I like the phrase "fit to tear up," and wonder when, in the opinion of this frugal people, anything does become suitable for destruction. But it is hardly destruction after all to turn old clothes into carpets, and the process is as simple as, in fact is identical with, ordinary hand-weaving. The cloth is simply shredded into very narrow strips, and each strip is treated in the loom just as if it were ordinary yarn, the result being, by a judicious alternation of tints, a very pleasant-looking and very durable floor-cloth. Rag-rugs are also made on a foundation of very coarse canvas by drawing very narrow shreds of rag through the spaces of the canvas, fastening them on the reverse side, and cutting them off to a uniform "pile" on the upper. In one cottage at Salina I remember seeing a rug of this kind in which the girl had drawn her own pattern and worked in the colours with a distinct appreciation of true artistic effect. An industrial exhibition for such products would, I have no doubt, bring to light a great many out-of-the-way handicrafts which these emigrant people have brought with them from the different parts of Europe, and with which they try to adorn their simple homes.
Our teamster from Mayfield to Glenwood, the next stage of my southward journey, was a very cautious person. He would not hurry his horses down hill—they were "belike" to stumble; and he would not hurry them up hill—it "fretted" them. On the level intervals he stopped altogether, to "breathe" them. It transpired eventually that they were plough horses. I suspected it from the first. And from his driving I suspected that he was the ploughman. In other respects he was a very desirable teamster.
His remarks about Europe (he had once been to Chicago himself) were very entertaining, and his theory of "ground hogs" would have delighted Darwin. As far as I could follow him, all animals were of one species, the differences as to size and form being chiefly accidents of age or sex. This, at any rate, was my induction from his description of the "ground hog," which he said was a "kind of squirrel—like the prairie dog!" As he said, there were "quite a few" ground hogs, but they moved too fast among the brush for me to identify them. As far as I could tell, though, they were of the marmot kind, about nine inches long, with very short tails and round small ears. When they were at a safe distance they would stand up at full length on their hind legs, the colouring underneath being lighter than on the back. What are they? I have seen none in Utah except on these volcanic stretches of country between Salina and Monroe.
Much of Utah is volcanic, but here, beyond Salina, huge mounds of scoriae, looking like heaps of slag from some gigantic furnace, are piled up in the centre of the level ground, while in other places circular depressions in the soil—sometimes fifty feet in diameter and lowest in the centre, with deep fissures defining the circumference—seem to mark the places whence the scoriae had been drawn, and the earth had sunk in upon the cavities thus exhausted.
The two sides of the river (the Sevier) were in striking contrast. On this, the eastern, was desolation and stone heaps and burnt-up spaces with ant-hills and lizards.
Nothing makes a place look (to me at least) so hot as an abundance of lizards. They are associated in memory with dead, still heat, "the intolerable calor of Mambre," the sun-smitten cinder-heap that men call Aden, the stifling hillsides of Italy where the grapes lie blistering in the autumn sun, the desperate suburbs of Alexandria—what millions of scorched-looking lizards, detestable little salamanders, used to bask upon Cleopatra's Needles when they lay at full length among the sand!—the heat-cracked fields of India. I know very well that there are lizards and lizards; that they might be divided—as the Hindoo divides everything, whether victuals or men's characters, medicines or the fates the gods send him—into "hot" and "cold" lizards. The salamander itself, according to the ancients, was icy cold. But this does not matter. All lizards make places look hot.
On the other side of the river, a favourite raiding-ground of "Mr. Indian," as the settlers pleasantly call him, lies Aurora, a settlement in the centre of a rich tract of red wheat soil with frequent growths of willow and buffalo-berry (or bull-berry or red-berry or "kichi-michi") marking the course of the Sevier.
But our road soon wound down by a "dug way" to the bottom-lands, and we found ourselves on level meadows clumped with shrubs and patched with corn-fields, and among scattered knots of grazing cattle and horses. Overhead circled several pairs of black hawks, a befitting reminder to the dwellers on these Thessalian fields, these Campanian pastures, that Scythian Piutes and Navajo Attilas might at any time swoop down upon them.
But the forbearance of the Indian in the matter of beef and mutton is inexplicable—and most inexplicable of all in the case of lamb, seeing that mint grows wild. This is a very pleasing illustration of the happiness of results when man and nature work cordially together. The lamb gambols about among beds of mint! What a becoming sense of the fitness of things that would be that should surprise the innocent thing in its fragrant pasture and serve up the two together! "They were pleasant in their lives, and in death they were not divided." And what a delightful field for similar efforts such a spectacle opens up to the philosophic mind! Here, beyond Aurora, as we wind in and out among the brakes of willow and rose-bush, we catch glimpses of the river, with ducks riding placidly at anchor in the shadows of the foliage. And not a pea in the neighbourhood! Now, why not sow green peas along the banks of the American rivers and lakes? How soothing to the weary traveller would be this occasional relief of canard aux petits pois!
After an interval of pretty river scenery we found ourselves once more in a dismal, volcanic country with bald hills and leprous sand-patches the only features of the landscape, with lizards for flowers and an exasperating heat-drizzle blurring the outlines of everything with its quivering refraction. And then, after a few miles of this, we are suddenly in the company of really majestic mountains, some of them cedared to the peaks, others broken up into splendid architectural designs of almost inconceivable variety, richly tinted and fantastically grouped. How wealthy this range must be in mineral! In front of us, above all the intervening hills, loomed out a monster mountain, and turning one of its spurs we break all at once upon the village of Glenwood—a beautiful cluster of foliage with skirts of meadow-land spread out all about it—lying at the foot of the huge slope.