices rising straight up from the plains—thousands of feet in height—and steep as a wall; and through the mountains themselves you may see great clefts cut by the rivers, as though they had been tunnelled and their tops had fallen in. They are called “cañons.” All these singular formations mark the wild region of the Great American Desert.

It has its denizens. There are oases in it; some of them large, and settled by civilised men. One of these is the country of New Mexico, containing many towns, and 100,000 inhabitants. These are of the Spanish and mixed Indian races. Another oasis is the country around the Great Salt and Utah Lakes. Here is also a settlement, established in 1846. Its people are Americans and Englishmen. They are the Mormons; and, although they dwell hundreds of miles from any sea, they seem likely to become a large and powerful nation of themselves.

Besides these two great oases, there are thousands of others, of all sizes—from fifty miles in breadth, to the little spot of a few acres, formed by the fertilising waters of some gurgling spring. Many of these are without inhabitants. In others, again, dwell tribes of Indians—some of them numerous and powerful, possessing horses and cattle; while others are found in small groups of three or four families each, subsisting miserably upon roots, seeds, grass, reptiles, and insects. In addition to the two great settlements we have mentioned, and the Indians, there is another class of men scattered over this region. These are white men—hunters and trappers. They subsist by trapping the beaver, and hunting the buffalo and other animals. Their life is one continued scene of peril, both from the wild animals which they encounter in their lonely excursions, and the hostile Indians with whom they come in contact. These men procure the furs of the beaver, the otter, the musk-rat, the marten, the ermine, the lynx, the fox, and the skins of many other animals. This is their business, and by this they live. There are forts, or trading posts—established by adventurous merchants—at long distances from each other; and at these forts the trappers exchange their furs for food, clothing, and for the necessary implements of their perilous calling.