Farnham's Travels in the Great Western Prairies, etc., May 21-October 16, 1839, part 1

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 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 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.

July 17. We made twenty miles to-day among the deep gullies and natural fortresses of this great gateway to the mountains. All around gave evidence that the agents of nature have struggled here in their mightiest wrath, not the volcano, but the floods of ages. Ravines hundreds of feet in depth; vast insular mounds of earth towering in all directions, sometimes surmounted by fragments of mountains, at others, with stratified rocks, the whole range of vision was a flowerless, bladeless desolation! Our encampment for the night was at the mouth of Wood's creek, five miles from the debouchure of the Arkansas from the mountains.119 The ridges on the south of the river, as viewed from this place, presented an embankment of congregated hills, piled one above another to the region of snow, and scored into deep and irregular chasms, frowning precipices, tottering rocks, and black glistening strata, whose recent fractures indicated that they were continually sending upon the humble hills below weighty testimony of their own superior height and might. Nothing could be more perfectly wild. The summits were capped with ice. The ravines which radiated from their apices were filled with snow far down their course; and so utterly rough was the whole mass, that there did not appear to be a foot of plain surface upon it. Eternal, sublime confusion!

This range runs down the Arkansas, bearing a little south of a parallel with it, the distance of about fifty miles, and then turning southward, bears off to Taos and Santa Fé. At the back of this ridge to the westward, and connected with it, is said to be a very extensive tract of mountains which embrace the sources of the Rio Bravo del Norte, the Wolfano, and other branches of the Arkansas; and a number of streams that fall into Rio Colorado of the West, and the Gulf of California.120 Among these heights live the East and West bands of the Eutaws. The valleys in which they reside are said to be overlooked by mountains of shining glaciers, and in every other respect to resemble the valleys of Switzerland. They are a brave, treacherous race, and said to number about eight thousand souls. They raise mules, horses, and sheep, and cultivate corn and beans, trap the beaver, manufacture woollen blankets with a darning-needle, and intermarry with the Mexican Spaniards.

Sixty miles east of these mountains, and fifty south of the Arkansas, stands (isolated on the plain), Pike's Peak, and the lesser ones that cluster around it.121 This Peak is covered with perpetual snow and ice down one-third its height. The subordinate peaks rise near to the line of perpetual congelation, and stand out upon the sky like giant watchmen, as if to protect the vestal snows above them from the polluting tread of man. On the north side of the river a range of mountains, or hills, as they have been called by those who are in the habit of looking on the Great Main Ridges, rise about two thousand feet above the plain. They resemble, in their general characteristics, those on the south. Like them, they are dark and broken; like them, sparsely covered on their sides with shrub pines and cedars. They diverge also from the river as they descend: and after descending it forty miles, turn to the north, and lose themselves in the heights which congregate around James' Peak.

On the morning of the 18th we rose early, made our simple repast of tole, and prepared to enter the mountains. A joyful occasion this. The storms, the mud, the swollen streams, the bleakness and barrenness of the Great Prairie Wilderness, in an hour's ride, would be behind us; and the deep, rich vales, the cool streams and breezes, and transparent atmosphere of the more elevated regions, were to be entered.

Wood's Creek, on which we had passed the night, is a cold, heavy torrent, from the northern hills. At the ford, it was about three feet deep, and seven yards wide. But the current was so strong as to bear away two of our saddle-horses. One of these was my Puebla animal. She entered the stream with all the caution necessary for the result. Stepping alternately back, forward, and sidewise, and examining the effect of every rolling stone upon the laws of her own gravity, she finally gathered her ugly form upon one of sufficient size and mobility to plunge herself and rider into the stream. She floated down a few yards, and, contrary to my most fervent desire, came upon her feet again, and made the land. By dint of wading, and partially drowning, and other like agreeable ablutions, we found ourselves at last on the right side of the water: and having bestowed upon it sundry commendatory epithets of long and approved use under like circumstances, we remounted; and shivering in the freezing winds from the neighbouring snows, trotted on at a pace so merry and fast, that three-quarters of an hour brought us to the buttress of the cliffs, where the Arkansas leaps foaming from them.

