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Show 172 WESTERN WILDS. Law in the forenoon; injunctions tied up every thing, and restraining orders confronted every body, and the weary way of contending claim-ants lay across a desert of fruitless litigation, diversified only by mount-ains of fee- bills, and strewn with certioraris, nisi priuses, and writs of error. Capital fled the scene of so much contention. There were more lawsuits impending than the Third District Court could have settled in ten years. At last some of the disputes reached a conclusion in court, twenty times as many were compromised, and in 1874 the dis-trict entered on the more satisfactory stage of steady work and devel-opment. The deepest mine is now down 1,400 feet, and the great ques-tion as to whether these are permanent fissure veins is being solved in the only way it can be by digging. The district contains some 1,200 working miners, and about half as many women and children. Language fails me to portray the hardy enterprise, nerve, and perse-verance of the miners who are opening the silver lodes of Western Utah. Roads are being laid out across every desert, trails over every range ; and on every mountain that lines this Territory and Nevada, hardy prospectors are hunting for " indications" and opening new sil-ver districts. The latest enterprise of note is in Dug- Way District, lying some ninety miles west of Ophir City, across one of the worst deserts in this desert region. Though this chapter begins with the autumn of 1871, I have condensed in it my later observations on Utah mines, and may as well insert here a more complete description of the Western District. All the interior of the Great Basin, between the Mormon settle-ment which line the foot of the Wasatch, and the corresponding val-leys which open eastward from the Sierras, has one uniform character of rugged grandeur and barrenness. It is divided into many inferior basins by a number of short and abrupt mountain ranges, running north and south, and furnishing scant supplies of water, with here and there a stream large enough to irrigate a few acres. Between these ranges lie almost level deserts plains where the soil is a compound of sand, salt, alkali, flint rock, and an incoherent red earth, destitute of all vegetation, save rare patches of stunted white sage- brush, re-sembling pennyroyal more than any plant to be seen in Ohio. At times, however, the entire soil is of an ashy white earth, half of it probably alkali, solid only in winter and wet weather, but in the dry sea-son easily stirred up in blinding white clouds. An area of some 60,000 square miles does not contain a hundred sections of cultivable land ; but at the mountain bases are found considerable tracts of the yellow bumch- grass. In the old freighting days, the custom of teamsters was |