About midway its length, the trail, or Indian track, divides: the one branch makes a circuit among the heights to the westward, terminates in the great valley of the south fork of the Platte, within the mountains, commonly called "Boyou Salade;" and the other and shorter leads northwardly up the gorge to the same point.[124] Our guide carefully examined both trails at the diverging point, and finding the more western one most travelled, and believing, for this reason, the eastward one the least likely to be occupied by the Indians, he led us up to the foot of the mountain which separates it from the vales beyond. We arrived at a little open spot at the base of the height about twelve o'clock. The steepest part of the trail up the declivity was a loose, moving surface of sand and pebbles, constantly falling under its own weight. Other portions were precipitous, lying along overhanging {222} cliffs and the brinks of deep ravines strewn with fallen rocks. To ascend it seemed impossible; but our old Kentuckian was of a different opinion.
In his hunting expeditions he had often ascended and descended worse steeps with packs of beaver, traps, &c. So, after a description of others of a much more difficult nature, which he had made with worse animals and heavier packs, through storms of hail and heaps of snow; and after the assurance that the Eutaw village of tents, and women, and children, had passed this not many moons ago, we felt nettled at our own ignorance of possibilities in these regions, and drove off to the task. Our worthy guide led the way with his saddle-horse following him; the pack animals, each under the encouraging guardianship of a vigorous goad, and the men and myself leading our riding animals, brought up the rear. Now for a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull not all together, but each leg on its own account. Five or six rods of zigzag clambering, and slipping, and gathering, and tugging, advanced us one on the ascent; and then a halt for breath and strength for a new effort. The puffing and blowing over, a general shout, "go on, go on," started the cavalcade {223} again. The pack animals, with each one hundred and fifty pounds weight, struggled and floundered, as step after step gave way in the sliding sand; but they laboured madly, and advanced at intervals of a few yards, resting and then on again, till they arrived at the rocky surface, about midway the ascent. Here a short pause upon the declivity was interrupted by a call of "onward" from our guide; and again we climbed. The track wound around a beetling cliff, which crowded the animals upon the edge of a frightful precipice. In the most dangerous part of it, my Puebla mare ran her pack against a projecting rock, and for an instant reeled over an abyss three hundred feet in depth. But her fortune favoured her; she blundered away from her grave, and lived to make a deeper plunge farther along the journey.
The upper half, though less steep, proved to be the worst part of the ascent. It was a bed of rocks, at one place small and rolling, at another large and fixed, with deep openings between them; so that our animals were constantly falling, and tottering upon the brink of the cliffs, as they rose again and made their way among them. An hour and a half of this most dangerous and tiresome {224} clambering deposited us in a grove of yellow pines, near the summit. Our animals were covered with sweat and dirt, and trembled as if at that instant from the race track. Nor were their masters free from every ill of weariness. Our knees smote each other with fatigue, as Belshazzar's did with fear.
Many of the pines on this ridge were two feet in diameter, and a hundred feet high, with small clusters of limbs around the tops. Others were low, and clothed with strong limbs quite near the ground. Under a number of these latter, we had seated ourselves, holding the reins of our riding horses, when a storm arose with the rapidity of a whirlwind, and poured upon us hail, rain, and snow with all imaginable liberality. It was a most remarkable tempest. Unlike those whose monotonous groans are heard among the Green Mountains for days before they assemble their fury around you, it came in its strength at once, and rocked the stately pines to their most distant roots. Unlike those long "blows," which, generated in the frozen zone of the Atlantic seas, bring down the frosty blasts of Greenland upon the warmer climes of the States, it was the meeting {225} of different currents of the aërial seas, lashed and torn by the live thunder, among the sounding mountains. One portion of it had gathered its electricity and mist around James' Peak in the east; another among the white heights north-west; and a third among the snowy pyramids of the Eutaws in the south-west; and, marshalling their hosts, met over this connecting ridge between the eastern and central ranges, as if by general battle to settle a vexed question as to the better right to the Pass; and it was sublimely fought. The opposing storms met nearly at the zenith, and fiercely rolled together their angry masses. As if to carry out the simile I have here attempted, at the moment of their junction, the electricity of each leaped upon its antagonist transversely across the heavens, and in some instances fell in immense bolts upon the trembling cliffs; and then instantly came a volley of hail as large as grape-shot, sufficient to whiten all the towers of this horrid war. It lasted an hour. I never before, not even on the plains, saw such a movement of the elements. If anything had been wanting to establish the theory, this exhibition sufficed to convince those who saw its {226} movements, and felt its power, that these mountains are the great laboratory of mist, wind, and electricity, which, formed into storms, are sent in such awful fury upon the great plains or prairies that stretch away from their bases to the States, and, that here alone may be witnessed the extreme power of the warring elements.
