The five days between the 20th and the 26th of September sped merrily at my new home, Camp Floyd; not pressed for time, I embraced with pleasure the opportunity of seeing the most of my American brothers in arms. My host was a son of that Old Dominion of Queen Elizabeth, where still linger traces of the glorious Cavalier and the noble feudal spirit, which (alas!) have almost disappeared from the mother country; where the genealogical tree still hangs against the wall; where the principal families, the Nelsons, Harrisons, Pages, Seldens, and Allens, intermarry and bravely attempt to entail; and where the houses, built of brick brought out from England, still retain traces of the seventeenth century. A winter indeed might be passed most pleasantly on the banks of James River and in the west of Virginia—a refreshing winter to those who love, as I do, the traditions of our ancestors.
From Captain Heth I gathered that in former times, in Western America as in British India, a fair aborigine was not unfrequently the copartner of an officer’s hut or tent. The improved communication, however, and the frequency of marriage, have abolished the custom by rendering it unfashionable. The Indian squaw, like the Beebee, seldom looked upon her “mari” in any other light but her banker. An inveterate beggar, she would beg for all her relations, for all her friends, and all her tribe, rather than not beg at all, and the lavatory process required always to be prefaced with the bribe.SPREES. Officers who were long thrown among the Prairie Indians joined, as did the Anglo-Indian, in their nautches and other amusements, where, if whisky was present, a cut or stab might momentarily be expected. The skin was painted white, black, and red, the hair was dressed and decorated, and the shirt was tied round the waist, while broadcloth and blanket, leggins and moccasins completed the costume. The “crack thing to do” when drinking with Indians, and listening to their monotonous songs and tales, was to imitate Indian customs; to become, under the influence of the jolly god, a Hatim Tai; exceedingly generous; to throw shirt to one man, blanket to another, leggins to a third—in fact, to return home in breech-cloth. Such sprees would have been severely treated by a highly respectable government; they have now, however, like many a pleasant hour in British India, had their day, and are sunk, many a fathom deep, in the genuine Anglo-Scandinavian gloom.
I heard more of army grievancesARMY GRIEVANCES. during my second stay at Camp Floyd. The term of a soldier’s enlistment, five years, is too short, especially for the cavalry branch, and the facilities for desertion are enormous. Between the two, one third of the army disappears every year. The company which should number 84 has often only 50 men. The soldier has no time to learn his work; he must drive wagons, clear bush, make roads, and build huts and stables. When thoroughly drilled he can take his discharge, and having filled a purse out of his very liberal pay ($11 per mensem), he generally buys ground and becomes a landed proprietor. The officers are equally well salaried; but marching, countermarching, and contingent expenses are heavy enough to make the profession little better than it is in France. The Secretary of War being a civilian, with naturally the highest theoretical idea of discipline and command combined with economy, is always a martinet; no one can exceed the minutest order, and leave is always obtained under difficulties. As the larger proportion of the officers are Southern men, especially Virginians, and as the soldiers are almost entirely Germans and Irish—the Egyptians of modern times—the federal army will take little part in the ensuing contest. It is more than probable that the force will disband, break in two like the nationalities from which it is drawn. As far as I could judge of American officers, they are about as republican in mind and tone of thought as those of the British army. They are aware of the fact that the bundle of sticks requires a tie, but they prefer, as we all do, King Stork to King Log, and King Log to King Mob.
I took sundry opportunities of attending company inspections, and found the men well dressed and tolerably set up, while the bands, being German, were of course excellent. Mr. Chandless and others talk of the United States army discipline as something Draconian; severity is doubtless necessary in a force so constituted, but—a proof of their clemency—desertion is the only crime punishable by flogging. The uniform is a study. The States have attempted in the dress of their army, as in the forms of their government, a moral impossibility. It is expected to be at once cheap and soldier-like, useful and ornamental, light and heavy, pleasantly hot in the arctic regions, and agreeably cool under the tropics. The “military tailors” of the English army similarly forget the number of changes required in civilian raiment, and, looking to the lightness of the soldier’s kit, wholly neglect its efficiency, its capability of preserving the soldier’s life. The federal uniform consists of a brigand-like and bizarre sombrero, with Mephistophelian cock-plume, and of a blue broadcloth tunic, imitated from the old Kentuckian hunter’s surtout or wrapper, with terminations sometimes made to match, at other times too dark and dingy to please the eye. Its principal merit is a severe republican plainness, very consistent with the prepossessions of the people, highly inconsistent with the customs of military nations. Soldiers love to dress up Mars, not to clothe him like a butcher’s boy.
The position of Camp Floyd is a mere brick-yard, a basin surrounded by low hills, which an Indian pony would have little difficulty in traversing; sometimes, however, after the fashion of the land, though apparently easy from afar, the summits assume a mural shape, which would stop any thing but a mountain sheep. The rim shows anticlinal strata, evidencing upheavals, disruption, and, lastly, drainage through the kanyons which break the wall. The principal vegetation is the dwarf cedar above, the sage greenwood and rabbit-bush below. The only animals seen upon the plain are jackass-rabbits, which in places afford excellent sport. There are but few Mormons in the valley; they supply the camp with hay and vegetables, and are said to act as spies. The officers can not but remark the coarse features and the animal expression of their countenances. On the outskirts of camp are a few women that have taken sanctuary among the Gentiles, who here muster too strong for the Saints. The principal amusement seemed to be that of walking into and out of the sutlers’ stores, the hospitable Messrs. Gilbert’s and Livingston’s—a passe temps which I have seen at “Sukkur Bukkur Rohri”—and in an evening ride, dull, monotonous, and melancholy, as if we were in the vicinity of Hyderabad, Sindh.