This river runs two hundred miles among the mountains. The first half of the distance is among a series of charming valleys, stocked with an endless number of deer and elk, which, in the summer, live upon the nutritious wild grass of the vales, and in the winter, upon the buds, twigs, and bark of trees. The hundred miles of its course next below, is among perpendicular cliffs rising on both sides hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of feet in height. Through this dismal channel, with a rapid current down lofty precipices, and through compressed passes, it plunges and roars to this point, where it escapes nobly and gleefully, as if glad at having fled some fearful edict of nature, consigning it to perpetual imprisonment in those dismal caverns.122

Here we entered the Rocky Mountains through a deep gorge at the right, formed by the waters of a little brook which comes down from the north.123 It is a sweet stream. It babbles so delightfully upon the ear, like those that flowed by one's home, when youth was dreaming of the hopes of coming years in the shade of the hemlock by the family spring. On its banks grew the dandelion, the angelica, the elder, the alder and birch, and the mountain-flax. The pebbles, too, seemed old acquaintances, they were so like those which I had often gathered, with a lovely sister long since dead, who would teach me to select the prettiest and best. The very mountains were dark and mighty, and overhanging, and striped with the departing snows, like those that I viewed in the first years of remembrance, as I frolicked with my brothers on the mossy rocks.

We soon lost sight of the Arkansas among the small pines and cedars of the valley, and this we were sorry to do. The good old stream had given us many a fine cat-fish, and many a bumper of delicious water while we travelled wearily along its parched banks. It was like parting with an old companion that had ministered to our wants, and stood with us in anxious, dangerous times. It was, therefore, pleasant to hear its voice come up from the caverns like a sacred farewell while we wound our way up the valley.

This gorge, or valley, runs about ten miles in a northwardly direction from the debouchure of the Arkansas, to the dividing ridge between the waters of that river and those of the southern head-waters of the south fork of the Great Platte.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

Tole for breakfast. It had been our only food for nine days. It seemed strange that we should have travelled one hundred and eighty miles, in a country like that we had passed through since leaving Fort William, without killing an animal. But it ceased to appear so, when our worthy guide informed us that no individual had ever come from the Arkansas, in the region of the Fort, to the mountains, with as little suffering as we had. "It is," said he, "a starving country; never any game found in it. The buffalo come into these valleys from the north through the Bull Pen, and go out there when the storms of the autumn warn them to fly to the south for warm winter quarters. But that valley off there, (pointing to a low smooth spot in the horizon), looks mighty like Boyou Salade, my old stamping ground. If it should be, we will have meat before the sun is behind the snow."127

We were well pleased with this prospect. Our Mexican servant cried, at the top of his voice, "Esta muy bueno, Señor Kelly, si, muy bueno, este Boyou Salade; mucho carne por nosotros." And the poor fellow had some reasons for this expression of joy, for the tole regimen had been to him what the water gruel of the Mudfog workhouse was to Oliver Twist, except that its excellent flavour had never induced the Mexican "to ask for more." He had, on previous occasions, in company with Kelly, gnawed the ribs of many a fat cow in Boyou Salade; and the instincts of his stomach put him in such a frenzy at the recollection, that although he could only understand the words "Boyou Salade," these were sufficient to induce him to cross himself from the fore-step to the abdomen, and to swear by Santa Gaudaloupe that tole was not food for a Christian mouth.

On the 20th we were early on our way. The small prairie wolf which had howled us to sleep every evening, and howled us awake every morning since we left Independence, was continually greeting us with an ill-natured growl, as we rode along among his hiding places. The streams that were mere rivulets twenty miles back, having received a thousand tributaries, were now heavy and deep torrents. The peaks and mountain swells were clad with hail and snow. Every thing, even ourselves, shivering in our blankets, gave evidence that we were traversing the realms of winter. Still many of the grasses and flowers which usually flourish in high latitudes and elevated places were growing along the radices of the hills, and aided much in giving the whole scene an unusually singular aspect. We were in fine spirits, and in the enjoyment of a voracious appetite. Our expectations of having a shot soon at a buffalo, were perhaps an accessory cause of this last. But be that as it may, we dodged along among the pines and spruce and hemlock and firs about ten miles, and rose over a swell of land covered with small trees in full view of a quiet little band of buffalo. Ye deities who presided of old over the trencher and goblet, did not our palates leap for a tender loin? A halt – our famous old Kentuckian creeps away around a copse of wood – we hear the crack of his deadly rifle – witness the writhing of the buffalo! He lays himself gently down. All is now silent, intense anxiety to observe whether he will rise again and run, as buffalo often do under the smart of a wound, beyond our reach among the hills. No! he curls his tail as in the last agony; he choaks; he is ours! he is ours!

Our knives are quickly hauled from their sheaths – he is rolled upon his brisket – his hide is slit along the spine, and pealed down midrib; one side of it is cut off and spread upon the sand to receive the meat; the flesh on each side of the spine is pared off; the mouth is opened, and the tongue removed from his jaws; the axe is laid to his rib; the heart – the fat – the tender loins – the blood, are taken out – his legs are rifled of their generous marrow bones; all wrapped in the green hide, and loaded on animals, and off to camp in a charming grove of white pine by a cold stream of water under a woody hill!