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Show CHAP. HI. THE GLISTENING GRAVEL WATER. 167 number of tributaries, which are all called the New Forks. We kept them in sight till they mingled with the upper air like immense masses of thunder-cloud gathering for a storm. From Pacific Creek the road is not bad, but at this season the emigrant parties are sorely tried by drought, and when water is found it is often fetid or brackish. After seventeen miles we passed the j unction of the Great Salt Lake and Fort Hall roads. Near Little Sandy Creek-a feeder of its larger narhesake-which after rains is about 2-5 feet deep, we found nothing but sand, caked clay, sage, thistles, and the scattered fragments of camp-fires, with large ravens picking at the bleaching skeletons, and other indications of a halting-ground, an eddy in the great current of mankind, which, ceaseless as the Gulf Stream, ever courses from east to west. After a long stage of twenty-nine miles we made Big Sandy Creek, an important influent of the Green Biver; the stream, then shrunken, was in breadth not less than five rods, each = 16-5 feet, running with a clear, swift current through a pretty little prairillon, bright with the blue lupine, the delicate pink malvacea, the golden helianthus, purple aster acting daisy, the white mountain heath, and the green Asclepias tuberosa,* a weed common throughout Utah Territory. The Indians, in their picturesque way, term this stream Wagahongopa, or the Glistening Gravel Water, f We halted for an hour to rest and dine; the people of the station, rrftn and wife, the latter very young, were both English, and of, course Mormons; they had but lately become tenants of the ranch, but already they were thinking, as the Old Country people will, of making their surroundings "nice and tidy." Beyond the Glistening Gravel Water lies a mauvaise terre, sometimes called the First Desert, and upon the old road water is not found in the dry season within forty-nine miles-a terrible jorna-da\ for laden wagons with tired cattle. We prepared for drought by replenishing all our canteens-one of them especially, a tin flask, covered outside with thick cloth, kept the fluid deliciously cold-and we amused ourselves by the pleasant prospect of seeing wild mules taught to bear harness. The tricks of equine vicious-ness and asinine obstinacy played by the mongrels were so distinct, that we had no pains in determining what was inherited from the father and what from the other side of the house. Before they could be hitched up they were severally hustled into some- * Locally called milkweed. The whites use the silky cotton of the pods, as in Arabia, for bed-stuffings, and the Sioux Indians of the Upper Platte boil and eat the young pods with their buffalo flesh. Colonel Fremont asserts that he never saw this plant without remarking " on the flower a large butterfly, so nearly resembling it in color as to be distinguishable at a little distance only by the motion of its wings." t Similarly the Snake River, an eastern influent of the Colorado, is called Yampa Pa, or Sweet Root {Anethum graveolens) Water. % The Spanish-Mexican term for a day's march. It is generally applied to a waterless march, e.g., "Jornada del Muerto" in New Mexico, which, like some in the Sahara, measures ninety miles across. |