I had often heard of a local lion, the Timpanogos Kanyon, and my friends Captains Heth and Gove had obligingly offered to show me its curiosities. After breakfast on the 23d of September—a bright warm day—we set out in a good ambulance, well provided with the materials of a two days’ picnic, behind a fine team of four mules, on the road leading to the Utah Lake. After passing Simple Joe’s dug-out we sighted the water once more; it was of a whitish-blue, like the milky waves of Jordan, embosomed in the embrace of tall and bald-headed hills and mountains, whose monarch was Nebo of the jagged cone. Where the wind current sets there are patches of white sand strewn with broken shells and dried water-weed. Near Pelican Point, a long, projecting rocky spit, there is a fine feeding-ground for geese and ducks, and swimmers and divers may always be seen dotting the surface. On the south rises a conspicuous buttress of black rock, and thirty miles off we could see enormous dust columns careering over the plain. The western part of the valley, cut with suncracks and nullahs, and dotted with boulders, shelves gradually upward from the selvage of the lake to small divides and dwarf-hill ranges, black with cedar-bush, and traversed only by wood roads. On the east is the best wheat country in this part of the Territory; it is said to produce 106 bushels per acre.
After seventeen miles we crossed Jordan Bridge,JORDAN BRIDGE. another rickety affair, for which, being Mormon property, we paid 50 cents; had we been Saints the expense would have been one half. Two more miles led us to Lehi, a rough miniature of Great Salt Lake City, in which the only decent house was the bishop’s; in British India it would have been the collector and magistrate’s. My companions pointed out to me a hut in which an apostate Mormon’s throat had been cut by blackened faces. It is gratifying to observe that throughout the United States, as in the Old Country, all historical interest pales before a barbarous murder. As we advanced a wall of rock lay before us; the strata were in confusion as if a convulsion had lately shuddered through their frame, and tumbled fragments cumbered the base, running up by precipitous ascents to the middle heights. The colors were as grotesque: the foreground was a mass of emerald cane, high and bushy; beyond it, the near distance was pink with the beautiful bloom most unpoetically termed “hogweed,” and azure with a growth like the celebrated blue-grass of Kentucky; while the wall itself was a bloodstone dark green with cedar—which, 100 feet tall, was dwarfed to an inch—and red stained with autumnal maple, and below and around the brightest yellow of the faded willow formed the bezel, a golden rim.
Two miles and a half from Lehi led us to American Fork,AMERICAN FORK. a soft sweet spring of snow-water, with dark shells adhering to white stones, and a quantity of trout swimming the limpid wave. The bridge was rickety and loose planked—in fact, the worst I ever saw in the United States, where, as a rule, the country bridges can never be crossed without fear and trembling; the moderate toll was $1 both ways. Three miles and a half more placed us at Battle Creek, where in 1853 the Yuta Indians fled precipitately from a Mormon charge. Six miles over a dusty beach conducted us to the mouth of the kanyon, a brown tract crossed by a dusty road and many a spring, and showing the base of the opposite wall encumbered with degraded masses, superimposed upon which were miniature castles. The mouth of the ravine was a romantic spot: the staples were sister giants of brown rock—here sheer, their sloping—where pines and firs found a precarious root-hold, and ranged in long perspective lines, while between them, through its channel, verdant with willow, and over a clear pebbly bed, under the screes and scaurs, coursed a mountain torrent more splendid than Ruknabad.
We forded the torrent and pursued the road, now hugging the right, then the left side of the chasm. The latter was exceedingly beautiful, misty with the blue of heaven, and rising till its solidity was blent with the tenuity of ether. The rest of the scenery was that of the great Cotton-wood Kanyon; painting might express the difference, language can not. After six miles of a narrow winding road, we reached the place of Cataracts, the principal lion of the place, and found that the season had reduced them to two thin milky lines coursing down bitumen-colored slopes of bare rock, bordered by shaggy forests of firs and cedars. The shrinking of the water’s volume lay bare the formation of the cascades, two steps and a slope, which at a happier time would have been veiled by a continuous sheet of foam.
After finding a suitable spot we outspanned, and, while recruiting exhausted nature, allowed our mules to roll and rest. After dining and collecting a few shells, we remounted and drove back through a magnificent sunset to American Fork, where the bishop, Mr. Lysander Dayton, of Ohio, had offered us bed and board. The good episkopos was of course a Mormon, as we could see by his two pretty wives; he supplied us with an excellent supper as a host, not as an innkeeper. The little settlement was Great Salt Lake City on a small scale—full of the fair sex; every one, by-the-by, appeared to be, or about to be, a mother. Fair, but, alas! not fair to us; it was verily