At eight o'clock on the 12th, we were harnessed and on route again for the mountains. It was a fine mellow morning. The snowy peaks of the Wolfano mountains, one hundred and seventy miles to the south-west, rose high and clear in view.[114] The atmosphere was bland like that of the Indian summer in New England. Five miles' travel brought us to the encampment of Kelly's servant, who had been sent abroad the night before to find grass for his horses. Here another horse was purchased of a Mexican, who had followed us from Puebla. But on adjusting our baggage, it appeared that three animals were required for transporting it over the broken country which lay before us. Messrs. Blair and Wood would, therefore, still have but a single saddle horse for their joint use. {208} This was felt to be a great misfortune, both on account of the hardships of such a journey on foot, as well as the delay it would necessarily cause in the prosecution of it. But these men felt no such obstacle to be insurmountable, and declared, that while the plain and the mountains were before them, and they could walk, they would conquer every difficulty that lay between them and Oregon. After we had eaten, Kelly's horses were rigged, and we moved on four or five miles up the river, where we halted for the night. Our provisions consisted of a small quantity of wheat meal, a little salt and pepper, and a few pounds of sugar and coffee. For meat we depended on our rifles. But as no game appeared during the day, we spent the evening in attempting to take cat-fish from the Arkansas. One weighing a pound, after much practical angling, was caught—a small consolation surely to the keen appetites of seven men! But this, and porridge made of wheat meal and water, constituted our supper that night and breakfast next morning.
July 13th, fifteen miles along the banks of the Arkansas; the soil composed of sand slightly intermixed with clay, too loose to {209} retain moisture, and too little impregnated with the nutritive salts to produce any thing save a spare and stinted growth of bunch grass and sun-flowers. Occasional bluffs of sand and limestone bordered the valley of the stream. In the afternoon, the range of low mountains that lie at the eastern base of the Great Cordilleras and Long's ranges became visible; and even these, though pigmies in the mountain race, were, in midsummer, partially covered with snow. Pike's peak in the south-west, and James' peak in the north-west, at sunset showed their hoary heads above the clouds which hung around them.[115]
On the 14th, made twenty miles. Kelly relieved his servant by surrendering to him his riding horse for short distances; and others relieved Blair and Wood in a similar manner. The face of the plain became more broken as we approached the mountains. The waters descending from the lower hills, have cut what was once a plain into isolated bluffs three or four hundred feet in height, surmounted and surrounded with columnar and pyramidal rocks. In the distance they resemble immense fortresses, with towers and bastions as skilfully arranged as they could have been by the best suggestions of {210} art—embattlements raised by the commotions of warring elements—by the storms that have gathered and marshalled their armies on the heights in view, and poured their desolating power over these devoted plains!
The Arkansas, since we left Fort William, had preserved a medium width of a quarter of a mile, the waters still turbid; its general course east south-east; soil on either side as far as the eye could reach, light sand and clayey loam, almost destitute of vegetation.
On the 15th travelled about eighteen miles over a soil so light that our animals sunk over their fetlocks at every step. During the forenoon we kept along the bottom lands of the river. An occasional willow or cotton-wood tree, ragged and grey with age, or a willow bush trembling, it almost seemed, at the tale of desolation that the winds told in passing, were the only relieving features of the general dearth. The usual colour of the soil was a greyish blue. At twelve o'clock we stopped on a plat of low ground which the waters of the river moistened by filtration through the sand, and baited our horses. Here were forty or fifty decrepid old willows, so poor and shrivelled that one felt, after enjoying {211} their shade in the heat of that sultry day, like bestowing alms upon them. At twelve o'clock we mounted and struck out across the plain to avoid a southward bend in the river of twenty miles in length. Near the centre of this bend in the mouth of the river Fontequebouir, which the trappers who have traversed it for beaver say, rises in James' Peak eighty miles to the north-west by north.[116]
We came upon the banks of this stream at sunset. Kelly had informed us that we might expect to find deer in the groves which border its banks. And, like a true hunter, as soon as we halted at the place of encampment, he sought them before they should hear or scent us. He traversed the groves, however, in vain. The beautiful innocents had, as it afterwards appeared, been lately hunted by a party of Delaware trappers and in consideration of the ill usage received from these gentlemen in red, had forsaken their old retreat for a less desirable but safer one among the distant hills in the north. So that our expectations of game and meat subsided in a supper of 'tole'—plain water porridge. As our appetites were keen, we all relished it well, except the Mexican {212} servant, who declared upon his veracity that 'tole was no bueno.' Our guide was, if possible, as happy at our evening fire as some one else was when he "shouldered his crutch and told how fields were won;" and very much for the same reasons. For, during the afternoon's tramp, much of his old hunting ground had loomed in sight. Pike's and James' peaks showed their bald, cold, shining heads as the sun set; and the mountains on each side of the upper river began to show the irregularities of their surfaces. So that as we rode along gazing at these stupendous piles of rocks and earth and ice, he would often direct his attention to the outlines of chasms, faintly traced on the shadings of the cliffs, through which various streams on which he had trapped, tumbled into the plains. I was particularly interested by his account of Rio Wolfano, a branch of the Arkansas on the Mexican side, the mouth of which is twelve miles below that of the Fontequebouir. It has two principal branches. The one originates in Pike's peak, seventy or eighty miles in the south; the other rises far in the west among the Eutaw mountains, and has a course of about two hundred miles, nearly parallel with the Arkansas.[117]
{213} We travelled twenty-eight miles on the 16th over broken barren hills sparsely covered with shrub cedars and pines. The foliage of these trees is a very dark green. They cover, more or less, all the low hills that lie along the roots of the mountains from the Arkansas north to the Missouri. Hence the name "Black Hills" is given to that portion of them which lie between the Sweetwater and the mouth of the Little Missouri. The soil of our track to-day was a grey barren loam, gravel knolls and bluffs of sand and limestone.
About four o'clock, P. M., we met an unheard of annoyance. We were crossing a small plain of red sand, gazing at the mountains as they opened their outlines of rock and snow, when, in an instant, we were enveloped in a cloud of flying ants with greyish wings and dark bodies. They fixed upon our horses' heads, necks, and shoulders, in such numbers as to cover them as bees do the sides of a hive when about to swarm. They flew around our own heads too, and covered our hats and faces. Our eyes seemed special objects of their attention. We tried to wipe them off; but while the hand was passing from one side of the face to the other, the part that was left bare was {214} instantly covered as thickly as before with these creeping, hovering, nauseous insects. Our animals were so much annoyed by their pertinacity, that they stopped in their tracks; and finding it impossible to urge them along, guide them and keep our faces clear of the insects at the same time, we dismounted and led them. Having by this means the free use of our hands and feet, we were able in the course of half an hour to pass the infested sands, and once more see and breathe.
We dined at the mouth of Kelly's Creek, another stream that has its source in James' peak. Encamped at the mouth of Oakley's creek, another branch of the Arkansas.[118] It rises in the hills which lie thirty-five miles to the north. It is a clear, cool little brook, with a pebbly bottom, and banks clothed with shrub cedars and pines. We had a pleasant evening here, a cloudless sky, a cold breeze from the snow-clad mountains, a blazing cedar-wood fire, a song from our merry Joe, a dish of 'tole' and a fine couch of sand. Who wants more comforts than we enjoyed? My debilitated system had begun to thrive under the bracing influence of the mountain air; my companions were well and happy; our {215} horses and mules were grazing upon a plat of rich grass; we were almost within touch of those stupendous ridges of rock and snow which stay or send forth the tempest in its course, and gather in their rugged embrace the noblest rivers of the world.