After the violence of the tempest had abated, we travelled up the remainder of the ascent, and halted a few minutes on the summit to view the scene around us.[125] Behind was the valley up which we had travelled, covered with evergreen shrubs. On the east of this, rose a precipitous wall of stratified rock, two thousand or three thousand feet high, stretching off towards the Arkansas, and dotted here and there with the small shrub pine, struggling from the crevices of the rocks. In the south-west the mountains, less precipitous, rose one above another in a distance, till their blue tops faded into the semblance of the sky. To the east of our position, there was nothing in sight but piles of mountains, whose dark and ragged masses increased in height and magnitude, till they towered in naked grandeur around James' Peak. From that frozen height ran off to the north {227} that secondary range of mountains that lie between the head-waters of the South Fork of the Platte and the plains. This is a range of brown, barren, and broken ridges, destitute alike of earth and shrub, with an average height of three thousand feet above the plain. On the western side of it, and north of the place where we were viewing them, hills of a constantly decreasing height fall off for fifty miles to the north-west, till they sink in the beautiful valley of Boyou Salade, and then rising again, tower higher and higher in the west, until lost in the haze about the base of the Anahuac range; a vast waste of undusted rocks, without a flower or leaf to adorn it, save those that hide their sweetness from its eternal winters in the glens down which we were to travel.
The Anahuac ridge of the snowy range was visible for at least one hundred miles of latitude; and the nearest point was so far distant that the dip of the horizon concealed all that portion of it below the line of perpetual congelation. The whole mass was purely white. The principal irregularity perceptible was a slight undulation on the upper edge. There was, however, perceptible shading on the lower edge, produced, perhaps, by great lateral swells protruding {228} from the general outline. But the mass, at least ninety miles distant, as white as milk, the home of the frosts of all ages, stretching away to the north by west full a hundred miles, unscaled by any living thing, except perhaps by the bold bird of our national arms,
"Broad, high, eternal, and sublime,
The mock of ages and the twin of time,"
is an object of amazing grandeur, unequalled probably on the face of the globe.
We left this interesting panorama, and travelled down five miles to the side of a little stream running north, and encamped.[126] We were wet from head to foot, and shivering with cold. The day had indeed been one of much discomfort; yet we had been well repaid for all this by the absorbing freshness and sublimity that hung around us. The lightning bounding on the crags; the thunder breaking the slumber of the mountains; a cooler climate, and the noble pine again; a view of the Great Main snowy range of the "Rocky," "Stone," or "Shining" mountains, south of the Great Gap, from a height never before trodden by a civilized tourist, the sight of the endless assemblage of rocky peaks, among which {229} our weary feet were yet to tread along unexplored waters, were the delights which lay upon the track of the day, and made us happy at our evening fire. Our supper of water porridge being eaten, we tried to sleep. But the cold wind from the snow soon drove us from our blankets to our fire, where we turned ourselves like Christmas turkeys, till morning. The mountain flax grew around our encampment. Every stalk was stiffened by the frosts of the night; and the waters of the brooks were barred with ice. This is the birth-place of the Plattes. From these gorges its floods receive existence, among the sturdy, solemn pines and nursing tempests, twelve miles north of the Arkansas's debouchement from the mountains, and forty miles due west from James' Peak.
On the 19th we travelled in a northward course down the little streams bursting from the hills, and babbling among the bushes. We were upon an Indian trail, full of sharp gravel, that annoyed our animals exceedingly. The pines were often difficult to pass, so thick were they. But the right course was easily discovered among them, even when the soil was so hard as to have received no impression from previous {230} travelling, by small stones which the Eutaws had placed among the branches. About mid-day we saw scattering spears of the wild flax again, and a few small shrubs of the black birch near the water courses. The endless climbing and ascending of hills prevented our making much progress. At two o'clock we judged ourselves but ten miles from the last night's encampment. A cloud of hail then beginning to pelt and chill us, we took shelter in a small grove of pines. But as the hail had fallen two inches in depth, over the whole adjoining country, every movement of the atmosphere was like a blast of December. Too cold to sleep, we therefore built fires and dried our packs, &c., till the howl of the wolves gave notice of the approach of morning.