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Show 166 WESTERN WILDS. saw the trees on the slopes gray- white with rime, and knew that we had invaded the domain of winter. For two days the storm continued, and then the late mild autumn of the mountains set in. In summer and autumn the Cottonwood dis-trict is the most delightful of cool retreats; in winter a lofty snow-bank, with here and there a gray projection. In the winter sunshine it would, but for the occasional patches of timber, present a painfully dazzling expanse of white; and as it is, serious snow- blindness is not uncommon. When a warm south wind blows for a day or two, there is greater danger of snow- slides. In January, 1875, the snow fell there, without intermission, for eight days, filling the deepest gulches, into which the few stray animals plunged and floundered helplessly. In the circular mountain- hollows, with a good growth of timber, the snow drifted from ten to forty feet deep, leaving the largest trees looking like mere shrubs. Distant settlements were quite isolated, and the narrow passes thereto stopped by snow. However, in the best developed mines work went on under ground, all the side chambers and vacant places being stacked full of ore as fast as it was mined. In a few more days the sun came out bright and clear, and though the thermometer rarely rises above the freezing point during the first two months of the year in the higher camps, yet the warmth seems to have been sufficient to loosen the snow not yet tightly packed; and in every place where the slope was great and the timber not sufficient to bind it, avalanches of from one to a hun-dred acres came thundering into the cafions, sweeping all before them. One of the largest swept off that part of Alta City, Little Cottonwood, lying on the slope. Six persons were killed outright, either crushed by the timber of their own cabins or smothered in the snow, and many more were buried five or six hours, until relief parties dug them out. One woman was found sitting upright in her cabin with a babe in her arms, both dead. The cabin had withstood the avalanche, but the snow poured in at the doors and windows, and they were frozen or smothered. Thirty- five lives were- lost in Utah that winter by snow- slides. Six men were buried in one gulch a thousand feet under packed ice and snow. Search for them was useless. But at length the breath of June dissolved their snowy prison, and the bodies were revealed, fresh and fair, as if they had just ceased to breathe. Alta City, the metropolis of Little Cottonwood, is at the center of an amphitheater, the ridges rising one or two thousand feet high on all sides, except the narrow opening down the cafion. In this circuit is a mining population of twelve or fifteen hundred people, |
