The short ride of the day had shown us the western limit of the partial fertility about Fort Hall. The earth had begun to be red, burnt, and barren; grass, sparse and dry; the shrubs and cotton-woods stinted and shrivelled.
The plain of the Trois Butes is situated between the Snowy mountain range on the south, and another ridge which, diverging from it above the sources of the Saptin River, follows that stream down to the Blue Mountains near Wallawalla. This plain by experiment is found to be eight thousand feet above the level of the sea. In the vicinity of the post, there is an abundance of grass for the subsistence of many thousands of animals. The soil, in various parts of it, also appears well adapted to the cultivation of the small grains and esculent roots. But {100} the fact that frosts occur almost every month of the year, shows the extent to which the arable sections can be rendered available for such purposes.
The Trois Butes rise on the plain fifteen or twenty miles east of the Fort.[193] They are pyramidal peaks, probably of volcanic origin, of two thousand feet in height above the plain, and twelve thousand feet above the level of the sea. Around their dark bases grow evergreen trees; from their sides burst small brooks, rendering verdant strips of the plain which radiate beautifully in all directions from them; and over all, during most of the year, hang their crests of glittering snows! East of the Butes, vegetation continually decreases till it ceases in the black crags which embosom the head streams of the river.
On the 5th, travelled thirty miles down the western bank of the river;[194] soil sandy and volcanic, bearing wild wormwood—in fact a desert; crossed a number of small streams putting into the Saptin; on these a little bunch of grass, and a few alders and willows, tried to grow. Whilst baiting at noon, we were agreeably surprised with an addition to our company, of a young Swiss trapper, eight years in the mountains; he {101} learned the silversmith business when in youth; afterwards entered a monastery and studied Latin, &c., for the order of Priests; ran away from the monastery, entered the French army, deserted, and came to America; sickened, was visited by a Roman priest who had been a classmate with him at the monastery; and having had a more numerous family than was required by the canons of his order, had fled to America, where his orisons would not be disturbed by the cries of infants. On entering our trapper's chamber they mutually recognized each other; and horror immediately seized the pious priest at the recollection of the trapper's sinfulness; and particularly the sin of forsaking the holy places of the mother church; of taking carnal weapons in hands that had been employed in making crosses in the sacred precincts of the cloister. The trapper had contracted the dangerous habit of thinking for himself, and replied to the godly man in a sharp and retaliatory manner; and among other things drew a very ungracious comparison between escaping from prayers and chants, and flying from an unlawful family.
This reference to former delinquencies in {102} a country to which he had fled to escape the remembrance of them, aroused the holy indignation of the priest to such an extent, that he immediately consigned the witness of his fault to worms, and his soul to an apprenticeship at fire eating in purgatory. Our trapper had become a heretic. In the blindness of his heart he had forgotten that the power to save and destroy the soul of man, had been committed to an order of men chosen, and set apart as the repositories of that portion of Omnipotence; and that whatever errors of conduct may occur in the life of these men, the efficiency of the anathematizing and saving commission is not thereby annulled; and he rose from his bed and hurled at the priest sundry counter anathemas in the form of chairs, and shovel and tongs. I could perceive in him no returning belief in the Omnipotent key of the "Roman Catholic apostolical mother Church." Instead of saying his prayers, and counting the beads of his rosary, he talked of the stirring scenes of a trapper's life, and recounted the wild adventures of the mountains; instead of the sublime Te Deum, he sang the thrilling martial airs of his native land; instead of {103} the crosier, he bore the faithful rifle; instead of the robes of sacred office, he wore the fringed deer skin frock of the children of the wilderness. He was a trapper—a merry mountain trapper.
6th. Twenty-five miles to-day; face of the country, black, hard and barren swells; encamped on a small tributary of the Saptin; very little grass for the animals; found here a family of the Root Digger Indians; the man half clad, children naked, all filthy. She was clad in a wrapper of mountain sheep skin.[195]
7th. Twenty miles. About mid-day heard a loud roaring of waters; descended the chasm of the river and discovered two enormous springs bursting from the basaltic cliffs of the opposite shore. Their roaring was heard three miles. The lower one discharged water enough to turn the machinery of twenty ordinary manufactories. The water foamed and rushed down inclined planes of rocks the distance of two hundred feet.[196] The country, an undulating, barren, volcanic plain; near the river cut into bluffs; lava every where; wild wormwood and another shrub two feet in height, bearing a yellow blossom, the only wood seen; encamped on a small stream about three miles {104} from the river. Found here the only grass which I had observed during the day.
8th. Still on the western bank of the Saptin; river one-fourth of a mile wide; water extremely clear; current five miles the hour; depth of water about four feet. On the eastern side, the soil appeared a dark mass of imbedded fused rock, stretching in broken undulations to the distant highlands. In that direction twenty miles lay a range of mountains like an irregular line of darkness on the horizon. Every thing touched by our horses' feet claimed a volcano for its birth-place. Thirty miles to-day.
9th. Face of the country the same as that passed over on the 8th—scarcely grass enough to feed our animals, and that dried to hay. The mountains on the west side of the river gradually nearing it. No timber since we left the immediate vicinity of Fort Hall. We cooked our food with the willow bushes which the Indians had killed and rendered dry for such purposes. All the rocks more or less fused; many large tracts of lava; a number of clear little brooks bubbling over the cinders of this great hearth of Nature's fire. Made forty miles.