Water, next to wood, is the great want of the plains and of the Great Basin. Travel along either base of the Rocky Mountains, and you are constantly meeting joyous, bounding streams, flowing rapidly forth from each ravine and coursing to the arid plain; but follow them a few miles and they begin to diminish in volume, and, unless intercepted by a copious river, often dwindle to nothing. The Republican fork of the Kansas or Kaw River, after a course of some thirty to fifty miles, sinks suddenly into its bed, which thence for twenty miles exhibits nothing but a waste of yellow sand. Of course there are seasons when this bed is covered with water throughout; but I describe what I saw early in June, when a teamster dug eight feet into that sand without finding a drop of the coveted liquid for his thirst-maddened oxen. Two months later, I observed the dry bed stretched several miles farther up and down what in winter is the river. Passing over to Big Sandy, the most northerly tributary of the Arkansas, I found dry sand (often incrusted with some white alkaline deposit) the rule; water the rare exception throughout the twenty or thirty miles of its course nearest its source. At Denver, on the 6th of June, Cherry Creek contributed to the South Platte a volume amply sufficient to run an ordinary grist-mill; ten days afterwards its bed was dry as a doctrinal sermon. My first encampment on the North Platte above Laramie was by a sparkling, dancing stream a yard wide, which could hardly have been forced through a nine-inch ring; but though its current was rapid and the Platte but three miles off, the thirsty earth and air drank up every drop by the way. Big Sandy, Little Sandy and Dry Sandy are the three tributaries to be crossed between South Pass and the Colorado, and the latter justifies its name through the better part of each year. Golden River runs through too deep a narrow valley and bears too strong a current from the snowy peaks in which it heads to be thus dried up; so with Bear, Welso, and the Timpanagos or Jordan, the principal affluents of Salt Lake, which tumble and roar between lofty peaks the greater part of their respective courses; but when you have crossed the Jordan, moving California-ward, you will not find another decent mill-stream for the five hundred miles that you traverse on your direct (Simpson's) route to the sink of the Carson. At intervals which seem very long, you find a spring, a scanty but welcome stream rushing down between two mountains, to be speedily drunk up by the thirsty plain and valley at their base; but you will oftener pass some 'sink' or depression below the general level of the valley you are traversing, where a shrewd guess has led to brackish or sulphurous water by digging two or three feet. A mail station-keeper lost his oxen, at a point a hundred miles south-west of Salt Lake; they had wandered southward on the desert, and he followed their trail for (as he estimated) a hundred miles, without finding a drop of water, when he gave them up, still a day's tramp ahead of him, and turned back to save his own life and that of his suffering horse. He might, I presume, have gone a hundred miles further without finding aught to drink but their blood.
This dearth of wood and water can hardly be realized from any mere description. A life-long denizen of Europe, or of the cis-Alleghany portion of this continent, is so accustomed to the unfailing presence or nearness of trees and springs, or streams, that he naturally supposes them as universal as the air we breathe. In a New Englander's crude conception, trees spring up and grow to stately maturity wherever they are not repressed by constant vigilance and exertion, while brooks and rivers are implied by the existence of hills and valleys, nay, of any land whatever. But as you travel westward with the Missouri, springs, streams, woods, become palpably scarcer and scarcer, until, unless in the immediate valley of the Platte, Arkansas, or some more northerly river that rushes full-fed from a long course among the snow-crowned peaks of the Rocky Mountains, your eye ranges over a vast expanse whereon neither forest, grove, nor even a single tree, is visible. If the country is rolling, springs may at long intervals be found by those who know just where to seek them; but streams are few and scanty, save in winter, and in later summer they disappear almost entirely. Beyond Salt Lake, the destitution of wood in Utah and Nevada is far less than on the Plains, but that of water is even greater. Fifty miles from water to water is the lowest interval in my experience on Simpson's route; but I only traversed the eastern half of it, turning thence abruptly northward to strike the valley of the Humboldt (formerly known as the St. Mary's), which rising in the north-west corner of the new Territory of Nevada, hardly fifty miles from the southern or Lewis branch of the Columbia, flows southward from the Goose Creek Mountains that cradled and nourished it, and thence hardly maintains its volume (which is that of a decent mill stream) in its generally south-west course of three hundred and fifty miles, till it is two thirds lost in a lake and the residue in a reedy slough or sink, a hundred miles from the Sierra Nevada and forty from the similar sink of the Carson, a larger and less impulsive stream which drains a considerable section of the eastern declivity of the Sierra Nevada only to meet this inglorious end. Doubtless, the time has been when a large portion of western Nevada formed one great lake or inland sea, whereof Pyramid and Mud Lakes, and the sinks respectively of the Carson, Walker and Humboldt rivers, are all that the thirsty earth and air have left us. The forty miles of low, flat, naked desert—in part of heavy, wearying sand—that now separates the sink of the Humboldt from that of the Carson, was evidently long under water, and might, to all human perception, have better remained so.
