A Forty-niner in Utah with the Stansbury Exploration of Great Salt Lake: Letters and Jounral of John Hudson, 1848-50

Forty-niner in Utah, page 144

Exploring Great Salt Lake I descended from romance into a very cold reality when I stepped into the lake for a repetition of my bath & its waters operated as effectually as those of Lethe" in upsetting my bathos & reducing me to the level of very ordinary mortals. Pursuing my way as salt & dry as a pickled herring, I came up with Carrington to find dinner over & the water all drunk, so that upon this occasion I met with the usual fate of day dreamers who pretty gen- erally belong to that class of mankind who have better appetites than dinners. Along the shores of the lake, runs an Indian trail although in many places overgrown with grass & brush & scarcely visible; the ground is thickly scattered with cheneapodaceous plants49 & the few flowers that will exist in a loose sandy soil & an arid salty atmosphere. When about 5 miles from last encampment owing to a head- wind the yaul could not make way; the Capt accordingly came on shore & we remained for the night at a sort of half way house which I denominated Cyclop's Cave.50 These rocks are quartzose with fellspar the right formation for an artist they possessing a kaledioscopical variety of tints & are piled upon each other in sublime irregularity & the scene made a superb picture when reduced to a small size in the camera. 51 It is contrary to my bumps52 48 According to mythology, the waters of Lethe "severance of the soul for which there is no balm." produce oblivion, forgetfulness, or a 49 The correct spelling is chenopodiaceous and refers to any plants of the goosefoot family. E. V. Rowley gives an excellent description of the plants and flowers found in the Great Salt Lake area. Gwynn, Great Salt Lake, pp. 335-50. 50 The crew was forced to carry the camp supplies about a half mile to shore through water too shallow to maneuver the yawl. From this point on around the head of the lake and down the west shore, the expedition faced this wearisome necessity on many occasions. Carrington recorded that the cliff above the cave where they spent the night was about seventy feet in height. Stansbury complained that after building a fire his men "consoled themselves for the fatigues of the day with a dance to the strains of one of the most execrable fiddles I ever listened to anywhere." Carrington, Journal, 29 April, p. 7; Stansbury, Report, pp. 171-72. 51 Artists of the time used the then-known camera to aid in the production of sketches, and there were two common methods. The camera lucida was an instrument which used a prism to focus an image of a scene or object upon a plain surface of paper or canvas so that the outlines could be traced. But as Fox Talbot, an early experimenter with photography, said of the process "when the eye was removed from the prism-in which all looked beautiful-I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold. . . . and came to the conclusion, that its use required a previous 144