I can not comprehend those who talk of the Plains and the more intensely arid wilds which mainly compose Utah and Nevada becoming a great stock-growing region. Even California, though its climate favors the rapid multiplication and generous growth of cattle and sheep, can never sustain so many animals to the square mile as the colder and more rugged hills of New York and New England, because of the intense protracted drouth of its summers, which suffer no blade of grass to grow throughout the six later months of every year. Animals live and thrive on the dead-ripe herbage of the earlier months; but a large area is soon exhausted by a herd, which must be pastured elsewhere till the winter rains ensure a renewal of vegetation.
But the grasses of the Great Valley and of a large portion of the Plains are exceedingly scanty where they exist at all, so that the teams and herds annually driven across them by emigrants and traders suffer fearfully, and are often decimated by hunger, though they carefully seek out and adhere to the trails whereon feed is least scanty. Many a weary day's journey, even along the valleys of the North Platte and Sweetwater, brings to view too little grass to sustain the life of a moderate herd; those who have traversed the South Pass in June will generally have just escaped starvation, leaving to those that come straggling or tottering after them a very poor feed. The carcasses of dead animals, in every stage of decomposition, thickly stud the great trail from the banks of the Platte westward to the passes of the Sierra Nevada, and, I presume, to the banks of the Columbia, bearing mute but impressive testimony to the chronic inhospitality of the Great American Desert, which is almost everywhere thinly overgrown by worthless shrubs, known to travelers as grease-wood and sage brush;—the former prickly and repellant, but having a waxy or resinous property which renders it useful to emigrants as fuel; the latter affording shelter and subsistence to rabbits and a poor species of grouse known as the 'sage hen,' but utterly worthless to man and to the beasts obedient to his sway.
Yet the daily Overland Mail is an immense, a cheering fact, and the Pacific Telegraph another. A message dispatched from any village blessed with electric wires on poles in the Atlantic States will probably reach its destination in any city or considerable settlement of California or Nevada within a few hours, while every transpiring incident of the war for the Union is directly flashed across the continent to the journals of Sacramento and San Francisco, and will often be devoured by their readers on the evening after its occurrence. The Republic may well be proud of having achieved two such strides in her onward, upward course, in the midst of a great and desolating war, and with confidence implore a God of beneficent justice to hasten the auspicious day when we shall be able to telegraph her children by the far Pacific that her enemies are baffled, vanquished, humbled, and that there opens again before her a long vista of unbroken and honorable peace.
WHAT TO DO WITH THE DARKIES.
A NEW AND ORIGINAL PLAN FOR SAVING THE UNION ON SOUTHERN PRINCIPLES.
There can be no question that the overwhelming difficulty of the present day, is the proper disposal of the Negro.
The writer of these lines takes the liberty of believing that the war is virtually a settled affair. There has been, there is, no diminution of Northern determination to push on and keep pushing until the wings of the eagle again stretch from Maine to the Rio Grande. The administration is sustained, as from the first, by ever increasing majorities. The daily defeats of those politicians who are known to sympathize with secession, the wreck of the peace party, and the growing indignation of the country, as manifested against all halfway men and measures, are becoming what in sober seriousness can not be regarded as other than a tremendous moral spectacle. In medio non tutissimus ibis.